Gao Xingjian - One Man

You want to be a sorrowful eye, penetrating and grieving, an eye observing the world as it turns this way and that, and this eye is in the palm of your hand.

You want to be a multitude of sounds, a velvety alto teased out from its midst and set against a wall of sounds.

You want to be a piece of jazz, flowing but unpredictable, passionate and yet so smooth. Then you abruptly strike an odd posture, adopt a scary expression with an ambiguous smile, an enigmatic smile that solidifies, then turns wooden and stiff. Afterward, you calmly slide out, turn into a mud fish, and leave that odd smile on that atrophied face. The mouth opens and reveals two tobacco-stained front teeth, or, maybe, they are two fitted front teeth that are shining with a golden glow on that joyful, smiling, atrophied face. All this will also be a lot of fun.

You want to be the little boy pissing in a small square in the center of Brussels. Young boys and girls, taking turns, crane their necks so that the spring water he pisses collects in their mouths. Some other girls stand on the side, cackling with laughter. However, you are an old man sitting in a cafe, watching them, a very old man whose deeply wrinkled face looks the same whether he is laughing or not. You take a sip of the sweet ale that is as dark as soy sauce.

You want to weep and wail in front of everyone, but don't make a sound. People won't know what you are weeping about, won't know whether you are really weeping or whether you are acting, but you want to have a good cry in front of this playacting world. Not making a sound, of course, you mime that you are weeping, and get the honorable members of the audience to look on helplessly. Next, you rip open your shirt and take out a plastic red heart. Then, from it, you take out a handful of straw or toilet paper and throw it to those willing to applaud. You strut about with an elegant gait, and then, then slip and fall and can't get up. You have had a heart attack on stage. Really, you don't need to be saved. It's just theater to show suffering, joy, grief, and lust. And then, with a crafty smile that could be a laugh or a grimace, you quietly slip off with a young woman. You have just met, but she has won your heart, and you make love standing up in the lavatory. People can only see your legs, her legs are around your waist. Then you noisily flush the toilet. You want to flush yourself like this, to cleanse yourself, so that the world will weep, so that the windows of the world will be washed with rain, so that the world will turn all hazy, so hazy that it could either be rain or mist. You then stand at the window and watch snowflakes falling soundlessly outside. Snow covers the whole city like a huge white shroud wrapping corpses, and you, by the window, mourn his loss of his self…

Or, for a different perspective, it is you in the audience, watching him crawl onto the stage, a deserted stage. He is standing naked in the bright light, and it will take a little time for him to get used to it, to see past the stage lights, and to see you sitting in the red velvet seat in the last row of the empty theater.

The bag the girl left with him had a student card in it. Xu was, in fact, her surname, but her given name was Qian. There were also some pamphlets and reports on the crisis. She could have been heading for Beijing to file a complaint, but all this was public printed matter, so maybe she was just going to Beijing to get out of danger and had given him her bag because she was afraid of being identified.

He had no way of knowing what had happened to Xu Qian and all he could do was search for news about the city from posters and pamphlets posted in the streets. He rode his bicycle along Chang'an Avenue from Dongdan to Xidan, to the railway station at Qianmenwai, and then to the gate at the back of Beihai, and he read through each of the crisis notices about armed battles in the provinces that were posted everywhere. There were reports about massacres, shootings, and brutal tortures, even photographs of corpses, and these all seemed somehow related to Xu Qian. He was certain that disaster had already befallen her, and could not help feeling an acute sense of pain.

The bag, also containing Xu Qian's sleeveless round-neck top with little yellow flowers, which still smelled of her, and the blood-stained underpants she had rolled into a ball, seemed to have become a relic that gave him twinges of pain deep in his heart. It was as if he had developed some sort of fetish, and he kept shifting about the contents of the bag. He even took off the red plastic cover from the copy of Mao's Sayings, where he found a slip of paper with an old address on it. The name Boundless Great Men Hutong had already been changed to Red Star Hutong, and it probably was the home of her maternal aunt. He charged out the door but, thinking he would appear too presumptuous, returned to his room, stuffed all the things on the table back into the bag, and took it with him, leaving behind only the top and underpants she had worn that night.

At ten o'clock at night, he knocked on the gate of a house with a courtyard and got them to open up. A sturdy young fellow who stood blocking the entrance gruffly asked, "Who are you looking for?"

He said that he wanted to see the maternal aunt of Xu Qian. The young fellow scowled and was clearly hostile. He thought of mentioning his Red Guard lineage, but that strong impulse vanished, and he said coldly, "I've come to convey a message and to deliver something to her aunt."

At this, the other party said to wait, and closed the gate. After a while, the young fellow came back and opened the door. He was with an elderly woman. The woman looked him over and politely asked what could he have to tell her. He took out Xu Qian's student card and said he had something to hand over to her.

"Please come in," the woman said.

The northern room directly facing the courtyard was in disarray but retained the style of a senior cadre's reception hall.

"Are you her maternal aunt?" he asked.

The only response seemed to be a nod, as she got him to sit down on the sofa.

He said that her niece-presumably, it was her niece-was stopped on the wharf and couldn't get on the ferry. The aunt looked through the pile of pamphlets. He said it was very tense in the city, machine guns were being used, and there were night searches. Xu Qian clearly belonged to the faction they were searching for.

"Why are they rebelling!'" the aunt exclaimed, or, maybe, asked, as she put the pamphlets on a low table.

He explained he was worried that something might have happened to Xu Qian.

"Are you her boyfriend?"

"No." He wanted to say that he was.

There was a lapse of silence, so he got up and said, "I just came to let you know. Of course, I hope nothing has happened and she is safe."

"I'll get in touch with her parents."

"I don't have her home address," he mustered the courage to say.

"I will write to her family."

The aunt clearly didn't intend to give him the address, so he could only say, "I can leave the address and telephone number of my work unit."

The old woman gave him a piece of paper to write on, then escorted him to the gate. As she locked it on the other side, she said, "You know this place, you're welcome to come again."

She was just being polite in response to his unnecessary act of kindness.

Back in his room, he lay on his bed and tried to remember every detail of what had happened that night, every word Xu Qian had spoken. Her voice in the dark and the responsiveness of her body were now etched in his mind.

There was knocking on his door. It was a cadre from his faction. Huang came in and asked, "When did you get back? I've been here several times, looking for you. You haven't shown up at the work-place, what have you been up to? You can't keep on being so carefree! They are beating up the cadres one at a time, and are breaking up our meetings!"