Gao Xingjian - One Man

"Make a noise and I will kill you!"

He made this threat as he moved away from her, took off his clothes, and wiped the urine off his face. The woman was afraid of being killed, and convulsed as she quietly sobbed. The fat plucked hen, innards removed and feetless legs sticking up, looked just like a woman's corpse. It thoroughly disgusted him.

For a long time afterward, he found women disgusting. He had to use disgust to bury his pity for this woman in order to save himself. Maybe Qian was right, he didn't love her, he had simply enjoyed her, he had for some time needed a woman and needed her flesh. What Qian said was right, too, he had not shown her tenderness, it was contrived, he had been trying to manufacture a make-believe happiness. The expression in his eyes when he ejaculated during intercourse must have betrayed that he didn't love her. However, under the circumstances of those times, terror had induced lust from both parties, which afterward did not become love but, instead, simply left behind the hatred that grew out of carnal release.

Qian sobbed and kept repeating, "You've killed me, I've been killed by you…" Through her sobbing and mumbling, he made out that Qian's father had been chief engineer in a factory during the Nationalist period, and that during the period of purifying class ranks, he had been classified as a historical counterrevolutionary by the Army Control Commission. Qian didn't dare curse the injustice against her father, didn't dare curse the revolution, so she could only curse counterrevolutionaries and she could only curse him. But she was also terrified of him.

"It is this era that has killed you," he retaliated. Qian herself had said something like that in her letter. "The reality is that there is no escape for anyone, and it's our fate to care for one another, so don't talk about love!"

"Then why did you pick me? You could have picked that randy little slut. Why did you have to marry me?"

"Who? Who are you talking about?" he asked.

"That Maomei of yours!"

"I don't have anything to do with that village girl!"

"You're in love with the randy little slut, so why are you using me instead?" Qian sobbed.

"I can't make any sense of all this! We can get divorced right away, we can go to the commune tomorrow and announce we had fraudulently signed our names, say it was all a joke, an abominable farce to give the village cadres and the villagers a good laugh!"

Qian, however, said as she sobbed, "I won't make any more trouble…"

"Then go to sleep!"

He got her to get up, and pulled off the urine-soaked sheet and covers from their nuptial bed. Qian, pathetically, stood out of the way. When he had remade the bed, he threw her some clean clothes from her bag, and told her to get changed and lie down. He got water from the water vat, washed himself all over, and sat on the stool by the fire all night.

Would he go on forever like this, caring for her? Wasn't he just a piece of straw to save her? He had to wait for her to fall asleep so that he could get those sheets of paper from the desk and burn them all. If she had a fit again, he would just have to say that she was psychologically disturbed. He would never write anything down again, he would just rot in this stench.

Qian said she hoped that she would die soon. She would never go with him again to desolate places, along cliffs or riverbanks. He would push her down. He could stop thinking about tricking her to go out the door, she would just stay in the house and not go anywhere!

As for him, he wished that she would drop dead, disappear forever, but he didn't say this. He regretted not having got himself a village girl who was physically and mentally healthy and who had not been educated. She would simply sleep with him, cook, and bear his children, she would never invade his inner mind. No, he hated women.

When Qian left, he took her to the bus stop at the end of town. Qian said, "You don't have to wait for the bus to leave, go home."

He said nothing, but hoped that the bus would move off soon.

It was winter again, and he was sitting by the brazier made by one of tlie locals, which he'd bought for two yuan. The brazier had an earthenware inset, which kept the hot coals and ashes warm, and to this he added a wire cover on top for his cup of tea. The winter nights were long, and it had already been dark for some time. In the off season in the countryside, the villagers would do their private work during the day, and at night it was pitch-black everywhere, only his house still had a light on. The incident of his quarrelling with his new wife had the villagers talking for ten to fifteen days, then no one asked about it and everything became peaceful again.

People now came to his house, and, without calling out, just pushed open the door and came in to look around, chat, smoke, and drink tea. That was how he received guests, and if people came, he would offer them a cigarette. He had got to know the village cadres well and established a pattern of life that would let others familiarize themselves with this scholar who did not meddle in village affairs. There were always copies of books by Marx and Lenin on his desk, so the village cadres who could read a little had a certain respect for him. Maomei once knocked at his door and asked if he had something good to read; he gave her a copy of Nation and Revolution. She took one look and said, "That's scary, how would I ever manage to read it?"

Maomei had a primary-school education but didn't dare take the book. Another time, his door was open, and having boiled a kettle of water, he was busy washing his sheets. Maomei came to the door and, leaning against the frame, said she could take them to the pond and pound them with a washing rod. She said they would be cleaner, but he declined her kind offer.

The girl stood there for a while, then asked, "Aren't you going away?"

He asked, "Where?"

Maomei pouted and, with an incredulous look, asked, "Then why did that person in your house go away?"

She was asking about Qian, but had avoided saying "your woman" or "your wife." Her bright, beautiful eyes looked seductively at him as she twisted the hem of her shirt and looked down at her shoes. But he couldn't have a sexual relationship with the girl, he no longer trusted women and wouldn't let himself be seduced again, so he said nothing and concentrated on washing the sheets in the tub. Maomei finally got bored and went off.

It was only through writing, and so engaging in a dialogue with himself, that he was able to dispel his loneliness. However before he could start writing, he had to plan things in advance. The thin letter paper could be rolled up and stuffed into the bamboo handle of the broom he kept behind the door: he had removed the inside membranes at the joints of the bamboo handle with a metal spike. When the pages accumulated, they would be put into an earthenware jar for preserving salted vegetables, with a layer of lime on the bottom, and sealed with a piece of plastic tied over the top. He dug a hole to store the jar in the earthen floor of the hut and covered the hole with the big water vat. He wasn't intending to write a book to hide in some famous mountain so that it could be read by later generations. He had not given the matter any thought because it was impossible to think about the future. He did not entertain any wild hopes.

Dogs were barking in the distance, then all the village dogs started barking. Afterward, it gradually became quiet. The dark night was long, but, as he was writing alone under the lamp, the excitement of pouring out his feelings made his heart palpitate. He felt vaguely worried that there were eyes in the dark at the front and back windows. He thought that maybe cracks in the door had not been properly sealed, and yet he had carefully examined the door many times. Still, he could sense footsteps outside the window. He sat stiffly by the brazier, holding his breath to listen, but there was no further movement.