One Man's Bible (29 page)

41

His head was a total blank. Outside the train window was a vast and desolate gray-yellow plain, trees with bare branches flashed past. He had not slept all night, but was tired, not sleepy. Looking mindlessly out of the window, he still did not dare to believe that he had escaped, just like that. The train passed the big bridge over the Yellow River, and the fields began to show signs of grayish-green: the wheat, after the winter, was starting to turn green. Two or three hours on, after stopping at several stations, the trees flashing past had turned green-gray, and, in the branches of a bare tree, some tender green leaves had appeared. Then lush green new willow leaves could be seen trembling in the wind, bringing tidings of early spring. The thought “You have been saved” welled up in his heart.

The fields turned green after crossing the Yangtze, and bright sunlight sparkled between the seedlings of the paddy fields. This world was real. Only then did he relax and fall into a deep sleep.

Following a change of trains, he got on a long-distance bus that bounced him up and down on the winding mountain road. The old bus rattled, shaking so badly that it felt as if it would fall to pieces. But, outside the window, as far as the eye could see, were luxuriant green mountains with clumps of bright pink azaleas among the bushes on the slopes. He was wild with excitement.

In the small county town, at the end of an old cobblestone street, he found Rong’s house, a mud hut with a thatch roof. Not being a local, Rong was not doing particularly well here, but the hut, which he did not have to share, with its vegetable garden enclosed by a bamboo fence, filled him with envy. Rong’s wife was a local and worked as a shop assistant in a local store, and their small son, just a few months old, was sleeping in a cradle in the hall. In the courtyard, in the warm sun, a hen with a flock of fluffy yellow chicks was pecking the ground. This scene moved him.

While Rong’s wife was in the kitchen, cooking for them, Rong asked about what was happening in Beijing and about his own situation. So, he talked a bit about it. Rong said, “What are all these criticism meetings about? Here, far from Beijing, the county cadres have also had their criticism meetings, although these didn’t involve the ordinary people.”

“Rong, do you remember when we used to have philosophical discussions in our letters and would ask searching questions to try and find out what was the ultimate meaning of life?” He wanted to joke a bit.

“Don’t talk about philosophy, that’s all just to frighten people,” Rong coldly interrupted. “I spend my days looking after my family. When it rains hard, the thatch roof leaks. This winter, I had to change the thatch. I can’t afford a tile roof.”

Rong’s calm indifference to seeking fame and wealth had allowed him to return to real life. He thought he should be like Rong, pass his days in this real way, and so he said, “I’d best go into the big mountains and find a village to settle in for good!”

However, Rong said, “You’d better think about that properly. You can get into those big mountains all right, but you won’t be able to get out. You, you’re always fantasizing; be a bit more realistic!”

Rong helped him work out that he should go to a village with
electricity, one that could be reached in a single bus trip, so that if he got seriously ill he would be able to get to the county hospital the same day.

“If you want to settle down here, you’ll have to get on good terms with the village cadres, the local tyrants. When you go to the county town to report your arrival, don’t mention anything about those damn happenings in Beijing!” Rong warned him.

“I know, I won’t fantasize anymore,” he said. “I’ve come here to seek a refuge and to find myself a sexy village girl who will bear me sons and daughters.”

“My only fear is that you’re not going to be able to cope,” Rong laughed.

Rong’s wife asked him, “Are you serious? I can arrange it for you, it’ll be easy!”

Rong turned and said to his wife, “Hey, you can’t believe everything he says!”

He found a free-standing mud hut by the primary school of a small farm town. The production team had just built it, and the rafters and tiles had only gone up that winter. The walls, made by compacting mud and stones between wooden separators, had not been whitewashed, and, as there was no ceiling, when there was heavy rain, a fine spray of water would drift in between the tiles. No one had lived in the hut before. He used mortar to fill the gaps between the walls and the wooden door and window frames, pasted white paper on the glass windows for a bit of privacy, and used some planks to make a bed. He lined a part of the earthen floor with bricks, to stack up his boxes of books, which he covered with a piece of plastic and put his bowls, chopsticks, and daily utensils on top. Afterward, he put a big earthenware water vat inside the hut, so that he could ladle water when needed, and, later still, had a desk made at the timber cooperative in the little town. He was quite satisfied.

When he got back from weeding in the paddy fields, he would wash the mud from his feet and calves in the pond floating with
duckweed, and then make himself a cup of green tea. Sitting in a bamboo chair, he would look at the distant layers of mountain ranges in the mist before him. The line “Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence, I suddenly see the Southern Mountains,” from Tao Yuanming’s poem would come to his mind, but his was not the leisurely life of that scholar-official of ancient times who lived as a recluse. Each day, when it was barely light, as soon as he heard the singing on the village loudspeakers—“The east is red and the sun rises, in China there emerges Mao. . . .”—he would go with the peasants to the paddy fields to plant seedlings. However, he no longer had to make a pretense of chanting Mao’s
Sayings
. Weary after toiling all day, just to be unsupervised, drinking a cup of green tea, resting in the bamboo chair with his legs stretched out, was all he needed. And, at night, to be able to lie down alone on the big plank bed and no longer have to be on guard about talking in his sleep was really something to be thankful for.

From now on, he was a peasant, relying on his strength to feed himself. He had to learn everything about farm life—plowing, building paddy embankments, planting seedlings, harvesting grain, shoveling manure, using a carrying pole—and he no longer expected that they would still issue him a salary. He had to mingle with the villagers, not give them any reason to be suspicious of him, settle down, and no doubt grow old and die here. He had to make a home for himself here.

In a few months, he was working almost as fast as the villagers, and he was not like the county cadres who, if they were sent there to work, would find excuses to return to the county town every couple of days. For the peasants, the local cadres were aristocrats who worked in the fields purely for show, but for him there was universal praise. He thought he had managed to win the trust of both the peasants and the village cadres, and so he opened those nailed-up boxes of books.

Tolstoy’s play
The Forces of Darkness
lay at the top of a box; water
seeping through the cracks had added yellow streaks to old Tolstoy’s beard on the cover. The play was about a peasant killing a baby, and its dark intense psychology had once shaken him; it was totally different from the early aristocratic feel of
War and Peace,
written in Tolstoy’s early years. Afraid it would disturb the inner peace he had only just achieved, he didn’t open the book.

He felt like reading some books that were remote from the environment he lived in, some faraway stories that were pure imagination, something puzzling, like
Wild Duck
in
The Collected Plays of Ibsen
. Also, there was the first volume of Hegel’s
Aesthetics
, which he had bought years ago but hadn’t even opened. Doing some reading would help relieve his physical weariness. He put all his copies of Marx and Lenin on the desk, and, before going to bed, took out of the box the book he wanted to read, and, sitting up in bed with the light on, leisurely flipped through the pages. The light globe hung from the rafter, and, without a shade, lit the window. The peasant homes near and far were in complete darkness at night. People were frugal in their use of electricity and went to bed right after the evening meal. Only his solitary hut had a light on, but he thought that to try to conceal it was pointless and would be sure to arouse suspicions.

He was not reading seriously, but was lost in thought and just turning the pages. He couldn’t understand the characters in
Wild Duck
, because old man Hegel would always materialize out of nothing and turn aesthetic feelings into a morass of intellectual analysis. The characters lived in some fictitious village, but if they were to see this real world of his, they would not be able to understand or believe it either. He lay there, listening to the patter of the rain on the tiles above him. In the rainy season, it was wet everywhere, and the grass along the road and the seedlings in the paddy fields grew madly at night, becoming taller and greener by the day. He was to spend his life in the paddy fields, growing and harvesting, year after year. Generations of life would be like paddy rice. People would be
like plants, they would not need a brain, wouldn’t that be more natural? And the total collected strivings of humankind—that is, culture—would, in fact, be so much wasted effort.

Where was the new life? He recalled these words of his classmate Luo, who had come to this realization much earlier. Maybe he should just find himself a peasant girl and raise children. This would be his home forever.

Before the harvest, there were a few free days, and all the men of the village went up the mountains for firewood, so he also went along, a hacking knife on his belt. He went to the county town once a month, to collect his salary along with other cadres who had been sent to the countryside, and often bought a load of charcoal that would last a few months. Nevertheless, he went up the mountains with the men for firewood just to get to know the situation in the four villages of the commune.

In the gully, before going into the mountains, was a small village of just a few families, which was the commune’s most far-flung production team. There he saw an old man with metal-rimmed glasses, sitting in the sun outside his home, squinting at a hand-sewn book riddled with wormholes. He was holding the book in both hands, away from himself, his arms stretched right out.

“Venerable elder, do you still read?” he asked.

The old man took off his glasses, looked up, saw that he was not one of the local peasants, grunted, and put the book down on his lap.

“May I see your book?” he asked.

“It’s a medical book,” the old man explained immediately.

“What sort of medical book?” he went on to ask.

“Treatise on Chills.
Do you think you’d understand it?” There was derision in the man’s voice.

“Venerable elder, are you a doctor of traditional medicine?” He changed the topic to show his respect.

It was only then that the old man let him take the book. This
ancient medical book printed on smooth gray-yellowish bamboo paper, was most certainly a Qing Dynasty edition. Between the wormholes were punctuation circles and commentaries in red cinnabar, written in script the size of a fly’s eye. These notations could have been made by his ancestors, but, more likely, had been made long ago by the old man himself. Holding the precious book in both hands, he carefully returned it to the old man. It was, perhaps, his respectful attitude that moved the old man, who called to the woman inside the house, “Fetch a stool and a bowl of tea for this comrade!”

The old man’s voice was still loud and clear, because of his many years of physical labor; moreover, his knowledge of traditional medicine, no doubt, kept him in good health.

“There’s no need to go to any trouble.” He sat down on the stump for chopping firewood.

A sturdy woman getting on in years, who could have been the old man’s daughter-in-law or a second wife, emerged from the main hall with a stool, then, from a big earthenware pot, she poured him a bowl of hot tea with big leaves floating on top. He thanked her and took the bowl in both hands. There were green mountains all around, and the tops of the firs moved silently in the wind.

“Comrade, where do you come from?”

“The county town, from the commune,” he replied.

“You’re a cadre who has been sent to the country, aren’t you?”

He nodded and said with a smile, “Is it obvious?”

“You’re not a local, anyway. Are you from the provincial capital or from somewhere else?” the old man went on to ask.

“I am from Beijing,” he said succinctly.

At this, the old man nodded and asked nothing more. “Then don’t leave, just settle here!”

He normally adopted a joking tone when the peasants questioned him during the rest breaks, and he did this without fail, so that he wouldn’t need to explain himself. At most, he would add that the
mountains were green, and the rivers clear, and how wonderful it all was! But this old man was clearly educated, and it wasn’t necessary to say this to him.

“Venerable elder, are you a local?” he asked.

“For many generations. No matter how splendid it is elsewhere in the world, it can’t surpass one’s home village,” the old man said passionately. “I’ve been to Beijing.”

He was not surprised, and went on to ask, “What year was it?”

“Oh, that was many years ago, during the Republican period. I was at university, it was the seventeenth year of the Republic.”

“Is that so.” He made a calculation. According to the Gregorian calendar, it was forty years ago.

“At that time, the trendy professors wore Western suits and top hats, carried canes, and came to classes in rickshaws!”

Nowadays the professors were either sweeping the streets or washing out lavatories, he thought but didn’t say.

The old man said he won a government scholarship to study in Japan, and he had a degree from Tokyo Imperial University.

He fully believed this, but what he wanted to know was why the old man had returned to the mountains. However, he couldn’t ask him this directly, so he approached from another angle, “Venerable elder, did you study medicine?”