A Private Life Page 20

  I said, "Yin Nan, I want you… to remember me."

  He said, "I'll always remember you."

  I said, "I want your body… to remember me."

  I felt his body tremble slightly, and a tremor in the pit of his stomach seemed to answer a silent call from deep within my body.

  I took him by the hand and led him to the battered old wooden bench on the heap of straw.

  Yin Nan seemed suddenly like an obedient little sick boy who had to have everything done for him. I motioned to him to sit down. I slowly undid my jacket, then took off my clothes and spread them on the bench. I took his head in my hands and made him slowly lie back. I pushed down his knees, straightening out his legs. He seemed almost awkward under my hands, but he offered no resistance to my will. His breathing became agitated and his long, delicate hands hung down helplessly on either side of the bench.

  I touched his face lightly, his eyebrows, his ears. Slowly, lingeringly, my hands moved behind his ears, around his neck. I slid them under the neck of his undershirt to explore every inch of his back.

  I felt a tremulous shiver run down his spine as he moaned my name.

  I bent over him as I gently undid his clothes and his belt. He was like a willing, eager prisoner, letting me do with him whatever I wished. His eyes were half closed, his head turned to one side, his soft hair hanging down.

  At last, he lay there hot and naked before me. This was the first time I had actually looked at the naked body of a man, and caressed him like this. His rib cage arched upward splendidly. In the gloom, his pale skin glowed like clear crystal.

  I don't know if other women remember their first loves like this. But I cannot forget how in that abandoned warehouse the soft, white radiance of his body emerging from under his rather dirty clothes actually left me feeling faint.

  I squeezed a space to sit on the bench beside him and, twisting over him, I let my fingers flow like water, unceasingly, over every curve and hollow of his tense frame.

  His body, stretched out in the murky shadows like a reef submerged at one moment in passion, at the next in anxiety, could do nothing but wait helplessly as those hands rolled ceaselessly over him like waves, touching his hard hips, his thighs, his groin, and that fatal private place.

  At last, I bent my body over his head, and cradling it in my hands, I lifted him gently until my breasts were touching his lips. I bumped them back and forth against his mouth like two sweet, ripe pears. A strained and aching moan escaped him as he opened his mouth to accept them. His arms jerked upward around me as he pulled my body and those sweet, pendulous pears down against him. His entire body was trembling violently as he desperately, blindly sought the way.

  I took hold of him, and gently guided that lost and hungry lamb into the sweet pasture of its yearning…

  Ah, his love! So young, so vital!

  Our half hour was too soon over, and it was time to bid each other good-bye.

  As we separated from our last burning embrace, I felt the unaccountable rush of a winter chill sweep over me. The open pores of my hot skin shrank shut at its touch.

  With the approach of our last moment, I began to tremble uncontrollably.

  Yin Nan had his hand on my shoulder as we made our way out of the warehouse. As I moved toward the door, I kept thinking that in another hour that hand would be reaching out in the blue empyrean, making its way westward to Europe, to that city of profound speculation and philosophy, Berlin. Never again would I be able to touch him. The heat I could feel at that moment from the hand on my shoulder would have dissipated within less than a minute, perhaps, of his last good-bye.

  I very clearly remember the weather that day. It was as gray and listless as the exhausted faces of people on the street, who had endured more than a month of tortuous summer temperatures. To pull up my spirits, I began hoping that Yin Nan would suddenly change his mind or that something unexpected would occur, making it impossible for him to leave me so soon. Even just a day would be good.

  Only at the very last moment, when his back finally disappeared at the end of the street, did I give up this hope.

  By the time we parted, the light had already started to fade, so I set off toward the hospital where Mother was convalescing.

  Again my silent tears began to flow. But I didn't know whom I was shedding them for, because I was quite aware that our relationship had not been so long or deep-rooted that it was to be cut forever into my soul. But after Ho's death, this young man with whom I had shared such intimacies was the only close friend I had left. Having departed, he was to become a memory that I would cling to desperately, a lifeless cloak that I was to invest with vitality. This "cloak," which from the moment of Yin Nan's last good-bye would never again be real, enclosed an image of him that was to become ever more perfect. All those intimacies obscured in shadow because they were too private were wrapped up, locked within that perfect, shining, inviolate outer "cloak." It took on an eternal radiance that had a more lasting allure than the actual person. This sudden, unexpected termination of our love gave it an enduring beauty, like the eternal beauty of the living flow arrested in marble.

  Of all the ways that human relationships can end, this is the most moving.

  It was for this that I shed my tears.

  At last, I lifted my head to look in the direction of the airport, and sure enough, I could make out a silver-gray object that looked like a huge kite floating against a blue backdrop, dancing at the end of an immensely long cotton string that I held in my hand. Little by little, I pulled it in until it was directly above where I stood.

  As it came slowly toward me, its shape became clearer and clearer.

  Eventually I could see that it apparently was not an airplane, but not until it was very near did I realize that it was a person. And what was strange was that it was not Yin Nan. The person soaring up there like some huge bird was myself.

  There on the ground was the real me holding a kite string, controlling another self-same me up there in the blue…

  One summer many years later, to my total surprise, I once again encountered this fleeting illusion, which had been very much like a scene from a film.

  In the hottest part of the summer of 1993, when I quite by chance saw the Italian movie 8 1/2, it seemed like the gods had arranged this meeting with Federico Fellini, the film's eccentric director, who had created the same illusion.

  Again, in the summer of 1994, I embraced the work of Ingmar Bergman, another male who was to infatuate me, when I saw in multitrack sound his films Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.

  But all of this happened later.

  They and I lived in different, mad ages, but for a fleeting moment our minds had shared the same visions.

  Wild Strawberries:

  … I think it was also on a bright summer day. An old man dreamed that he was walking on a quiet, deserted street in a strangely desolate city. His shadow was outlined by the sunlight, but he felt very cold nonetheless. As he strolled down the broad, tree-lined street, the sound of his footsteps echoed uneasily from the surrounding buildings.

  He felt strange, but he had no idea why.

  While he was passing an optometrist's shop, he noticed that there were no hands or numbers on the big clock on the store's sign. He took his watch out of his breast pocket and checked the time. But the hands of his very accurate old gold timepiece had also disappeared. His time had run out; those hands would never again indicate time for him. He held the watch next to his ear to check that it was still ticking, but all he heard was the beating of his own racing heart.

  Putting his watch back in his breast pocket, he looked up at the optometrist's sign, only to see that the big pair of eyes on it had almost totally rotted away. Frightened out of his wits, he turned around and started walking in the direction of his home.

  At a street corner, he at last saw another person standing with his back to him. He rushed over and bodily spun him around, only to discover that under the floppy brim of his hat there
was no face, and as his body turned it collapsed as if it were nothing more than a heap of dust or wood shavings, leaving an empty suit of clothes crumpled on the ground.

  Only then did he discover that everyone along that tree-lined street that connected with the city square had died. There was not a living soul… A hearse clanked by, its wheels rumbling loudly as it lurched along the rough street. Just as it reached him, the coffin fell off as three of its metal wheels rolled over, and clattered down beside him. As he was looking at the coffin, its lid sprang open. There was not a sound or a breath coming from it. Curious, he ventured slowly over to it. As he did so, an arm suddenly shot out from those splintered planks and clung to him desperately. Then the corpse slowly arose. He stared at it transfixed. The corpse standing there in the coffin in a swallowtailed coat was himself.

  Death was calling…

  The Seventh Seal:

  Overhead, the dull gray sky was dead as the vaulted ceiling of a tomb.

  A black cloud stood motionless on the horizon as the curtain of night began to fall. A strange bird hung aloft, severing the air with its unsettling cries.

  The knight Antonius was seeking the road back home through fields littered with corpses in a pestilence-ridden land.

  He surveyed the scene around him.

  There was a man standing behind him all dressed in black, his face an unusual ashen gray, his hands hidden in the deep folds of his cloak.

  Turning to him, the knight asked, "Who are you?"

  The man in black with the ashen face said, "I am Death."

  The knight: "Have you come looking for me?"

  Death: "I have been watching you for a very long time."

  The Knight: "I have known this – it is your way."

  Death: "This is my territory. Are you ready to 'set off' with me now?"

  The knight: "My flesh is a bit frightened, but I myself don't give it much note."

  Death spread open his black cloak to enclose the knight.

  The knight: "Wait a moment."

  Death: "I cannot delay your time."

  The knight: "You like to play chess, don't you?"

  Death: "How did you find that out?"

  The knight: "I have seen it in paintings, heard it in people's songs."

  Death: "You are right, of course. I am an excellent chess player."

  The knight: "But you're not necessarily better than me."

  As he spoke, the knight carefully laid out a chessboard on the ground and started setting up the pieces. Then he said, "The condition is this – as long as I am in the game you must let me live."

  The knight extended two closed fists to Death.

  Death let out a burst of wild laughter as he held up the black pawn in his hand.

  The knight: "So, you will play the black?" Death: "Is it not most appropriate for me to do so?"

  The knight and Death sat down rigidly, facing each other across the chessboard. Antonius hesitated for a moment, then moved a pawn. Death countermoved.

  An intense heat surrounded this desolate field, which was immersed in strange mists. In the distance, crowds of people were dancing their dance with Death, and Death was dancing his fatal steps with each of them.

  Death concentrated on his game with Antonius, determined to take him away. Eventually, Antonius lost, and Death carried him off…

  But there is a chronological discrepancy involved in all of this. On that oppressive early summer evening when this unbroken string of strange scenes flashed through my mind, I had not yet seen these films.

  That evening, as these anticipated scenes were unfolding in my mind, I was walking along that tree-lined street behind the square. It wasn't very far from the hospital where my mother was convalescing.

  At that point, an ill-omened wind from above seemed to press down upon the street with an anxious disquietude. The depressing sound of my footsteps on the street, now trapped in twilight gloom, seemed to mark the respite that precedes the onslaught of a storm's main force. Their sound brought me back from the unreality of those illusionary scenes that had held my mind.

  The overturned object at the corner of the street looked like a dead mare, her belly swollen with foal. Its smoldering fragments gave off a stench of burning rubber that filled that tree-lined, peaceful street with the nauseating smell of war and floated upward to clog the translucent twilight sky above the city.

  The smoke floated up like curling wisps of incense above an altar toward a silent, unanswering heaven.

  It was at just that moment that the stray bullet, with complete disinterest, came out of nowhere to pierce my left calf on one side and exit from the other.

  19 The Birth Of Miss Nothing…

  A person's ability to act in accord with her own conscience depends upon the degree to which she can go beyond the limits imposed by the society in which she lives, to become a citizen of the world. The most important quality she must possess in this is the courage to say no, the courage to refuse to obey the dictates of the powerful, to refuse to submit to the dictates of public opinion.

  In the early autumn of 1990, my mother's heart condition brought on a serious heart attack, and one night, sometime after a last wrenching bout of pain, she "died" quietly in the midst of her dreams.

  I put quotation marks around "died" because that was what the doctors and the others around her said.

  But that was not the way I saw it.

  Lying there in her sleep, Mother looked wonderfully serene, as if she were having a beautiful dream. Perhaps she was dreaming that she was strolling down one of Beijing 's broad, paved avenues. I knew that after she got sick and had difficulty breathing, she especially liked open spaces with lots of green trees and lush grass, and the grand streets of Beijing were a perfect match for the ideal streets of her dreams. I imagined that in her dream that night, she was surveying that city where she had lived for more than fifty years through those eyes that would never know youth again, ardently looking at every old tree along the streets, every old-fashioned doorway, and even the stray stones along the roadside worn smooth with time. She looked intently at every wall she passed along her way, as if searching for the secret dreams of her youth hidden in the patterns etched there by the rain and grit-laden winds. Like a pair of loving hands, her eyes caressed the passing scenes along the streets. Time seemed to be flowing backward, and from the deep sockets of her eyes there issued a cloudless radiance.

  She so looked like she was sleeping that final night, that I could not believe she had died.

  And from that time I have also harbored a quiet secret in my heart: my mother, in actuality, had not left me. Because she couldn't breathe properly, her organs slowly atrophied, perhaps very much in the way that things left in badly ventilated places go wormy, so she got rid of her body and became invisible. She was playing a joke on the living.

  But the doctors and the people around me had no sense of humor. They insisted that she was dead, period. Even the stupid professors in my school believed this, and they said I was losing my mind and sent me to the hospital for treatment. (That was where I met Qi Luo, the psychiatrist I mentioned at the very beginning.) The school also used this as an excuse to make me discontinue my studies.

  In my heart, I have gone over the factors involved in my case many times, and I know the source of the problem. The key thing is the fact that I still don't know whether the bullet that pierced my calf was red or black. The two different colors for bullets indicate two different things. This has a bearing on all my other problems.

  But I never found the bullet. It was total chance that I got caught in the line of fire. There was nothing I could do.

  I remember that at the time, when in confidence I told Doctor Qi about my conjecture, I saw him write in my case history: "block in logical thinking; excessive fragmentation in symbolic thought association."

  I regarded him as a friend, but I found out that he was not on my side.

  So after a while I didn't talk openly with him anymore, though he st
ill wanted to help me. I lied to him all the time and didn't let him know what I was really thinking, but this didn't stop him from wanting to be my friend. He was always loaning me psychology books to read. I really learned a lot from those books, which helped me to eventually understand myself and straighten myself out.

  In the beginning, I insisted on telling the people around me, "My mother hasn't really died; she's just playing a joke on us."

  But when I talked like this, all of them (except Doctor Qi) felt uneasy about me and then started to avoid me, as if they were afraid.

  Eventually I smartened up and didn't talk that way anymore. But in my heart I knew that what they saw as reality was false.

  I went home and looked in the mirror to find out what it was about me that made them avoid me. There was nothing about my appearance that was frightening; even my eyes weren't swollen, because I hadn't cried at all.

  Why should I have cried? I didn't in the least believe that my mother had died, as they all said.

  After Mother's body was gone, all the sounds in her apartment, such as the ticking of her wall clock and the gurgling in the water pipes, seemed to die away.

  But her clothes were still alive, I'm absolutely certain of that.

  Often, I would knock on her door, then, opening it with my key, I'd go in, saying, "Mama, are you sleeping?" After that, I would talk with her clothes for a long, long time. They were definitely alive, because I clearly heard them talking to me.

  One evening when I was out for a walk, I saw a girl who looked a lot like my friend Ho. She was standing under a scholar tree watching the dancing shadows of the leaves beneath the street lamps. For a long time I stood watching her as she watched the shadows moving like dark clouds.