Soul Mountain (62 page)

This realization brings you joy, you are so happy you want to shout. You shout but there is no sound, the only sound is the gurgling of the water as it strikes the holes at the roots of the trees in the river.

Where do the holes come from? The watery region is vast and boundless but it is not very deep and there are no banks. There is a saying that the sea of suffering is boundless, you are drifting in this sea of suffering.

You see a long string of reflections and hear a choir singing a dirge as if it were a hymn. The dirge isn’t sad but is happy. Life is joyous, death is joyous, it is nothing more than your memories. However, there are no choirs singing hymns amongst the images of your remote memories. Listening carefully, you find that the singing is coming from under the moss, thick soft undulating waves of moving moss which cover the earth. You lift it up to have a look and a squirming mass of maggots disperses. This disgusting sight fills you with wonder. You realize that these are maggots feeding off rotting corpses. Your body sooner or later too will be eaten up and this is not a particularly wonderful prospect.

I have been travelling for several days on this network of waterways with a couple of friends as my guides. We are doing whatever we feel like, walking several tens of
li
, going some distance by bus, taking a boat ride. It is by chance that we arrive in this town.

This new friend of mine is a lawyer and knows everything about the local conditions, customs, society and politics. He has his woman friend with him who speaks the gentle Suzhou dialect, and with the two of them as guides I am utterly relaxed touring these riverside towns. I, this drifter, am a celebrity in their eyes and they say that taking this trip with me gives them the chance to be carefree and happy. Each of them has family complications but, in the words of my lawyer friend, humans are basically free-flying birds so what harm is there in seeking some happiness?

He has only been a lawyer for two years. When this long-forgotten profession was resumed, he passed the entrance exams and quit his government job. He is determined to open his own legal office one day and claims that being in law is like being a writer. It is a profession with freedom. If one wants to defend someone one accepts the case so there is an element of choice. Unfortunately, at the moment he can’t defend me but, he says, when the legal system is stronger and I want to take my case to court I can certainly get him to represent me. I say that my situation doesn’t amount to a court case: no money is involved, I have neither damaged a hair on anyone’s head nor anyone’s reputation, there is no theft or fraud, no drug peddling, and no rape. There is no point going to court and if I did I couldn’t win. He throws up his hands, he knows this and is just saying it anyway.

“Don’t rashly say you’ll do the impossible,” his woman friend says.

He looks at her, winks, and turns to ask me, “Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

“Don’t listen to him, he has lots of girlfriends,” she says.

“What’s wrong with saying you’re beautiful?”

She puts out her hand and pretends to hit him.

They pick a restaurant overlooking the street and treat me to dinner. It is ten o’clock at night when we finish. Four young men turn up, order a big bowl of liquor each and a spread of dishes and it looks as if they intend drinking deep into the night.

When we come downstairs, some of the shops and eateries on the street are still ablaze with lights and haven’t closed, the bustle of former times has returned to this town. After a full day, at this moment what is urgent is finding a clean hostel, having a wash, brewing a pot of tea, letting the weariness disssipate, relaxing, and having a bit of a chat either sitting up or lying down.

On the first day we visited a few old communal villages with buildings dating back to the Ming Dynasty, inspecting old opera stages, looking for ancestral temples, taking photos of old memorial archways, reading old inscriptions, visiting old people. We also went inside a number of temples which had been restored or built with funds raised by the villagers and even had our fortunes told while we were there. We spent the night on the outskirts of a small village with a family in a newly-built house. The owner was an old retired soldier who welcomed us as lodgers and even cooked us a meal. He sat and told us about the heroic events which occurred during his participation in the work of bandit extermination, then told us stories about the bandits of earlier times in the area. Afterwards, when he saw that we were tired, he took us upstairs, which wasn’t partitioned, spread out some fresh straw, brought in some bedding, and said if we wanted the lamp to be careful not to cause a fire. We didn’t need the lamp and let him take it downstairs with him, then lay down in the dark. The two of them went on talking as I drifted off to sleep.

The next night, with the stars overhead, we arrived at a county town. We knocked on the door of a small inn and got them to open up. There was only an old man on duty and no other lodgers. The doors of several rooms were open and the three of us each chose one. This lawyer friend of mine came to my room to chat and his woman friend said she was scared of staying in the empty room by herself. She picked an empty bed and got under the covers to listen to him and me raving on.

He had a lot of astonishing tales and they weren’t like the old soldier’s tales which had gone stale and lost their bite. As a lawyer he had access to verbal and written testimonies of cases and had even come in contact with some of the criminals. He livened up the stories as he told them, especially the sex crime cases. His woman friend, curled up like a cat under the quilt, kept interrupting to ask whether it was all true.

“I’ve personally questioned a number of the criminals. The year before, there was a crackdown on hooligan offenders and one county arrested eight hundred of them. Most were sexually frustrated youths who didn’t deserve to be sentenced and certainly only a very small minority deserved the death sentence. Nevertheless large numbers were executed each time as stipulated in the directives from higher up. Even some of the clearer-thinking cadres in the public security bureau felt bad about it.”

“Did you defend them?” I asked.

He sat up and lit a cigarette.

“Tell the one about them dancing in the nude,” his woman friend prompted him.

“There’s this granary which used to belong to a production team on the outskirts of town. All the fields have now been divided up and the grain produced is stored in people’s homes, so it was empty and unused. Every Saturday, as soon as it got dark, a big group of youths from the cities and towns would come on their bikes and motorbikes. They would bring along a record player and go inside to dance. They had people guarding the door and the local peasants weren’t allowed in. The granary ventilators were very high so people couldn’t see in from the outside. The villagers were curious and one night some of them brought a ladder and climbed up. It was pitch-black inside. They couldn’t see a thing and could only hear music, so they reported it. The public security came out in force, raided the party and arrested over a hundred. They were all about twenty years of age, the sons and younger brothers of local cadres, young workers, petty merchants, shop assistants and unemployed youths. There were also a few adolescent boys and girls who were still at high school. Afterwards some were sentenced to prison and others to labour camps, quite a few were also executed.”

“Were they really dancing in the nude?” she asked.

“Some of them were, most were indulging in minor sexual activities. Of course some inside were having sex. One girl barely twenty years old said she had been penetrated more than two hundred times. She was really wild.”

“How did she manage to keep count?” It was still her asking.

“She said afterwards she became numb and simply counted. I have seen her and spoken with her.”

“Didn’t you ask her why she allowed this to happen?” I asked.

“She said at the beginning she was curious. Before going to the dance she had not had any sexual experiences but once the floodgates had opened there was no stopping. Those were her own words.”

“That’s quite true,” she said from under the quilt.

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“To look at her, you wouldn’t believe it, she was very ordinary. You would even think her face was rather homely, it was expressionless and had nothing wanton about it. Her head had been shaved and she was dressed in a prison uniform so you couldn’t tell what sort of a figure she had. Anyway, she wasn’t tall and she had a round face. And she didn’t baulk at talking about anything. She talked about whatever you asked her without any emotion.”

“Of course . . .” she said softly.

“Afterwards she was executed.”

All three of us fell silent.

“What was her crime?” I asked after quite some time.

“Her crime?” he asked himself. “A hooligan who incited others to crime. She didn’t go on her own but took other girls with her and of course these girls also ended up indulging in these activities.”

“The point is whether she had lured others into engaging in illicit sexual activities or had been an accomplice in rape,” I said.

“Strictly speaking, there was no rape. I saw the testimonies. However, as to her enticing others into engaging in illicit sexual activities, that’s hard to say.”

“Under those circumstances . . . it’s all very hard to say for sure,” she said.

“What about her motives? Not regarding herself, but for taking other girls along. What made her do this? Had someone asked her to do it or given her money to do it?”

“I asked her about this. She said she had only been intimate with men she knew and with whom she had eaten and had been drinking. She had never taken anyone’s money. She had a job, it seems, in a pharmacy or was in charge of drugs in some clinic, she was educated  . .”

“This has nothing to do with education. She wasn’t a prostitute, it was just that she had a psychological problem,” she cut in.

“What psychological problem?” I turned to ask her.

“Why do you need to ask? You’re a writer. She was dissolute and wanted women around her also to be dissolute.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

“You understand perfectly well,” she retorted. “Everyone has sexual feelings, only she was unlucky. She must have loved some person but couldn’t have him. So she wanted revenge, first on herself . . .”

“Do you also want revenge?” the lawyer turned to ask her.

“If I got to that, I’d kill you first!”

“Are you as violent as that?” he asked.

“There’s violence in everyone,” I said.

“The question is whether it is a capital offence,” the lawyer said. “In my view, in principle only murder, arson and drug peddling should be treated as capital offences because these cause the deaths of others.”

“So you’re saying rape is not a criminal offence?” she got up to ask.

“I’m not saying rape is not a criminal offence. However soliciting for illicit sexual activities isn’t, because there are two consenting parties.”

“So do you think that enticing young girls into illicit sexual activities is not an offence?”

“That depends on how you define a young girl, if it’s an adolescent girl under eighteen years of age.”

“Do you mean to say that girls under eighteen don’t have sexual feelings?”

“Legally, there has to be a cut-off point.”

“I’m not concerned with the law.”

“But the law is concerned with you.”

“Why is it concerned with me? I haven’t committed any crimes, it’s you men who are the criminals.”

The lawyer and I burst out laughing.

“What are you laughing about?” She was targeting him.

“You’re worse than the law, are you even concerned about my laughing?” he turned and asked her instead.

She was unfussed about being only in her underwear and, hands on her hips, she glowered as she asked him, “Then tell the truth, have you ever been with prostitutes? Speak up!”

“No.”

“Tell the story about the hot soup noodles! Let him be the judge.”

“What’s there to tell, it was just a bowl of hot soup noodles.”

“Heaven only knows!” she yelled.

“What happened?” I was naturally curious.

“Money isn’t the only thing prostitutes want, they too are sensitive human beings.”