Soul Mountain (67 page)

“You’ve come from far away to this port and must sample some seafood. It’s not just difficult to find inland, but you can’t always get it in the big coastal cities.” She is very earnest.

It is difficult to refuse so I say to the owner of the house, “How about coming with me?”

He knows her well and says, “This is a special invitation for you. She gets bored living on her own and she’s got something to discuss with you.”

They have evidently worked it out between them so I have no choice but to follow her out the door. She wheels her bicycle over and says, “It’s some distance and will take a bit of time to get there, get on and I’ll double you.”

People are coming and going in the lane, and I am not a cripple.

“What if I double you and you tell me the way?” I say.

She gets on the back seat. We attract a great deal of attention as we weave through the crowds the handlebars swaying and me ringing the bell continuously.

It is great getting an invitation to dinner from a woman but she is past the best years of her life. She has a pale sallow complexion and prominent cheekbones, and the way she talks and how she wheels out the bicycle and gets on is devoid of feminine grace. I glumly pedal away and try to find something to talk about.

She says she is an accountant in a factory. No wonder. She’s a woman in charge of money, I’ve had dealings with such women. You could say that every one of them is bright but they never pay a cent more than they have to for anything. Of course, this is a habit resulting from that line of work, it isn’t a basic trait of women.

Her apartment is one of several around an old courtyard and she parks the old bicycle which will barely stand upright under her window. A huge padlock hangs on the door which opens into a small room with a big wooden bed occupying half of the room. At one side is a square table laid out with liquor and food. Two big wooden chests are stacked one on the top of the other onto bricks on the floor and there are some cosmetics on a slab of glass on top of the chests. There is a pile of old magazines at the bed head.

She notices me looking around and hastily says, “I’m so sorry, it’s all a terrible mess.”

“Life is like that.”

“I just muddle through life, I’m not very fussy about anything.” She puts on a light and gets me to sit at the table, goes to the stove by the door to put on the pot of soup then pours me a drink and sits down opposite. Propping her elbows on the table, she says, “I don’t like men.”

I nod.

“I don’t mean you,” she explains. “I’m talking about men in general. You’re a writer.”

I don’t know whether to nod or not.

“I got divorced long ago and live on my own.”

“It’s not easy.” I am referring to life being hard and that it is like that for everyone.

“I had a girlfriend, we were very good friends from primary school days.”

It occurs to me that she is probably a lesbian.

“She’s dead now.”

I make no response.

“I invited you here to tell you her story. She was very beautiful. If you saw her photo you’d like her, everyone who saw her fell in love with her. She wasn’t beautiful in a normal sense, she was extraordinarily beautiful – a melon-seed shaped face, a small cherry mouth, willow frond eyebrows, big crystal-clear almond eyes. Her figure, needless to say, was like that of classical beauties described in the fiction of the past. Why am I telling you all this? Because, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to keep a single photo of her. At the time I wasn’t prepared, when she died her mother came and took away everything. Drink up.”

She has a drink as well and I can immediately tell by the way she drinks that she is experienced. There are no photos or paintings on the walls and certainly none of the flowers and little animals women usually like. She is punishing herself and probably most of her money is converted into something which goes from a cup into her stomach.

“I am asking you to write her life into a work of fiction. I can tell you everything about her, you have a good writing style. Fiction–”

“Is existence produced from nothingness,” I say with a smile.

“I don’t want you to make it up, you can use her real name. I can’t afford a writer, I can’t pay the manuscript fee. If I had the money, I would willingly pay. I’m seeking your help, asking you to write about her.”

“This is–” I sit up to show that I appreciate her hospitality.

“I’m not bribing you. If you think this girl has been unjustly treated and is worthy of sympathy, then you can write about her. It’s a pity you can’t see her photo.” Her eyes look blank. The dead girl clearly weighs heavily in her heart. “I was born ugly so I always admired pretty girls and wanted to be friends with them. I wasn’t at the same school but always ran into her on the way to school or on my way home, but these were always fleeting encounters. Her oval face moved not just men but also women. I wanted to get to know her better. I saw that she was always on her own and one day I waited for her coming back from school, followed her and said I wanted to talk with her and hoped she wouldn’t mind. She agreed and I walked with her. Thereafter on my way to school, I would always wait for her near her house and in this way got to know her. Don’t hold back, drink up!”

She serves up the stewed eel, the soup is delicious. As I eat, I listen to her telling how she became a member of the girl’s home. The mother treated her like her own daughter and often she didn’t go home and just slept with her in the same bed.

“Don’t go thinking
that
sort of thing was going on. I only knew about sexual matters after she was sentenced to ten years in prison. She had a big argument with me and didn’t want me to visit her. Afterwards I just found some man and got married. She and I had the purest love, that which exists between young girls. You men wouldn’t understand, a man’s love for a woman is like an animal’s. I’m not talking about you, you’re a writer. Have some crab!” She breaks up into pieces the strong smelling raw crab marinated in salt and spices and piles some into my bowl. There are also cooked clams with a sauce dip. It is another battle between men and women, a battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Her friend’s father was a military officer in the Guomindang and when the Liberation Army came south, her mother was pregnant with her. Her father sent word but when she rushed to the wharf, the troop ship had already left. It is one of those old stories again. I lose interest in her friend and simply apply myself to eating the crab.

“One night when we were in bed together, she threw her arms around me and started crying. I was alarmed and asked her what was wrong. She said she missed her father.”

“But she’d never seen him.”

“Her mother burnt all the photos of him in military uniform but they still had wedding photos of her mother in a white net gown with her father. Her father was wearing a Western-style suit and was quite dashing. I tried my best to comfort her and I felt really sorry for her. Afterwards I hugged her tight and sobbed with her.”

“That’s understandable.”

“If everyone thought that, it would have been fine. However, people didn’t understand, they treated her as an anti-revolutionary and said she was hoping for a reactionary restoration and was planning to flee to Taiwan.”

“The policies of those times aren’t like they are today. It’s changed now and people are being urged to come back to the mainland to visit their relatives.” What else can I say?

“She was a young girl and although she was in high school at the time she couldn’t understand all this. She wrote about missing her father in her diary!”

“If this was seen and reported she would certainly have been sentenced,” I say. I am interested in knowing if there were certain changes when the girl’s infatuation with her father got mixed with lesbian love.

She starts talking about how, because of her family background, the girl couldn’t go to university but was selected by the Peking Opera Troupe as a trainee performer, how she was instantly a big hit when the lead woman performer was sick and they put her in as a temporary replacement, how the lead woman performer was jealous, how when the girl’s opera troupe went on tour the woman secretly read her diary and reported her, how when the opera troupe returned to the city the public security officials got her mother in for questioning, asked her to urge her daughter to confess and to hand over the diary, how the girl was afraid of the public security officials ransacking her home and had transferred the diary to her home. However she too was afraid of the public security officials coming in to search so she took the diary to the home of the girl’s maternal uncle. During questioning the mother testified that her daughter only ever went to her home and the home of her maternal uncle. The maternal uncle was summoned and, afraid of being implicated, handed over the diary. The public security officials then turned to the girl, who of course was terrified, and made a full confession. At first she was isolated in the opera troupe and not allowed to go home and then later she was indicted on the criminal charge of writing a reactionary diary and recklessly planning restorationist anti-revolutionary activities. She was put under arrest and imprisoned.

“Are you saying that everyone informed on her and exposed her, even her mother and uncle?” The crab is too strong, I can’t eat anymore and put it aside. My fingers are covered in crab meat and there’s nothing to wipe my hands on.

“We wrote confessions exposing her and put our thumb print to it. Even her uncle who was much older was so frightened he didn’t even dare to see me again. Her mother insisted it was I who had led her daughter astray, that it was I who had fed her those reactionary ideas, and she forbade me to enter her home again!”

“How did she die?” I am anxious to find out the outcome.

“Listen to what I’m saying–” she seems to be defending herself.

I am not judging. If this had happened to me at that time I wouldn’t necessarily have been more level-headed. As a child I had seen my mother pulling out the roll of land deeds from the bottom of my grandmother’s chest and burning them in the stove, and I saw this as destruction of criminal evidence. Fortunately no-one came to investigate. If at the time investigations had involved me, there is no doubt that I would have denounced my maternal grandmother who had bought me the spinning top and my mother who had raised me. It was the way things were in those times.

It isn’t just the strong-smelling crab marinated in brine which is disgusting, it’s also me. I can’t eat anything else and just kept drinking.

She suddenly starts sobbing and covers her face with her hands, and next she is wailing loudly.

I can’t comfort her with my hands covered in crab roe, so I ask, “May I use a towel?”

She points to the basin containing clean water on the rack behind the door. I wash my hands and it is only after I give her a rinsed hand towel that she stops crying. I detest this ugly woman and have no sympathy for her.

She says at the time she was confused. A year later she gradually recovered and made enquiries about the girl’s whereabouts, bought a whole lot of foodstuffs and went to visit her at the prison and the girl had been sentenced to ten years and didn’t want to see her. The girl accepted the things she had brought only after she said she wouldn’t marry and would work to support her after she had served out her sentence.

She says the happiest days in her life were those spent visiting her friend. They swapped diaries, spoke lovingly as if they were sisters, swore never to marry and always to be together. Who would be the husband? Who would be the wife? Of course she would be the wife. Together in bed they would tickle one another until they couldn’t stop laughing, she was happy just to hear the sound of her laughter. However I prefer to imagine the worst of her.

“Then why did you get married?” I ask.

“It was she who changed first,” she says. “Once when I went to see her, her face was swollen and she was very cold to me. I was puzzled and kept questioning her. Right at the end of visiting time, it was always twenty minutes each time, she told me to get married and not to come again. Only after I pressed her about it did she say she had someone. I asked her who it was and she said another prisoner! I did not see her again after that. I wrote her many letters but never got a reply, it was then that I got married.”

I want to say that she had harmed her, that her mother justifiably hated her, otherwise the girl would have loved normally, married normally, had children, and not have ended up like this.

“Do you have children?” I ask.

“I didn’t want any.”

A mean woman.

“I separated after less than a year, then we squabbled for about a year before going through a divorce. Since then I have lived alone, I hate men.”

“How did she die?” I change the subject.

“I heard that she tried to escape and was shot by the guards.”

I don’t want to hear anymore and just want her to quickly finish the story.

“Shall I reheat the soup?” She looks at me apprehensively.

“Don’t bother.” She shouldn’t have got me here, to give vent to her frustrations, eating this meal disgusts me.

She also tells me how she tried all means to seek out a fellow inmate who had been released after serving out her sentence, and found out that her friend had been caught passing notes to a male prisoner and deprived of going out into the open and of having visitors. She had also tried to escape but by that time she was already deranged and would often laugh and weep for no apparent reason. She says that later she found out the address of the male prisoner who had been released. When she arrived at his place there was a woman there and when she asked him about the girl’s circumstances, either because he was afraid of the woman being jealous or because he was quite callous, he said he didn’t know. They didn’t exchange ten sentences and she departed in a rage.