One Man`s Bible

15

He recalled that, as a youngster, he once read a fairy tale, the author and tide of which he had since forgotten. The story went like this: there was this kingdom, where everyone wore a bright mirror on the chest, and the smallest wicked thought would reflect in the mirror. Everything was revealed, and everyone could see it, so no one dared to be even slightly wicked, because there would be nowhere to hide, and the person would be driven from the kingdom. It therefore became a kingdom of pure people. The protagonist entered this kingdom of ultimate purity, maybe he stumbled upon it-he didn't remember too clearly. Anyway, the protagonist also had a mirror on his chest, but in it was a flesh-and- blood heart. An outcry went up among the masses-he was terrified when he read this. He could not remember what happened to the protagonist, but the story left him feeling shocked and uneasy. At the time, he was still a child and did not have any really wicked thoughts, but he couldn't help feeling scared, although of what, he had no idea. As he became an adult, such feelings gradually paled into oblivion; he already had hopes of becoming a new person and, moreover, of living a peaceful life in which he would be able to sleep soundly, without nightmares.

The first to talk to him about women was his schoolmate Luo, a precocious boy who was a few years older. While Luo was a senior in middle school, several of his poems had been published in a magazine, earning him the title of poet among his classmates. He greatly admired Luo. However, after failing the university entrance exams, Luo worked off his frustration by going alone to the school basketball court. There, he would strip to the waist and, sweating all over in the hot summer sun, jump and shoot baskets. Luo didn't seem to be upset about failing and said he was off to fish in the Zhoushan Archipelago. This convinced him that Luo was a born poet.

Some years later, when he went home for the summer vacation, he saw Luo in a white apron selling bean curd at a vegetable market near his home. Luo gave a wan smile when he caught sight of him, and, taking off his apron, got the plump elderly woman who sold vegetables to take care of his bean-curd stall. As they went off together, Luo told him that he had been a fisherman for two years, but when he came back he couldn't find work. Finally, the subdistrict office assigned him to the cooperative vegetable stall to sell bean curd and to look after the accounts.

Luo would count as a genuine slum-dweller. His shanty, a structure of broken bricks and woven bamboo with a coat of mortar, was divided into an inner and an outer room. His mother slept in the inner room, and the outer room served as the main room and kitchen. On one side of the shanty, Luo had extended the roof and put together some sheets of pressed asbestos to build himself another room. In the far corner, where one couldn't stand up straight, stood a collapsible canvas bed and a small desk with a drawer; against the wall on the other side was a rattan bookcase. Everything was meticulously tidy and clean. Although Luo's mother was at work in the factory, Luo took him into this room the size of a chicken coop instead of the main room of the shanty, and got him to sit at the desk while he himself sat on the canvas bed.

"Do you still write poetry?" he asked.

Luo pulled out the drawer and took out a diary. It contained neatly written poems, each clearly dated.

"Are these all love poems?" he asked, leafing through the pages. He had not thought that this big fellow who was always a loner at school wrote lyrical poetry like this. He still remembered the old literature teacher reading out lines from Luo's poems in composition classes, and he said to Luo that these love poems were totally different from those early poems, which were filled with impassioned youthful determination.

"Those poems were like that so that they'd get published, but now even those poems wouldn't get published. These poems here were written for that little slut," Luo said, and started talking about women. "That little slut was just having a bit of fun with me. She had found herself a cadre who was more than ten years her senior and was waiting to get the marriage registered. She used to stay up all night knitting pullovers for that man. I got this book of poems back from her and I don't write anymore."

He thought it was best to get off the topic of women and started talking to Luo about literature. He said that the new life of the new era should have a new literature, but he wasn't sure what exactly this new literature of this new life would be like. However, he didn't think it could be about the good things happening to good people, like in the new folk songs of the Great Leap Forward that filled the pages of all the newspapers and magazines. He also talked about the fiction of Gladkov and Ehrenburg, and the plays of Mayakovski and Brecht. At the time, he wasn't aware of the purges of counterrevolutionaries by Stalin, Ehrenburg's Thaw, or the execution of Meyerhold.

"The literature you're talking about is too far away," Luo said. "I don't know where you will find any literature. I spend my time selling vegetables during the day, then, at night, after all the stalls close, I do the accounts. Sometimes I read a bit, but it's all about faraway happenings, and I just read to fritter away time, get rid of the boredom. And I don't know where this new life is. The bit of pride I had as a student vanished long ago; I just find myself some girls to have a bit of fun."

He found Luo's decadence sadder than Luo's talk about the little slut. He said he had never touched a woman and this time it was Luo who was surprised. "You're a real bookworm!" Luo said without envy of his apparently better circumstances. Luo was, after all, a few years older and said magnanimously, "I'll get you a girl so you can have a bit of fun. You definitely won't have any problems touching Little Five." Luo said this Little Five was a very easygoing girl, a randy little cunt. He again heard Luo talking disrespectfully about women.

"I'll get her to come. This slip of a girl can play the guitar. She's not like those girls at school, all of them with their airs," he said.

He, of course, wanted to know such a girl, and Luo went off to fetch her. He read through Luo's love poems, some of which were quite explicit. In his view, they surpassed Guo Moruo's "Goddess" in extolling sex, and he was deeply moved. He was even more convinced that Luo was indeed a genuine poet, but, at the same time, he knew that these poems definitely could not be published, and he felt sorry for Luo.

Before long, Luo was back. He turned to Luo and said, "Now, this is poetry!"

"Ha, I wrote them for myself to read." Luo gave a bitter laugh.

Little Five arrived wearing clogs. This young girl with intensely black eyes in a sleeveless round-neck floral top had big breasts. She was barely fifteen, but her body was already that of a young woman. She didn't come into the little room but leaned against the doorway. "He also writes poetry," Luo said, to introduce him to the girl.

In fact, Luo had never read any of his poetry, but this seemed to be an ideal introduction. The girl would have read these erotic poems, and such an introduction would have had an implicit meaning. The girl smiled, and her full lips took on a sultry look; he had never seen a girl with such sexy lips. He closed the book and started talking to Luo about something else. It was he, and not the girl, who felt awkward.

Luo took from behind the door a guitar that had lost most of its varnish and said to the girl, "Little Five, how about singing for us."

He had been saved from his embarrassment. Little Five took the guitar and asked, "What shall I sing?"

"Whatever you like. How about 'Kalinka'?"

This Russian folk song used to be very popular among the youth, but had been replaced by songs extolling the new society, the Party, and the leaders.

Little Five put down her head to pluck the strings. Muted soft notes arose, but she didn't seem to be listening, and looked listless. When she looked at him, he felt utterly confused. Somewhere in the room a cricket quietly chirped, and outside the small window the hot sun glared fiercely. The girl played a tune, stopped, and told Luo she didn't feel like singing. When she turned to him, she seemed to be looking somewhere above his head.

"If you don't want to sing, then don't," Luo said. "But come to see a movie tonight."

The girl smiled without answering, and put the guitar by die door. When she got as far as the main room, she turned and said, "I've got things to do at home!" Then she went off.

"The hell she has. As if I'd believe that crap," Luo said. "You really don't know how to flirt with girls. Don't you want to date her?"

He fell silent. Luo said there wasn't much of a future, so his group of losers often found girls to have a bit of fun, to play the guitar, and to sing together. Sometimes they went to the lake outside the city. They would have a swim or steal a small boat, row out to where the lotus grew in thick clumps, and steal some of the pods. Little Five went with them, and, at night in the middle of the lake, anyone could roam her body and she wouldn't complain. She was a very worldly wench. It was obvious Luo was in love with her, but he said he had a woman. The two of them had grown up together, but she had joined a song-and-dance troupe in a military zone and couldn't marry a vegetable seller like him. Anyway, she got pregnant. That was last winter. Getting an abortion in a hospital required a marriage certificate and a work card, but where could he get hold of these? On top of that, the woman was military personnel, and she had to obtain permission from her superiors to get married. If her workplace found out, she would, of course, be expelled from the army, lose that good job, and end up hating him for the rest of her life! Furthermore, the tiny income from the cooperative vegetable stall was barely enough to feed himself, how would he be able to support a wife and a child? Luckily, one of his maternal uncles was a doctor in a county town, and, thanks to his uncle persuading his associates at the county hospital, Luo was able to take her there, say they were married, and have the abortion performed.

"I went with her early on Sunday morning, and she had to get back to the song-and-dance troupe by ten o'clock that night for roll call. It was army regulation. We had to change buses on the way and were waiting by the bus-stop sign. It had been dark for some time, it was raining, and there wasn't anyone else around. She said she was still bleeding down there, and as I put my arms around her the two of us wept miserably. Afterward, we separated, just like that. Can this be expressed in writing?" Luo asked. "Where is this new life?"

Luo said he couldn't help being decadent. He had womanized in the two years he spent fishing. When the men on the island went out to fish on the high seas, there was no way of knowing if they would be back. He was a young boy just out of school, there was an abundance of sex-crazed women in the fishing village, and that was how it all started. There was nothing romantic to it, and, after he had had his fling, he knew that it was really fucking boring. There was no one he could have a conversation with, so he chose to come back and sell vegetables.

"What gave you the idea of being a fisherman?" he asked Luo.

"I had no choice, I had to find something to do. At the time, like you, I wanted to go to a prestigious university to study literature. Don't you know why I failed?" Luo asked.

"You were the most outstanding in the whole class and acknowledged as a poet by your fellow students. It didn't occur to me that you would fail," he said.

"It was all because of that fuckin' poetry," Luo said. "The year of the university entrance examination was just before the antirightist campaign. Hadn't they called upon people to speak out? The provincial publications got some young writers to take part in a meeting where they were encouraged to speak their minds. I joined with some other young writers and said that there were too many restrictions on topics. Poetry was poetry, why did it have to be divided into industrial themes, agricultural themes, and lives of young people? I also said that they had published my worst poems with the best lines deleted. Because of those comments, they sent in a report to the school. The principal had me in for a talk, and it was only then that I found out I was in trouble. I don't know what happened to the others. I was the youngest, and I had spoken less than the others. At least, I was able to come back to sell vegetables."

Afterward, he bought three tickets to the movies. He waited at the door of the theater until the show was due to start, when Little Five turned up running and out of breath. She said Luo had to go on night duty at the vegetable stall and couldn't come. He wasn't sure if it was Luo's intention to push Little Five onto him, but as soon as they went inside the darkened theater, he took Little Five's hand and they sat down in a couple of seats on the side. He had no idea what the movie was about and only recalled that he was holding the girl's soft hand all the time and that his hot palm was sweating.

He thought that as all the boys had felt the girl, why shouldn't he? Before that, he had never touched a girl. Love for him was something totally different.

At senior middle school, he fell in love with a girl from a lower grade and got to speak with her at the New Year school dance. Right through the night, whether they were playing at solving riddles written on lanterns or some other game, he kept close to that girl in a red pinafore with black flowers. In the hazy light of dawn, or maybe in the reflected light of the streetlights on the snow, he followed the girl as she walked home with some other girls. They were laughing and looking back at him from time to time, and he knew they were talking about him.

He did not think that he, too, could casually touch a girl. When he came out of the theater with Little Five, he deliberately avoided the main street and went into an alley, all the time holding her hand. The girl went along with him, looking at her shoes as she walked, and, now and then, kicking stones on the road. At a corner unlit by the streetlights, he took Little Five's arm and tried to draw her to him. She shook her head and looked at him wide-eyed.

"You men are all bad."

He said he wasn't like that and only wanted to kiss her.

"Why?" she asked with a frown, as the whites of her eyes showed.

He let go of her and said he had never kissed a girl before. Little Five said she'd have to think about it.

His hands fell to his sides, and he hung his head. He did not expect to hear Little Five say, "Then go ahead and kiss me."

He touched her tightly closed lips and immediately withdrew. Little Five closed her eyes, her lips relaxed, and he kissed her again. This time, her lips were thick and soft. He touched her firm breasts through her loose-fitting clothes, and the girl murmured, "Don't hurt me…"

His hand found its way inside her clothes and roamed over her swelling breasts. But he did not dare and had not considered having sex with a girl he did not love. He did not yet know about lust, but he could tell that the girl was really passionate. Afterward, at the university, he received a letter from Little Five. It was a simple letter asking whether he would be back for the summer vacation.

That summer he didn't return. It was the great famine that followed in the wake of the Great Leap Forward. During the summer vacation, university students were required to do voluntary labor, digging holes to plant trees in the Western Hills of Beijing. Everyone was swollen from hunger but nevertheless obliged to donate the whole vacation to carrying out these futile "good deeds." He regretted that he had not been able to sink into total depravity when he was fooling around with Little Five that summer vacation, and he secretly wanted to be totally decadent.