One Man`s Bible

53

The first time he ever saw the great man at such close range was in Tiananmen Square, midway between the Imperial Palace and Qianmen, behind the Memorial of the Heroes of the People. The recently completed mausoleum, constructed with heavy-duty steel-reinforced concrete, was said to be capable of withstanding nuclear bombs and point-nine earthquakes. In the crystal casket, Mao's head was really big, it was clearly swollen, and this could be seen in spite of the heavy makeup. He was five meters away, and filing past in the queue only allowed two or three seconds. There was no time to articulate what was on his mind.

He felt that he had things to say to the old man. Of course, not to the corpse of the Leader of the people in the crystal casket, but to Mao wearing only a bathrobe. Whether he had just got out of bed with some woman friend, or had just got out of the swimming pool, was not important; moreover, that such a great leader had numerous women friends shouldn't be held against him. He simply wanted to speak to the old man after he had taken off his Commander-in-Chief army uniform and his Great Leader's mask. You really lived fully as a human being, and it must be admitted that you possessed individuality, that you really were a Superman. You succeeded in dominating China, and your ghost still hovered over more than one billion Chinese. Your influence was so powerful that it spread to all parts of the world, and it was pointless to deny this. What he wanted to say was, you could kill people at will. What he wanted to tell Mao was, you made every single person speak your words.

He also wanted to say that history would fade into oblivion, but, back in those days, he had been forced to say what Mao had dictated, therefore, it was impossible for him to eradicate his hatred for Mao. Afterward, he had said to himself that as long as Mao was revered as leader, emperor, god, he would not return to that country. However, what gradually became clear to him was that it was impossible for a person's inner mind to be subjugated by another, unless that person allowed it.

What he finally wanted to say was that although it was possible to kill a person, no matter how frail the person was, that person's human dignity could not be killed. A person is human because this bit of self-respect is indestructible. When a person's life is like an insect's, is the person aware that an insect also possesses its own insect dignity? Before an insect is trampled or squashed to death, it will pretend to be dead, struggle, or try to run away in order to save itself, but its insect dignity can't be trampled to death. People have been killed off like the grass under the blade, but does the grass under the blade seek to be forgiven? People are clearly inferior to grass. What he wanted to prove was that, as well as life, people have human dignity. If preserving one's human dignity is impossible, and one isn't killed and doesn't commit suicide, then, if one does not want to die the only option is to flee. Dignity is an awareness of existence, and it is in this that the power of the frail individual lies.

Once one's awareness of existence is extinguished, the apparition of existence, too, is extinguished.

Enough of all this, all this nonsense. But he had sustained himself precisely through this nonsense. Now, when he could finally speak these words openly to Mao, the old man had already been dead for some years, so he could only address them to Mao's spirit or shadow.

Mao was wearing a bathrobe, he had probably just come out of the swimming pool. He was tall and had a fat belly. His high-pitched voice was somewhat like a woman's, and he had a thick Hunan accent. His kindly benign face was just as it was in the unchanging oil portrait on the wall in Tiananmen Square. To look at, he was an amiable person. He liked smoking, was a chain smoker, and his teeth were stained black from tobacco. He smoked specially manufactured Panda-brand cigarettes with a pungent aroma. Mao also liked richly flavored foods, for example, fatty pork with chili, a point that had not been fabricated in the memoirs of his doctor.

"Friend," Mao said. Mao sometimes addressed people as "friend" and not always as "comrade" because he had many young women friends, and, of course, he couldn't be ranked with them. The only man in China who succeeded in having Mao address him as "friend" was Lin Biao. Later, when it was said that Lin Biao's plane went down at Ondorhaan in Mongolia while he was fleeing the country, the Party took the unprecedented action of making photographs of the plane wreckage public. Among foreigners, there was Nixon.

Mao had a lot to chat about with him, and, once they started talking, it went on for three hours. At the time, Mao, close to eighty, was being kept alive with injections, and talked and laughed with great gusto, so that even that intelligent Jew, Kissinger, while not adoring him, greatly admired him.

When Mao said "friend," he certainly couldn't have been addressing him, but he went forward regardless. What he wanted to ask was, "Did you really believe in the Utopian state of Marx's communism, or did you just use it as a front?" Back then, he had naively asked this question, but he wouldn't have asked it later on.

"There are more than a hundred political parties in the world, and most of them no longer believe in Marxism-Leninism," Mao said in a letter to his wife, Jiang Qing, during the early part of the Cultural Revolution. The letter, clearly also addressing the entire Party, was not bedroom talk between husband and wife, but, afterward, it was used as important evidence to purge Mao's widow, and was presented before the entire Chinese people.

At the time, he preferred to think that since Mao had said this, probably he believed it. So, the old man did want to create this sort of a paradise on earth, if it didn't count as hell. That was what he also wanted to ask at the time.

"It was only the initial stage," Mao said.

Then when will the next stage come about? he reverently asked.

"In seven or eight years, it will come again," Mao wrote in a letter to his wife, "the Cultural Revolution is a serious trial practice." The old man took another cigarette, paused for a while, then went on to write, "Moreover, after seven or eight years, there will be another movement to purge all Ox Demons and Snake Spirits. And, after that, there will be many more purges." After finishing the letter, he laughed, showing the black teeth in his mouth. According to the memoirs of Mao's doctor, he smoked three packs a day and never used a toothbrush, and this was apparent from the news documentaries of Mao in old age meeting with foreign guests.

The old man was really a great military strategist! He had hood-winked the people of China and many people in the world. This was also what he wanted to say.

Mao frowned.

He hastened to add: You defeated all of your enemies and won every single battle in your life.

"Don't let your brains be addled by victory. I am ready to fall down and be smashed to pieces, but this is of no consequence. Matter is not destroyed, it only disintegrates." Mao had written this in that no-longer-secret family letter subsequently made public by the Party.

Only your wife was smashed. You, old man, still enjoy good health. People still go to visit you in your mausoleum, and this is irrefutable testimony to your greatness, he said to Mao's spirit or shadow.

"Believing I will live two hundred years, I set out to swim three thousand li."

You wrote poetry from your early years, and it must be said that you were a great writer of classical poetry, but your tyranny is without precedent, you destroyed all the writers of the country, and it is in this that you were great. He said that he, too, did a bit of writing, but that he had to wait until after the old man was dead.

"In my person, I have, first, the spirit of the tiger, and, second, the spirit of the monkey."

He said that, in his case, he had, at most, a minute amount of the spirit of the monkey.

The old man gave the hint of a smile, as if he had squashed some insect. He stubbed out more than half of a cigarette, indicating that he wanted to rest.

Mao lay in the crystal casket, and it seemed that the Party flag covered his body, he couldn't remember too clearly. In any case, the Party led the country, and Mao led the Party, it really wasn't necessary for him to be covered with the national flag. In the long queue filing past Mao's remains, he probably had these unformed words in his mind, but didn't dare to pause. After he had walked past, he didn't dare look back, afraid that the people behind would notice the strange look in his eyes.

Writing freely about it now, this is what you want to say to this emperor who ruled as dictator over one billion people. Because you are insignificant, the emperor in your heart can only be the dictator of one person, and that person is yourself. Now that you have said this publicly, you have walked out of Mao's shadow, but this was not an easy thing to do. You were born at the wrong time, and encountered the era of Mao's rule, but your being born in that era had nothing to do with you, and was decided by what is known as fate.