While the Crabman was hanging the portrait, his hands were trembling. There was a moment when he was actually on the verge of tears, but he quickly rubbed his eyes and looked up at the straw room divider, acting as if a speck of dust or something had flown into his eye. We know he must have been feeling that he had somehow lost face (it appears that for the most part, all this was predetermined by personality type). But once again, he was wrong: no one laughed at him, not even Four Eyes. In fact, quite the contrary- Four Eyes told him later that this was the single most emotional and moving scene the production team had experienced in over three years.
Translated by Madeline K. Spring
Yu Hua – The Past and the Punishments
On a summer night in 1990 in his muggy apartment, the stranger opened and read a telegram of unknown origin. Then he sank into deep reverie. The telegram consisted of just two words-return quickly-and indicated neither the name nor the address of the sender. The stranger, filing through the mists of several decades of memory, saw an intricate network of roads begin to unfold before him. And in this intricate network, only one road could bring the slightest of smiles to the stranger's lips. Early the next morning, the lacquer-black shadow of the stranger began to glide down that serpentine road like an earthworm.
Clearly, in the intricacy of the network that constituted the stranger's past, one memory, as fine as a strand of hair, had remained extraordinarily clear. March 5, 1965. A simple string of digits, arrayed in a specific and suggestive order, had determined the direction in which the stranger had begun to move. But in reality, at the same time that the stranger had decided upon his course, he had also failed to discover that his forward motion was blocked by yet another group of recollections. And because he had been standing at a remove from the bright mirror on his wall, he had been unaware of the ambiguity that had plagued his faint smile in the moments after he had deciphered the telegram. Instead, he had felt only stubborn self-confidence. It was precisely because of this excessive faith in himself that the procedural error that was to occur later on became unavoidable.
Several days later, the stranger arrived at a small town called Mist. It was here that the procedural error became apparent. The rror was revealed to him by the punishment expert.
Imagine for a moment the stranger's face and posture as he walked through Mist. Besieged by several different strata of memory, he had been left virtually incapable of perceiving his immediate surroundings with any sort of clarity or accuracy. When the punishment specialist caught sight of the stranger for the first time, his heart cried out like a trumpet. The stranger entered the punishment specialist's field of vision like a lost child.
When the stranger walked past a gray, two-story building, the punishment specialist blocked his forward movement with an exaggerated grin. "You've come."
The punishment expert's tone sent a shock through the stranger's body. Although the stranger could hardly credit his own suspicions, it certainly seemed as if this man were hinting at the existence of a certain memory as he stood before him, his white hair gleaming.
The punishment expert continued, "I've waited for a long time."
This statement did nothing to help the stranger determine what role the man might have played in his past, if any at all. Perhaps he was simply a mote of dust floating across the vast expanse of his memory. The stranger sidestepped past the old man and continued on his way toward March 5, 1965.
Just as the punishment expert had hoped, however, the stranger failed to continue on toward March 5, 1965. Instead, a short and simple dialogue took place between the two men. And because of the punishment expert's warning-which was issued casually and without premeditation-the stranger began to understand his predicament. He discovered that his present course* would not lead him to the desired destination. And thus he turned in the opposite direction. But the fact of the matter was that March 5, 1965, was receding farther and farther from him.
This was also the first time the stranger had thought back to the humid night when he had received the mysterious telegram.
For days, his mind had circled around the moment in which March 5, 1965, had emerged in his mind. Now his focus shifted. He began to ponder several other dates, other memories that had continued to disturb him even as they lay abandoned at the back of his mind. These memories were January 9,1958, December 1,1967, August 7, i960, and September 20, 1971, respectively. And with this realization, the stranger began to understand why he was unable to move toward March 5, 1965. The telegram's message might have been just as relevant to these four dates as to March 5, 1965. Indeed, it was precisely these memories that had blocked his way to March 5, 1965. And each of these four events represented roads that ran in entirely different directions without ever intersecting with the other. So even if the stranger abandoned his search for March 5, 1965, he would be unable to find either January 9, 1958, or any one of the other three remaining dates.
This realization took place at dusk, when the stranger, thrown into a quandary by his procedural error, began to ponder how to escape his predicament. That was also when he began to devote his attention to the enigma represented by the punishment expert. He began to sense that the old man was a kind of elusive link to his past. This is why he had come to feel that their meeting had been arranged in advance.
As the sky darkened, the punishment specialist's intense excitement did not detract from a sense that he was in control of himself and of the flow of events around him. The stranger unsuspectingly yielded to some kind of preordination and followed the punishment specialist into the gray apartment building.
The living room walls were painted black. Here the stranger sat down without a word. The punishment expert switched on a little white electric lamp. The stranger began to search his mind for a link between the mysterious telegram and the room that surrounded him. He found something entirely different. He found that the path he had followed on his way to Mist had been crooked.
Almost as soon as the stranger and the punishment expert had sat down to talk, a remarkable affinity grew up between them. It was as if they had spent their lives huddled together in deep conversation, as if they were as familiar to each other as they were to the palms of their own hands.
The first topic of conversation, unsurprisingly, was broached by the stranger's host. He said, "Actually, we always live in the past. The past is forever. The present and the future are just little tricks the past plays on us."
The stranger acknowledged the force of the punishment expert's argument, but it was his own present that remained uppermost in his mind. "But sometimes you can be cut off from the past. Right now, something is tearing me away from my past." The stranger, rethinking his failure to approach March 5, 1965, was beginning to wonder if perhaps some other force besides that of the other four dates might be responsible.
But the punishment expert said, "You're not cut off from your past. Quite the contrary."
It wasn't simply that the stranger had failed to move in the direction of March 5, 1965. Instead, March 5,1965, and the other four dates were receding farther and farther into the distance.
The punishment expert continued, "The fact is that you've always been deeply immersed in your past; You may feel cut off from the past from time to time, but that's merely an illusion, a superficial phenomenon, a phenomenon that at a deeper level indicates that you're really that much closer."
"I still can't help thinking that there's some force cutting me off from my past."
The punishment expert smiled helplessly, for he had sensed the difficulty of trying to overcome the stranger with language.
The stranger continued to move along his train of thought-at the very moment that he had left his past far behind him, the punishment expert had appeared before him with a strange smile and the cryptic assurance that "I've been waiting for you for a long time."