‘Yes. The Three Musketeers are either dead or castrated. Everyone thinks that romance with a doctor conforms more to reality.’ She lazily opened her eyes and said leisurely, ‘A hot-blooded fellow could soar higher than the wind, higher than any victory ever experienced, transcend the most beautiful utterances in the history of the world. We have left that time behind, and we have learned to crawl. Armed men couldn’t break down the security doors. Only a few men with long hair were left to dwell in Beiping. It is impossible to know whether they feared bloodshed. I still want to believe that, besides shouting and singing, our flesh was also hardened. I am waiting for war, to bring back my homeland. The wolves are growing old and perishing in the wilderness, they have nowhere else to go. I am not a thug. I just want to marry a poet.’
Seeing that Mengliu had no response, Suitang straightened up and said slowly, ‘Those two sentences about war and wolves… would you know who wrote them?’
Of course he knew that the poem was written by Hei Chun on the evening before the bloodshed. The poem had circulated underground. Everyone who read it was struck with sorrow. Those who died would not live again, and those who had disappeared were still missing. The Green Flower had been closed down, Shunyu’s father captured. Mengliu did not want the pressures of his past to bear down on his present life. In particular, he could not bear to let a girl as lovely as Suitang know the cruel weight of history. But his more secret reason was the fact that he had not played the part of a hero at the crucial moment. He didn’t have enough of that quality to fascinate a young girl. He said casually, ‘I’m a doctor. I only care about the life and death of my patients. I do not bother with who writes what sort of poetry.’
5
As Juli applied medication to Mengliu’s wounded leg, it was just like the first time they had met. She didn’t say anything as she squatted before him, her face a distant landscape covered with a light fog. Mengliu felt like a fish, protected in her aquarium, but also limited, barricaded in. He was willing to give her up — he refused to write poetry, and she did not deliberately do anything to make it difficult for him, but his heart was very troubled, and he was sometimes suddenly filled with remorse. But then he would insist that what he was doing was right. If neither his repressed poems nor his body could be liberated, everything was meaningless to him. He thought she should understand this logic. When he had gone to bed with women, the bodies of both parties were free and uninhibited. It had always been this way. In his own room, doing whatever he pleased with his own body, who was there to bother? He looked at the stud flashing in Juli’s nose. Every so often she would get a different part of her body pierced. Her ears had been pierced until they resembled sieves, and even her navel hadn’t been spared. He thought that sooner or later she would become a human quiver, carrying arrows in the various holes on her body. Yet her natural orifices didn’t allow anything to penetrate.
In the dull silence, after she had wrapped his wound in white gauze and told him about the effects of a squid bite, she said that if he tried writing poetry, the distraction would make the healing process go faster. The poetic impulse had a secret property that stimulated healing, causing the body to secrete regenerative cells. Most people, relying on natural healing, would only recover fifty percent of their health. The wound would continue to fester, the new flesh to decay, and the patient would eventually die of infection.
‘I’m going now to the opening ceremony of an exhibition at the art museum.’ Juli wore a knee-length black coat over her grey robe, her hair braided and fastened at the back with a red clip. She was transformed into an emerald-hairpin spiral-bun lady, an independent petal. When she spoke, he felt like he was surrounded by blooming peach trees and green willows. ‘If you are interested, you can come and have a look at what is going on in the minds of today’s young people, and see how things have changed.’
Mengliu envisioned her naked body, her skin the colour of golden wheat, the nectar rippling in her full round breasts. He thought of all the women he had sampled as water, flowing wild and wanton during sex. At the moment of climax the buns in their hair would uncoil in a sudden burst, their bodies blossom, and their greedy throats utter a baby-like sound that hummed in his ears. They gripped his hair, raising their bodies and biting his shoulder, and he did not hold back. Sometimes after they had recovered they expressed sweet feelings of love, or politely exchanged stories about their background, laughing together over interesting people or experiences. But he had never again fallen in love with a woman.
When Mengliu pulled himself back to the present, there was nothing in front of him but a fleeting trail of scent. He looked to the door through which Juli had walked, up the gravel path that cut through the grass, and out onto the empty road. He saw that it was an overcast day, as if rain was in the offing. His feelings grew dull, and the pain in his leg became more noticeable. He brewed a pot of fermented tea, then hung around the house sipping from his cup. The green plants that crowded the living room seemed to make the air more stifling. He went to the window to get some fresh air, and in the distance saw flashes in the clouds. He knew it was raining there, and that the bright flashes were moving in his direction.
The art museum was four kilometres away at the foot of the mountain, about a twenty-minute journey in an environmentally-friendly electric vehicle. Mengliu set out to walk there, giving himself time to think. In this way, he could stop if he changed his mind, take a piss, then return home. The bushes gave way to pine forest, and the pine forest to wheat fields. He sat down on the edge of the grass near a field of wheat. Observing closely how the wheat resembled the colour of Juli’s skin, he plucked a spear, and tested its sharp, hard edge with his fingertip. Suddenly the sun came out, and it was as if a brush had swept over the fields, turning them a bright, glaring yellow. They were like a desert, and his gaze was drawn to a straight row of trees in the distance. Perhaps it was an illusion. When he set off again, he could not remember if he had stopped at all. On the left were rolling hills, covered with tall old trees, oak, elm, chestnut, and beech, all clustered together under the rolling wind and extending far into the distance. As he travelled the road between the wheat fields and the hills, he felt he was passing through emptiness. Suddenly, everything was gone. At the same time, two sentences escaped from his mouth:
‘My corpse is here.’
‘My spirit is there.’
He took out his xun and, after polishing it with his fingers, started playing ‘The Pain of Separation’. The tune howled like the wind.
A small road veered to the right, passing through the middle of a forest, sheltered by trees on both sides, the sky visible in the interstices between the branches. The sun shone on the leaves as they were blown by the wind, reminding him of the rustling of the crowd that had filled Round Square. For all this time Mengliu had not been able to picture the moving armored vehicles in detail. His imagination collapsed completely at some point. But the cold wind at this moment seeping into his oxygen-filled brain from across the vast wheat fields made him realise that it was harvest time. To the beat of a cheerful, pleasing rhythm, the rows of wheat were falling in succession, the farmers’ faces full of a festive spirit. The earth would be left empty as the sun turned red, leaving only the low-flying egret to watch over it. Where were the sheaves of harvested wheat? At the celebration, the wine would be thicker than blood, sweet and sticky. A spilled glass of wine would flow like a river, and a word would transform into a corpse. Right or wrong, man or woman, old or young, innocent eyes would open, large and round, silently swept into the rolling, invading waves and returning with them to the sea when the tide turned. Every summer, all of the world’s wheat lowered its head, the flowers withered, fruit remained underdeveloped, insects were more rampant year after year. Summer was meant to be like a woman in the throes of love, wet and thunderous. At this moment, his imagination and the wheat fields were alike bathed in golden radiance, and poetry soared like the birds of the forest.