“Monster!” he croaked, trying to make out the figure of the messenger, now vanishing in the distance. “Monster in the file, spreader of plague — there’s nothing to stop you now from infecting the whole of China!”
…Yesterday, meeting with Guo Moruo. He made a very adverse impression on me. He kept saying, “Do you know what! am, compared with Mao Zedong, on the score of intelligence? A three-month-old baby,” Then he told us he was worried because the enemies of the régime didn’t speak badly enough of him. It kept him awake at night.
“I’m still an intellectual,” he said several times, “I’m going to wallow in the mud, then go and purify myself in the river,”
I thought about the trifshatars…
THE HOUR OF THE RIGHT — SYNOPSIS
“Listen — this time you can be sure I’m right: the hour of the right has come!”
“I don’t believe you… Don’t look at me like that! I just don’t believe you, that’s all And if you want to know what I really think, I'll tell you without mincing my words: I don’t want to hear any more about it, I’ve had it up to here! I don’t care whose hour has come — the hour of the right, or of the left, or of the half-left, or of the quarter-right! I don’t want to know, and that’s that! I just want to live the few days left to me normally. I can’t bear to listen to all that stuff any longer. I’m tired of it, exhausted by it, I can’t take any more!”
“If you want to stop up your ears that’s your business. Perhaps you don’t want to be committed any more? Perhaps you’ve grown immune to poison?”
“Stop, Lin Hen — that’s enough!” said the other, burying his head in his hands.
They were both sitting in an old tavern where tea was served in tin cups and soon got cold.
“Don’t take what I say too hard, Lin Hen. I can’t help it either. My nerves are in shreds.”
“Do you think mine are any better?”
“Perhaps not…But still…” — one hand was unbuttoning his shirt — “… you haven’t got marks like these on your body. Do you see these scars?” He was almost shouting now. “I’ve had them since the days when ‘a hundred flowers were blooming,' when like a fool I thought the hour of the right had come. And do you see this other mark, under my breast? That’s a souvenir of the next hour that came, the hour of the left, when in order to wipe out the memory of the hour of the right I tried to be more to the left than necessary, and went to a meeting and stuck a picture of Mao into my own chest.”
He drank a few sips of tea, then went on more slowly and thoughtfully.
“I got blood-poisoning, and barely escaped with my life. Because the infection itself was nothing compared to the suffering I had to endure in hospital. My wound became a bone of contention. The staff was divided in two, one group maintaining my wound was an ordinary injury that required normal treatment, their opponents claiming that Mao’s picture could be a source of infection, and that I’d injured myself deliberately so as to discredit him. These arguments took place across my bed, where they kept putting on and taking off my bandages according to which party was in charge, and needless to say the debaters soon came to blows. The hospital became a battlefield. I had a raging fever and long periods of delirium, but what I saw in my lucid intervals was even worse than the scenes in my nightmares. Each of the two competing sides got the upper hand alternately. When the right were in the ascendant, the barefoot doctors were beaten to a jelly and their popular remedies trampled underfoot or thrown out of the window. Bet not for long. When everyone least expected it, the tide of battle would turn and the left be on top again. Thee — I still shudder at the thought of it — they would tear off my bandages and call a meeting to examine the prescriptions of their predecessors for detecting implications hostile to Chairman Mao. The following week there would be another reversal, and the doctors of the right, whom their opponents, after giving them a suitable thrashing, had set to cleaning the toilets, emerged once more in their white coats. And so on…And all the time I was getting worse …I shall never forget it as long as I live! That’s why even now my hair stands on end whenever I hear the words 'left’ and ‘right’. You see, Lin Hen, I have seen hell with my own eyes, and that’s why I don’t, why I won’t…!”
His friend looked at him sympathetically, but with eyes still cool and severe.
“I understand all that. Nevertheless, the hour of the right has come, Vun Fu. In fact, the things you’ve just told me about are so many warning signs.”
“How can you still believe that?” said the other, buttoning his shirt up slowly, as if wanting his scars to be seen one last time.
“They’re going to allow private shops and reopen the churches,’ said the other.
Autumn in Peking
A flock of wild geese rises into the sky.
The last golds of autumn are dimmed for ever.
Winter approaches bearing cold and frost.
Its dreary greys, and a plenum to liven it up…
The datsibaos in Peking on a rainy day. The long wall covered with dozens of posters fluttering in the wind. Dreariness by the mile. Bits of rain-soaked paper full of thousands, millions of horrible insults. Genuine anti-autumn!
AND YET…I have to write this in capital letters. And not just once, but over and over, three, three hundred times. And yet. And yet. And yet…
And yet, yes, they’re a great people, and it would be small-minded not to bear witness to that in these notes. Though they make up only a quarter of the human race, the Chinese have probably endured half of all its sufferings. If anyone ever wrote a History of Hunger, the Chinese would be the main characters. The immense poverty, the immense hunger, the immense backwardness of an old world. The strength that could change all that must have been immense too.
The Chinese have had that strength. You’d have to be insane or reactionary not to admit it. They demolished that old world, and the dust from its ruins now floats over their country. On the one hand are the ravings of the Cultural Revolution, on the other the ancient ghosts, in what immemorial archives did they find the model for their current relations with us? From what imperial chancelleries did they derive these factional struggles for power, the icy guides and officials who separate us like a wall from the ordinary people?
And yet. And yet. And yet…Strange — I think I’m going to miss this country.
12
SKENDER BERMEMA PUSHED his notes aside and rubbed his aching forehead. He found it hard to turn away from one last manuscript, though. Should he read it or not?
He’d dashed it off in three nights in a dreary hotel in Chang Ha, on the basis of an incident he’d been told about. Now he was as curious to see what he’d made of the story as if someone else had written it.
And his eyes had started to read it without waiting for him to make up his mind: