'That would have been very dangerous,' she says.
'Why?'
'It was nothing for me. I'm saying it would have been dangerous for you. You probably didn't say anything at the time because right then there was knocking at your door. You opened it, and it was someone who had come to check the electricity meter. You gave him a chair and he stood on it to read the meter behind the door, then, after making a note, left. Did you think he had really come to read the meter?'
You don't answer, you can't remember any of this. You say life in China sometimes appears in nightmares and you deliberately try to forget them, but from time to time they charge out of the subconscious.
'Didn't they warn people in advance that they would be coming?'
You say that in China anything is possible.
'I didn't go again because I was afraid of getting you into trouble,' she says softly.
'I didn't think…' you say.
You suddenly want to be affectionate, and put your hands on her abundant breasts.
She strokes the back of your hands and says, 'You're very caring.'
'You too, dear Margarethe.' You smile and ask, 'Are you leaving tomorrow?'
'Let me think… I could stay longer but I'll have to change my plane ticket to Frankfurt. When do you return to Paris?'
'Next Tuesday. It's a cheap ticket and hard to change, but if I pay extra I can still change it.'
'No, at the latest, I'll have to leave by the weekend,' she says. 'A Chinese delegation will be in Germany for a conference on Monday and I'll be interpreting. I'm not as free as you, I work for a boss.'
'Then there are still four days.' You count up the days.
'Tomorrow, no, one night has already passed, there are only three days,' she says. 'I'll phone the boss and ask for leave, change my ticket, then go to my hotel and bring my luggage across.'
'What about this boss of yours?'
'He can get lost,' she says. 'My job here has been completed.'
It is already light outside the window, and clouds swirl above the big building with the white pillars opposite. The peak is shrouded in mist and the lush vegetation on the mountain is the color of black jade. It looks like rain.
5
He did not know how he had returned to his home in Beijing. He couldn't find the key in his pocket, couldn't open the door, and was anxious people in the building would recognize him. He heard footsteps coming down the stairs and quickly turned, pretending to be going down. The person coming from the floor above brushed past him: it was Old Liu, the department chief, his boss back when he was working as an editor years ago. Old Liu was unshaven and looked like he did when he was hauled out and denounced during the Cultural Revolution. He had protected this old cadre at the time and Old Liu wouldn't have forgotten this, so he told him that he couldn't find the key to his apartment. Old Liu hesitated, then said, 'Your apartment's been reallocated.' At this he remembered that his apartment had been confiscated. 'Would you be able to find somewhere for me to stay?' he asked. A worried frown appeared on Old Liu's face, but, giving the matter some thought, he said: 'It will have to go through the building management committee, it won't be easy. Why did you have to come back?' He said he had purchased a return plane ticket, he hadn't thought… However, he should have. After being overseas for many years, how easily he had forgotten the difficulties he had experienced in China. Someone else was coming down the stairs. Old Liu pretended not to know him and hurried downstairs and out the front door. He quickly followed to avoid anyone else recognizing him, but when he got outside Old Liu had vanished. The sky was filled with flying dust, it seemed to be one of Beijing's early-spring dust storms, but he couldn't be sure if it was spring or autumn. He was wearing a single layer of clothing and felt cold. Suddenly he remembered that Old Liu had jumped out of the office building and had been dead for years. He must quickly escape.
He went to stop a taxi on the street to take him to the airport but realized that the customs officials would immediately see from his documents that he was a public enemy. He was troubled about having become a public enemy and even more troubled that he had no place to stay in this town where he had spent more than half of his life. He arrived at a commune in the suburbs to see if he could rent a room in the village. A peasant with a hoe took him to a shed covered with thin plastic, and pointed his hoe at a row of cement kang inside. The place must have been a cellar for storing cabbages in winter, which they had converted with a layer of cement. Probably there has been some progress, he thought. He had slept on the ground at the reform-through-labor farm in a big communal bed: the ground was spread with straw and people slept one next to the other, each with a forty- centimeter bed space, not as wide as these kang. Here, it was one person to a kang, much larger than the single cement lot in the cemetery where he had buried the ashes of his parents together, so there was nothing for him to complain about. Inside, he found more kang downstairs. If he rented, he would choose a downstairs kang where it was more soundproof. He said his wife liked singing.
Good heaven! There was a woman with him… He woke up. It had been a nightmare.
He had not had that sort of nightmare for a long time, and if he had dreams they didn't have much to do with China. Abroad, he met people from China and they would all tell him to go back and have a look: Beijing has changed a lot, you wouldn't know it, and there are more five-star hotels than in Paris! When people said it was possible to make a fortune in China today, he would ask if they had made a fortune. And if they went on and said that surely he thought about China, he would say both of his parents were dead. What about being homesick? He had already committed such feelings to the grave. He had left the country ten years ago and refused to think about the past. He believed he had broken with it a long time ago.
He was now a free-flying bird. This inner freedom had no attachments, was like the clouds, the wind. God had not conferred this freedom upon him, he had paid dearly for it, and only he knew just how precious it was. He no longer tied himself to a woman. A wife and children were burdens too heavy for him.
When he closed his eyes his mind began to roam, and only with his eyes closed did he not feel others watching and observing him. With his eyes closed, there was freedom and he could wander within the female cavern, a wonderful place. He once visited a perfectly preserved limestone cave in the Massif Central of France. The tourists entered one after the other, holding onto the iron rail of their individual cable cars. The huge cavern, illuminated by orange light, had layers of walls with twisting folds and numerous wet, dripping stalactites and stalagmites. This deep fathomless cavity created by nature was like a huge womb. In this dark natural cavern he was minute, like a single sperm, moreover an infertile sperm, roaming about happy and contented; this was a freedom that exists after release from lust.
Before he had sexually awakened, as a child, he would travel on the back of the goose in the children's books his mother had bought for him. Or, like Andersen's homeless waif with a bronze pig, he would mount the bronze pig to roam the noble mansions of Florence at night. But he could still remember that his first experience of female warmth didn't come from his mother but from a servant called Mama Li who used to bathe him. He would splash around naked in the tub, then Mama Li would grab him and carry him against her warm breasts to his bed, scratch him where he itched, and coax him to sleep. This young peasant woman didn't worry about taking a bath and combing her hair in front of him when he was a child. He could still remember her big white breasts hanging like pears, and her oiled, shiny, waist-length black hair. She used a bone comb to smooth out her hair and folded it into a big bun that was tied into a net and then fixed onto her head. At the time, his mother had a hairdresser's perm, and combing it wasn't as much trouble. As a child, the cruelest thing he saw was Mama Li being beaten up. Her husband came to look for her and wanted to drag her off, but she clung desperately to a leg of the table and wouldn't let go. The man grabbed her hair by the bun and banged her head on the floor until blood from her forehead dripped onto the tiles. Even his mother could not stop the man. Only then did he find out that Mama Li had fled from the village because she couldn't endure her husband's bullying. But she wasn't able to buy her freedom even by giving the man her indigo print bag with the silver coins and a silver bracelet in it, all of her wages for several years of work.
Freedom is not a human right conferred by Heaven. Nor does the freedom to dream come at birth: it is a capacity and an awareness that needs to be defended. Moreover, even dreams can be assailed by
