One Man’s Bible

He pointed it out, then stood to one side. This was all he could say in defense of his roommate, Tan. But at the same time, he had drawn a line of demarcation between Tan and himself. Only later did he find out that, just as he was going downstairs to get his bicycle to hurry home, a Red Guard notice had been posted in the front hall of the workplace building: “Seize Tan Xinren with his history as a counterrevolutionary!” Old Tan, immediately isolated in the workplace building, had lost his freedom.

They pulled out Old Tan’s notebooks, translation manuscripts, letters, photographs, and English-language books. Tan translated some novels from English in his spare time, mostly prorevolutionary works by writers from Asia and Africa. However, there was an English novel with a half-naked foreign woman on the cover, and this was put to one side. From under the old-newspaper lining of a drawer, they pulled out a white envelope. It was found to contain several condoms.

“The old bastard is still at this sort of thing!”

Danian took one and waved it about. Everyone laughed.

It wasn’t that the people involved were amused, but that everyone was putting on an act of being pure and chaste. He and Lin also laughed but avoided one another’s eyes.

Later, at the mass meeting called to criticize him, they questioned Old Tan about the woman he had an “improper sexual relationship” with. It was intimated that Old Tan was involved in a spy network, and he was forced to name the woman, a widow. Immediately, the Red Guards at the woman’s work unit were notified, and her home, too, was searched. Some heartrending classical poems in Tan’s drawer, probably written for this woman, constituted irrefutable evidence of “anti-Party, anti-Socialist longings for the paradise of the past.”

The Red Guards found two loose bricks in the house and pried them up.

“Should I go and borrow a spade from a neighbor?”

He had deliberately asked Danian this to avoid the pain of being subjected to a search. At the same time, he wanted to play a joke: they might as well dig three feet down and make an archaeological discovery. Terror only came afterward. He borrowed a pickax from the old retired worker next door, and they began digging, filled the room with dirt and bits of brick so that there was nowhere to step, then threw down the pickax and left.

It was afterward that he found out the surveillance unit at his workplace had been informed by the street committee that the sound of a wireless transmitter was coming from their room. The person who had reported it must have been the old retired worker next door. When Old Tan and he had gone off to work, the old man, who was at home, heard the crackle of the radio they had forgotten to turn off behind the locked door. He took it to be a secret transmitter and must have thought that if he could catch the enemy it would prove his total loyalty to the Leader and the Party. When he ran into the old codger in the courtyard after the search, the man’s wrinkled old face was beaming with smiles. Disaster had thus brushed by him.

10

The lights are off, and you’re lying in the dark on a bed with a woman, your bodies close to one another, and you are telling her about the Cultural Revolution. Nothing could be more futile, and only a Jewish woman with a German mind, who has learned Chinese, could possibly be interested.

“Shall I keep going?” you ask.

“I’m listening,” she says.

You say there was a middle-aged woman who worked as an editor in your office. A political cadre summoned her and said there was a telephone call for her in the security office. She returned some minutes later to the office, tidied the proofs on her desk, and, looking at the expressionless faces in the office, announced that her husband had gassed himself and that she was going home to attend to things. The head of the office was in solitary confinement, and Old Liu, the department chief, had been labeled an alien-class element who had wormed his way into the Party, so she could only request leave from those left in the office. Early the following day, she wrote a poster, clearly drawing a line of demarcation between herself and her husband who had “cut himself off from both the people and the Party.”

“Don’t go on, it’s heartbreaking,” she whispers into your ear.

You say you have no desire to go on.

“Why was this happening?” she asks.

“Enemies had to be found; without enemies, how could the political authorities sustain their dictatorship?”

“But that’s how it was with the Nazis!” She is excited. “You should write about all this!”

You say you are not a historian, you’re lucky enough to have escaped, and there’s no need for you to make another sacrifice to history.

“Then write about your own experiences, your personal experiences. You should write all this up, this is valuable!”

“Historically valuable? When the many thousands of tons of archives become public, it will just be a wad of scrap paper.”

“But Solzhenytsin—”