“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—”
You cut her short and say you’re not a fighter and you’re not a flag-bearer.
“But don’t you think that some day things will change?” She needs to have faith.
You say you are not a fortune-teller, and you don’t live in empty hope, and you will not be lining up in the streets to welcome it. You will not be returning to China during your lifetime, and there is no need for you to waste the little life you have left.
She softly apologizes for stirring up these memories, and says that to understand your suffering is to understand you, can’t you see?
You say you got out of hell and don’t want to go back.
“But you need to talk about it, and, while you are, maybe you will become less uptight about it.” Her voice is gentle, she wants to comfort you.
You ask if she has ever played with sparrows, or watched children at it. A string is tied to one of the sparrow’s legs while the child holds the other end of the string. The sparrow flaps its wings desperately but can’t fly, and is tormented until it just closes its eyes and stops moving, strangled by the string. You say that, as a child, you used to catch praying mantises. That jade-green body with its long, thin legs and two pincers raised like meat cleavers looks ferocious, but when children tie a fine thread to one of its legs, it tosses and turns a few times, and then falls to pieces. You ask if she’s had such experiences.
“People aren’t sparrows!” she protests.
“And, of course, they’re not praying mantises either,” you say. “Nor are they heroes, and if they can’t stand up to might and power, they can only flee.”
The room floods with darkness so thick that it seems to be in motion.
“Press close to me.” Her voice is suffused with gentleness. She’s brought you pain and she’s trying to comfort you.
Separated by her negligee, you embrace her soft body but can’t generate lust. She caresses you, and her soft hands wander over your body, bestowing her feminine kindness upon you. You say you’re mentally worked up and tense, and you close your eyes to loosen up and to feel her tenderness.
“Then talk about women,” she softly teases by your ear like a solicitous lover. “Talk about her.”
“Who?”
“That woman of yours, was her name Lin?”
You say she wasn’t your woman, she was someone else’s wife.
“Anyway, she was your lover. Did you have lots of women?”
“You should realize that in China, at that time, it was not possible to have lots of women.”
You also add that Lin was your first woman. You say this, knowing that probably she will not believe you.
“Did you love her?” she asks.
You say that it was she who seduced you and that you didn’t want to become involved in this sort of futile love.
“Do you still think about her?” she asks.
“Margarethe, why are you asking this?”
“I want to find out the status of women in your heart.”
You say she was, of course, quite lovely. She was a recent university graduate, she was very pretty, and could even be called sexy. At that time, in China, not many dressed like her, in body-hugging dresses and mini high heels; for those times, she was quite flashy. As the daughter of a high-ranking cadre, she was in a superior position, she was arrogant and willful but totally unromantic. However, you were only able to live in your books and your fantasies, your routine work was dead-boring. There were always zealots who wanted to get into the Party in order to become bureaucrats. They organized extra Mao’s Selected Works study groups for after work and hassled people to attend. Anyone who didn’t attend was considered ideologically unsound. It was only after nine or ten o’clock in the evening, when you got back to your room and sat at your own desk by the light of your desk lamp, that you were able to lose yourself in reverie and write your own things: that was you. In the daytime, in that world alien to yourself, you were always in a daze and always dozed off at meetings, because you would have stayed up all night. You were nicknamed “Dream,” and you even answered to “Sleepy Bug.”
“Dream is a beautiful name.” She’s chuckling, and the sound reverberates in her robust chest.
You say it was, to some extent, a camouflage, otherwise you would have been hauled out for criticism long ago.
“Did she also call you that? Did she fall in love with you just like that?” she asks.
“Maybe.”
You say of course you were fond of her, and it wasn’t just pure lust. You were very wary of women who had been to university, because they all gravitated toward the light and always tried to achieve a sort of angelic purity. You knew that your own thoughts were dark, but you had been taught a lesson by your little experience of love at university. If what you raved on about in private came to be confessed by the woman in one of the drought-report sessions set up by the Party or the work unit, you, too, would have been put on the altar for sacrifice.
“But surely there were other women?”
“If you haven’t lived in that environment, you wouldn’t understand.”
You ask whether she would want to make love with a Nazi who might expose her Jewish background.
“Don’t mention the Nazis!”
“Sorry, but there is a similarity. They made use of the same psychology,” you explain. “Lin, of course, wasn’t like that, but she enjoyed many privileges because of her family. She didn’t try to get into the Party; her parents, her family, were the Party. She didn’t need to put on an act or go to report on her thinking to the Party secretary.”
You say the first time she invited you to a meal was in an elegant dining room that was not open to the public. To get through the door, a pass was needed. Naturally, she paid, you didn’t have a pass and didn’t have the money to pay, and felt bad about