Читать книгу The Bathing Women - Tie Ning - Страница 13

One day in the autumn of 1966, Tiao, as a new student in the first grade of Lamp Alley Primary School in Beijing, participated in a noisy and confusing denouncement meeting on the school’s sports field. It was an assembly that the entire faculty and student body attended, where many desks were brought together and stacked to make a tall stage. In front of the stage, students from all grades sat on their own little chairs that they brought out of the classrooms.

It was new to Tiao, who had just become an elementary school student a few days earlier. Back then she didn’t have a clear idea about what having such a meeting meant. She thought sitting this way on the field was like having class in the open air, and felt freer than having an ordinary class. During class, teachers required children to sit straight with hands behind their backs; only correct posture would help their bodies grow healthily. But today, on the sports field, their class teacher didn’t ask them to put their hands behind them; they could keep their hands wherever they wanted. Maybe, with the atmosphere so serious and subdued, the teachers couldn’t bother about the students’ sitting positions. Tiao remembered the senior students leading them in the continuous shouting of slogans. No one told them to clench their fists and raise their arms when they shouted, but somehow they all figured it out by themselves. They raised their little arms over and over again and vehemently shouted those slogans, even though they had no idea what the slogans meant. As some of the slogans slowly began to make sense to her, she started to understand what they were and at whom they were directed. For instance, there was the slogan “Down with female hooligan Tang Jingjing!” As Tiao shouted, she knew Tang Jingjing was a female teacher who taught senior students maths in their school. She also heard boys from other classes behind her talking: “So, Teacher Tang is a female hooligan.”

Teacher Tang was escorted to the stage by several senior girls. She had a big white sign around her neck, hanging down over her chest, with words in ink: “I am a female hooligan!” The first grade sat in the first row, so Tiao saw the words on the sign very clearly. She recognized three characters, “I am woman,” and figured out the last word must be “hooligan,” based on the slogan they’d shouted a moment before. The sentence terrified her because, in her mind, “hooligan” didn’t just mean bad people, but the worst of the worst, worse than landlords and capitalists. She was wondering how an adult could so easily admit “I am a female hooligan” in the first person. That use of the first person to declare “I am ***” made Tiao extremely uncomfortable, although she couldn’t explain why.

Sitting in the front row, Tiao also had a clear view of Tang Jingjing. Tang Jingjing was about thirty years old, fair-skinned, and thin; so thin and white that with the pointiness of both her nose and close-cropped head, she resembled a toothpick. Toothpick would be how Tiao described her afterwards. She indeed looked like a toothpick, not a willow wand. She appeared thin and weak, but she was very tough and strong. She stuck herself into the stage like a toothpick and refused to bend or lower her head no matter how the senior girls pushed her around. Tiao at the time wouldn’t have been able to come up with the description “toothpick”; she simply had a natural sympathy for Teacher Tang, because—it was funny that Tiao didn’t know where she got the idea that the word “hooligan” only referred to men—how could a woman be a hooligan? She sympathized with Teacher Tang also because Teacher Tang was pretty. Pretty, that was the reason.

Since Teacher Tang refused to lower her head and bend her back, both on stage and off, people appeared excited and a little out of control. The senior girl students apparently didn’t know what to do, and other teachers just shouted the slogans. None of them personally seemed willing to grab their colleague’s neck and force her to lower her head. Just as the scene looked like it was about to run out of gas, a middle-aged woman in a moon-white shirt rushed onto the stage (only later did Tiao learn she was the director of the Lamp Alley Street Committee) and pointed at Teacher Tang. “Did you feel wronged because we said you were a hooligan? Then let me ask you: Are you married or not? According to the information we’ve collected, you’ve never married. Why do you have a child, then, even though you were never married? You have to confess truthfully the identity of the person with whom you had the child!” The chanting arose again: “Tang Jingjing must confess the truth! If she doesn’t confess, we revolutionary students will not stop!” Then a group of even older students jumped up onto the stage; they had come from a nearby middle school, all wearing red armbands, to assist their little brothers’ and sisters’ revolutionary action.

These middle schoolers were good at fighting. One of them went behind Teacher Tang and swung a leg at the back of her knee and she immediately knelt down with a thud. The audience cheered; the die-hard Teacher Tang was finally subdued by the revolutionary students. The denouncement meeting continued. Several young teachers went onto the stage to speak one by one. With great emotion they accused Teacher Tang of hiding serious corruption in her life in order to deceive her colleagues, school, and students into trusting her. Just imagine, everyone, what a terrible thing it is! A woman with such a degenerate morality and corrupt lifestyle could get into our school and become a teacher … The slogans arose again: “Tang Jingjing must leave Lamp Alley Primary School! We successors of the revolution demand she leave Lamp Alley Primary School!” The middle-aged woman in the moon-white shirt continued to expose Tang Jingjing’s crimes: According to her neighbours, Tang Jingjing pretended to live simply and plainly, but at home she always lived a bourgeois lifestyle—she had a cat, and treated her cat better than people. One day she even dared to kiss her cat right in the courtyard—in the name of heaven, kissing a cat!

The audience first broke into laughter at this and then switched to even angrier shouting. “Down with female hooligan Tang Jingjing!”

How insufficient it seemed just to allow Tang Jingjing to kneel there listening to people shouting while more and more of her disgusting actions were revealed. The intractable hostility on her pale, skinny face made people on the stage burn with anger. A boy student with a red armband suddenly stuck out his rubber army overshoe into Tang Jingjing’s face and said, “If you can kiss a bourgeois cat, can’t you kiss a working-class shoe?” He kept his foot in Tang Jingjing’s face as he spoke. A girl ran over and pressed Tang Jingjing’s head down to force her to kiss the boy’s shoe. More dust-covered shoes were extended forcing her to kiss them.

The field seethed and the stage gave way to chaos. The students in front of the stage could no longer sit still, some knocking over their chairs, some standing on them, and others pushing their way to the front in order to see more clearly. Dust flew around and choked Tiao until she coughed. She also stood up and wanted to see more clearly. But unlike some of the boys in her class, she didn’t step on her chair; she instinctively thought it was improper, something that a student shouldn’t do. But she felt so small in the midst of the crowd and could see nothing on the stage, which made her anxious. Just then a stink wafted over. Someone brought up a cup of shit, and then a voice rang out, “Tang Jingjing isn’t worthy of kissing our shoes; her mouth simply deserves to eat shit!”

“Right, right,” others chimed in. “Let her confess to the revolutionary teachers and students. If she doesn’t confess we’ll make her eat.”

Make her eat shit.

This suddenly calmed the boiling crowd, and the smell also made people hold their breath and concentrate. The shit was carried to the stage openly in a teacup, which played on the ugliest nerve hidden in the depths of the human mind. Its terrorizing power came onto the stage. The ones who had crowded to the front backed away, and the ones who stood on the chairs sat down. It was just like at a concert, when there’s some opening act during which the audience can raise as much clamour as they want, and only during the star’s big number will they sit straight and properly appreciate the performance. Making Tang Jingjing eat shit might well be the big number of the day’s denouncement meeting.

The teacup was placed in front of Tang Jingjing, only a metre away from her. She kept that ghostly pale face of hers still. Everyone is waiting for you to confess, why don’t you just open your mouth? … Tiao’s heart contracted as if clutched by a hand, and she could hardly breathe. She hoped Teacher Tang would open her mouth immediately so that she wouldn’t have to eat shit. But many people might not have thought like Tiao, and they might not have been so eager to hear Tang Jingjing’s confession anymore. When a person is given a choice between confessing and eating shit, what others are eager to see may not be her confessing.

She didn’t open her mouth, nor did she eat the shit. So a boy student ran to the middle-aged woman in the moon-white shirt and whispered something in her ear. He then returned to Tang Jingjing and spoke to the entire audience. “If Tang Jingjing refuses to confess or eat shit, we have another method. We revolutionary masses will not be frightened by her hooligan’s arrogance. We will bring her daughter to the stage and let you look at her. Let everyone take a look at her daughter. Her daughter will be the evidence that stands as proof of her hooligan activities.”

Tang Jingjing finally lost her poise. Tiao saw her quickly move two steps in a kneeling position towards the teacup. Those urgent and determined “kneeling steps,” which came like a thunderclap exploding before anyone could cover their ears, left a lifelong impression on Tiao. She moved with her “kneeling steps” to the teacup and stared at the cup for a while. Then, under the gaze of everyone, she grabbed the teacup with two hands and drank it down in one swallow …

The first thing Tiao did after returning home was brush her teeth and rinse her mouth; she couldn’t resist the urge to eat all the toothpaste in the Little White Rabbit tube that only she and Fan used. Brushing her teeth made her vomit and after vomiting she continued to brush her teeth. Once she had finished brushing she continued to reach into her throat with the toothbrush. Then she began to vomit again. She vomited some food until at last only sticky sour fluid came out. She finished vomiting and brushing and then cupped her nose and mouth with her two hands—she cupped them very tightly, careful not to leave any space—and then she exhaled in big breaths—as she learned to do in kindergarten. She could smell her breath this way. Finally she could relax and she should relax; there wasn’t any taste in her mouth. She looked at herself in the mirror numerous times; she saw that her lips were white, like they’d been dyed white with the toothpaste, but they were even whiter than the toothpaste. She rubbed her lips hard with a towel until they became hot and red and almost bled, until they throbbed with pain. She locked herself in the bathroom tormenting herself for a long time.

Then she came out of the bathroom with red eyes and a heavy head. Fan came over, and she embraced Fan and kissed her. Fan kissed back and they kissed each other loudly. She then went to kiss her father, her mother, that pair of old corduroy sofas at her home, her little chair, and the ice-cold radio/tape recorder made in the Soviet Union. Believing that she must be sick, her father and mother told her to go to bed. There she saw her folded handkerchief. She opened the handkerchief, at the centre of which was a white, yellow-eyed cat. She stared at the white cat and swept the handkerchief to the corner of the bed, but later she reached out to get it back. She opened the handkerchief and stared at the white cat. She put her mouth on the cat’s mouth and cried.