Soul Mountain

Actually, some men don’t think at all!

You seem to be in some sort of trouble.

Anyone can think, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in trouble.

I’m not trying to pick a fight.

Me neither.

I’d like to help.

Wait until I need it.

Don’t you need it now?

Thanks, no. I just need to be alone, I don’t want anyone upsetting me.

So something is worrying you.

Whatever you say.

You’re suffering from depression.

You’re making too much of it.

Then you admit something is worrying you.

Everyone has worries.

But you’re looking for worries.

What makes you say that?

It doesn’t take a great deal of education.

You’re so glib.

As long as it doesn’t offend you.

That’s not the same as liking it.

Nevertheless, she doesn’t refuse your suggestion to go for a stroll along the river. You need to prove you are still attractive to women. She goes with you along the embankment, upstream. You need to search for happiness and she needs to search for suffering.

She says she doesn’t dare look down. You say you know she’s afraid.

Of what?

Water.

She starts laughing loudly but you can tell she’s putting it on.

But you don’t dare jump, you say, deliberately going to the edge. Below the steep embankment is the surging river.

What if I jump? she says.

I’ll jump in and save you. You know if you say this you’ll make her happy.

She says she feels dizzy, that it’d be easy to jump. She’d only have to close her eyes. Dying like this would be intoxicating and virtually painless. You say a young woman just like her from the city jumped into the river. She was younger and more naive. You’re not saying she’s complicated, just that people today aren’t significantly more intelligent than they were yesterday and yesterday is right there in front of you and me. You say it was a moonless night and the river looked darker and deeper. The wife of the ferryman Hunchback Wang Tou said afterwards that she had shoved Wang Tou and told him she heard the chain of the cable rattling. She said if only she’d got up and had a look then. Later, she heard sobbing and thought it was the wind. The sobbing must have been quite loud. It was late at night and everyone was asleep. The dogs weren’t barking so she thought it couldn’t have been someone trying to steal the boat and fell asleep again. While she was half asleep the sobbing continued for quite some time and even when she woke up she could still hear it. The wife of Hunchback Wang Tou said if someone had been there, the girl wouldn’t have taken her own life. She blamed her husband for sleeping too soundly. Usually it was like this: if there was an emergency and someone wanted to cross the river at night, they would knock on the window and shout out. What she couldn’t understand was why the girl was rattling the chains if she wanted to kill herself. Could it have been that she was trying to get the ferry to the county town so that she could get back to her parents in the city? She could have taken the noon bus from the county town. She must have been trying to avoid being found out. No-one could say for sure what she was thinking before she died. Anyway, she was a perfectly good student who had been sent from the city to work on the fields in this village. She had neither family nor friends here and was raped by the party secretary. At dawn thirty li downstream at Xiashapu, she was fished out by loggers. The upper part of her body was bare, her shirt must have caught on a branch in a bend of the river. She had left her sports shoes neatly on that rock. Later on, “Yu Crossing” was carved into the rock and painted in red and the tourists all climb on it to have their photos taken. It’s only the inscription that remains and the spirit which had suffered an unjust death has been completely forgotten. Are you listening? you ask.

Go on, she replies softly.

People used to die at this spot all the time, you say, and they were very often children and women. Children would dive off the rock in summer, the ones who didn’t re-surface were said to have been trying to die and had been reclaimed by parents of another life. Those forced into taking their own lives are always women — defenceless young students sent here from the city, young women who had been maltreated by mothers-in-law and husbands. Many pretty young girls have also suicided. Before the schoolteacher Mr Wu started doing his research on the town, Yu Crossing was known to the villagers as Grieving Ghost Cliff and grown-ups would always worry if their children went swimming there. Some say at midnight the ghost of a woman in white always appears. She is always singing a song they can’t identify but which sounds something like a village children’s song or a beggar girl’s flower-drum song. Of course, this is all superstition, people often frighten themselves with what they say. In fact there’s an aquatic bird here which the locals call a blue head and the academics call a blue bird, you can find references to it in Tang Dynasty poetry. Blue heads have long flowing hair according to the villagers. You must have seen them, they’re not very big and have a silver-blue body and two long dark blue plumes on the head. They’re alert, agile, and lovely to look at. She always rests in the shade under the embankment or by the thick bamboos near the bank of the river, and looks about nonchalantly. You can enjoy looking at her for as long as you like but if you make a move, she flies off. The blue head in this village is not the mythological blue bird which took food to the Queen Mother of the West as mentioned in the Classic of the Mountains and Seas, but it does have an aura of magic nonetheless. You tell her that this blue bird is like a woman, of course there are also stupid women but you’re talking about feminine intelligence, feminine sensuality. Women who fall deeply in love really suffer — men want women for pleasure, husbands want their wives to manage the home and cook, and parents want the son’s wife to continue the family line. None of these are for love. Then you start talking about Mamei. She listens intently. You say Mamei was driven to suicide in this river, this is what people say. She nods and listens child-like, so beautifully child-like.

You say Mamei was betrothed but she disappeared when the mother-in-law came to fetch her. She ran away with her lover, a young village fellow.

Was he a lantern dragon dancer? she asks.

The lantern dragon team involved in the fighting in town was from Gulaicun downstream, this young fellow’s family was from Wangnian, fifty li upstream. He was lower than her in the clan hierarchy but was a fine youngster. Mamei’s lover had neither the money nor the means, his family had only two mu of dry land and nine portions of paddy field. In this area, people won’t starve if they work hard and have strong limbs. Of course that’s as long as there are no natural disasters and no rampaging soldiers, when these occur it’s not unknown for eighty to ninety per cent of the villagers to die. Now back to Mamei. For her lover to marry such a pretty and clever girl as Mamei, this bit of property wasn’t enough. A girl like Mamei came at a specified price: a pair of silver bracelets for the deposit, a betrothal gift of eight boxes of cakes and a dowry of two cartloads of gilded wardrobes and chests. The person who paid this price lived in Shuigang, behind what is now the photographer’s shop. The old house has long since changed owners, but we’re talking about the owner at that time. His wife kept giving birth to daughters and because he had his mind set on having a son, this wealthy man decided to take a secondary wife. It so happened that Mamei’s mother was an intelligent widow who had worked out her daughter’s future: it was better for her to become the secondary wife of a rich man than to spend her life working in the fields with a poor man. An agreement was made through a go-between. As there would not be a bridal sedan, the required sets of clothing for both the bride and her mother were to be provided. A date to fetch the girl was fixed but during the night she ran away. She just bundled up a few clothes, and in the middle of the night tapped on her lover’s window to get him to come outside. They burned with passion and she gave herself to him right there. Then, wiping the tears from their eyes, they pledged themselves to one another and agreed to run away into the mountains to eke out a living. Arm in arm they arrived at the river crossing and looked at the surging waves. However the lad vacillated and said he’d have to go home to fetch an axe and a few work tools. He was discovered by his parents. The father beat the unfilial boy with a length of wood and the mother was heartbroken but couldn’t bear to have her son leave home. In the prolonged chaos of the father’s beating and the mother’s weeping it was soon daybreak. The ferryman who was up early said he had seen a girl with a bundle. Then there was a heavy mist and as it became light, the morning mist from the river became thicker so that even the sun turned into a ball of dark red burning charcoal. The ferryman doubled his guard: bumping into another boat wouldn’t be too serious but there would be a disaster if they were rammed by a timber-float. There were crowds on the bank on their way to the markets, these markets which have been going for at least three thousand years. Amongst those on their way to these markets there were inevitably people who heard a shout which was instantly stifled in the mist. Then there was the sound of thrashing in the water. Some with sharper ears said they heard it more than once, but everyone just went on talking and nothing could be heard clearly. This is really a bustling crossing, otherwise Yu the Great wouldn’t have decided to make his crossing here. The boat was laden with vegetables, charcoal, grain, sweet potatoes, mushrooms, chrysanthemums, edible fungus, tea, eggs, people and pigs, so that the punt-pole curved and the waterline came to the top of the sides of the boat. The rock called Grieving Ghost Cliff was just a grey shadow in the white mist of the river. Some women prattled about hearing the cawing of a crow early in the morning. It’s a bad omen to hear a crow cawing. A black crow was cawing as it circled in the sky, it must have detected the aura of someone dying. When people are about to die, before they actually die, they give off an aura of death. It’s something like an aura of bad luck which can’t be detected by the eyes and ears, and can only be sensed.

Do I have an aura of bad luck? she asks.

You just make it hard for yourself, you have a masochistic streak. You’re deliberately teasing her.

Hardly, living is such agony!

You then hear her screaming again.

10 (#ulink_86eab28f-2a89-507d-9c90-1920320f3bb2)

The moss on the trunks, the branches overhead, the hair-like pine lichen hanging between the branches, even the air, everything, is dripping. Big bright, transparent drops of water, drop after drop, slowly drip onto my face, down my neck, icy cold. I tread on thick, soft, downy moss, layer upon layer of it. It grows parasitically on the dead trunks of huge fallen trees, grows and dies, dies and grows, so that with every step my sodden shoes squelch. My hat, hair, down-lined jacket and trousers are wet through, my singlet is soaked in sweat and clings to me. Only my belly feels slightly warm.

He has stopped just up ahead but doesn’t turn around, the three-section metal aerial at the back of his head is still swaying. As soon as I clamber over a mass of fallen trees and get close, he takes off again before I have time to catch my breath. He is not tall and is lean and agile like a monkey. He thinks it’s too much trouble to zigzag and I have no choice but to make my way straight up the mountain. Since setting out from the camp early in the morning, we’ve been going for two hours without a break and he hasn’t spoken so much as a sentence to me. It seems he’s using this strategy to put me off, thinking I’ll find it’s too hard and turn back. I struggle desperately to follow close behind but the distance between us keeps widening, so from time to time he stops and waits for me. While I catch my breath he puts up the aerial, dons his earphones, tracks the signals and makes a record in his notebook.

Weather equipment has been installed in a clearing. He inspects it, takes notes, and tells me the humidity is already at saturation point. These are his first words to me all this time and may count as a sign of friendship. A little further on he beckons me to follow him into a clump of dead Cold Arrow Bamboos. Standing there is a big pen fenced with round wooden stakes taller than a man. The bolt isn’t in place and the gate is open. The pen is for trapping the pandas which are shot with an anaesthetic rifle, tagged with a transmitter neckband, and then released. He points to the camera I’ve got hanging on my neck. I hand it to him and he takes a photo of me outside the pen, thankfully not inside it.

Going through the gloomy linden and maple groves, mountain birds trill in the nearby flowering catalpa bushes so there’s no sense of loneliness. Then at an altitude of two thousand seven or eight hundred metres we come into a conifer belt — patches of scattered light gradually appear and giant black hemlocks soar up, their branches arched like open umbrellas. However, at a height of thirty or forty metres they are surpassed by grey-brown dragon spruce which soar to heights of fifty or sixty metres and are majestic with their peaked crowns of grey-green new leaves. There is no longer any undergrowth and it’s possible to see quite a distance. In between the thick spruce and hemlock trunks are some round alpine azaleas. They are about four metres high and covered in masses of moist red flowers. The branches bow with the weight and, as if unable to cope with this abundance of beauty, scatter huge flowers beneath to quietly display their enduring beauty. This unadorned splendour and beauty in nature fills me with another sort of indescribable sadness. It is a sadness which is purely mine and not something inherent in nature.

Up ahead and down below are huge dead trees which have been snapped by the assault of the elements. To pass by these towering crippled remains reduces me to an inner silence and the lust to express which keeps tormenting me, in the presence of this awesome splendour, is stripped of words.

A cuckoo which I can’t see is calling — it’s further up then down below, to the left then to the right. It somehow keeps circling around me, as if it’s trying to make me lose my bearings, and seems to be calling out: Brother wait for me! Brother wait for me! This brings to my mind the story of the two brothers who went into the forest to sow sesame seeds. In the story the stepmother wanted to get rid of the son of the first wife but fate rebounded upon the person of her own son. I also think of the two university graduates who got lost. A feeling of disquiet grips me.

He comes to a sudden halt, raises an arm to signal me, and I rush over to him. He pulls me down hard. I crouch there with him and start to get tense: then I see through a gap between the trees two large grey-white speckled birds with red feet running on the slope. When I make a quiet move, the pervading silence is instantly shattered by a disturbance in the air.

“Snow cocks,” he says.

In barely an instant the air seemingly congeals again and the lively grey-white speckled snow cocks with red feet seem never to have existed, making me feel that I am hallucinating, for before my eyes there are only the huge unmoving trees of the forest. My passing through here at this moment, even my very existence, is ephemeral to the point of meaninglessness.

He is friendlier and no longer leaves me too far behind, he goes for a bit, stops, and waits for me to catch up. The distance between us shortens but still we don’t talk. Afterwards, he stops to look at his watch and then turns to look up at the increasing patches of sunlight. He sniffs at the air, climbs up a slope and puts out a hand to pull me up.