‘All right,’ he said. He leaned back and pressed the play button, waited for the prelude to finish, then slowly pushed the tray into the furnace to the rhythm of the Salammbô aria. The paper ingot shoes were the last to go in. Stuck to the soles he saw a patch of grey ash and a brightly shining drawing pin.
‘The electricity bill’s under the premium bonds!’ he heard his mother cry from inside the furnace, as the lyrics of the dirty song began to blare out. Without a word, he brushed his hair back and slammed the steel door shut.
The Suicide or The Actress
Su Yun was sixteen when she first stepped onto the stage. It was the height of the Cultural Revolution, and she was determined to pour all her youth and vitality into the revolutionary heroines she played. She took the roles of Jiang Jie, the brave activist who is shot in a Guomindang jail, and Liu Hulan, the Communist martyr who is decapitated by Japanese invaders. She sang the part of the shepherdess who loses her feet to frostbite in her attempt to rescue her state-owned flock, and danced the role of the fearless peasant leader, Wu Jinghua, who bayonets the evil capitalist landowner.
But the winds brought in by the Open Door Policy blew away those revolutionary heroines, and Su Yun lost her way. She tried to keep up with the changing times and relax her moral views, but was kicked back time and again by a series of failed love affairs. She slowly lost her grip on reality and retreated inside herself. She wanted to travel to the core of her being, to see what lay at her life’s end.
Su Yun’s initial plan was to die alone, but she was afraid that without an audience, her performance would go unnoticed. When she thought that she would soon become a heap of white powder inside a blazing incinerator, her heart clenched.
What if she shed no tears at the moment of death? She was incapable of predicting how she would react. When she tried to imagine taking her last breath, crazed thoughts fluttered through her mind like dry petals falling from a withered bunch of flowers. A laugh rose from the pit of her stomach.
Her life seemed like the string of maxims she copied from magazines, then tore up and tossed on the floor. These maxims gave her strength and insight. They taught her, for example, that ‘a sage must assume the guise of a fool’. As well as jotting down these maxims, she also liked to copy out from Milan Kundera’s books passages that mock female frailty. ‘He really must hate women,’ she said to herself. ‘He implies that without us, the world would be a better place. What a cheek! Although, I must admit, my foolish behaviour today does seem to support his argument.’
She felt as though she had lived a hundred years. Everything that happened in the world seemed to her like a tedious repetition of some past event. One day she made up her mind to write a play about a woman who wants to commit suicide. She tried to remain objective, but couldn’t help writing herself into the script. While she worked on her suicide play, she continued her career as an actress, having to die day after day on stage. The strain was almost too much for her to bear. In the midst of her distress, a new idea came to her. She decided that in her play she would return from death to perform her suicide once again.
As her thoughts took shape, she sat down at her desk and set to work on her second draft. First she sketched an outline of the male lead, who was a composite of her current boyfriend – a painter who worked in the municipal museum – and several other men she had known.
She made the lead a little taller and bulkier than her boyfriend, and gave him a graveyard voice that suggested a sentimental character and a long history of heartbreak. Through his untidy, tobacco-stained teeth, she made him spew a few of the vulgar terms and phrases that filled the latest magazines – words like: IQ, spiritual enlightenment, ‘my bleeding heart’, ‘too vile for words’, and ‘chasing skirt’. This was her idea of the perfect man.
In real life this man was cold and arrogant, and showed her little respect. But in her play, he became her servant – the meat under her knife that she could dissect and analyse as she pleased.
Having assigned him his correct position, she smiled to herself and lowered her pen. She knew that in dealings with people, it is essential to first assign positions. This applied not only to her and to him, but to the four billion other people on this planet. No human contact is possible without first assigning positions. If two people are talking to each without prior knowledge of their respective ranks, they will achieve nothing. They might as well be talking to themselves.
Before she lifted her pen again, she flicked through her notebook and read a couple of remarks she had jotted down about him: