Free Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather by Gao Xingjian Page A

long hair, and on her underwear and panty hose on the floor.
    He senses the tide swelling. The seawater surges around the legs of the chair, swirls around, then recedes. An old tune fills the air. Beautiful and sad, it is like the wailing of a peasant woman at a funeral, and yet like the sobbing of a reed pipe.
    She moves her ankles to kick off her shoes and bends to put on a new pair. A shoe with the heel worn to the quick lies discarded at the side of the passageway near the door.
    A poster with a black-and-white photograph shows just the lower half of a woman holding up her long skirt and revealing her beautiful legs. She is standing on her toes. This is another advertisement for shoes, posted on the wall of the platform in the subway station. An old woman with a big empty bag is standing on the platform, a middle-aged man sitting on a bench is reading a newspaper. The train comes; some doors open and some don’t. The people getting off head for the exit, and no one so much as looks at the advertisement. With his back turned, he is the onlyperson left on the platform, and as others start to arrive, that back departs.
    The legs of the deck chair are already immersed in the lapping water and the sea keeps rising. That sad tune is still playing, but it has become somewhat vague and sounds more like a reed pipe.
    She says she wants a man twice her weight to bear down on her. In the dark she is lying on the bed, her eyes wide open. He is sitting at the desk, bare-chested, and without turning he asks if she will cope. She says she loves being squashed until she can’t breathe and, having said this, she laughs. Doo —it’s the computer.
    The tune becomes louder and louder, yet more vague as well. It sounds like the wind tearing the paper used for windows, but with the grating of grains of sand mixed in. The tune becomes more vague, yet still hurts the ears a little. The sea has risen to the seat of the deck chair and it is swaying.
    He is sitting at the computer with a cigarette in his mouth. A long sentence appears on the screen. “What” is not to understand and “what” is to understand or not is not to understand that even when “what” is understood, it is not understood, for “what” is to understand and “what” is not to understand, “what” is “what” and “is not” is “is not,” and so is not to understand not wanting to understand or simply not understanding why “what” needs to be understood or whether “what” can be understood, and also it is notunderstood whether “what” is really not understood or that it simply hasn’t been rendered so that it can be understood or is really understood but that there is a pretense not to understand or a refusal to try to understand or is pretending to want to understand yet deliberately not understanding or actually trying unsuccessfully to understand, then so what if it’s not understood and if it’s not understood, then why go to all this trouble of wanting to understand it—
    A white-nosed clown in a circus troupe is playing an accordion, pulling and squeezing, pulling and pulling, squeezing and squeezing. He pulls the accordion out fully, gives a hard jerk, breaks the sound box, and the music instantly stops.
    In the air, there is only the sound of the wind, the noisy waves of the sea, and the brilliant sunlight.
    The ash on the cigarette is about to drop and, flicking it into the ashtray, he deletes each of the words of the uncompleted sentence one at a time.
    A pair of hands shuffles a pile of mah-jongg tiles, takes one, feels it; it’s a “middle,” then there’s a “develop,” and a “white,” and these are put in the sequence “middle” “develop” “white.” Next to be picked up are “develop” “middle” “white” “develop” “middle” “white” “east” “develop” “middle” “wind” “north” “east” “south” “wind” “west” “north” “bamboo no. 2”—he pushes over the tiles