Free One Man's Bible by Gao Xingjian Page B

thread, memories that have been submerged by time gradually appear and, like a net emerging from the water, they are interconnected and infinite. The more you pull, the more threads seem to appear and disappear. Now that you have picked up one end and again pulled up a whole mass of happenings from different times, you can’t start anywhere, can’t find a thread to follow. It’s impossible to sort them to put them into some sort of order. Human life is a net, you want to undo it a knot at a time, but only succeed in creating a tangled mess. Life is a muddled account that you can’t work out.

6
    A man you don’t know has invited you for lunch at noon. The secretary said on the phone, “Our chairman of the board, Mr. Zhou, will pick you up punctually in the hotel lobby.”
    You arrive in the lobby, and, immediately, a fashionably dressed man walks up to you; he has broad shoulders and a solid build, a broad face and a square jaw. He presents his business card to you in both hands.
    “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.” The man says he’s seen your play and has boldly ventured to take up a bit of your time by inviting you to share a meal with him.
    You get in his big Mercedes limousine, an obvious sign of wealth. The chairman of the board drives the car himself and asks what you would like to eat.
    “Anything’s fine. Hong Kong is a paradise for food,” you say.
    “It’s different in Paris, the women there are all so wonderful.” Mr. Zhou is smiling as he drives along.
    “Not all are, some in the subways are tramps,” you say. You start believing that the man really is a boss.
    The car drives past the bay and enters the long underwater tunnel to Kowloon.
    Mr. Zhou says, “We’ll go to the racecourse, it’ll be quiet at lunchtime and good for talking. It’s not the racing season. Normally, if you go there for a meal, you have to be a member of the Jockey Club.”
    So, a wealthy man in Hong Kong likes your play. You start feeling curious.
    The two of you are seated, and Mr. Zhou orders some plain food, stops joking about women, and becomes serious. Only a few of the tables are occupied in this spacious, comfortable dining room, and the waiters stand some way off quietly in the courtyard. It’s not like most Hong Kong restaurants that are bustling and packed with customers all the time.
    “I’m not bluffing. I swam here illegally from the Mainland. During the Cultural Revolution, I was doing hard labor on a military farm in Guangdong province. I had finished middle school, I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself like that for the whole of my life.”
    “But crossing illegally was dangerous.”
    “Of course. At the time, both my parents were in prison, the house had been ransacked, and whichever way you looked at it, I was a mongrel offspring of the Five Black Categories.”
    “What if you came across sharks—”
    “That wouldn’t have been so bad, at least I’d have had a chance to fight it out to see if I was lucky. It was people I was frightened of, the searchlights of the patrol boats were sweeping the water all the time. When they found anyone trying to cross illegally, they’d just open fire.”
    “Then how did you get across?”
    “I equipped myself with two basketball bladders, basketballs used to have a rubber bladder with a tube that one blew into.”
    “I know them, children used them for floats when they were learning to swim, plastic products weren’t widely available in those days,” you say, nodding.
    “If boats came along, I’d let out the air and swim underwater. I practiced for a whole summer. I also took some drinking straws with me.” Mr. Zhou has a smile on his face but it doesn’t seem genuine. You sense that he is sad, and he no longer looks like a rich man.
    “The good thing about Hong Kong is that you can somehow get by. I suddenly got rich and now no one knows my past. I changed my name a long time ago and people only know me as