It was Lin who saved him. Early in the morning, soon after getting into work, Lin walked by several times in the corridor. His desk faced the corridor and he saw that Lin was signaling him. He came out of the office and followed Lin down to the end of the corridor, where there was a bend before the stairwell. As no one was coming, they stopped there. Lin quickly told him to hurry home to fix up his things, because the Red Guards from the workplace were about to set out to search the belongings of his roommate, Old Tan. He rushed down the stairs, cycled hard, and got back to his room in a lather of sweat. He piled all his own things onto his own bed and beside it. He also went through the drawers of Old Tan’s desk. He found an old, pre-Liberation photograph of Old Tan, taken at university with a group of students. Everyone was in student uniform, wearing caps with the twelve-point white-sun insignia of the Nationalist Party. He rolled it into a little ball, went out of the courtyard, and tossed it into the deep pit of the public lavatory on the street. When he got back to the courtyard, the car from the workplace had already arrived.
Four Red Guards from the workplace entered the room, and Lin was among them. Lin knew he was a writer but had never seen any of his manuscripts. She was in love with him, and didn’t care about his writings. She, of course, had not come because of his manuscripts, but because he had taken lots of photographs of her, not naked but in provocative poses. They had been taken before and after the two of them had illicit sex in the woods at Badaling, in the western suburbs of Beijing. If any of those were found, it would be seen at a glance that their relationship had gone past being colleagues or revolutionary comrades. Lin was a deputy-minister’s daughter, and she was married. Her husband, from an old revolutionary family, was in the army, and worked in a research unit carrying out research on nothing less than rockets or some new weapons. He had not the slightest interest in defense secrets, but was infatuated with this beautiful woman. Lin had taken the initiative, and she was the more passionate.
Lin was deliberately casual and made a loud fuss, “This room of yours is really small! There’s nowhere to sit.”
She had been here before, of course, when Old Tan wasn’t home, and she’d be wearing a low-cut dress—he’d pull down the zipper on the back, take out her breasts and kiss them—nothing like the army outfit she wore now. Her long hair that used to be in a plait had been cut and tied with rubber bands into two short bunches, the standard hairstyle for women soldiers in the forces, as well as for the Red Guards of the present.
“How about making some tea, I’m dying of thirst!”
Lin deliberately opened the door wide and, standing in the doorway, she fanned herself with her handkerchief. Because of her doing this, the neighbors in the courtyard, peering into the back window, would not get the wrong impression that he was being searched. She made it all seem cheerful, as if they had dropped in for a visit.
He quickly made tea for everyone. The others declined, but the seriousness of the search had evaporated; besides, they all knew one another. Before the wearing of red armbands, family backgrounds were indistinguishable and everyone appeared to be equal. The leader of the Red Guards, Danian, was a hefty youth who played table tennis with him at lunchtime, and the two got on well. Danian’s father was political commissar of an army division. He was wearing his father’s old, much-washed, faded khaki army cap, and also an old leather army belt that was no longer regulation gear. These gave him the air of being a blood-lineage successor to the revolution.
When the Red Guards first formed at the workplace, he and other youths without a Five Red Categories background accepted the invitation to attend a meeting. It was there that Danian first revealed what he was capable of. Seated at one end of the bench of the main table, he said to those who didn’t qualify to be Red Guards, “You people attending our Red Guard meeting today count in our revolutionary ranks as fellow travelers!” Danian confronted him by calling out his name—“Of course, that includes you!”—to let him know that it referred to him as well. However, having read The History of the USSR, he knew precisely what “fellow traveler” signified. If Lin had not warned him, and those manuscripts of his were found, he would certainly have been destroyed by this fellow in this surprise attack.
Danian retained his air of formality and said, “We’re here to search for reactionary criminal evidence on Tan Xinren, and this has nothing to do with you. Which are your belongings? Separate them from his.”
He put on a smile and said, “I’ve already separated my things, is there something else I can do to help?”
They all said, “This is none of your business, this is none of your business. Which is his desk?”
“That’s his, the drawers aren’t locked.”
He pointed it out, then stood to one side. This was all he could say in defense of his roommate, Tan. But at the same time, he had drawn a line of demarcation between Tan and himself. Only later did he find out that, just as he was going downstairs to get his bicycle to hurry home, a Red Guard notice had been posted in the front hall of the workplace building: “Seize Tan Xinren with his history as a counterrevolutionary!” Old Tan, immediately isolated in the workplace building, had lost his freedom.
They pulled out Old Tan’s notebooks, translation manuscripts, letters, photographs, and English-language books. Tan translated some novels from English in his spare time, mostly prorevolutionary works by writers from Asia and Africa. However, there was an English novel with a half-naked foreign woman on the cover, and this was put to one side. From under the old-newspaper lining of a drawer, they pulled out a white envelope. It was found to contain several condoms.
“The old bastard is still at this sort of thing!”
Danian took one and waved it about. Everyone laughed.
It wasn’t that the people involved were amused, but that everyone was putting on an act of being pure and chaste. He and Lin also laughed but avoided one another’s eyes.
Later, at the mass meeting called to criticize him, they questioned Old Tan about the woman he had an “improper sexual relationship” with. It was intimated that Old Tan was involved in a spy network, and he was forced to name the woman, a widow. Immediately, the Red Guards at the woman’s work unit were notified, and her home, too, was searched. Some heartrending classical poems in Tan’s drawer, probably written for this woman, constituted irrefutable evidence of “anti-Party, anti-Socialist longings for the paradise of the past.”
The Red Guards found two loose bricks in the house and pried them up.
“Should I go and borrow a spade from a neighbor?”
He had deliberately asked Danian this to avoid the pain of being subjected to a search. At the same time, he wanted to play a joke: they might as well dig three feet down and make an archaeological discovery. Terror only came afterward. He borrowed a pickax from the old retired worker next door, and they began digging, filled the room with dirt and bits of brick so that there was nowhere to step, then threw down the pickax and left.
It was afterward that he found out the surveillance unit at his workplace had been informed by the street committee that the sound of a wireless transmitter was coming from their room. The person who had reported it must have been the old retired worker next door. When Old Tan and he had gone off to work, the old man, who was at home, heard the crackle of the radio they had forgotten to turn off behind the locked door. He took it to be a secret transmitter and must have thought that if he could catch the enemy it would prove his total loyalty to the Leader and the Party. When he ran into the old codger in the courtyard after the search, the man’s wrinkled old face was beaming with smiles. Disaster had thus brushed by him.
The lights are off, and you’re lying in the dark on a bed with