The girl stood there for a while, then asked, "Aren't you going away?"

He asked, "Where?"

Maomei pouted and, with an incredulous look, asked, "Then why did that person in your house go away?"

She was asking about Qian, but had avoided saying "your woman" or "your wife." Her bright, beautiful eyes looked seductively at him as she twisted the hem of her shirt and looked down at her shoes. But he couldn't have a sexual relationship with the girl, he no longer trusted women and wouldn't let himself be seduced again, so he said nothing and concentrated on washing the sheets in the tub. Maomei finally got bored and went off.

It was only through writing, and so engaging in a dialogue with himself, that he was able to dispel his loneliness. However before he could start writing, he had to plan things in advance. The thin letter paper could be rolled up and stuffed into the bamboo handle of the broom he kept behind the door: he had removed the inside membranes at the joints of the bamboo handle with a metal spike. When the pages accumulated, they would be put into an earthenware jar for preserving salted vegetables, with a layer of lime on the bottom, and sealed with a piece of plastic tied over the top. He dug a hole to store the jar in the earthen floor of the hut and covered the hole with the big water vat. He wasn't intending to write a book to hide in some famous mountain so that it could be read by later generations. He had not given the matter any thought because it was impossible to think about the future. He did not entertain any wild hopes.

Dogs were barking in the distance, then all the village dogs started barking. Afterward, it gradually became quiet. The dark night was long, but, as he was writing alone under the lamp, the excitement of pouring out his feelings made his heart palpitate. He felt vaguely worried that there were eyes in the dark at the front and back windows. He thought that maybe cracks in the door had not been properly sealed, and yet he had carefully examined the door many times. Still, he could sense footsteps outside the window. He sat stiffly by the brazier, holding his breath to listen, but there was no further movement.

Hazy moonlight came through the glass window pasted with paper on the inside. The moon had appeared in the middle of the night. He again detected movement outside the window and, holding his breath, quietly tugged the light cord looped over the bed headboard. A hazy figure silhouetted on the window disappeared in the next instant. He clearly heard noises in the bushes outside die window. Without putting on the light again, carefully and without a sound, he put away his manuscript, got into bed, and stared in the dark at the moonlit window pasted with white paper.

In the bright moonlight, there are eyes everywhere, spying, observing, surrounding, and watching you. In the hazy moonlight, there are traps everywhere, waiting for you to do the wrong thing. You don't dare open the door or the window, don't dare make a sound. Don't let yourself be tricked by the tranquility of this moonlit night when everyone is asleep. If you panic and lose control, those lying in ambush all around will for sure charge forward to arrest you and bring you to trial.

You mustn't think, mustn't feel, mustn't pour out your feelings and mustn't be solitary! You must either be doing hard physical labor or else snoring when you sleep, or else copulating and producing sperm so that children can be bred and a labor force nurtured. Why are you crazily writing? Have you forgotten the surroundings in which you are living? What is it, are you thinking of being a rebel again? Do you want to be a hero or a martyr? This stuff you're writing will have you eating bullets! You've probably forgotten how counterrevolutionary criminals were executed when revolutionary committees were established in the counties, haven't you? Those only count as minor events compared with today's public denunciations. Hands tied behind their backs, the prisoners are paraded with placards on their chests: written in black are the person's surname and crime, the surname crossed out in red. Wire is tied around their necks so tightly that their eyes bulge. This is the latest red authority's new idea for stifling any protests before executions, so that even in the netherworld those executed needn't think they might become martyrs. Two trucks with military police shouldering loaded rifles escort them as they are paraded through the villages of the commune. The loudspeaker on top blaring slogans, a jeep at the front leads, sending up a cloud of dust and driving chickens and dogs into a wild frenzy. Old women and grown-up girls come to the road at the entrance of the village, and children rush about and run after the trucks. Families wanting to collect a corpse have first to pay a fifty-fen bullet fee. But there will be nobody to collect your corpse. By then, your wife will have exposed you as the enemy, and your father is in the countryside undergoing reform through labor. And now you also have an old counterrevolutionary father-in-law, so on the evidence of all this, it won't be a miscarriage of justice to have you shot. Moreover, you have no miscarriage of justice to complain about, so stop writing before it's too late!

But you say you're not demented, that you have a brain, and it's impossible for you not to think. How about it, if you're not a revolutionary, and not a hero or a martyr, but are also not a counterrevolutionary? All you do is let your thoughts and imagination roam beyond the regulations of this society. You're crazy! It's clearly you who are crazy, and not Qian. Look, this person actually wants to let his thoughts and imagination roam! What a preposterous joke! All the women, the old people and the youngsters, will all come out to watch this lunatic eating bullets!

You say you seek a reality in literature? Stop joking! What reality does this person seek? What sort of toy is reality? A very cheap bullet! All right, so does that reality demand that you risk your life to write? But don't worry about that bit of moldy reality buried in the ground rotting, you'll be finished well before that happens!

You say what you want is a transparent reality, like a heap of garbage captured through the lens of a camera. The garbage is still garbage, but through the lens it has the imprint of your grief. What is real is your grief. As you are photographing, you will pity yourself, and you must find a state of mind that will allow you to endure the pain so that you can go on living to create a realm that is purely yours, that is beyond this pig's pen of a reality. Or, one might say, it is contemporary myth. By locating present reality in myth, pleasure can be derived from writing, so that it is possible to achieve existential and psychological balance.

He copied a myth he had written into the notebook left to him by his mother. He attributed the work to "Alipeides," a foreigner he'd invented, who could have been from Greece or some other place, and he attributed the translation to the poet Guo Moruo. At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, that old poet announced in the newspapers that all his past writings should be destroyed. For this, he received special favors from Mao and was able to survive. He could say it was a translation Guo made half a century ago and that he had copied it down while at university. Who would be able to check it out in this mountain village, or even in the county town?

Less than half of the notebook was the diary his mother had kept while doing farm labor before she drowned. Seven or eight years earlier, in the years of famine wreaked by the Great Leap Forward, his mother had gone to work on a farm to be reeducated, just as he had gone to the May Seventh Cadre School. She worked hard and had saved up several months of meat and egg coupons to supplement her son's food supplies when he came home. She looked after a chicken farm but was bloated from starvation. At dawn, after working a night shift, she went to the riverside to wash herself and fell into the river; it was not clear whether she was overfatigued or weak from malnutrition. At daybreak some peasants herding ducks to the river discovered her corpse in the water. The hospital autopsy listed the cause of death as cerebral ischemia. He wasn't able to see his mother's corpse. All he had was this diary, which recorded impressions of her reform through labor, as well as a mention that she wanted to accumulate leave so that she could spend a few extra days with her son when he came home for the summer vacation. After he had copied out the myth written under the pseudonym of Alipeides, he placed it in the pot for salting vegetables with a layer of lime on the bottom, and buried it in the earth under the water vat in his house.