The Cave Man Xiaoda Xiao Two Dollar Radio December 2009, Paperback, 174 pages 978-0982015131

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Ja Feng fell asleep as soon as the two prisoner-nurses left the ward. He had a dream that he was still in the dark cave and when he raised his feet, trying to touch the stone walls on either side, they didn’t touch anything. He screamed. Wakening, he found his two legs falling off the bed. He heard his heart thudding. He turned to the other side and tried to return to his sleep. But the same thing happened and he woke up to find his legs stretching out of the bed once again. Having tried, with no success, all the methods known to him either to stay awake, or fall asleep without dreaming, Ja Feng requested the next morning when the two prisoner-nurses came, that he be bound to the bed with a rope. His strange decision surprised the officer-surgeon and the prisoner-surgeon who came to the ward in the afternoon.

“Why do you want to be bound?” the officer-surgeon asked.

Ja Feng described what had happened to him. The officer-surgeon went out of the ward for a few minutes and then came back, telling him that his request was permitted. He was bound to the bed from then on.

A week later they sent him to a common ward, where he again met Maison, his solitary cell neighbor. The tall, thin man around thirty had been sent to the hospital two days before for screaming in the middle of the night. There were twenty-five patients crowded into the ward, almost all of them had broken their legs or ankles in the quarries, and all gaped at Ja Feng as he walked in with the help of the two prisoner-nurses. Obviously they had already heard about him. On his left there were two prisoners sitting against the window, talking about his legs. Their legs are broken, he thought, looking at their plaster bandages. The younger of the two drew out a piece of cake from under his pillow and handed it to Ja Feng, but put it back awkwardly when he shook his head. The other man said that it was not a good time to give him food, because he had concentrated all he could on walking.

According to the surgeons, Ja Feng’s leg bones were all right. But his legs looked even thinner than those broken ones around him. Thirty-two single black iron beds were placed in the ward resembling the resting halls of public bathhouses in Shanghai. Two lines of eight beds ran along the longest walls, with each bed placed perpendicularly. Another two lines of eight were placed head to head in the middle of the ward, parallel to the beds on both sides. This formation left a U-shaped corridor running through the ward. Maison must have told the inmates, most of whom had experienced the solitary cell for themselves, everything about him before he moved there. Their countenances told him that they knew how incredible it was that he could survive such a long time in solitary confinement.

“Imagine,” Maison declared, as he lay on the bed beside Ja Feng’s, “in nine months a baby is born.”

Ja Feng was used to this, the hunch-backed warden who delivered food to him would say the same thing about his nine-month life inside the cell. He hadn’t expect Maison’s remark to inspire the other inmates to respond so enthusiastically. “The solitary cell is just like a womb,” said one of them.

“A stone womb,” another voice said.

“He had a second birth.”

“We better call it reform, because…”

“…”

Had they just shown their sympathy to his suffering he wouldn’t have felt hurt a bit. But he didn’t like people talking about him like that, as though he were different from them. He was able to admit, however, that it often seemed to him that the other inmates were different as he watched them strolling to and fro. As a result, he became more sensitive when he heard them talk about the solitary cell. He didn’t want to live with so many inmates around him, with his nerves taut all the time and his ears pricked to whatever they talked about. He would rather live within a space that belonged to him and no one else.

Where was this space? The common ward was enormous, and crammed with patients from all over the labor reform camp. They looked healthy and had big fists, even though their legs were broken. When Ja Feng looked at himself, he couldn’t help thinking of an empty sack. He remembered how those children threw stones at the iron door of his cell. They had never really threatened his security because the cell was solid. Now, however, that he had been pulled into the open, where people could hit him from all directions, he was too thin to fend them off. So he kept himself in a defensive pose, with his legs curled upward, as though he was ready to kick someone.

Eventually the inmates realized that they could hardly bear him because he would jump off his bed, screaming, almost every night while the ward was asleep. They told him that his screams sounded as though someone had set a knife at his throat. They forgave him when he apologized, telling him that they understood what had happened to him.

“It’s not a rare symptom at all when a man is released from solitary confinement,” a middle-aged man who slept on the bed next to Ja Feng’s remarked, tapping his own forehead thoughtfully.

Had he been able to control his nightly screaming, nobody would have mentioned it anymore, and they would have accepted him as they had with Maison, whose screaming fits had lasted no longer than a week. Although no one had openly complained to him about his problem, the looks on their faces showed how angry and tired they were. One day the middle-aged man said to him, “We have to talk about it, I mean, I can’t bear it any longer…”

They wanted him, having heard the two prisoner-nurses say that he had had his legs bound at night when he was in the observation ward, to have his mouth gagged with a piece of sponge. He refused and threw the yellow sponge out of the window. “Were you dreaming something terrible?” Maison asked him when he cried out again one night and woke up the whole ward.

“I’m okay now,” Ja Feng said calmly. But Maison’s question hurt him. He thought Maison would have understood.

They had to tell him to move from the center of the ward to the right corner, and from the right to the left, where three empty beds separated his from the nearest inmate’s.

“It doesn’t mean we want to get rid of you. We have to let you sleep there because you can’t control yourself,” the head of the ward said with a sorry look on his face, as he helped move the mattress to the bed they had prepared for him.

He didn’t care to lie beside them, but how could he be driven from one corner to another like a dog? He was prepared to object to their decision when he found all the inmates watching him, silently, with the same sorry look. For the first two nights he didn’t scream because he couldn’t sleep well, but he began to scream again when he eventually grew used to his new bed. Looking at the faces of the exhausted inmates, he felt guilty. He tried not to sleep at night, assuming that he wouldn’t have to go to bed if he was able to get enough sleep in the daytime. When he failed, he reported to the authorities that he would rather move into the special ward which was for those who were under punishment, equivalent to the solitary cell for an unhealthy prisoner. His request was granted.

The whole ward looked at him respectfully when they learned of his decision, as though he had again become a hero.

“You don’t have to take it so seriously. Nobody can force you to move there,” Maison said to him before he left.

“But I can’t live here any longer because I know I can’t control myself from screaming.”

There was no bed in the special ward, and the bare cement floor was covered with a heap of straw. Its narrow, high window made him feel more comfortable than the single iron bed and big, bright windows in the common ward. He didn’t have to bend himself because the ceiling was high enough for him to stand. He could even pace the ward a little bit. Now that he didn’t have to worry about disturbing other people’s sleep, he felt exhausted and yet relaxed as if he had just recovered from an illness.

“You don’t have to move there. That’s a solitary cell. Haven’t you suffered enough?” Maison remarked.

“This is my decision,” Ja Feng said.

One morning when birds were singing outside the high window, Ja Feng woke up to find himself lying on the straw heap on the gray cement floor by himself. For a few minutes he was confused and had no idea if he was in solitary confinement again, though it was bigger and brighter than the dark cave in which he had been locked. But soon he felt relaxed because he would never hear people talking about him and complaining of his nightly screaming fits. Having realized that he could actually relax in the special ward, Ja Feng started to enjoy his daydreams.

“You should go and take a walk outside,” Maison remarked. “Or it would be no different from a real solitary confinement. We had hoped every day that the iron door would be unlocked when we were in the dark caves, hadn’t we?”

“The reason I prefer it here,” Ja Feng explained, “is that I know I’ve not been used to life outside the cave, just like a piece of metal antiquity would immediately be oxidized and turned black as soon as it was unearthed from an underground tomb. After nine months of solitary confinement, my body wasn’t able to adjust itself to the sudden change in environment.”

Soon, however, he felt that he didn’t have to stay in the ward all day long. He could walk without a cane, though his legs were still thin. He was satisfied and, as time passed, started to rid himself of his recent experience. He had hated the dirt footpath that ran before the cells and would tremble while looking at people walking past his door hole, but now he walked on that path without being able to understand why he had been so angry. In fact this was the freedom he had expected, and the concept of living freely. He kept himself from the crowd, although he wanted to hear what people were talking about. But nothing was more important than his new home so he always stayed in his ward, of which the primary merit he enjoyed was its stillness. Sometimes he would pace across the ward, but more often he would lie on the straw heap in a half-slumber and look happily out the high window. He would write to his friends in the afternoon, a habit he had established before his solitary confinement.

One morning, he saw people gathering in front of the headquarters, and he heard them talking about freedom and rehabilitation when he went to the prison store to buy envelopes.

“So how about my case?” asked a young man who had been a moment ago indulged in whistling a melody of a ballet, the muscles on his arms and on his chest wrapped tightly in a sailor’s t-shirt.

“What is your case?” asked a middle-aged man wearing a pair of glasses.

“I’d been wrongly criticized by my teacher and so I wrote counterrevolutionary slogans on the blackboard after school was over,” the young man described. The man wearing eye glasses thought for a while and asked the young man if he had any witnesses.

“Many witnesses,” the young man said.

“How old were you then?”

“Sixteen.”

“You’ll be rehabilitated,” the other man said.

According to this man wearing eye glasses, those who had been sentenced as counterrevolutionaries were to be rehabilitated, and would receive legal statements announcing their innocence because Chairman Mao had passed away. Ja Feng worried about his future when he listened to the inmates talking. What could he do, as his weary body was concerned, to eke out a living on his own? On his way back to the hospital, he ran into Maison who was going to the office to receive his new judgment.

Maison told him that he had also seen Ja Feng’s name on the list and that, in order to be considered for rehabilitation, each of them should speak briefly to the officer in charge about why he was arrested.

The hall was crowded when they arrived. A clumsy-looking prisoner with a newly shaven head, who had already finished reporting his case, was complaining. “Look at me,” he said with a grimace, turning around to the crowd. “I believe quite a few of you guys still remember how strong I was and what I looked like when I first came. There was a widespread story in the prison that five guards failed to subdue a prisoner. That’s me. But now, look at me, two guards would be enough to get the job done.”

The officer said, “Next.” A young prisoner with a girlish smile approached his desk.

“What do you have to say?”

“They searched my room and thought there were counterrevolutionary speeches in my diary.”

“What did you write?”

“I don’t remember,” the prisoner replied.

“Where is the diary?”

“They took it, along with two hundred yuan of my savings I had put inside the leather cover.”

“Next,” the officer said, raising his hand.

“Sir, I was arrested because I had fed many homeless cats from the street,” an old man said, bowing himself deeply to the officer.

Seeing nobody step forward after the old man’s case was settled, Maison said, “Sir, my case was as simple as theirs. I was accused of spreading dirty jest about the top leaders.”

“What’s that?” asked the officer.

“I heard people say that all the top leaders bathed with beautiful female workers in the People’s Conference Hall,” Maison said.

“Who told you that?”

“A man who used to cook for them in the People’s Conference Hall,” Maison said.

When the officer called for the next person, Ja Feng stepped forward. After finding his name on the list, the officer in charge asked him as usual: “What’s wrong with your case?”

“I didn’t join a counterrevolutionary organization,” he said.

“What did you do then?”

“I got to know my fiancée and sometimes I played music with them, and I did nothing with them other than that.”

“Your fiancée?”

“I was arrested on the day of my wedding,” Ja Feng explained. “So I can’t say she’s my wife. She’s no longer my fiancée, either, because she married someone else.”

The officer raised a hand to discontinue his words, and wrote something on a note book. Then he said, “You may go back to the hospital and wait for our decision.”

He was called to the reform office, along with Maison and three other prisoners whom he didn’t know. As soon as the hospital officers learned that Ja Feng was innocent, they would no longer allow him to stay in the special ward. As one of the reform officers handed him the legal paper, Ja Feng asked the officer if Weiguo, had he been alive, would also have received such a sheet. “Perhaps, but he was unlucky,” the officer said.

All the prisoners who would be released ahead of their sentenced time went to a bar in a nearby village except for Ja Feng. He was lying on the straw heap with his hands on the back of his head. He had to think about his future, which seemed to have arrived so abruptly.

“Where shall I go?” he thought.