"Are your goldfish doing anything for the people, Comrade Jiu?" asked the committee chairman.
He understood the question, and quivering, he acknowledged their zero utilitarian contribution, "No, Comrade Zhang. They are just for my selfish pleasures."
His head bowed low, his eyes moist but his heart has so far been able to hold back the more tears.
"You understand that only the bourgeoisie would keep pets for their own pleasure while the proletariat starved and strove for such pleasures," said the woman next to the committee chairman. Like him, she also strove to sound sympathetic, rather than arrogant. They all knew him. They were his neighbors, no less. They knew he had cherished those goldfish for the past five years. His father had died a little before this decadent pleasure of his started to foster.
"Are you taking care of your Mother, at least?" asked the young man to the far right of the table, looking rather stern.
"Yes," said Comrade Jiu, his head dipping further.
"And the people?" demanded the same young man, who frowned.
Pausing, Jiu answered, "Not enough, Comrade Cao." His shakes and near tearfulness could be interpreted as remorse. They had been rather lenient with him, under the circumstances and with such accusation as harboring bourgeois desires. All he had to do was confess his sins and undo his wrongs.
"I have not done nearly enough. I owe the people a great apology I cannot mend. I will make it up to the people, through hard work and rigorous study of Chairman Mao's poetry and quotes and his ways."
They nodded, and even the stern young man softened the expression on his face. Jiu's words sounded sincere, more sincere than perhaps necessary. Everyone else just confessed using the same rote of words, same monotone of defeatism. But Jiu spoke with some emotion, some conviction.
Still, it was not enough. The young woman at the other end of the table suddenly stood up and screamed, "How do we know you are not just a two-face bourgeois who says one thing and still bears the evil heart of the oppressor?"
There were some cheers and more nods from the crowd behind Jiu, who was flanked by two Red Guards. The meeting was hastily put together. It would have been less rowdy but trouble has been brewing lately, with factions of Mao's followers bickering, sometimes even fighting against one another, with reports of gun violence. Therefore all the public hearings, which were really humiliation sessions, had to be done more haphazardly lest factions bump into each other.
The young woman, wearing her red scarf of the communist flag, with an equally red set of cheeks, looked with piercing eyes at the middle-age man with a lowered head standing a few feet from her. It was her moment to glow, to show everyone that she meant business, that her path with the Sun, with Mao, was the righteous one in case any bourgeois vermin should try to sneak in and steal from the people. She was expecting something.
Then he, with greatest effort in his life, held back his growing pressure of tears, raised his head to look at her, and said, "Comrade Liu, I will bury those bourgeois pleasures as soon as the people let me, to correct my ways."
The young woman, without smiling but obviously feeling triumphant, looked around her and said, "Let the bourgeoisie die now!" The whole room broke into an uproar, causing the older committee members to look a little intimidated. But they all stood up and shepherd the goldfish lover out of the school where this was taking place. They walked through the streets they had all spent their lives walking and sharing until they reached his place. They tried going inside, but the committee chairman stopped them and said, "Let the little bourgeois go in and fetch his fish. We need not have our spirit tempered by his evil atmosphere." His concern for the man's emotions was discerned only by the young woman, who eyed him with enough venom that he knew he could very well be the next to stand before the committee.
Jiu went inside with the uproar behind him. He went to his fish tank and started catching the fish one by one into a bowl of water. Was it water or his tears. He finally could cry all he wanted and had his sniffles and bitter cries drown. It was a pathetic scene, his tears mixing with his nose snots and his saliva, but it was the saddest moment in his life. When his father died, they didn't let him cry too much, saying that such tears should be saved for the glory of the revolution. But now he was alone, burying again all his sorrow, but in his own free privacy. The fish were startled, and almost as if they were looking at him for some answers to questions they could not transmit to him. But his answer was an infinity of apologies. He didn't know what had gone wrong, but it was all wrong. And in a few moments, in his own backyard, he would dig a hole with is bare hands as an ultimate act of sacrifice, to the people, as it seemed, but he knew in his heart that it would be for his own cowardice, his own safety. And into that hole he would throw in his precious loved ones who would be flapping and yelping for air in the dirt before he would cover them with dirt. He would see the dirt hopping a little before he fully covered them. And he would never go to his backyard, ever again.
