Shao, the young poet, had written most of the script already, and Yomei liked what he had done. She could see that the young man had a refined, poetic sensibility that tended to keep the actors’ diction too elevated, so here and there she toned it down a little, explaining to Shao that the actors had to speak naturally. As a rule, the language ought to be common speech, relying on the words people used every day. Overall, the script had captured the main points of the novel’s dramatic conflicts, but Yomei wanted to add something original, since this would be a foreign play made for a Chinese audience. She would like to have a more memorable woman character that was based on the role of Lyoliya, who was portrayed in the novel as damaged, scarred, scrawny, and hard on the eyes. Yomei wanted Lyoliya to be somewhat beautiful, inside as well as outside, with a shapely figure in spite of her face, which had been mutilated by the Nazis. She wanted Lyoliya to carry more weight, so as to give the story more historical depth and gravity. In addition, Lyoliya’s love for Jima should be rewarded with a semi-union in the end. Yomei talked to young Shao about her ideas for the revision, which he thought made good sense. He agreed, “We shouldn’t stick too close to the novel. We are doing a play for the Chinese audience. The play ought to be more poetic and more intense than the novel, since it’s much shorter. We must make it more expressive and more resonant.”
So in the play, Yomei let Lyoliya, a second-tier character in the novel, carry a great deal more weight. She had an actress chosen for Lyoliya already: she gave the role to the svelte Hsiao Chih, who had played Cassy in Black Slaves’ Hate. Due to the drastic differences between Cassy and Lyoliya, Chih was intimidated and said she might not be able to do it. “We’re all tyros in this,” Yomei told her. “That makes our work more exciting.” She assured Chih that she would help her find a new way to play such a damaged woman, but Chih must follow her guidance. The young actress agreed.
The task Yomei assigned Chih was simple: learn to play the guitar. She even hired a teacher for Chih and told her to practice diligently and learn how to strum it while singing. So every day Chih just took a guitar lesson and practiced a couple of simple chords. This wasn’t easy for her, never having touched such an instrument before, but she practiced it devotedly, at least four hours a day.
Yet once the rehearsal started, Yomei left Chih alone, just telling her to continue with her guitar lesson and learn how to sing while plucking the instrument. Yomei even had a Russian folk song composed for Lyoliya. Chih often splayed her hands to show others her fingertips, callused from all her playing. Indeed, she’d been practicing continuously, even though she often got bored. As the weeks passed, she felt somewhat agitated when watching others rehearse actively. Everybody seemed to be having a great time on the rehearsal stage, laughing and wisecracking, but why was she left alone? Why did they often skip her part to practice other scenes?
Then one morning Yomei said to Hsiao Chih, “All right, now you perform a song on the guitar for us.”
Confidently, Chih wrapped her face with a white scarf and sat down, then plucked the strings as she began to sing in a slightly husky voice. The acting crew gathered around to listen and was impressed. Nodding her approval, Yomei said, “Good, let us rehearse your part now. Lean the guitar against the bench. Keep in mind, it’s not yours, it belongs to Jima Yershov. You should carry only a backpack when you come here to see him for the last time.” In the play, Lyoliya appears to say goodbye to her friend Jima—she won’t be able to come to see him on weekends anymore. Prior to the war, she had been a lovely girl with a natural, innocent manner and charming looks, but after the Nazi troops assaulted her and mutilated her body and face, she felt humiliated and ruined, unable to live among the people who knew her. Chih, as Lyoliya, stopped outside Jima’s house and put her hand on a picket fence, while her other hand held the strap of her backpack. She looked hesitant, as if changing her mind. Yomei interrupted Chih and said, “Now tell me how you see the character Lyoliya at such a moment.”
Chih, who had read the novel twice, told her director, “She is in pain now, almost unable to tear herself away from the fishing village familiar to her, because she’s afraid to meet strangers and also to lose her only friend, Jima, who she believes loves Kazakova, the pretty young engineer in his workshop. To Lyoliya’s mind, her life is about to change forever. She’ll be more lonesome and maybe more isolated from now on.” Chih used to think that this character wasn’t essential since she wasn’t a worker at the steel plant, the center of the struggle against corruption, but Chih didn’t let out that thought. Yomei nodded and said, “Lyoliya appears only a few times in the play, but she’s a vital character. The war started by Hitler inflicted endless destruction on common people, and Lyoliya, as a victim, damaged in both body and mind, represents an accusation against fascism and a justification for the serious efforts to remember the past.” Indeed, with her ruined life standing in sharp relief, most fashions in arts and literature appear superficial and frivolous.
Chih nodded and felt a bit enlightened and began to see the significance of the role she was playing. Yomei turned more specific, saying, “A wedding just ended beyond this fence, but you’ve almost lost the ability to love like a normal woman—to become a bride and a mother, because the Nazis mutilated your body and looks, and you cannot give birth anymore. When you hear the jubilant chatter from the wedding and see the cheerful crowd, how do you feel?”
Stirred and touched, Chih stepped over to the stone bench, sat down, and picked up the guitar, playing it while singing in a sorrowful contralto voice:
Along the bank of the Volga River
There’s a craggy cliff
Covered by thick green moss.
For so many years no one has come here…
She was too emotional to continue, so she lowered her head, her cheeks bathed in tears.
“Jima, why are you still standing there?” Yomei cried at the actor who played the chief foreman at the steel plant. At this point of the drama, he was supposed to rush over and embrace Lyoliya, but he was so spellbound by Chih’s performance that he forgot what to do. Everyone could see that this episode would be a shining point in the play—a resounding climax. Both Yomei and Shao were pleased about this revised episode. This bright conclusion might lift the drama from grisly history to the realm of the human heart. It was how the play got charged with more feeling.
When the rehearsal was nearly completed in the fall of 1963, how to present The Brothers Yershov to the public became an urgent issue, because it was a play full of political implications that might have international repercussions. On the weekend prior to the dress rehearsal, Yomei went to the Zhous, bringing along Little Lan, whom Father Zhou and Mother Deng both loved to see. The girl was nine years old now, and already wearing a red pioneer neck scarf at school. She used to be naughty when her mother took her to the Zhous’ residence and had even dropped and broken some tableware. Grandpa Zhou had once pointed his chopsticks at the girl’s round face while saying to Yomei, “You’ve spoiled her rotten—she’s like a wild thing now. If you continued to indulge her like this, she’d soon climb up to our roof and tear off the tiles. You must rope her in.” But now the girl, already a third grader, was demure and respectful, knowing Grandpa Zhou was one of the most powerful men in the country and that she must behave at the Zhous’.
Over lunch—moo shu vegetables and seafood soup—Yomei told Father Zhou and Mother Deng about the problem of knowing how to present the play to the public. The premier was aware of the adaptation Yomei had been doing. In fact, the project had support from the top circle of the CCP. “You mean Chairman Mao approved this production too?” Yomei asked in amazement.
“Not exactly. Chairman Mao must have read about the anti-Khrushchev slant presented in the novel, but he doesn’t pay much attention to these kinds of matters nowadays. He doesn’t read contemporary fiction. Still, anything against Soviet revisionism and opportunism ought to be favored by our Party.”
Yomei didn’t ask more questions, aware that in recent years Mao had been forced to “stay away from the frontline of the central government,” having given up most of his power as a result of the famine (in which tens of millions of people were starved to death) and the debacle of the Great Leap Forward. It was believed that the real powers in the government were Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping, and that Mao might have lapsed into being a mere figurehead. In a sense, Mao had become a toothless tiger.
Father Zhou said he should see the play first, and then would think about what kind of venue might be suitable for it. His instinct told him not to show it to the general public like a regular production. “We’ll have to consider how the Soviets might take it,” he said.
In spite of his hectic schedule, Premier Zhou managed to attend the dress rehearsal the following Thursday. He was bowled over by the intensity and the striking vigor and beauty of the play. Afterward he kept saying to Yomei, “You did a great job with the adaptation. The play must have become a different work from the novel, maybe equally good if not better. I can see that it can serve as a textbook for the comrades of our Party, to remind us of the danger of corruption and of forgetting our original ideals.” But he believed it might be unsuitable to open the play to the general public because it disclosed some of the underbelly of that socialist society: bureaucracy, greed, the petty maneuvers of power struggles, wicked manipulations of others, selfishness, hedonism. It was disheartening to see such a prevalent obsession with ranks and positions and rubles in the USSR, where corruption and avarice had undermined the foundations of socialism. More worrisome, such an exposure might boomerang, making the public more aware of the seedy aspects of the current Chinese society and reminding the audience of venal elements among their own officials. In a word, the play could backfire on the CCP if it was seen by the masses.
After exchanging views with the Party’s Propaganda Department, the State Council decided to stage The Brothers Yershov in a smaller auditorium inside the Great Hall of the People instead of in a large public theater. All Party members in Beijing were required to go see it as part of their political education. Thanks to the required attendance as a political study, which meant most Party branches in the capital had to purchase tickets collectively, Yomei’s theater production enjoyed a financial success her company had never had before.