The Crazed

19

It was almost midmorning. I opened the window of our bedroom to let in some fresh air. Outside, on the sun-baked ground a pair of monarch butterflies was hovering over an empty tin can, which was still wet with syrup. The colorful paper glued around the can showed it had contained peach wedges. I turned away from the window and resumed scrubbing a shirt soaking in my basin. Huran had athlete’s foot, and from under his bed his shoes emitted an odor like rotten cabbage. Mantao stood in the middle of the room and repeatedly raised a set of sixteen-pound dumbbells above his head. His dark bangs, in a sideswept wave, almost covered his right eye. His face was soft and pale; a film of perspiration coated his forehead. In fact we had another roommate, a graduate student in the Philosophy Department, whose bed was next to mine, but he had never used it because his wife had an apartment in town. His absence pleased us somewhat, as we could have more space just for the three of us, although in wintertime we often wished he had slept in here at night so that his body heat could have made the unheated room a little warmer.

Having scrubbed the shirt and left it in the basin to be rinsed later, I opened my mosquito net and lay down on my bed. With my right arm tucked beneath my head, I began reading a letter from my parents for the second time. Regardless of seasons, my roommates and I all had mosquito netting hanging over our beds so that we could have some private space inside the nets.

Done with his exercise, Mantao came over and drew my net open. Waving his sweaty hand, he said to me, “Can you play volleyball with us this evening? We need you to beat the fellows in the Physics Department.” He was rubbing his hands free of dirt, which dropped in tiny bits on the floor.

I put the letter facedown on my belly. “Sorry, I can’t. I’m not feeling myself.” I could receive and pass the ball better than most of them, but I didn’t want to play today. My head was aching. Heaven knew in what state of mind I would be when I returned from the hospital toward evening.

“Just one game, please.” He nudged me with his elbow.

“No.”

“You miss your girlfriend again?” He smiled, his eyes turning into slits on his baby face.

“Yes, very much,” I admitted.

“Ha-ha-ha, what a man!” He closed the mosquito net. I knew he would talk to others about how lovesick I was, but I didn’t care.

My parents’ letter said they had just renovated the north-wing house, in which there was a new brick-bed now. The walls of the bedroom were freshly papered so that Meimei and I could use it in the summer. To my parents, we two must have been like a married couple (though Meimei still called them Uncle and Aunt), because we had stayed together in their home the summer before. Several times they had mentioned they couldn’t wait to hold a grandchild. I begged them not to say this in front of my fiancée. I had only one sibling, a younger brother, so they expected Meimei and me to give them a grandchild first.

Their letter made me more anxious, because I hadn’t heard from Meimei yet. She must have been mad at me for giving up the exams, and I was uncertain whether we could spend this summer together.

Last July, when staying at my parents’, Meimei and I had often gone swimming in the Songhua River. She wasn’t a good swimmer, always floating and diving in the shallows, whereas once in a while I would swim across the main channel, where the currents were rapid and cold. One afternoon, on our way to the beach, we ran into a young couple walking over from the opposite direction. Below the broad levee birds were warbling in willow thickets; now and again a loon gave a cry like a croupy guffaw. The woman was petite, in a straw hat and a white silk blouse, which rippled slightly in the fishy breeze. She was pretty, like an actress. The man was a tall officer, bareheaded and with his collar unbuttoned, though he wore a uniform. With a wan face and bushy eyebrows, he looked urbane, rather emaciated. The moment they passed by, Meimei whirled around to observe them.

“Hey, what is it?” I asked and poked her in the ribs.

“That man’s face looks so familiar.” She turned back and we went on toward the beach.

“You know him?” I asked.

“No, I don’t, but he reminded me of somebody.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Liu, who was my mother’s friend.”

I felt strange about the past tense she used. “You mean this doctor isn’t your mother’s friend anymore?”

“No. He died when I was six, of gastric perforation.”

We didn’t get into the water as we had planned. Instead, we sat at the warm beach, and she continued telling me about Dr. Liu while she absently scooped a handful of white sand and let it trickle from one palm into the other. She said, “I didn’t know my father until I was four. A year after I was born he was sent to the countryside. Life was hard for Mother because the nursery and the kindergarten wouldn’t accept me, a child whose father was a counterrevolutionary. Dr. Liu was very considerate to Mother, and he often came to baby-sit me when Mother was away at work in the lab, where she took care of animals. They were in the same hospital at the time, but they often worked different shifts. When I was three, on a summer day, Dr. Liu took me to a small park close by, which had a pond inside with some waterfowl in it. He held me in his arms, telling me that the big white birds were called swans. I wondered if I could ride on one of them and fly away like a little girl did in a movie. Then three preschool boys appeared. They all wore slingshots around their necks and Chairman Mao buttons on their chests. They came up to us and one of them pointed at me and said, “This is the bastard of a counterrevolutionary.” Another boy tweaked my toes and called me ‘little slut.’ I didn’t understand their words, but I knew they meant to hurt me, so I broke out crying. Dr. Liu carried me away, patting my back and saying, ‘They’re just small hooligans. Meimei’s a good girl.’ When I calmed down, I saw tears on his cheeks.”

She paused and narrowed her eyes, watching two pelicans flying over the other shore, one chasing the other. Then she went on, “He was an older man, in his early fifties. Mother told me that he had studied medicine in Japan and was the most skillful surgeon in the hospital. His wife died of bone cancer in the late 1950s. After that, he lived by himself. It was said that he had loved her very much. They were classmates in college. For some years I was so attached to him that I thought he was my father, although Mother often showed me Father’s photos and said he was coming home soon. When Dr. Liu died, Mother and I attended the funeral. She collapsed in front of hundreds of people, crying and raving beneath his portrait and a pile of wreaths.”

“When did he die?”

“Nineteen seventy-one. That same year Mother was transferred to the agricultural school.”

I felt her mother’s relationship with Dr. Liu might have been more than friendship, so I asked, “Did your father go to the funeral too?”

“No, he didn’t. In fact Father wasn’t happy about Dr. Liu’s presence in our life. I remember he and Mother once quarreled over this. Mother yelled at him, ‘You’ll never understand!’ Perhaps he was jealous.”

We didn’t swim that afternoon, though it was scorchingly hot. Nor did I teach Meimei how to make bird cries as I often did when we were there. I could trill, warble, and twitter like most birds, because in my early teens, having no friends, I had spent many afternoons in the thickets alone, collecting firewood and picking mushrooms.

The sun seemed very close to our heads. The water sparkled and sloped away toward the eastern sky, where herons and cranes were bobbing beneath the distant clouds. We sat there, now watching the vast grassland on the other shore with our arms around each other, now lying down and kissing passionately. From time to time a passing steamboat would blast its horn at us; some of the sailors must have been observing us through binoculars, but we were too engrossed in ourselves to care.

“Jian, we really need you to join us in the volleyball game,” said Mantao before leaving for class.

“I’ll try to be there, but don’t count on me,” I said.

“All right, see you in the evening.” He walked out, humming the tune of “When Will You Come Again?” a loveydovey song that had come back into fashion a few years ago after being banned for three decades.

His shortwave radio was still on, giving forth crackling static. I got up and flicked it off. At once the room turned as quiet as if the whole house were deserted. Lying in bed, I tried to connect what Meimei had said about Dr. Liu with Mr. Yang’s accusation against his wife in his sleep two days ago. As I was thinking about the mess of their entangled emotions, a miserable feeling came upon me. Even in our suffering, how isolated human beings can become. Mr. Yang seemed unable to stop taking Dr. Liu to be a mere third party, even though Liu had been dead for eighteen years. By nature my teacher might not be a small-minded man, but in this matter he was a picture of obstinacy.