The Crazed

8

I apologized to Banping for being late, delayed on the way by traffic.

“That’s all right,” he said.

“How was he this morning?” I asked about Mr. Yang.

“Awful.”

“What happened?”

“He sang a lot of songs.”

“What did he sing?”

“All kinds of stuff, from revolutionary chants to opera snatches.” Banping shook his head, smiling facetiously.

His smile evoked a strange feeling in me, a mixture of sadness and aversion. In my head a voice suddenly said about our teacher, He’∂ be better off if he lost his speech.

Meanwhile Mr. Yang was asleep, his nose making a tremulous sound.

Banping walked out, holding a battered black umbrella and a bulky book, An Omnibus of Spy Stories. He had been writing a detective novel, which I wasn’t sure he’d ever finish. I had noticed that his feather bookmark was moved toward the back of the book about a hundred pages a day. He still could read quite a bit while attending our teacher, whose rigmarole didn’t seem to bother him at all. Today I had with me only a pocket English dictionary. I sat down and began reviewing the word entries I had underlined.

About half an hour later Mr. Yang stirred and muttered something. I tried to ignore him, but couldn’t help glancing at him from time to time. His flabby face, less puffy today, was duck-egg green, and his hair looked shaggy despite the fact that I had washed and combed it the previous afternoon. His lips quivered weirdly. For a moment I couldn’t understand his odd facial expression — the corners of his mouth jerked while he breathed noisily.

Was he crying? He didn’t look so. He must be smiling at someone. I knew that whenever he was in good spirits, his tongue would lick his upper teeth. He had often smiled like this in class. I averted my eyes. As long as he kept everything to himself, I’d go on perusing the dictionary.

But soon he started speaking aloud. I couldn’t help but crane forward listening. He seemed to be reciting something. He definitely looked happy, pinkish patches rising on his face while his lungs labored wheezily. All of a sudden words poured out of his mouth:

Oh glorious stars, oh light infused with

Divine Power, to you I owe all my genius—

Whatever be its worth.

Born with you and hidden with you,

He who is the father of mortal life,

When I first breathed the Tuscan air.

And far away, as I was granted the grace to enter

The high wheeling sphere in which you roll around,

Your very region was assigned to me.

Devoutly my soul sighs to you now

So that it may gain the strength

For the hard journey leading to the final end.

He paused, beaming, but his mouth, its corners twitching, reminded me of a rabbit that had just bitten hot pepper. “You cannot trap my soul, nobody can!” he cried stridently.

What poem is that? I wondered. Its joyful, sonorous tone and its fluid cadence suggested a foreign poem. The heavenly vision was definitely not something that would occur in Chinese poetry. Then I realized it must be a passage from The Divine Comedy.

He recited again:

“You are so close to the ultimate bliss,”

Beatrice began, “that you must purify your passion

And keep your eyes clear and keen.

Before you go further into it,

Look down and see how much of the world

I have spread beneath your feet,

So that your heart, with full joy,

May show itself to the triumphant throng

Who comes rejoicing through the surrounding air.”

He stopped, as if to think about the words voiced by Beatrice, whose name enabled me to locate where Mr. Yang was in The Divine Comedy. He was in Paradiso, because only in that book did Beatrice meet Dante.

As he went on reciting, his face became more relaxed, but his words were disordered and unintelligible at times. I made no effort to follow him. Even if I had understood everything he uttered, I couldn’t have shared Dante’s heavenly vision. I was on earth, in this hellhole, whereas he was led by Beatrice through the divine domain and basked in the chaste love and the celestial light. Perhaps only a deranged person could enjoy such a sublime illusion.

Then I curbed my irreverent thoughts as I remembered what The Divine Comedy meant to Mr. Yang. The poem had once saved his life.

Two years ago, on an early-summer morning, I had gone to his office and found him hunched over his desk reading a well-thumbed book. Stepping closer, I attempted to sneak a look at its title. He realized my intention and raised the book to show me its front cover, which contained a picture of numerous fists, of various sizes, all stabbed upward into the air. It was Inferno. “Have you read Dante?” he asked me in a nasal voice. He had a stuffy nose as a result of a cold.

“No, I haven’t.” Unable to say yes, I was somewhat embarrassed.

“You should read The Divine Comedy. After you finish it, you will look at the world differently.”

So I borrowed all three books of the poem from the library and went through them in two weeks, but I didn’t enjoy the poem and felt the world remained the same. On the other hand, I was horrified by the filth and torture to which the damned are subject in Inferno. When I told Mr. Yang that I had read the poem, he asked me to comment on it. Taken by surprise, I had little to say and just summarized some grisly scenes in hell. My thoughts rambled, and I even talked about the austere woodcut illustrations.

I was making a fool of myself, because he knew those scenes by heart. A copy of Purgatorio was lying on his desk. He must read Dante every day.

“Where are we now?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Which one of the three worlds described by Dante are we in now? We’re certainly not in paradise, are we?”

Somehow a popular song came to mind, so I quoted its last line with a straight face, “Our life is sweeter than honey.”

He burst out laughing. “You have a sense of humor, Jian. That’s good. Humor can make one detached. I wish I had it.” Then his face went somber again. “We’re neither in paradise nor in hell. We’re stuck in between hell and purgatory, don’t you think?” He smiled enigmatically, chewing his lip.

“Maybe. I’ll think about it,” I mumbled, unable to understand his bizarre notion. I wanted to end our conversation there. There was enough Tang poetry for me to work at, and I had no need for such a huge Christian poem to clutter my mind. I turned my head. On the wall hung a painting Weiya had done for him. In it a tubby, smiley monk was eating a gourd ladle of figs while fanning his naked paunch, on which were stuck a few scraps of fig skin.

Mr. Yang resumed, “This is my favorite poem. It saved my life.”

“How?” My interest revived.

“When the Cultural Revolution broke out, I came under attack as a Demon-Monster because I had translated some foreign poems and once argued that Goethe was a great poet. Sometimes the Revolutionary Rebels on campus planted on my head a dunce hat with my family name written on it. Sometimes they tied a bucket filled with water around my neck to bend my body and keep my head low. Sometimes they made me kneel on a washboard. Even when my knees began bleeding, they wouldn’t allow me to get up. But during the torture I would recite to myself lines from The Divine Comedy. They could hurt me physically, but they could not subdue my soul. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the scenes in Inferno. If they forced me to open my eyes, I’d imagine that the crazed people below and around me were like the blustering evildoers, devils, and monsters cast into hell. They were cruel and desperate because they were hopeless. While reciting The Divine Comedy in my heart, I felt that my suffering was meant to help me enter purgatory. I had hope. Suffering can refine the soul. Beyond purgatory there’s paradise.”

“Are you a Christian?” I blurted out, unable to see why he had taken pains to memorize such a long poem.

“No, I’ve never been truly religious. But at that time, under torture, I often wished I were a Christian so that I could have prayed to God wholeheartedly. Religion is spiritual opium, as Marx has taught us. No doubt about that, yet once in a while human beings need some spiritual narcotics to alleviate pain. The flesh alone cannot sustain us. In any case, this poem helped me, comforted me, encouraged me, tided me over many moments when I thought of ending my life.” With a grimace he lifted his hand and clutched his throat, sticking out his fat tongue. He then picked up the copy of Purgatorio from his desk and waved it at me, as if to convince me of the boundless power the flimsy paperback possessed.

Now his body was confined to this hospital bed while his mind roamed the empyrean, as though the Christian divine spheres could also admit pagans as long as they had been humble and virtuous in their lives. I kept quiet, not to disturb his hallucinatory journey so that he could enjoy the bliss a little longer.

I turned a page of my dictionary and resumed reading while his mouth writhed and a smile broke out on his face. From time to time I’d watch him.

Outside, a siren started screaming. There must be a fire somewhere nearby. I couldn’t tell which direction the siren came from, because the mountain of anthracite outside the window had put me out of my bearings. As the siren squealed louder and louder, Mr. Yang stirred, whispering, “Fire, fire, that’s the holy fire. Burn them, burn those devils!”

I listened closely. He sighed, “Yes, fire and rose are one.” He opened his eyes and looked around. He noticed me and gazed at my face intently for a moment. Then he made an effort to turn to face the window, but he couldn’t move his left shoulder. I got up and went over.

“Give me a hand, please,” he said.

I lifted his back and made him sit up. Supporting his back with my right arm, I grasped the pillows and put them behind him. He seemed eager to talk, so I returned to the chair, ready to give him an ear.

But before he could start, somebody knocked on the door. I went to answer it. To my surprise, Vice Principal Huang’s white head emerged. Since Mr. Yang was hospitalized, no school official had ever come to see him. The tall vice principal took a step forward, holding a string bag of yellow apples, some of which had russet flecks on them. He wore a double-breasted jacket with peaked lapels, which was too large on him and made his triangular face appear thin and small. “How are you, Comrade Jian Wan?” he asked, his walleyes looking me in the face.

I was amazed he knew my name. “Fine, thank you for coming,” I said and stepped aside to let him in.

He went up to Mr. Yang. Although over sixty, he looked well preserved, his waist robust but not rotund, and his legs so thin that he was hipless. He said heartily to my teacher, “How are you doing, Old Yang? Do you feel better?” He patted Mr. Yang’s hand.

My teacher made no reply. The leader said again, “I came to see you. Look, I brought you some fresh fruit. How are you?” He lifted the apples up and put them on the bedside cabinet.

“I’m good, won’t die for a couple of hours,” Mr. Yang grunted. I was puzzled by his sullenness, wondering why he showed no respect for the vice principal.

Huang turned to me and put on a smile, saying, “I’m going to talk with your teacher.” I realized he meant I should make myself scarce, so I walked out and carefully closed the door.

I loitered in the corridor for a few minutes, then sat down on a long straight-backed bench. I was a bit groggy, my temples aching. The previous night I had pored over a textbook on dialectical materialism and hadn’t gone to bed until 3:00 A.M. Now, eyes closed and arms folded, I soon drifted off to sleep.

I had a bizarre dream, in which Meimei and I stayed in an inn at a sandy beach. I was sick with a stomachache, lying in bed and shivering all over. Wearing a white cap and a knee-length skirt, Meimei was cooking crucian carp soup for me on a small alcohol stove we had brought along. Five of its six wicks were afire, hissing softly as the flames licked the bottom of a stainless steel pot. Turning over the fat fish gingerly with a spatula, Meimei crooned a folk song in a soothing voice. Outside, on the bulging sea, a couple of gray sails glided almost motionlessly while a conch horn was tooting somewhere on the shore.

The soup was done. It looked milky and smelled like steamed mussel, but I was too sick to eat it by myself. Meimei tried to feed me with a spoon like a small ladle, which turned out to be too broad for my mouth. She piped into my ear, “Open wide, open wide, my little groom.” But my mouth was too narrow for the spoon, and a few drops of broth spilled on the front of my shirt. Tittering, she said, “You have such a tiny mouth, like a pretty girl’s.”

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t open my mouth wider, as if my lips had been partly sewn together. My tongue went numb and felt like a wooden stick. I was angry at myself, my heart kicking. I told her to put away the bowl and get into bed. She shed her shirt, poplin skirt, and anklets. She was now in red panties and a white cotton bra; a birth-mark the size of a mulberry was under her right breast. Her belly was almost flat; her hips were shapely, concave on the side, each hollow resembling a giant dimple. She lay down and nestled against me. As she touched my forehead, I shuddered — her hand was ice-cold.

“You have a temperature,” she said, and her knees, rather warm, kept rubbing my thigh.

“I’ll be all right,” I muttered, still shaking.

“Uncle, please help me,” broke from a voice.

Both of us froze, listening.

“Uncle, have pity,” the same childlike voice said again.

I opened my eyes, only to find a scrawny girl, about four or five years old, standing in the hospital corridor between my leather shoes, her chafed hand patting my knee.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Money.” She opened her pale palm, whose edge was coated with dirt. Her dark eyes were large and fierce, sharpened by hunger or fear.

I fished some coins out of my pants pocket and gave them to her. Without a word she ran away on her bent legs, her feet in tattered sneakers. Reaching the end of the corridor, she waved her fist and gave the money to a woman, obviously her mother, who shot glances at me. I glared at the sunken-mouthed woman, cursing under my breath, “Bitch.” I felt cheated, as I had thought the child was on her own.

Not knowing how long I had dozed, I rose to my feet, my right leg still sleeping. I was a little anxious and wondered if the visitor had left, so I hobbled to the door of the sickroom and put my ear to the keyhole. Vice Principal Huang was still in there. He was saying earnestly to my teacher, “Let her decide what to do herself, all right?”

“No,” Mr. Yang answered.

Silence followed.

About half a minute later, Huang said again, “Okay, Old Yang, take it easy. We’ll talk about this when you’re well.”

My teacher made no response.

Hearing footsteps coming toward the door, I leaped aside. The vice principal came out. He nodded at me, meaning I could go in now. “Take good care of Professor Yang, will you?” he said to me.

“Sure I will.”

“Good-bye.” Without giving me another look, he walked away. He seemed unhappy and preoccupied.

I tiptoed into the room. Mr. Yang sat on the bed with both heels tucked under him, his head hanging low and his eyes shut. I sat down and observed him closely. He looked like a sleeping Buddha, as inert as a vegetable, but with both hands cupped over his kneecaps instead of rested palm upward. A moment later he opened his eyes a crack. The look on his face showed he was alert, but why had he pretended to be drowsing just now?

“He’s gone,” I told him.

“Who?”

“Vice Principal Huang.”

“Who’s he? I don’t know him.”

Perplexed, I had no idea how to deal with his denial. And anger surged in my chest. Of course he knew Huang. Who else had he been talking with a short while ago? But I kept silent, thinking of the dream I’d just had. Why couldn’t I eat the fish soup, my favorite food? My mouth wasn’t small at all, at least as big as most people’s. As if I could have smelled the delicious soup, I went on sniffing.

Meimei in fact was not a good cook. She couldn’t even make steamed bread, not knowing how to use yeast and baking soda, let alone a crucian carp soup. But this didn’t bother me. I had promised her that I’d cook most of the time after we married. She said she would wash dishes.

“Revenge!” Mr. Yang bawled, as though he were playing the part of an official executioner or a rowdy in an old opera. “I shall raise this nine-section whip and thrash your fat hips, pack, pack, pack — I want to taste your blood and flesh. Ah, with full resolve I shall root out your whole clan like weeds! A debt of lives must be paid with lives!” His shrill voice was getting louder and louder.

I was totally baffled, not knowing whether he was faking or truly believed he was onstage. Holding my breath, I watched him wriggling as if he were bound by invisible chains. He looked in pain and probably imagined exchanging words and blows with an enemy.

He chanted ferociously, “I shall eliminate all the vermin of your kind, and shan’t withdraw my troops until the red clouds have covered the entire earth. .”

Dumbfounded, I listened. He enacted this militant role for about half an hour. I couldn’t tell why Vice Principal Huang’s visit had disturbed him so much. By no means did it seem that the official had come to press him for the $1,800. Then why did Mr. Yang go berserk like this?