The Crazed (4 page)

We said good night at the ilex bushes about fifty yards away from her dormitory building. I turned back without waiting for her to disappear from the dimly lighted doorway as most men would do for their female friends. It was safe on campus.

4

It was well past midnight, and my roommates were sleeping soundly. Outside, the drizzle rustled through the leaves of trees. The room was dank and fusty. A mouse scuttled across the ceiling; there were at least a dozen mice in the roof. Mantao murmured something and let out a curse in his sleep. He went on grinding his teeth, which, according to folk medicine, indicated that he might have roundworms in his stomach. I envied the way he slept—day or night, the moment his head touched a pillow, he’d begin to snore loudly. Sometimes my other roommate, Huran, would shout at him and beg him to roll on his side so that he would stop snoring for a while. Tonight I couldn’t sleep, missing my fiancée and puzzling over the possible causes of my teacher’s stroke.

According to Banping, it was Professor Song, the chairman of the Literature Department, who had crushed our teacher. Indeed, Mr. Yang and Professor Song had often locked horns. The animosity between them culminated in a quarrel over the birthplace of the great poet Li Po a year ago. In his paper on Tang poetry, Professor Song had adopted a recent claim that the poet was born in Kazakhstan, somewhere south of Lake Balkhash. In fact, this “biographical discovery” might have been intended to validate the patriotic view that China’s map in the Tang Dynasty was much vaster than today, so as to refute the Russian assertion that the Great Wall used to be China’s borderline. Mr. Yang believed this was pseudo-scholarship, so he insisted that Professor Song change the poet’s birthplace to Szechwan if the paper was to be included in
Studies in Classical Literature,
a journal he was editing. Professor Song refused and asserted that nobody was really clear about this issue. Separately the two scholars looked it up in a number of books, which gave at least seven places as Li Po’s birthplace, including Shandong Province and Nanjing City, both in eastern China, probably because the poet was peripatetic all his life. “I wouldn’t even alter a dot,” Professor Song declared to others. So Mr. Yang turned down his paper. The chairman was outraged and told everyone that he had withdrawn it by choice. A few days later the altercation resumed. This time they both lost their temper, calling each other names and banging their fists on the pinewood desktop in Mr. Song’s office. They pointed at each other’s faces, as if each was trying to thrust his own idea into his opponent’s head. There might have been a scuffle if their colleagues hadn’t separated them.

Eager to retaliate, Professor Song prevented Mr. Yang from being promoted to full professor and even said he’d get the journal transferred to “reliable hands.” In recent months he seized every opportunity to criticize Mr. Yang. For this reason, Banping believed it was the pressure from Professor Song that had crushed our teacher.

I didn’t take this to be the main cause. Though the two professors disliked each other, their enmity had originated from their common interest—literary scholarship. The chief obstacle to their reconciliation might be that Professor Song was the chairman and that if Mr. Yang had apologized first, he’d have appeared to stoop to power. Even if their falling-out were irreconcilable, Professor Song could hardly have destroyed my teacher. During the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Yang had been paraded through campus as a Demon-Monster once a week for more than half a year; if he had survived that kind of torment, a few skirmishes with a colleague shouldn’t have driven him out of his mind.

But what Weiya had said at the dinner might be a matter of ugly consequences. A year ago Mr. Yang had received an invitation to speak at a conference in Vancouver. For a long time he couldn’t get funding for the trip. The Canadian side assumed he might never make it, so they replaced his talk with another one. Meanwhile, Mr. Yang wrote letters to our school leaders and even to officials at the Provincial Administration, begging for dollars. To be fair, our college did take the invitation seriously, because this was the first time a faculty member in the humanities here had been invited to lecture abroad. To Mr. Yang, this must have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; never having gone abroad, he was naturally eager to visit Canada. Yet not until a month before the conference did he obtain enough funding from our school. Despite the tardiness, he set out anyway, probably knowing he was no longer on the panel. He didn’t give his talk in Vancouver, but met some foreign sinologists there.

On his way back he stopped at San Francisco for two days to see a friend of his, a philosophy professor at UC-Berkeley. He returned unhappy and slightly fatter, but with a two-door refrigerator, which kindled a great deal of envy among the faculty and staff here. Soon people began to whisper that he had gone to North America just for sight-seeing and so that he could pocket the foreign currency (he had been given an allowance of thirty-four dollars a day, which he saved for the refrigerator of Chinese make). He couldn’t exonerate himself from such an accusation. If the school now demanded the $1,800 back, Mr. Yang couldn’t possibly pay up such a debt.

Although I could accept Weiya’s explanation, I wouldn’t exclude overwork as a major cause of his stroke. Since the previous year he had been compiling a textbook of Tang poetry for graduate students. It was a critical edition, so he needed to supply comments and notes on the poems. Every night he stayed up late at his tiny desk, with books spread on his bed and on the floor, working until three or four in the morning. During the day he had to teach, meet students, and attend meetings. How could he hold out for long if he worked like a camel, sleeping only four or five hours a night? The publisher in Shanghai had pressed him several times, and Mr. Yang had promised to deliver the manuscript by the end of May. I often said to him, “When can you slow down a little?” He would answer with a smile, “I’m a harnessed horse. As long as I’m on my feet, I have to pull the cart.” He slapped his belly to show he was strong.

Besides working and writing, he had to take care of himself, since his wife and daughter were not around. He ate lunch in the school’s dining hall, but cooked a simple dinner for himself in the evening, always cornmeal porridge or dough-drop soup mixed with vegetables. He hand-laundered his clothes himself. I helped him clean his apartment twice. Three weeks ago he and I together planted a dozen sunflower seedlings in his small backyard.

There could be another cause of his stroke, which was probably more ruinous than those I have described but which I was reluctant to reveal to my fellow graduate students, namely that his marriage might have been floundering. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem, but was certain that Mrs. Yang had gone to Tibet not just for professional reasons. Last May, three months before she left, I had happened to witness a scene. I went to his home to return his volume of
Book of Songs,
an anthology compiled by Confucius 2,600 years ago. Mr. Yang’s copy of the book was filled with comments in his cursive handwriting at the tops, margins, and bottoms of the pages. I was the first person he had ever allowed to read his marginalia. At the door of his apartment I heard Mrs. Yang yell from inside, “Leave! Get out of here!”

Mr. Yang countered, “This is my home. Why don’t you go?”

“All right, if you don’t, I’m leaving.”

As I wondered whether I should turn back, the door opened slowly and Mrs. Yang walked out. She was a small angular woman with deep-socketed eyes. Seeing me, she paused, her face contorted and sprinkled with tears. She lowered her head and hurried past without a word, leaving behind the rancid smell of her bedraggled hair. Her black silk skirt almost covered her slender calves; she had bony ankles and narrow feet, wearing red plastic flip-flops.

Mr. Yang saw me and waved me in. On the concrete floor were scattered a brass pen pot and dozens of books, most of which were opened and several with their spines loosened from their sutures. He grimaced, then sighed, shaking his head.

Silently I handed him his book. Though I didn’t know why they had fought, the scene unnerved me as I replayed it in my mind later on. Whenever I was with the Yangs I could sense an emotional chasm between my teacher and his wife. I was positive they had become estranged from one another. For some time I couldn’t help but wonder whether my fiancée had inherited her mother’s fiery disposition, or whether her parents’ fights had disturbed her emotionally. But my misgivings didn’t last long, as I was soon convinced that by nature Meimei was a cheerful girl, even more rational than myself.

A locomotive blew its steam whistle in the south like a mooing cow. The night had grown deeper and quieter. Having considered these happenings in Mr. Yang’s life, I felt none of them alone could have triggered his collapse. Perhaps they had joined forces to bring him down.

5

Nurse Chen put a thermos of hot water on the bedside cabinet in Mr. Yang’s room and asked me, “Was your professor educated abroad?” She looked perkier than two days ago.

“No, he’s a genuine Chinese product, homebred like you and me.”

“I heard him speak foreign words last night.”

“Really, in what language?”

“I’ve no clue, but it was definitely not English or Japanese. It sounded strange.”

“Was it like this,
‘Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der
Engel Ordnungen?’ ”

She shook her head in amazement, then giggled. “What language is that? You sounded like an officer rapping out orders.”

“It’s German.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s the beginning of a book of poems Mr. Yang often quoted,
Duino Elegies.
It means ‘Who, if I cry, would hear me among the angelic order?’ Something like that.”

“My, that’s deep, I’m impressed. Tell you what, he might have spoken German.”

Her praise embarrassed me a little, for that line was the only part of the long poem I had memorized. We often committed a passage or a few lines to memory not only because we liked them but also because we could impress others with them. That’s one of the tricks of the academic game.

Mr. Yang had never spoken foreign words during my shift. He could read German and knew some French. He loved Rilke and had once made me read
Duino Elegies
in a bilingual edition after he came to know I had studied German for a year. But I didn’t like the poems that much, perhaps because I hadn’t read them carefully.

Mali Chen raised her hand, looking at her wristwatch. “I should be going, the doc must be here already. Bye-bye now.” She fluttered her fingers at me as she made for the door. She left behind a puff of perfume like almond.

I knew she had come to see Banping, who had left fifteen minutes before. Although Banping appeared clumsy and dull, he had a way of getting along with others, especially with women. We had started caring for our teacher just a few days before, but already he was mixing with the nurses as chummily as if he had known them for months. I wondered whether this was due to his rustic looks and manner, which might tend to put most women at ease—they would drop their guard without fearing any emotional entanglement with him. By comparison, I must have seemed like an eccentric to them, a typical bookworm, high-strung and a bit morose.

Mr. Yang was quiet and stationary. I took out my textbook,
Contemporary Japanese,
and began reviewing some paragraphs marked in pencil. The exams were just a month away, and I had too much to study. Japanese would be a jinx on me; if only I had taken it up a few years earlier.

As I tried parsing a complicated sentence in my mind, Mr. Yang snickered. I raised my head and saw his lips stir murmuring something. I averted my eyes and made an effort to concentrate on the textbook, but in no time his words grew clear. He chuckled and said, “They look like peaches, don’t they?” He smacked his lips, his face shining.

My curiosity was piqued. What did he compare to peaches? I put down the book and listened attentively. He beamed, “I’m such a lucky man. He-he-he, you know, your nipples taste like coffee candy. Mmmm . . . ah, let me have them again.” His lips parted eagerly.

I was amazed. He was talking to a woman! No wonder he looked so happy. He chuckled, but his words turned ragged.

Who was the woman? His wife? Unlikely. They two had been aloof toward each other in recent years; besides, she couldn’t possibly have that kind of breasts. In my mind’s eye I saw Mrs. Yang’s chest flat like a washboard. She was as thin as a mantis, so the peachy breasts must have belonged to another woman. Could he be having a fling with someone? That was possible. There was a fortyish woman lecturer in the Foreign Languages Department, named Kailing Wang, who had recently collaborated with him in translating Brecht’s
Good Woman of Szechwan.
She was quite busty, soft-skinned, and convivial. Mr. Yang and she had been pretty close and often teased each other playfully. Several times I had seen them together in his apartment working on the translation. They laughed a lot and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Once I saw them chatting over a bottle of plum wine; another time I found her cooking a sausage dinner for him in his apartment. Besides her, a few women faculty members in the Literature Department were also close to him, though they dared not show their friendship overtly for fear of Professor Song’s notice.

On the other hand, the peachy breasts could belong to his wife, if Mr. Yang had in his mind an intimate moment from their early years. She might have had a full body when she was young. Or perhaps this erotic episode had occurred only in his dream, not in reality.

“Sorry, there’s no chamber pot in here,” Mr. Yang said. “He-he, you’d better peepee into the washbasin under the bed . . .” Gleefully he imitated the urinating sound: “Pshhhhh, pshhhhh, pshhhhhh—yes, yes, use the basin.”

The thought came to me that he must have been in a dormitory or a guesthouse, since every home would have a chamber pot or a toilet.

“I can see you,” he piped, then grinned, baring his tobacco-stained teeth.

Who was the woman he was talking to? She might not be his wife, because the Yangs had a toilet in their apartment, which she could use at night. When did this happen? Long ago?

Then I began to revise my reasoning, since it was entirely possible that he and his wife had stayed a night somewhere other than their home and had had to resort to a washbasin in place of a chamber pot.

“My goodness,” Mr. Yang said with increasing relish, “how I adore your hips. Gorgeous, like two large loaves of bread fresh from a steamer.” He paused, chuckling, then went on, “Yes, I’m shameless, can’t help it, shameless and crazy. Come on, give me one on the mouth.”

I was all ears, but his voice was dwindling, though he still smiled mysteriously. I listened for another minute without understanding a thing, so I returned to my textbook.

But soon he started moaning. His voice suggested a sheep bleating and jarred on my nerves. In my heart I couldn’t help but blame him:
Come on, stop speaking in riddles. If you want to say
something, spill it out. I have to work. If I flunk the exams, I won’t be
able to go to Beijing and taste Meimei’s nipples there.

To my astonishment, he shouted without opening his eyes, “Forget it! I know you just want to ruin me.”

I held my breath, wondering what this was about. He went on angrily, “I have no savings. Even if you kill me, I cannot come up with that kind of money.” After a pause, he resumed, “I never knew you were so sneaky. Why did you encourage me to go abroad in the first place? You set a trap for me, didn’t you? Now go away. I cannot bear the sight of you.”

Undoubtedly he was talking about the $1,800 he had spent. Weiya was right—the university must indeed have demanded that he pay the money back. But who was he talking to? A school official? That seemed implausible, because his familiar tone of voice indicated that he knew the person quite well. According to Weiya’s account, it was Secretary Peng who had pressed him for the money. The unidentified person could be she, but how had she set a trap for him? Ignorant and almost illiterate, she couldn’t possibly have known how a Canadian conference operated and that Mr. Yang, though already taken off the panel, would go to North America merely for sight-seeing. This made no sense to me.

“Let me tell you, I shall never knuckle under to you,” he sneered. His face, flushing, expanded with rage while his lips turned blue and sweat beaded on his cheeks. Never had I seen him so angry. Could he be arguing with Secretary Peng? I wasn’t sure. He had always been polite to her, at least in appearance, though I knew he despised her at heart. The words he had just uttered sounded more like something he would spit in Professor Song’s face. Could Song be the schemer?

Mr. Yang interrupted my thoughts, declaring in a raspy voice, “Nobody can destroy my soul!”

I was perplexed. This seemed irrelevant to what had gone before. Where was he now? With the same person?

Then his face began twisting, his stout nose red and crinkled. He looked in pain, groaning, “Oh, don’t hurt my children, please! Don’t separate them! I beg you to leave them alone.” He began sniveling, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. His flabby chin kept shaking as if stung by something. Yet I couldn’t tell whether he was really heartbroken or just shamming.

This was crazy, beyond me. Having only one child, why did he mention his children and beg his tormentor not to separate them? Apparently he had mixed things up. On second thought I wondered if he had another daughter or a son I didn’t know of, in other words, an illegitimate one. This was hardly plausible. To my knowledge, Meimei had always been her parents’ only child.

Now Mr. Yang was wailing, tears wetting his cheeks. I went over and waved my hand before his glazed eyes, which gave no response. He seemed at another place, dealing with a different person. He cried out, “I don’t want a full professorship anymore! Give it to anyone you like. I don’t need a larger apartment either, I’m completely satisfied with what I have. Oh, please don’t be so mean! Have mercy! I’ve a family to keep. Don’t separate my children. For heaven’s sake, can’t you leave me alone?” He had to stop to catch his breath. With a warm towel I wiped his face, which went on shaking.

Although he sounded stubborn and grief-stricken, he now looked obsequious, as if making an effort to smile ingratiatingly. His jaw muscles were tight, trembling. He resumed speaking, but his voice grew weaker and weaker, his words again unintelligible. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t figure out anything. Meanwhile, the look on his face became more and more fawning. He smiled and moaned alternately. Never had I seen such an eerie face, which raised goose bumps on my forearms.

I was confused and upset. When I took over from Banping, I had expected a relatively quiet afternoon, like the day before, so that I could review a few chapters of the textbook, but again Mr. Yang spoiled my plan. My desire for work was all gone. Stretched out on the wicker chair, I closed my eyes and gave free rein to my thoughts about his secret life.