Ha Jin - In the Pond

Before he turned to the office building, Bin saw Secretary Liu coming out of the garage, with an umbrella under his arm. So Bin went up to him and asked why the leaders refused to acknowledge the sick-leave certificate. Liu said there was no Doctor Sun in the County Central Hospital and Bin had made up the whole thing.

“What?” Bin cried. “You have called the hospital to check on it, haven’t you?”

“It’s unnecessary.” Liu waved his hand as though chasing a mosquito. “I tell you what, people here don’t go to the Central Hospital for a sick-leave note. If you were really sick, you wouldn’t have been able to move around in the county town. Now, tell me what you did there. Why didn’t you stay in bed at home? You must confess everything first.”

“I’ll answer that after you tell me whether you’re positive there’s no Doctor Sun in the hospital. If you haven’t checked, you’d better shut up.”

Liu was taken aback by Bin’s sharp tone of voice. “All right, describe to me what he looks like,” he said and closed his eyes, ready to visualize Doctor Sun.

Bin’s face went blank because he had never met the doctor; his nose was twitching while his mouth spread sideways.

Staring at Bin, Liu chuckled and said, “You aren’t good at anything, you’re not even a good liar. Go home and write out a confession of what you’ve been doing these days. Not until—”

“Damn it!” Bin cried, his senses restored at last. “Doctor Sun has big, dark eyes. I didn’t see his face because he had on a large gauze mask. You must call the hospital and talk with him personally.” Bin supposed Doctor Sun’s eyes were similar to his nephew Song’s.

Liu stopped chuckling and shifted his weight to the left leg. He said, “Okay, write out your confession and we may give you the pay.”

“You give me the pay? This plant doesn’t belong to you. It’s our country’s. The pay is given to me by the Party and the people. You have no right to take it away from me. I was sick and had diarrhea, couldn’t move. No, I have nothing to confess.”

“Then I can’t help you.”

“If you take a fen off my pay, my wife and I will visit your home every evening.” Bin turned and walked away with a gleeful face.

For a whole day Bin’s ears echoes with Tu Fu’s lines inscribed on a painting of a grand eagle:

When will it strike ordinary birds,

Splattering blood and feathers on the plain?

Time and again, a large eagle emerged in his mind’s eye, circling in the sky and catching sparrows, jays, swallows, titmice. The air was full of ecstatic cries and pitiful noises.

The poetry reminded him of the book of bird paintings published by Master Chen Fan, a distinguished professor in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Bin usually copied the book once a year as a part of his apprenticeship, but he had not done it for two years.

After supper, he moved to his corner in the room and prepared to practice eagle painting. Meilan was listening to the historical serial The Female Generals of the Yang Clan , broadcast by Radio Liaoning, while Shanshan was playing with pocket magnifying glass on the floor. Bin spread out a large sheet of paper, opened the model book, and began to apply the brush.

For some reason he felt his wrist stiffen; the brush wandered without any sense of destiny. The eagle’s broad wings turned out disproportionate, too large for its body and lacking the spirit of the model painting. He tore the sheet and threw it into the basket for kindling. He painted another piece, which came out similarly; the eagle’s neck stretched up, like a giraffe’s.

Bin was bewildered by the sudden change and thought it must have been caused by the noise from the radio. He wanted to tell Meilan to turn it off, but seeing her so engrossed in the Chinese troops pressing their attack against the northern barbarians, he changed his mind. Putting away the model paintings, he began to practice calligraphy by copying a stone rubbing. To his dismay, the brush seemed to have its own will, determined to disobey its master. The strokes on the paper lacked the vigorous movement of swords and spears, and a few even stretched like bands of black cloth waving in the breeze. Every word was devoid of life; some didn’t stand upright and looked like piles of sticks. The characters just lay dead on the paper. Bin gave a sigh and put down the brush.

With his head hanging, he tried to think why all of a sudden he couldn’t harness the brush any longer. He felt as though something blocked his windpipe. One obvious cause of the relapse could have been that he hadn’t worked hard on his arts these months but had spent too much time fighting those thugs. His heart was aching when a short poem on the methodology of study by a well-beloved octogenarian revolutionary echoed in his ears:

Against the current you must punt hard;

One stroke skipped, you fall back many a yard.

The ancients said every minute was gold;

So, cherish your time and have it controlled.

As though the poem triggered his lachrymal glands, all at once his face was flooded with tears. How he regretted wasting his time on those hoodlums! Why couldn’t he concentrate on the real work and forget the turmoil outside? What good was getting the better of those idiots, who shouldn’t have existed for him in the first place? Why couldn’t he utilize his talent and energy exclusively for the improvement of his arts? For whatever reason, he should never have let his brushwork regress.

Shanshan noticed her father’s tears and sang out, “Mommy, Daddy’s crying again.”

Meilan came over and patted him on the shoulder. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“My brush, oh, my brush becomes disobedient!” he wailed, rubbing his chest with both hands.

His wife broke out giggling, and Shanshan followed her mother, laughing too. Bin gazed at them, his face dark and long.

Meilan said to him, “I thought heaven collapsed or your mistress dropped dead. You scared us.”

“What’s so funny? I’m losing my mastery, my artistic power. Don’t you see it?” He slapped the sheet of poor calligraphy on the desk.

“Stop talking like that.” She didn’t look at the characters. Instead, she took a towel and wiped the saliva off Shanshan’s mouth. “You just had a bad day. Keep practicing. Nothing is as easy as eating noodles.”

Somehow her casual remark enlightened him. Indeed this may be just a bad day, he thought. Probably it’s only a painter’s block. No artistic pursuit can be smooth sailing. It’s a lifelong endeavor, and I mustn’t lose heart so easily just because of temporary regression. I must persevere.

He struck a match, lighted a cigarette, and blew out a coil of smoke.

On payday Bin received his full wages. He took this as an initial victory. “If they gave me a fen less, I would shake heaven and earth,” he told his fellow workers. Everybody was impressed, but some people still believed Bin had faked the sick-leave certificate. “Even the devil can be intimidated by a vile man,” they said behind his back.

In fact the leaders were not frightened by Bin exactly, though they had called the County Central Hospital and spoken to Doctor Sun, who assured him that the sick-leave certificate was as genuine as their fertilizers. They were lenient to Bin this time for another reason. Three days ago they had received a classified bulletin which reported a tragedy that had resulted from a wage-scale adjustment. An old worker in Forever New Leather Mill in Sand County had lost his mind because most of his comrades had got a raise but he hadn’t. To vent his rage on the mill’s leaders, he blew up a corner of the apartment building where their families lived. Though nobody was killed, four people were seriously injured. Fortunately the old worker hadn’t had access to TNT and had made do with a gunpowder package.