Ha Jin: The Crazed

I was amazed by his wild interpretation — it was as though he’d been talking about his own life and about how he had gone out of his mind. He tilted his head back and rested his neck fully on the pillows; he was exhausted, but seemed relieved. Silence fell on the room.

Again I thought about his biblical story, whose source baffled me. Probably he had made it up himself, combining some folktale with his own fantasies. Why was he so eager to tell me it? Never had he shown any interest in the Bible before, though in secret it must have occupied his mind for a long time.

He began snoring softly; his head drooped aside. I went over, removed the pillows from behind him, and slid him carefully back into bed. He moaned vaguely.

Soon he sank back into sleep. I picked up my Japanese vocabulary cards and started to review them. Despite not enjoying Japanese, which sounded to me like ducks’ quacking, I had to fill my brain with its words and grammatical rules for the Ph.D. candidacy, which required a test in a second foreign language. My Japanese was weak because I had studied it for only a year. English was my first foreign language, in which I was much more proficient.

A bent old nurse came in to check on Mr. Yang. She was a mousy woman with a moon face, and her bony hands suggested gigantic chicken feet. She introduced herself as Hong Jiang. Seeing that my teacher was sleeping, she didn’t feel his pulse or take his temperature and blood pressure. I asked her if he could recuperate soon, and she said it would depend on whether a blood clot in his brain could be dissolved. If not, no treatment could really cure him. “But don’t worry,” she assured me, leaning down to pick up the spittoon by the bed-post. “Lots of people have recovered from a stroke. Some have lived more than twenty years afterward. Your teacher should be able to get well.”

“I hope so,” I sighed.

“For now, what’s most important of all is to keep him calm. Don’t disturb him. If he gets too excited, he may break a blood vessel in his brain. That’ll cause a hemorrhage.” Holding the white spittoon with one hand, she with her other hand piled together the soiled plates, bowls, and spoons on the bedside cabinet, then placed a pair of lacquered chopsticks on top of them. I stood up to give her a hand.

“Don’t bother. I can manage this,” she said, and unwittingly tilted the spittoon toward my belly. I stepped aside and barely dodged a blob of the yellowish liquid that fell to the wood floor.

“Whoops! Sorry.” She grinned and lifted the stack of bowls and plates carefully. With a stoop she gingerly turned to the door. She was so skinny, she reminded me of a starved hen. I opened the door for her.

“Thank you. You’re a good young man,” she said, shuffling away down the hall. I took a mop from behind the door and wiped the blob off the floor.

Her explanation of Mr. Yang’s stroke consoled me to a degree. I used to think a brain thrombus was caused by a ruptured blood vessel. Thank heaven, his case was merely a blockage.

Once again I bicycled to the hospital to relieve Banping Fang. Thanks to the scalding sun, the asphalt street had turned doughy; automobile tires had left tracks on its cambered surface, from which a bluish vapor rose, flickering like smoke. I felt drowsy, not having slept well the night before. I pedaled listlessly. If only I could’ve taken a nap at noon as I used to do every day.

On arrival, I heard somebody speaking loudly inside the sickroom. I stopped at the door to listen. It was Mr. Yang’s voice, but I couldn’t make out his words. He sounded strident, panting and shrieking by turns, as if he were arguing with someone. I opened the door and went in noiselessly. Seeing me, Banping nodded and put his forefinger to his lips, his other hand supporting our teacher’s back. It looked like he had just helped him sit up.

“Kill them! Kill all those bastards!” Professor Yang shouted.

Banping’s mouth moved close to his ear, and he whispered, “Calm down, please!”

Mr. Yang’s head hung so low that his chin rested on his chest. “Why did you interrupt me?” he asked with his eyes still closed. “Hear me out, will you? When I’m finished you can raise questions.” He sounded as if he were teaching a class. But whom had he yelled at just now? And who were the people he wanted to wipe out? Why did he hate them so much?

Banping smiled at me with some embarrassment and shook his head. I sensed the meaning of his smile, which showed sympathy for me probably because of my relationship with the Yangs. He gestured me to sit down on the wicker chair and then turned to make our teacher lean back against the headboard.

The moment I sat down, Professor Yang broke into speech. “All the time he has been thinking how to end everything, to be done with his clerical work, done with his senile, exacting parents, done with his nagging wife and spoiled children, done with his mistress Chilla, who is no longer a ‘little swallow’ with a slender waist but is obsessed with how to lose weight and reduce the size of her massive backside, done with the endless worry and misery of everyday life, done with the nightmares in broad daylight — in short, to terminate himself so that he can quit this world.”

I was shocked. Banping smiled again and seemed to relish the surprise on my face. Mr. Yang continued, “But he lives in a room without a door or a window and without any furniture inside. Confined in such a cell, he faces the insurmountable difficulty of how to end his life. On the rubber floor spreads a thick pallet, beside which sits an incomplete dinner set. The walls are covered with green rubber too. He cannot smash his head on any spot in this room. He wears a leather belt, which he sometimes takes off, thinking how to garrote himself with it. Some people he knew committed suicide in that way twenty years ago, because they couldn’t endure the torture inflicted by the revolutionary masses anymore. They looped a belt around their necks, secured its loose end to a hook or a nail on a window ledge, then forcefully they sat down on the floor. But in this room there’s not a single fixed object, so his belt cannot serve that purpose. Sometimes he lets it lie across his lap and observes it absentmindedly. The belt looks like a dead snake in the greenish light. What’s worse, he cannot figure out where the room is, whether it’s in a city or in the countryside, and whether it’s in a house or underground. In such a condition he is preserved to live.”

I couldn’t tell where he had gotten this episode. When did it happen? And where? Was it from a novel, or was it his own fantasy? Since the man’s mistress had a rather Westernized name, Chilla, the story might be set in a city. That was all I could guess. Professor Yang was so well read that I could never surmise the full extent of his knowledge of literature. Maybe he had made up the whole thing himself; otherwise he couldn’t have poured it out with such abandon.

He interrupted my thoughts, speaking again. “All the time he imagines how to stop this kind of meaningless existence. Mark this, ‘all the time.’ He can no longer tell time because there’s no distinction between day and night in this room. He has noticed some kind of light shimmering overhead, but cannot locate its source. He used to believe that if he could find the source, he could probably get out of his predicament by unscrewing the lightbulb and poking his finger into the socket. But by now he has given up that notion, having realized that even if he identified the source, the light might not be electric at all. He’s thus doomed to live on, caged in an indestructible cocoon like a worm.” Mr. Yang paused for breath, then resumed: “The only hard objects in the room are the plastic dinner set — a bowl, a dish, a spoon, and a knife. There’s no fork. He’s deprived of the privilege of piercing his windpipe with a fork. Time and again he picks up the knife, which is toothless and brittle. Stropping it on his forefinger, he grunts, ‘Damn it, I can’t even cut my penis with this! ’ ”