by Ha Jin
For a good two minutes neither Liu nor Ma knew what to do; they stood there whispering to each other and scratching their scalps and necks, while Bin was weeping and sniffling, his face buried in his arms on the desk. The meeting turned chaotic. Some people said the leaders should let Bin go; they could deduct his bonus and even beat him, but stopping him from entering college was way too much; by doing so, they ruined his whole life. If there was no hope left, who wouldn’t go berserk? Some said the leaders had promised to support whoever took the entrance exams, and now Bin was admitted, which was an event that should be celebrated in the plant, why didn’t they keep their word? Who would try again the next year? Who would believe them in the future? Liu and Ma as leaders were too nearsighted and narrow-minded. As for the bag of apples, Bin must have done it in desperation; it was perfectly understandable if you were utterly confused and frightened and had no idea what to do. However, those who had always hated this pseudo-scholar remained silent, smirking.
Finally Director Ma clapped his hands and declared the meeting was over.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Meilan moaned after Bin told her what the leaders had done. “I thought the Mas didn’t have Indian apples. I didn’t mean to bribe him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me beforehand?” He was angry and had planned to slap her.
“I’m sorry. I thought you’d be too stubborn to allow me.” She began weeping, blaming herself for having ruined his future. Her tears softened him.
Instead of questioning her further, he handed her a wet towel. He felt that in a way he himself was to blame too. He had seen her handbag bulging strangely but hadn’t asked what was inside; he had been too careless, knowing she was a sort of oddball. Yet all in all, it was neither her fault nor his. Those hoodlums just wanted to do him in and had made a pond out of a pee puddle. It doesn’t matter if something bad has happened; what matters is the person who takes advantage of it. Wicked people will create misfortune for you.
That night he wrote to Yen and told him that everything was gone. The university would surely accept the official statement from the plant and drop him. He swore he would avenge this injustice someday, but for the time being he had to get out of here. Obviously the leaders were set on broiling him alive. He felt as though his heart would explode with rage at any moment. “A bomb,” he wrote, “my heart is like an atomic bomb, eager to blast everything.” He knew he might grab hold of Liu’s and Ma’s grandsons and hurt the children badly if more pressure was put on him. At the end of the letter, he begged Yen, “Help your older brother, please!”
It was a long letter, six pages written with a pen. After completing it, he was too exhausted to climb onto the bed; he remained at the desk and let his head rest in the crook of his arm. In no time a thread of saliva began dribbling from the corner of his mouth. As he was snoring away, a soft sound whistled in his nose.
He slept this way until daybreak.
Eleven
ON THURSDAY EVENING a young man came to visit Bin. He introduced himself as Song Zhi, a reporter and a colleague of Yen’s at the newspaper Environment. He was bareheaded and wore an old army uniform; one of the knees of his pants was covered with a rectangular patch that looked brand new. He said Yen had told Bin’s story to the editorial staff, and everybody had felt outraged by Liu’s and Ma’s abuse of power. So the editor in chief, Jiang Ping, sent him over to investigate and report on the case.
Bin was impressed by Song, who not only had good manners but also looked handsome, with a square face, a straight nose, large, sparkling eyes, and broad shoulders. He felt Song was a trustworthy man who seemed to exude compassion.
They talked over tea and melons. Outside the window, the moon was wavering above the aspen crowns like a silver sickle slicing strips of clouds. Katydids were chirping away, and a young male voice was singing Peking opera in a neighboring courtyard.
Bin was talking about how evil Liu and Ma were while Song was writing down his words in a notebook. He went on for about twenty minutes; then he stopped to declare loudly, “They’re both thugs and bandits without any Communist conscience. I often wonder if they are from reactionary families; otherwise, where on earth could they have got such wicked minds? One night I dreamed Liu Shu was a fat landlord who died of thousands of cuts, hacked to pieces by revolutionary masses. In any case, we must have these vermin kicked out of the Party.” He kept slapping his thigh.
“Don’t be too emotional, Comrade Old Shao. Just tell me the facts,” said Song.
At that, Bin swallowed a gulp of tea to calm himself down. He remembered he himself wasn’t a Party member yet, though he had applied for membership many times. So he had better not discuss how the Party should punish the two leaders.
“Say everything clearly to Young Song,” Meilan told Bin, “or how can he expose them?”
Patiently Song was writing. Having controlled his anger, Bin continued to talk about the injustice in the housing assignment, and then about the leaders’ persecuting him for the works of art he had published. He took out the cartoons about housing and holiday bribery and gave Song a copy of each to take back as evidence. After that, he described Secretary Yang’s role in these incidents, asserting that it was because Yang was behind the scenes that Liu and Ma dared to torture him so flagrantly. They always served Yang as though he were their grandfather; in return, Yang would cover up for them whatever crimes they committed. Their control was so tight that this commune was simply an independent empire, into which even a needle couldn’t find its way. To conclude, Bin said, “All the officials here are rotten. There isn’t a clean, honest one to whom you can report your thoughts.”
Song wrote that down too; by now he was also incensed by the leaders’ evildoing.
After Bin put the kettle back on the self-made electric stove — a coil of tungsten wire embedded in a large brick — he began to talk about how Liu had kicked his private parts. “I went to the theater to see if Vice Governor Long had come. I had once shaken hands with him in the provincial capital, you know. But Liu and Ma accused me of disrupting the conference. Without warning they attacked me. Liu kicked me right here, and I dropped flat on the floor.” He pointed at his groin and continued, “I was so hurt I couldn’t get up, but they pinched my cheeks and twisted my ears to drag me up. I couldn’t move; I almost fainted. Then Liu Shu dropped his big ass on my face and said, ‘I’m smothering you to death on the spot.’ He weighs almost two hundred pounds, you know. My glasses were smashed, I couldn’t breathe, and the bridge of my nose was about to snap. So I opened my mouth and gave him a bite, just driven by the instinct for survival.”
Song almost tittered and asked, “Then what happened?”
“Liu was so brazen he took a photo of his ass and showed the bite to everyone, saying I had attacked him from behind for no reason at all, and this proved that I had a mental disorder. You see what a goddamn liar he is.”
“Did you do anything to clarify the case?”
“What could I do? It’s obvious that if I had attacked him I wouldn’t have chosen his stinking ass to bite, would I?”
“No.”
“He’s the Party secretary, with a bigger mouth that can outshout mine. Besides, I can’t take a photo of my balls and publicize it, can I? He’s low, but I mustn’t be lower, you know.”
“True, that’s very true.” Song nodded, and his black fountain pen kept writing.
Meilan and Shanshan had by now fallen asleep with their clothes on, a pink toweling blanket covering them both. Time and again Meilan murmured something, smiling. It was getting late, almost ten-thirty, and Song hadn’t heard everything yet, so they decided to resume their talk the next evening. In the meantime, Song would visit the plant, ideally catching a glimpse of Liu and Ma, so that when he wrote the article he would have a better grip on the ambience and the characters. After Bin described to him how to get to the plant and where the leaders’ offices were, Song drank up the last drops of tea, put the notebook into his pocket, and took his leave.<
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The night turned cloudy, and a dog in the neighborhood began yapping. In the distance a tractor was passing and blaring its horn, while soundless lightning streaked across the northern sky.
For some reason Bin was possessed by a mysterious joy that hadn’t come to him for a long time. He felt fortunate to be acquainted with a cultured young man like Song. He was so excited, he took out his brushes and ink slab; then a giddy feeling came over him, and he knew he had to paint something right now. Grasping his thick hair, he was thinking hard of a subject.
Yes, he would paint a piece for Song, to express his gratitude and trust. With his hollowed palm he scooped some water from the washbasin behind the door and put it into the ink slab. He then set about grinding the ink stick; his mind was busy working on a subject. A few minutes later he was certain what to do.
He dipped a large brush into the ink, let it get saturated, then started to draw. After a few strokes the stalwart figure of Zhong Kui, the legendary devil executioner, took shape on the paper. Bin used the technique of splash-ink to give him a long, thick beard, which seemed to be fluttering with anger. His loose-fitting robe was also flapping, as though a steady breeze was blowing from one side. His left hand grasped a list of devils’ names, while his right carried a huge crescent sword, whose broad blade slanted before his knee. The sole of his left boot was raised as if to trample a devil in front of him.
Viewing Zhong Kui’s square face for a moment, Bin put two dots as a pair of pupils into the eye sockets he had already drawn. It was too bad the size of the devils’ list couldn’t be larger, or he would have written Liu Shu and Ma Gong on it. He laid down the brush and picked up a small one. After letting it absorb enough ink, he wrote in a vertical line at the right side: “Execute the Devils.” Beneath the title, he inscribed in cursive: “For Comrade Song Zhi. Please Point Out My Inadequacies.” Then he pressed his oblong seal beside the inscription.
“My, my,” he murmured, amazed by the bold piece of work. His eyes blurred with joyful tears. It seemed to him that this was his masterpiece; he found the whole painting marked by an august aura and radiating an upright spirit. Though no devil was present in the scene, one could feel that the execution was about to take place. Zhong Kui’s colossal figure would definitely paralyze any devil in his presence before he captured and beheaded it. “Damn, what a piece,” Bin mumbled, licking his mustache.
He couldn’t help wondering why for all these years he had studied and worked hard, only intending to produce a piece like this, and he had never succeeded, but all of a sudden he had made it with so much ease, strength, and mastery, as though he had practiced drawing this very piece for decades. A happy mood shouldn’t be the answer, because there had been a lot of shadows in his mind. He recalled the process of creating it, and felt as if something had just gushed out of his chest and splashed onto the paper. What was that thing bottled up in him? He figured it must have been the pain and suffering he had gone through recently. He remembered that when he was drawing the sword, the brushstrokes had been so ferocious that he had paused to see whether he had poked a hole through the paper. So it was the misery and rage that had driven the brush to make such a breakthrough in his art. He realized anger was also a source of power, which the artist ought to convert into creative energy.
Then he felt reluctant to present this piece to Song. Heaven knew when he could accomplish such a work again. On second thought, he decided to let it go, since he had already inscribed the dedication; besides, by coming here to help him, Song had contributed to its creation. You shouldn’t be too small-minded, Bin warned himself.
The next morning Bin came across Song in front of the office building in the plant. They glanced at each other without exchanging greetings, because they needed to appear to others as strangers in order to forestall the leaders’ suspicion.
As Song and Bin were passing each other, Liu happened to come out of his office, descending the stairs.
“Good morning, Secretary Liu Shu,” Bin shouted from a distance of fifty yards, waving as though they had been old friends. He did this for Song, to identify Liu for him; Song turned to look at the stocky leader.
Apparently Bin’s warm greeting frightened Liu. He halted on the stairs, speechless and bulgy-eyed, then turned around and hurried back toward his office. Bin saw Liu’s surprised face, and he gave a hearty laugh, swaggering away. The laugh shook Liu’s heart.
God knew what made that lunatic so happy today. Something must have been going on. Suddenly Liu remembered his grandson, and cold sweat broke out in his armpits. He was in the middle of a meeting and couldn’t go home, so he hastened to Finance and begged Nina, almost with tears, to go tell his wife to take the boy out of the plant’s childcare center and watch him carefully at home today. Damn this mad dog Shao Bin! If only they could have slammed him into jail.
The fear on Liu’s face pleased Bin a lot. While filing a brass faucet in Maintenance, he couldn’t help humming a folk song. His fellow workers asked him why he was so different this morning. He told them he had had an auspicious dream the night before, with whales and a boat that carried him into the blue ocean. Asked further, he wouldn’t explain what this meant but kept smiling mysteriously. “What a superstitious bookworm,” they said behind his back. At lunch he bought a good dish — fried tofu cubes mixed with pork and leeks — and also a mug of beer.
He felt nobody in the world could subdue him after he had painted “Execute the Devils,” which ought to be a masterpiece. Probably this work would survive him and become a sought-after treasure, passing through generations to posterity. It was too bad that Song would have it; otherwise he would have sent it to the National Gallery in Beijing. If they accepted it, he might be able to go to a university, not as a student but as a lecturer or a professor, just like the cobbler who had recently been invited to teach math at a major university on the strength of his inventing a method of rapid calculation.
In the evening Song came again. Bin talked about the leaders’ breaking their promise to let him go to college and then about Liu’s lifestyle. He insisted that somebody had seen Liu and Nina lying in each other’s arms on the bank of the reservoir near Quarry Village, and that they went to the waterside every Sunday afternoon. On their way there Liu often bought her grapes, or sweetmeats, or boiled periwinkles, or steamed mantis shrimps. Bin defined the affair thus: “Liu Shu purchases her thighs with power. That’s why Hou Nina was given a new apartment and got a raise each year.”
After their talk, Bin took out “Execute the Devils.” Song looked excited by the painting and said, “Comrade Old Shao, thank you for trusting us.”
His words puzzled Bin. Bin said, “I painted this for you, to express my gratitude, yes, also my trust.”
“We’ll cherish it and hang it in our editorial office.” Song rolled the painting up and put it under his arm. He slung his duffel onto his back, getting ready to leave for the ten o’clock train.
They shook hands and said good-bye.
Bin felt mortified by the rough way Song had handled the painting. It seemed Song took it as something like a poster and obviously wouldn’t mind sharing it with anyone. Now Bin began to doubt Song’s character; at least he no longer took him for a good friend. You shouldn’t play the lute to a water buffalo, he said to himself. Without doubt Song was ignorant of the fine arts, unable to appreciate real work.
Twelve
HAVING READ SONG’S report on Bin’s case, Jiang Ping, the editor in chief of Environment, felt that after minor revisions he should publish it. Though the newspaper was designed mainly to bring natural environmental issues to people’s awareness, it would be better if once in a while it published something about the social environment — to reduce moral and cultural pollution.
Two weeks later the report came out on the front page of Environment with the title “The Legend of Shao Bin.” It consisted of four long sections: first, “A Conscientious Artist”; second, “Persecutions After Two Cartoons”; third, “In the F
ace of the Abuse of Power”; fourth, “A Cry of Blood and Justice.” In addition to the thirty-five hundred words, a photograph of Bin, three inches by two, was printed in the first section, and the cartoons about housing and bribery appeared in the middle of the article. There were also the prints of two seals carved by Bin in the Worm Style; one said, “Eliminate the Wicked and Enhance the Good,” and the other, “Justice Will Prevail.” The sentences in the article were trenchant, emotional, now and then invigorated by a pair of exclamation marks. Never had Environment looked so lively.
The minute the newspaper came off the press, Yen sent two copies to Bin by the express mail.
On reading the article Bin burst into tears, which scared his daughter. She dropped her bottle and ran out of the room, shouting, “Mommy, Daddy’s crying.”
Meilan rushed in with an iron ladle in her hand. Seeing the half-filled bottle lying on the dirt floor, she became angry, about to yell at Bin. But he smiled and handed her a copy of the newspaper, saying, “I got them! Caught them all in one net.”
She took the paper and hurried back to the kerosene stove, on which a wok of celery and potato slivers was sizzling. She left in the room an aromatic puff of scallion, fried with soy sauce.
To Bin, the best feature of the article was its broad scope — no relevant detail was left out. There were twelve places where Secretary Yang’s name was mentioned. At one point, the author even questioned him directly: “As the head of the commune, you didn’t make any effort to correct the wrong done by Liu and Ma, but instead you connived with them. Where is the principled stand of a Communist? How could you forget and maltreat the people who put the power in your hands? We advise Comrade Yang Chen to think this over.”
