Cries in the Drizzle (31 page)

Guoqing wiped the sweat on his forehead and said, “I've got some killing to do.”

“But it shouldn't be her that you're killing,” the policeman said softly, indicating Huilan. Then he pointed outside the courtyard. “It's her parents you should be killing.”

Guoqing could not help but nod. He was beginning to fall for the policeman's line.

The policeman asked, “Can a little boy like you kill two grown-ups?”

“I sure can!” Guoqing said.

The policeman nodded and said, “I believe you. But there are lots of other people outside, and they're going to protect the people you want to kill.”

Seeing that Guoqing was looking unsure of himself, he stretched out his hand and said, “I'll help you kill them, how would that be?”

His tone was so friendly. Finally somebody was offering to help. Guoqing was now completely under his spell, and when the policeman extended a hand Guoqing instinctively passed him the cleaver. The man tossed it aside at once. But Guoqing failed to notice this, for after feeling so misused and so afraid at last he had found support, and he threw himself into the man's arms and burst into tears. The policeman seized him by the collar and shoved him—almost carried him—out the gate. Guoqing tried desperately to raise his head as the tall officer propelled him forward and the crowd parted to let them pass. Even now the fact of his bloodless surrender had not quite sunk in. The policeman tugged so hard on the back of his collar that Guoqing was practically throttled by his top button, and as he gasped for air his sobs turned into a succession of uneven whimpers.

SMEAR

Our teacher was soft-spoken but intimidating. With his glasses he somewhat resembled Su Yu's father, whom I was to meet later. He always looked at us with a smiling face, but he meted out harsh punishments at the drop of a hat.

His wife, it seemed, sold bean curd in a small market town in the countryside. This young woman would visit the school in the first few days of each month, wearing a floral-patterned outfit, sometimes with two brightly dressed little girls in tow. She had a funny habit of scratching her behind. But we all thought she was very pretty, and in her hometown, we heard, she was known as the Tofu Belle. Our teacher would wear a frown every time she came to stay, because he had to surrender to her the wages he had just been given, only a small portion of which she would return to him. At such moments she would admonish him in a sharp voice: “What are you scowling about? You're happy enough to see me in the evening, when you need me, but when I ask for money you look as though you're about to cry.”

At first we couldn't work out why the teacher would smile so much in the evening. We gave his wife the nickname Imperial Army, because she made us think of the Japanese devils and their campaigns of loot and pillage: every month she would sweep in and clean out his money pouch.

I cannot remember now who came up with this name. But I'll never forget the time when Guoqing, then a second grader, ran
into the classroom with a droll expression on his face. He tapped loudly on the dais with the blackboard eraser and solemnly announced that the teacher would be a little delayed, because “The Imperial Army is back …”

Guoqing was a real daredevil on that occasion, for he had the impudence to go on: “… escorted by the Chinese collaborator.”

Guoqing had to pay for being a smart aleck. There must have been at least twenty classmates who reported him at the same time. When our teacher took his place on the dais, his face was livid, and Guoqing was so frightened he was sweating mightily. I too had my heart in my mouth, not knowing how the teacher would punish him; even the classmates who had ratted on Guoqing now felt uneasy. Given our age at the time we quailed at the prospect of punishment, even if it was inflicted on children other than ourselves.

This angry expression stayed on the teacher's face for a good minute, and then suddenly he was all smiles. There was something eerie about the way his manner changed. In a velvety tone he said to Guoqing, “I'm going to punish you.” Then, turning to the rest of us, he said, “Now we'll start the lesson.”

Throughout the whole period Guoqing's face was pale as he awaited with foreboding and a kind of perverse longing the teacher's retribution. But when class was over the teacher picked up his notes and left the room without even looking at him. I don't know how Guoqing managed to get through the day. He remained glued to his seat, watching us timidly like a new kid in class. He was no longer the same boy who loved to race around in the playground, but more like a skittish kitten. Several times his mouth twisted unnaturally as though he were about to burst into tears. Only when school finished for the day and he was completely
outside the school gate did he dash about like a panther kept too long in captivity. We now felt that nothing was going to happen after all and confidently assured him that the teacher must have forgotten about it. Besides, the Imperial Army was still here, and the teacher was bound to have a smile on his face again tonight.

But when school began the following morning the first thing that the teacher did was to tell Guoqing to stand up. Then he asked him, “How do you think I should punish you?”

Guoqing had forgotten all about it, and his whole body trembled. He looked at the teacher fearfully and shook his head.

“You can sit down now,” the teacher said, “and think it over.”

When the teacher said to think it over, he was really telling him to not forget to torture himself. For Guoqing the next month was sheer hell. If he ever forgot about the punishment and looked his cheerful old self, the teacher would appear out of nowhere and quietly remind him, “I have yet to punish you.”

This threatened but never-imposed sentence left Guoqing on tenterhooks every day. All it took was for the poor boy to hear the teacher s voice and he would quiver like leaves in a wind. Only when he went home after school did he feel more or less secure, but the feeling of apprehension would return on his way to class the next day. This life of anxiety did not really end until his father abandoned him, when it was superseded by far greater misery.

At that point, out of compassion perhaps, the teacher not only discontinued his intimidation of Guoqing but actually went out of his way to commend his achievements. Guoqing would get a perfect score for an essay even if he had written a couple of characters wrong, whereas I would get only ninety points for an essay with no mistakes at all. During the days before Guoqing's uncles
and aunts arrived our teacher took him to see his father. In his kindly tone the teacher sang Guoqing's praises: such a respectful, intelligent boy, he reiterated—why, he was a favorite with every teacher in the school. After listening to these words, Guoqing's father said coldly, “If you're so fond of him, maybe you should adopt him as your own son.”

Our teacher had an answer to that. Smiling broadly, he said, “Actually, I was thinking of adopting him as my grandson.”

Until I myself was earmarked for punishment, I held our teacher in warm regard. When I went to school that very first time with Wang Liqiang, I was taken aback by the sight of him knitting, for I had never seen a man with a ball of wool in his hands. Only when Wang Liqiang brought me before him and told me to greet him as Teacher Zhang did I realize that this odd character was going to be my teacher. He seemed affable and considerate. I remember he put his hand on my shoulder and said something that I took as a compliment: “I'll make sure that you get a nice seat.”

He was as good as his word, assigning me a place in the middle of the front row. Apart from times when he needed to go to the back of the dais to write on the blackboard, the rest of the class period he was standing right in front of me. He would lay his notes down, rest both hands on my desk, and lecture away, ejecting saliva with the force of his delivery. As I listened, my upraised face was fully exposed to his spit, as though I was taking notes in a drizzle. When he noticed that my face was flecked with saliva, he would stretch out a chalky hand to wipe it away, and by the end of class my face was often stained in gaudy colors, like a cotton print.

The first time I was punished by him it was about halfway through third grade. A big snowfall that winter gave us schoolchildren an opportunity to engage in a wild exchange of snowballs
in the playground. Woe befell me when one of my snowballs, aimed at Liu Xiaoqing, accidentally hit the head of a girl classmate, whose name I no longer remember. This girl wailed as loud as if I had made her an indecent proposal. She complained to the teacher.

He called me up from my seat, where I had just sat down, and told me to go outside and make a snowball. I thought he was mocking me and just stood there, not daring to move. He continued to teach the class, seemingly having forgotten about me, and it was a few moments before he said to me in surprise, “Why are you still here?”

I left the classroom and went to make a snowball. When I returned to the classroom, the teacher was reading aloud a story from the textbook about the selfless courage of Ouyang Hai. It was a spirited recitation, sweeping high and dipping low like a road through the mountains, and I stood by the door, not daring to interrupt. At last he finished reading a long section of the story and walked toward the blackboard, but to my dismay he still did not pay me the slightest attention. It was disconcerting to find that he had forgotten about me, and as he wrote on the board I said to him timidly, “Sir, I made the snowball.”

He shot me a glance and gave a grunt of acknowledgment, then continued to write. Finally he tossed the chalk into the box and turned to the girl. He told her to check to see if the snowball in my hand was as big as the one that had hit her. She, of course, had never seen the snowball, because it hit her on the back of the head and immediately disintegrated. Though some time had passed since she had been upset by the incident, she began to cry pitifully as soon as she arrived next to me, saying, “It was bigger than this one.”

So I was ordered out of the classroom by the teacher once more, to make a bigger snowball. When I came in holding a jumbo-size snowball in my hands, he did not ask the girl to once again certify that it had the correct dimensions. He walked around the classroom a couple of times and formally announced my punishment: I was to stand there and could not return to my seat until the snowball had melted.

That winter morning a north wind howled through the broken windows of the classroom while the teacher, his hands in his sleeves, recounted in the cold the story of heroic Ouyang Hai. I stood by the door, clutching my icy snowball. Gradually I felt a peculiar scorching sensation in my hands, as painful as if they were being sawn off. But I had to be careful not to let the snowball fall from my grasp.

The teacher came up to me at one point and said to me solicitously, “If you hold it a bit tighter, it will melt more quickly.”

The snow had not melted much by the time the class ended. After the teacher picked up his notes and slipped past me, my classmates gathered round. Their speculation about how long it would take for the snowball to melt simply intensified my distress, and I felt so misused I almost cried. Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing marched over to the girl's desk in a rage, cursing her as a snitch and flunky. The poor girl collapsed in a flood of tears, and after putting her satchel in order she stood up and headed out the door, saying she was going to report them to the teacher. It had not occurred to Guoqing and Liu Xiaoqing that she would resort to this same tactic a second time; they rushed to restrain her, apologizing and begging forgiveness. By this point, my hands had gone completely numb— as hard as icicles—and the snowball fell from my lifeless fingers to the floor, where it broke up into slush. I was so horrified that I
burst into slushy tears of my own, at the same time begging the classmates around me to bear witness: “I didn't do it on purpose! You saw what happened—I didn't do it on purpose!”

Our teacher's authority was not founded on correct judgments, but on draconian punishments that followed in the wake of the judgments that he did make. He was altogether too arbitrary in his decisions about right or wrong, and for that very reason his punishments would arrive suddenly and unpredictably. During my four years at the Littlemarsh elementary school he never once repeated a punishment. Because of his exceptional creativity in this area we were reduced to nervous wrecks at the very sight of him.

On one occasion a dozen of us were throwing a ball around in the playground, and by accident we broke a window in the classroom. In this case the penalty he imposed was light, but because I had not expected to be punished I performed a feeble act of resistance.

I still remember the look of misery on the face of the boy who broke the window. Even before the teacher stepped into the room he was already in despair, visualizing the awful punishment that awaited him. Then the teacher came in and stood beaming on the dais—I suspect that he was overjoyed every time there was an opportunity to punish a pupil. But as always he came out with a ruling that was not at all what we anticipated: he did not punish the guilty classmate directly but told all of us who had been playing ball to raise our hands. Then he said to us, “Each one of you is to write a self-criticism.”

Although this decree was perfectly in keeping with his trademark style, at the time I was really shocked. I felt that I had done nothing wrong, so why should I have to write a self-criticism? The
voice of resistance stirred in my heart: I would simply refuse to do it. For the first time in my life I would defy an adult—defy moreover, the teacher who made every schoolchild quake in his boots.

I did my best to steady my nerves, though actually I was very unsure of myself. After class I tried to incite the other classmates affected to resist the teacher as well. They expressed their dissatisfaction just as heatedly as me, but they hemmed and hawed when it came to refusing to write the self-criticism. Guoqing shrugged it off, saying to me, “It doesn't matter if we write a self-criticism now, because there is no dossier on us yet. Its when you start working that you can't afford to write one, because then it goes into your file.”