世新中文 ‧ 中國文學名著英譯選讀教室

3

For about twenty days, I went to the hospital every day for most of the day. I took care of her, sat by her bedside and watched over her, and talked briefly with her. Her illness worsened, and as she grew weaker every day, her abdomen grew larger day by day and her movements grew more and more difficult. At that time there was no one on the ward to help her; except for food and drink, she had to take care of everything else herself. Later on I heard her fellow patients praise her for being “strong and resolute.” They said that every morning she would quietly struggle to get out of bed and go to the washroom.

The doctor talked to us. He said that the patient's health was not good enough to operate, that what was most to be feared was bowel obstruction; if there was no obstruction, it would be possible to prolong things for a while.

That half a month after she went into the hospital was the one period since August, 1966, in which I felt both painful and fortunate; it was the last peaceful time that she and I spent together, and I cannot forget it to this day.

After half a month, though, her illness grew worse. One day during lunch the doctor told my son to bring me in to talk. He told me the patient's bowels had become obstructed and it was necessary to operate. The operation would not necessarily be successful and there might be trouble during the procedure but the consequences of not operating were even more horrible to contemplate. He wanted me to decide and then to persuade her to agree. I decided and then went to the ward to explain it to her. After I finished talking, she said just one thing. “It looks like we are going to have to part.” She looked at me, her eyes full of tears. I said, “That’s not possible ....” My voice choked up. Just then the head nurse came in to comfort her and said to her, “I’ll be with you. It's all right.” She answered, “If you're with me, it'll be all right” Time was very short. The doctors and nurses made all of the preparations very quickly, and she was taken into the operating room; it was her niece again who wheeled her through the operating room doors. We waited outside in the hallway for several hours, waited until she was safely sent out; our son wheeled her back to the ward. Our son stayed at her side overnight. In a couple of days he too fell ill, and an examination showed that he had hepatitis; he had brought it back from the farm village in Anhui. At first we wanted to keep the news from his mother, but we inadvertently let her find out. She kept asking repeatedly, “How is our son?” At night when I came home and walked into my quiet empty room, I almost wanted to cry out, “Everything fall down on my head! Let every sort of calamity come at once!”

I ought to thank that friendly and kind head nurse. She sympathized with my plight and told me to let her handle everything relating to my son’s treatment. She arranged everything, went with him to see a doctor, to be examined, and allowed him to move into a quarantine ward in another part of the hospital where he could receive prompt care and treatment. He waited bitterly in that quarantine ward for his mother's illness to improve. His mother lay on her sickbed and very weakly said a few words. She always asked, “How is Tangtang?” I understood from her tear-filled eyes just how badly she wanted to see her most beloved son, but she no longer had the energy to give it much more thought.

Every day she had transfusions and saline injections. When she saw me come, she would keep on asking me, “How many cc's of blood? What are we going to do?” I would comfort her, “You just take it easy. There’s no problem; getting well is the important thing.” More than once she said, “This is hard on you.” What hardship did I have? If I could do things for the person I loved most, even if it was just some small thing, I would be happy! The doctor gave her oxygen, and she had tubes stuck into her nose all day long. She asked several times for them to be taken out because she was in pain, but after we talked to her she finally put up with them.

She only lived five days after the operation. Who could have thought she would go so fast? During those five days, I stayed at her bedside all day silently watching her suffer (I could really feel her suffering), but except for requesting two or three times for that huge oxygen tank to be moved away from the front of her bed and expressing her anxiety about using too much blood and not being able to pay the medical bills, she never once complained about anything. When she saw people she knew, she often seemed to want to convey the feeling, “please forgive me for causing you all so much trouble.” She was very peaceful, but did not doze off; she always had her eyes wide open. Her eyes were very large, very beautiful, very bright. I watched and watched as though watching a candle that was about to flicker out. How I yearned to make those two eyes continue to shine! How I feared her leaving me! I even wanted to suffer ten thousand tortures because of my fourteen volumes of “evil books” if only to make her keep on living peacefully.

I was not at her side when she left this world. It was a Sunday. The Anti-Epidemic Station of the Hygiene Department sent someone to disinfect our house because we had hepatitis in the family. Her clan sister had the time to go to the hospital and look after her; we had agreed that we would go after lunch and relieve her. We never imagined that as soon as we sat down to lunch we would receive a message telling our daughter to go to the hospital and saying that her mother was “in trouble.” It was truly a bolt out of the blue! I hurried with my daughter and son-in-law to the hospital. Even the mattress had been removed from the sickbed that she had occupied. Some people told me she was in the morgue. Then we ran downstairs and met her clan sister there. It was she who had got some people's help to bring the patient who had “breathed her last” into the morgue. The dead one had not yet been placed in a metal box and put in the freezer; she was lying on a stretcher, but had already been tightly bound up in a white sheet and her face was not visible. I could only see her name. I bent over and embraced that white linen package that still had a human shape. I was weeping and calling her name. Only a few minutes passed. What kind of a last farewell was that?

According to her clan sister, at the moment that she left this world, her clan sister did not know it. She had once said to her clan sister, “Bring the doctor.” The doctor had come, but there was nothing special. After that, she just gradually sank into sleep. Her clan sister still believed she was sleeping. A nurse who came to give her an injection first discovered that her heart had already stopped beating. I had not been able to say a last good-bye to her; I had a great deal of things that I had not yet expressed to her. She could not have left me without leaving behind even one word of farewell! When she told her clan sister, “Bring the doctor,” most likely it was not “Bring the doctor (yisheng);” but rather "Bring Mr. Li (Li Xiansheng).” She usually called me that. That morning of all mornings why was I not in her sickroom? None of us were at her side; she died so very sadly!

My son-in-law immediately telephoned our few relatives. Her younger sister-in-law hurried over to the hospital and immediately fainted. Three days later, we held the final parting ceremony at the Longhua Crematorium. Not one of her friends came, firstly because we did not notify them and secondly because I had been the target of nearly seven years of investigation. There were no mourning songs and no mourners, just the sound of crying and grief; I warmly thanked those few friends who came to the ceremony and my daughter's two or three fellow students who especially helped out. Finally I bid farewell to her remains. Her daughter stared at her face and wept mournfully. In his quarantined room, the son whom she regarded as her very life did not yet know that his mother had already died. It is worth mentioning that the son of a deceased friend whom she had looked after like her own son hurried down all the way from Peking just to see her one more time. This technician who worked all day with steel certainly did not have a heart of steel. After he received our telegram, his wife told him, “You better go. If you don't go, your heart will never be at peace.” I stood there beside her transformed body a while, and someone took our picture. I thought painfully to myself that it was the last time; even if the picture turned out terribly, I would still want to treasure the scene.

Everything was over. After a few days, I went with my daughter and son-in-law to the crematorium again to pick up the jar containing her ashes. After storing them in the storage room for the required three years, I brought the jar back to the house. Some people advised me to give her remains a peaceful burial, but I would rather put the jar in our bedroom where I can feel that she is still with me.

4

Those nightmarish days have finally passed. Almost in the blink of an eye six years have been left far behind. It certainly was not the blink of an eye! So many days of blood and tears were contained in those years. Not only six years. Half a year has passed since I first began to write this short essay, and during that half a year I have regularly gone to the crematorium to stand in the big hall and mourn silently, bow ceremonially, and memorialize my friends who were hounded to death by the Gang of Four.

    Every time that I put on the black gauze armband and the paper flower, I think of my own dearest friend: an ordinary lover of literature; a not-too-successful translator;

a goodhearted person. She was a part of my very life; her ashes contain my own blood and tears.

She was one of my readers. I met her for the first time in Shanghai in 1936. Twice, in 1938 and 1941, we lived together like friends in Guilin. In 1944 in Guiyang we were married. When I first met her, she was not yet twenty, and I must bear a great deal of the responsibility for her growth and development. She read my novels, wrote me letters, and then later met me and fell in love with me.

We courted each other for eight years, and when we finally married in Guiyang, we only made one announcement and did not even have a banquet. From Guiyang we moved to Chongqing where we lived in one room in a seven- or eight-room house under the stairs of the sales department of the Cultural Life Publishing Company on Minguo Road. She had someone buy four glasses and began to organize our little family. She stayed with me through all kinds of difficult trials. During the War of Resistance against Japan, we escaped from Canton only about ten hours before the Japanese troops entered the city; we went from Guangdong to Guangxi, from Kunming to Guilin, from Jinhua to Wenzhou; we were separated and met up again, and after we met up we parted again. Part of the record of that sort of life is included in my Report of Travels. Forty years ago a friend criticized me saying, “What sort of writing is this!” After my Collected Works was published another friend thought that I should not have included those essays. What they said made sense; for the last two years, I have told my friends and my readers more than once that I have decided not to allow my Collected Works to be published again. For my own sake, however, I often read over those reports. In those days when I fell into difficulties and my friends all went on ahead making their fortunes, she would always whisper very intimately in my ear, “Don't feel bad. I won't leave you. I'm right here at your side.” That was for certain. Only just before she was wheeled into the operating room did she ever say, “We are going to have to part.”

I lived with her for over thirty years, but I really did not help her very much. She was more talented that I was, but she lacked the spirit to do difficult and meticulous studies. I enjoyed very much her translations of Pushkin and Turgenev's novels. Even though the translations were not appropriate and were not in the style of Pushkin and Turgenev, they were rather works of creative writing, and reading them, for me, was a kind of enjoyment. She wanted to change her life, did not want to be just a housewife, but she lacked the courage to accept patient suffering through hard work. On the advice of a friend, she received the permission of comrade Ye Yiqun—later also hounded to death by the Gang of Four—to go to Shanghai Literature to “perform voluntary labor.” She did a little work there, but then during a “campaign,” she came under attack. They said she only sought articles from older writers and also that I had sent her there to be a spy. When I was just about to “stand to the side,” she was also called back to the Writers' Union to participate in a “campaign.” It was the first time she had ever participated in that kind of stormy struggle, and participating as the household member of a reactionary authority, she really did not know how to handle it. She was completely flustered and, in a panic, could neither sit nor stand; afraid for me, she worried about her children's future. She looked for someone to hold out a helping hand to her, but her friends deserted her and her “fellow workers” used her as a target; some even thought that by attacking her they could attack me. She was not a regular employee of the Writers' Union or the publication, but still she was ordered to “stand to the side,” stand in line and wear a sign; after she was sent home, she was also dragged before the authorities.

After a while, she wrote an admission of guilt. The second time she was sent home, the leader of the “rebel faction” in our area even notified the neighborhood committee members that she should be punished by sweeping the streets. Afraid that someone would see her, very early she would get up in the morning and go out with the broom, sweep until she was exhausted before coming back home, close the door, and heave a great sigh; but sometimes she would run into children on their way to school who would curse her as “Ba Jin's stinking old lady.” On occasion when I would see her returning with the broom, I did not dare to look her straight in the eyes because I felt so guilty. The sweeping was a mortal blow to her. In less than two months, she fell ill; after that she did not go out to sweep the streets again (my younger sister carried on her sweeping for a while), bur she never completely regained her health again. Even though she continued to hang on for four years, right up to her death, she was not able to see me regain my freedom. These were her last days, but certainly not her final denouement. Her final denouement will be intimately related to mine.

When I lose the ability to work any more, I hope that Xiao Shan’s few translated stories will be there on my sickbed. Then when I close my eyes for eternity, please mingle my ashes with hers.

 1979