In the Pond (2 page)

The moment he passed the railroad crossing near the northern end of the plant, he saw the Party secretary, Liu Shu, walking ahead with his hands clasped behind. Bin caught up with him and got off his bicycle. “May I have a word with you, Secretary Liu?” he said.

“All right.” Liu stopped and straightened up a little, his hooded eyes half closed.

“Why didn’t I get housing this time?” Bin asked.

“You’re not alone. Over a hundred comrades are still in line. Don’t you know that?”

“I’ve worked in our plant for six years. Hou Nina has been here for only three years, but she got an apartment this time. Why? I cannot understand this.”

Liu told him bluntly, “That’s a decision made by the Housing Committee. They believe she needs it more than you. Women and men are equal in our new society. You have a place to live now, but she has stayed with her folks in the village all these years. She needs her own place to get married. Her wedding has been put off twice; she can’t remain single forever.”

Bin wanted to yell: She can live with you, can’t she? But he didn’t say a word; instead, he turned and hopped on his National Defense bicycle, riding away without saying good-bye to the secretary. He couldn’t help cursing Liu to himself, “Son of a tortoise, you’ve had a good apartment already, but you took a larger one this time. You’ve abused your power. This is unfair, unfair!”

The stocky secretary shook his head and said to Bin’s back, “Idiot!”

Bin planned to break the bad news to his wife after dinner, but seeing his dark face, Meilan sensed that something was wrong and asked him several times what it was. He went ahead and told her; he even mentioned that Hou Nina, the junior accountant, had received a new apartment. At this, tears came to Meilan’s eyes, and she cursed the leaders loudly. She also blamed Bin for his stubbornness, saying, “A few bottles of liquor are a small cost. How many times did I tell you? But you wouldn’t listen.”

“Come and eat,” he said, picked up a pair of chopsticks, and lifted a bowl of noodles to his mouth, slurping the soup. Then with a spoon he put some minced toon leaves into his bowl.

“I don’t want to eat, I’m full of gas.” She turned and pushed the window open. Outside, a breeze passed by and shook a few raindrops off the aspen leaves, pattering through the trees. A frog was croaking hesitantly.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“They’ve maltreated us. You should report those corrupt men.”

Bin didn’t answer and went on eating. Shanshan, their baby daughter, was stirring her bowl of custard with a green plastic spoon, waiting for her mother to feed her. A short noodle was lying on her white bib, near the red bill of an embroidered dove.

Meilan, in a sky blue dress, remained at the window, her shapely chest bulging a little as she was still fuming. She raised her hand and put a strand of hair back behind her small ear; she leaned over the sill and spat out the window. Once in a while she wiped the tears off her cheeks with her thumb and forefinger.

After dinner Bin was sitting outside the dormitory house, smoking and waving a fan on which spread a misty landscape — a temple, a river, and two slender boats, each punted by a tiny fisherman in a straw hat. His Adam’s apple moved up and down while his lean face
looked tense. He was deep in thought; his small eyes narrowed as the bushy brows joined. Above his head flared a 25-watt lightbulb, around which a puff of gnats were flitting, a few mosquitoes buzzing among them. The air smelled of rotten fish and fresh corn. Beyond the high wall two trucks were tooting their horns on the street, as if quarreling.

In the middle of the courtyard, Meilan was washing bowls and dishes with an angry clatter at the faucet. Bin understood that this time he had been in the wrong. A wise man should do everything to preempt bad odds, as Meilan had told him, but he had been impervious to reason and let the bad odds multiply. Unlike his plant, the department store had only sixteen employees; it was unable to build an apartment house on its own. So his family depended on him to get decent housing, but he had blown the opportunity. Who could tell in what year a new apartment would be available again? Heaven knew how long his family would have to live in this single room.

Choking with anger, he was determined to do something about the injustice. Even though he couldn’t correct the leaders’ wrongdoing, he wanted to teach them an unforgettable lesson and show them that he wouldn’t swallow an offense. But what should he do?

He remembered that the materialist thinker Wang Chong of the Han Dynasty had said something about punishing the evil with the writing brush. He couldn’t
recall the exact words. That passage must have been in the paperback
The Essence of Ancient Chinese Thought
, which he had read a few weeks before. He stood up and went back into the room. On the top of a wicker bookshelf, the book was sandwiched between an epigraphic dictionary and an album of flower paintings. He pulled it out and without difficulty found the passage, since he had folded the bottom corner of the page as a bookmark. He perused Wang Chong’s words:

Bin closed the book, profoundly moved. Writing and painting belong to the same family of arts, he reasoned; they are both the work of the brush. Yes, to fight the evil is the essential function of fine arts. As an artist and scholar I ought to expose those corrupt leaders. Whatever they are, painting and writing must not be embroidery and decoration; they must have strength and a soul — a healthy, upright spirit. A good piece of work should be as lethal as a dagger to evildoers.

After Meilan and Shanshan went to bed, Bin began
grinding an ink stick in his antique ink slab, which was in the shape of a crab, carved out of a Gold Star stone. His hand kept moving clockwise in tiny circles. The ink was ready in a few minutes; he picked up a brush made of weasel’s hair and began to draw a cartoon. On a large sheet of paper he drew a huge official seal, standing upside down. Then on the seal’s bulky handle he sketched an ecstatic face with a few hairs on the crown. Up on the seal’s flat top, which was in the form of an oval stage, he put a dozen midget men and women sitting together in two rows. He made sure that two of them in the center resembled Secretary Liu and Director Ma. Liu, wearing a handlebar mustache, sat with his short arms crossed before his chest, while Ma’s long face was pulled downward as though his mouth was filled with food. Behind the human figures Bin set up a six-story building with broad balconies and tall windows, from which fluorescent rays were darting out.

The drawing finished, Bin dipped a smaller brush in the ink, then wrote a line of bold characters at the top of the paper as the title: “Happy Is the Family with Power.”

The excitement of creating a meaningful piece of work kept him awake after he went to bed. He forced himself to count his heartbeats, which were faster than the second hand of the clock on the wall. His temples were tight, and his head wouldn’t cool down; within two
hours he got up three times to urinate in the outhouse in the west corner of the courtyard. Not until two o’clock did he go to sleep.

The next morning he showed the cartoon to his wife. “Good, good,” she said. “I hope this will be a land mine and blast them.”

Carefully he stuffed it into a manila envelope addressed to the
Lüda Daily
, a regional newspaper in which he had published three words of calligraphy. On his way to work, he went up Bank Street and dropped the envelope into the mailbox in front of the post office.

F
OR DAYS
the whole plant was talking about the housing assignments. The leaders had anticipated the discontent and were not worried. Only two big-character posters, fewer than they had expected, appeared in the plant; both were pasted on the side wall of the office building. One was entitled “Workers’ Park Is Not for the Workers to Inhabit”; the other, “What Makes the Housing Principle Flexible?”

Though the two posters touched on bribery and the privileges the leaders had granted themselves, Secretary Liu and Director Ma were not daunted by this sort of writing. What they feared was that some workers might put out posters at the Commune Administration, appealing to their superiors to interfere with the plant’s housing, but so far nothing of that kind had happened. In fact, the workers’ bitter voices were dwindling.

The mollification was mainly the result of four buckets of human excrement that had been secretly dumped
into the larger apartments, one bucket in each. For two days the unused rooms stank and teemed with flies and maggots; some of the walls were soiled.

It was a simpleminded trick, far from reaching the effect the rumor claimed: the leaders would no longer want the stinking apartments. On the contrary, they still meant to move in, though it was true that Liu and Ma had been outraged and almost called an emergency meeting after seeing the mess. But both of them were seasoned cadres and hadn’t acted rashly.

“We should report it to town police,” Ma said to Liu, returning from the park.

“You really think so?”

“Yes, it’s damage to public property, you know.”

“Forget it, Old Ma. We’ve no idea where the shit came from or who to suspect. The police can’t do a thing if we don’t give them any clue.”

“Then what should we do?”

After exchanging views, they decided to keep quiet about the incident and not have it investigated, because they felt that their reticence might pacify the workers some. Indeed it did; within a few days they could see that those resentful eyes became less hostile.

Director Ma assigned a group of temporary workers, hired from a nearby village, to clean and whitewash the walls of the apartments and scrub the cement floors with caustic soda and Lysol. The two leaders went to Workers’ Park over ten times within a week to ensure that no trace
of human stench was left in their future homes. Afterwards, their wives also went over to check the sanitary conditions. Mrs. Ma wanted the window frames and the doors to be repainted; this took four workers another day.

In three weeks the cartoon appeared in the literary and art section of the
Lüda Daily.
Apparently, the editors of the newspaper hadn’t taken it as a significant piece of work; it came out only four by three inches, inserted in the bottom left corner of the page. Yet the author’s name, authenticated by the mention of his workplace, stood below the drawing. Anyone with a little imagination wouldn’t fail to link the happy crowd in the cartoon to the cadres of the Harvest Fertilizer Plant.

Though only a few people in the plant subscribed to the newspaper, more than half of the three hundred workers and staff saw or heard of the cartoon on the day of its publication. That night, someone even pasted a copy of it on the notice board at the front entrance. Because Bin was its author, people assumed he had sneaked to the plant at night and posted it there. In fact, he didn’t know of its appearance in the newspaper until he came to work early the next morning.

On arriving at the plant, Bin was surprised to see his cartoon on the notice board. Several workers were gathered near it, chattering and smoking. They all congratulated him, but Bin nodded without showing any
enthusiasm. In his heart he was happy and couldn’t help thinking, Good, see how those bastards will patch up the whole thing. This will make them remember that I don’t forget an offense in a hurry.

Entering the workshop, he ran into the director of Maintenance, Hsiao Peng, whose rank was not high enough to qualify him to compete for one of the four larger apartments; so Hsiao was among the outraged too. With a cunning smile he said to Bin, “That’s not a bad drawing, Young Shao. I’m impressed.”

“I aimed it at some people,” Bin said, his jaw jutting out.

“I know, you mean to correct the unhealthy tendency in our plant.” Hsiao was chewing a toffee, his round eyes blinking.

Bin knew Hsiao was also one of the wolves, who grumbled only because he hadn’t got a piece of meat this time. Quietly he turned away to put on his work clothes.

Within an hour after the morning shift started, the cartoon disappeared from the board. In the director’s office, Liu and Ma were restless, thinking how to handle this situation. Now they were notorious in the entire prefecture, only because they each had a faucet and an extra room in their new homes. Many leaders of higher authorities must have seen the cartoon and might have inquiries made about the people involved. That damn dog Shao Bin had turned upon his masters. No wonder
people called him Man Hater. He simply hated everyone and couldn’t bear to see anybody better off than himself. They had to figure out a way to subdue him now; otherwise some workers would follow his example and make more trouble for them.

That evening the plant held a workers-and-staff meeting in the dining hall. After everybody was seated, Secretary Liu began to speak about the allocation of cabbages, turnips, carrots, and rutabagas for the coming winter, and also about the coal that the plant would sell to its employees to supplement the fuel the state had rationed. After that, he turned to the main topic: the cartoon and its author. In a thick voice, the squat secretary announced that this was a serious political case and that Shao Bin, “a representative of bourgeois liberalism,” had to be responsible for all the consequences.

Liu explained, “Comrade Shao Bin never expressed his dissatisfaction with the housing assignment. Then without the leaders’ knowledge and permission, he sent the cartoon to the newspaper. This is a sniping attack. As a result, he has damaged our plant’s reputation and slung mud in our faces. Besides, this is pure slander. You all know that only five single-story houses were built this year, but Shao Bin set up a tall building with his brush. In our commune no house is taller than White Mansion, which has only two stories. That’s a fact. How could our plant own a six-story building? If Comrade Shao is so constructive, we’d better invite him to build us a few
great mansions. Then everybody here will have a spacious, beautiful unit. That will solve the problem of our lack of funds. In a couple of weeks we’ll realize the ideal of Communism in our plant, and we’ll become a progressive model for all of China.”