“We don’t deny that,” the boy said, “but Marxism isn’t everything in political science.”
“Of course not,” Mr. Yang conceded. “Still, Marxism is a powerful theory that can explain social structures and the evolution of human society. When I started reading Engels’s On Feuerbach, I had headaches, but I stuck to it. Believe it or not, little by little I grew to be fond of the book. After that, I went on to study Marx’s and Engels’s works, one after another. I read Manifesto of the Communist Party; On German Ideology; Socialist: Utopian and Scientific; The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State; and the three volumes of Das Kapital. I enjoyed their writings a great deal, but I’m not an out-and-out Marxist. I respect their passionate arguments and their profoundly speculating minds.” Ignoring that these youngsters knew nothing about those titles, he talked without pause and got carried away by his own discourse, just as in his class, where I had often felt that he was addressing a visualized world beyond the reach of the audience. Unlike other experienced teachers, who would modulate their tones and rhythms and pound their points home, Mr. Yang would simply speak with great gusto and without any calculation, as if possessed by a spirit. I had always admired him as a born lecturer, though I was afraid that his voice might interfere with my own teaching. As a matter of fact, one of my students had once said to his classmates that I tried to imitate my teacher. “A cat plays the tiger” was the actual remark. Yes, Professor Yang was their “tiger.” The undergraduates adored him mainly because they couldn’t always understand him.
The bespectacled boy admitted to Mr. Yang, “What you said makes sense, but we’re going to take several tests and have no time to read any of Marx’s books. At most we can only spit out what the teacher has fed us.”
“I know,” Mr. Yang said. “All I’m saying is that Marxism is a powerful theory in social sciences, which you may like or dislike, but you cannot simply dismiss it as charlatanism.”
“I didn’t say that,” protested the boy.
“But you implied that. ‘The stuff he’s selling us,’ what does this phrase mean? See, I caught you, my boy.” He gave a belly laugh.
Everybody cracked up except the nearsighted boy, who grinned, scratching the back of his head.
Arms folded, I stood in a corner and observed them with loathing. Nobody seemed aware of my presence. They prattled on and on, their topics moving from Tang poetry to contemporary fiction, from the cases in German grammar and French verbal inflections to English tenses, from painting to calligraphy, from the food quality to the dormitory conditions at different schools. They also talked about the student demonstrations in Beijing and other cities. Mr. Yang assured them in all seriousness that the government would resolve this crisis reasonably; he advised them not to act like hotheads.
I was amazed that he blended in with them so well, like a leader of a student association. He even looked healthy and happy now.
Why did he need to do this? He didn’t have to pull such a trick. They all knew he had suffered a stroke and wouldn’t have thought ill of him even if he had shown them his true condition. He was just addicted to wearing masks.
Never had he betrayed to me any knowledge of Marxism before, and I hadn’t seen a single volume of Marx’s or Engels’s writings in his home or office. God knew if he had actually read those titles he just now mentioned. I couldn’t imagine him spending months, or even years, poring over Das Kapital. But these undergraduates simply lapped up whatever he gave them. Although Mr. Yang knew German well and could read French, he didn’t know English at all; at most, his knowledge of this alphabet was merely a smattering deduced from his knowledge of the other two European languages; very often when he came across an English sentence in his reading, he’d ask me to translate it for him. How come he had the temerity to talk about the English subjunctive mood and its future perfect tense? Some of these undergraduates had studied this language since middle school, but they were too fascinated by him to question the truthfulness of his words. They loved being duped.
I was sick of him, sick of his chicanery, sick of his nonsense, sick of these ignoramuses, sick of academia, sick of the hospital! I was sick of everything!
At long last the students were ready to leave. They said, “See you soon in class, Professor Yang.”
He smiled and promised, “Sure, see you later.” He even lifted his swollen hand halfway, waving at them slowly.
Passing by, Small Lili turned and locked her eyes on me. I recognized the meaning of her gaze — she envied my good fortune in accompanying their great teacher, their demigod. It was as if just by staying with him in this room I were crowned with an aureole and achieved a sort of apotheosis, attractive to girls despite my unremarkable face.
The door closed, leaving him and me alone. I wondered what he was going to say. I waited patiently for him to explain why he had acted like a fraud.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” he asked without turning his face to me.
I stared at him sullenly.
He broke into tears. He bent down and buried his face partly in the right arm of his hospital gown. He wept almost without noise for a while. Then he moaned, “Oh, how can I get out of this suffocating room, this indestructible cocoon, this absolute coffin? How can I liberate my soul? I don’t want to die like a worm.”
I realized he was referring to the dark rubber-surfaced room he had talked about some time ago. My anger abated a little, but still I felt embittered.
“I want to use my office, I want to teach,” he whimpered timidly.
I made no response. He cried in gasps, “Ah, I know you’re de-disgusted with me. You think I’m an. . an arch-hypocrite, don’t you?”
I kept silent. He went on, “I feel the same about myself, sick of the sound of my own voice. Oh, how repulsive I am! I’m a worm, a maggot, a coward, and a feckless crook! Why, why should I live? I have wasted my life and others’ lives. Why should I continue like this? Oh, if only I could quit this world!”
His self-hatred shocked me. Still, I wouldn’t speak.
23
Yuman Tan came to see Mr. Yang the next day. He was a bony man with a shock of hair falling over his forehead. His sallow but intelligent face, slightly pitted, had large, whitish eyes that were often bleary as though he was under-slept. Today he wore leather bluchers, a beige shirt, and buff pants held by a belt with a shiny brass buckle. In such a light-colored outfit he looked less skinny, as if he had gained a coating of flesh.
Although to me Weiya deserved a better man than him, from his standpoint she might not be the best choice. There were a good number of unmarried women among the faculty, and I was told that two of them were actively after him. What’s more, he often received letters from female fans of his essays, some of whom even sent him their photos. But in my opinion, his writing tended to be verbose and pretentious. He indulged too much in self-display and overused ah’s and oh’s as if they were punctuation marks; he was so fond of the adverb “very” that it would appear four or five times on a single page; besides, he tried too hard to titillate his readers.
Mr. Yang’s collapse had presented a rare opportunity to Yuman Tan, who in a way was Professor Song’s right-hand man. By now he was fully in charge of the journal Studies in Classical Literature, though Mr. Yang in name remained its editor in chief. After I let him in, I wondered why he had come. Despite respecting Mr. Yang in appearance, he had never been close to him. He sat down, opened his leatherette briefcase, and said, with his eyes shifting between my teacher and me, “Professor Yang, I’m here to see how you’re doing. Do you feel better?”