Dr. Bethune's Children Read online

He was talking about the period of martial law in 1970 known as the October Crisis. “A man who grew up in Quebec, who was nurtured by Quebec,” he continued. “He was a traitor to Quebec, a sinner who committed an unforgivable crime against Quebec.” At that point, he walked angrily to the checkout counter, throwing the notes down and leaving the restaurant.

  The reason I befriended Claude was not because of his generosity, but because of you, dear Dr. Bethune. The first time I met him was in the elevator of our building. He was accompanying a woman downstairs (I wonder now if she was one of the fifty-three), and from their conversation, I learned that they had just celebrated Claude’s birthday. I was amazed. Staring at him, I took the initiative of wishing him a happy birthday and introducing myself. That was the start of our friendship.

  Claude is the only peron I’ve ever met who shares a birthday with you. He doesn’t know this and doesn’t seem to have any interest in learning about it or about anything connected to you. What’s more, I later found out that Claude is the same age as my mother, which means he was born in the same year you left Montreal for good. What a coincidence! But your lives in Montreal did not overlap. When Claude was born, you were heading from Hankou toward the communist base in Yan’an. That was your first birthday in China, the most ordinary (and thus the most extraordinary) birthday in your life. No friends, no celebrations, but you were full of yearning for life and longed for a conversation with your great friend in his historically significant cave dwelling. One year later, though, while Claude was celebrating his first birthday in his poor French-speaking family in Montreal, you had already tired of your legendary life in China. That day, you had performed an eleven-hour, non-stop surgery, without rest. By night-time, you were exhausted. After a short sleep, you got up from your cot, typed a long letter to a Canadian comrade whom you missed. You celebrated your birthday with memories as your only companions, not knowing it would be your last.

  The fact that Claude is not interested in you has disappointed me from the outset. He does not even know that you lived in Montreal and did a lot of good things for his country. It is impossible for you to earn his respect, because you were a “fucking Canadian.” In Claude’s opinion, nothing that a fucking Canadian ever did for Quebec could be good. I respect his sentiment, and decided not to mention that your birthdays are on the same day. Such a coincidence would not be a happy surprise for a separatist.

  A retired French teacher, Claude still loves teaching, always eager to impart his knowledge and skills to people around him. In addition to his “required course” on politics, he also taught me some “electives.” The elective I benefited the most from was a skating course. One Christmas Day, he knocked on my door in the early morning, prodding me with a pair of skates and inviting me to go for a skate with him on Beaver Lake, at the top of Mount Royal. Then after the second time, the third time, it was no longer an invitation. It became an obligation. To be honest, he was too impatient to be a good teacher. I learned anyway. And after suffering his teaching for a whole winter, I was able to skate, which surprised me.

  This experience slid me more deeply not only into life in Montreal but also into memories of my perplexing past. It was a mystical experience in some ways. One morning at five o’clock, not long after learning to skate, I was awakened by a nightmare about skating alone on Mount Royal for the first time. So I got up and went to Beaver Lake, as I had dreamed, and skated on the ice in the faint light of dawn. The tranquillity of the scene and my inner serenity were so in tune with each other that I experienced an absolute freedom I had never felt before.

  But then my reverie was broken by a faint sound. Someone was calling me, just as in my nightmare, and it was a familiar voice, my wife’s voice. I stopped in agitation, turning around, and saw my wife standing at the end of the lake. I waved at her, as though we were not separated by a decade. But just as I was about to skate toward her, she disappeared. I skated to where my wife had been standing. I took a deep breath of cold air, even though I could no longer sense her presence. On the ice, I saw a baby’s glove, just like in the nightmare. I picked it up and saw the small red stain. Then, with the glove in my hand, I knelt down on the ice, trembling and sobbing.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, Claude was not the first separatist I had met. The first separatist I met was Dumb Pig. In the night we spent locked in our classroom, he claimed he could go down the drainpipe and escape through the sewer, a claim for which Only Girl called him a separatist, just “like the Dalai Lama.” Yangyang was so amused by her outburst that he shouted, “Unite, don’t separate.” This was your great friend’s warning to his opponents inside the Communist Party, which we heard every day over the high-pitched loudspeaker. We children of Dr. Bethune lived with this warning every day we were in school.

  Fifteen years later, Only Girl and Dumb Pig did unite, as expected. It can be said that their union was a result of their shared experience of memorizing the Old Three. At their wedding, Dumb Pig mentioned that night we were locked in. He said that he and his wife had had two matchmakers. One was Yangyang, and the other was you, Dr. Bethune. Their union gave birth to an enterprise that became renowned in the entire country, a business producing children’s food. My mother once told me on the phone that their office is in a prime location on Prosperity Boulevard, in the highest building in the city. It is even iconic. My mother also told me that this couple are known as models of respect for teachers. When our homeroom teacher was still alive, they used to visit her every month. When she was hospitalized with cancer, they covered all her medical expenses. More interestingly, one day, when she was dying, she was suddenly unable to remember Dumb Pig, the nickname she herself invented—though she clearly remembered that he had failed that special examination on “In Memory of Dr. Bethune,” and that because of his “sabotage,” our class, Class 3 of Grade 3, failed to win the city title that year in the “Excellence in Mastering Chairman Mao’s Writings” category. Not long before she passed away, our homeroom teacher said to Dumb Pig, “You’re a Dr. Bethune in action now.”

  A Notebook

  Dear Dr. Bethune, Yangyang begged me to go to the air-raid shelter with him. His expression and voice alerted me immediately that he had something very special to tell me. I had never been to the air-raid shelter on my own initiative and was extremely uncomfortable, but Yangyang’s expression and voice made it impossible for me to refuse his request (or should I say his demand?).

  The air-raid exercise was the most interesting activity in my third year of elementary school. When the alarm sounded, Foreign Affairs’s voice came over the intercom, asking our teachers to protect us, “the flowers of the nation.” He asked us to walk “calmly” out of the classroom, line up in the hallway “in an orderly fashion,” walk downstairs “with composure,” cross the field “in silence,” and enter the air-raid shelter “in a disciplined way.”

  Foreign Affairs was the overseer of the air-raid drill. He always gave his orders over the intercom, always emphasizing certain words, which made his orders seem all the more forceful. However, the overseer himself never appeared in the air-raid shelter, as Only Girl pointed out. One time she asked our homeroom teacher why Foreign Affairs always stayed in his office and never once hid with us in the shelter. She said the absence of the overseer made her feel that the exercise wasn’t real.

  Only Girl’s question displeased the teacher, who clearly did not know how to explain Foreign Affairs’s absence. We never imagined Dumb Pig would be the one to break the stalemate. He gave Only Girl a look. “You don’t understand,” he said. “This is called guarding the home front, and it is the expression of utter devotion to others.” Dumb Pig’s explanation made us a bit more respectful of Foreign Affairs. The facial expression of our home teacher relaxed. She took a long look at the boy who was supposed to be the stupidest pupil in her class, and with great satisfaction said, “Sometimes you’re not as dumb as I think you are.” At this unexpected praise, Dumb Pig lowered his head in
embarrassment.

  The atmosphere during the air-raid drill was a bit tense, but the times we actually spent in the shelter are happy memories. The day I walked there with Yangyan, however, I felt afraid and stifled. When we reached the shelter, I felt an intense antipathy to the place, which was cramped, damp, and cold. I had a strange new feeling, too. It was as though I had never been there before. I vowed never to tell anyone about my experience. In the investigation that took place over the weeks to come, I never once mentioned going to the shelter with Yangyang.

  But now I’m telling you, dear Dr. Bethune. The last time I spent with Yangyang was in the air-raid shelter. We went soon after class ended. He begged me not to ask why. I was so scared, I started trembling. “Why?” I asked.

  Yangyang laughed bitterly and said he was going somewhere far away.

  “Where?” I asked uneasily.

  Yangyang looked at me without answering my question.

  “How far away?” I asked stubbornly.

  Yangyang kept looking at me, but he did not answer my question.

  “How far?” I asked again. “Farther than where Dr. Bethune came from?”

  I don’t know why I asked the question in that way. Maybe I had suddenly remembered that you had made light of travelling thousands of miles.

  Yangyang looked alarmed, as if I knew something I shouldn’t, and then he told me, “Much farther than that.”

  I did not dare ask the next question. I did not dare ask when he would be back.

  “Nobody knows,” Yangyang said. “Neither do you. If anybody asks you, you should say you don’t know.”

  Yangyang’s cold tone made me feel like we were conspiring to commit a crime.

  I really did not know. Where was he going? What was he going to do?

  Then, Yangyang started to remember some of the things we had experienced together over the three years we had known each other. He mentioned the two weeks he had spent with me in my hometown the previous summer. He mentioned that Dumb Pig was sweet on Only Girl. He even mentioned the maggots in the urinal. “The first day you came to school I knew you would become my best friend,” he said, with feeling.

  “And you are my great saviour,” I said.

  But Yangyang did not mention going to Graveyard Hill to pick mulberry leaves. I don’t think he overlooked it; I think he was refusing to talk about it. Moreover, I noticed that he did not use a flashlight to light the way in the shelter, but rather a candle. This was certainly a choice. Just like he avoided mentioning our most mysterious experience. His stubborn avoidance made me all the more uncomfortable.

  Dear Dr. Bethune, thirty years have passed. My eyesight has started to go. I’m already near the age you were when you left the world. But I can still see Yangyang’s final expression. I can hear his voice. That evening was a turning point in my relationship with you. My respect for you did not diminish, but my fear of you increased quite a bit. Yangyang did not end up coming to your home country, as I have done, but he did go to the place where you had gone. That is a place we will all go. But he went too suddenly, too violently, and too early. In retrospect, the loss seems all the more painful. If Yangyang could have been more patient, we would have entered high school together in the autumn of 1976. We would have learned about the Cartesian coordinate system. He had probably never heard the name Descartes. For a time in 1976, that name drew my attention away from the painful past.

  The one who taught us about the coordinate plane was an overseas Chinese from Indonesia. Oppressed under Suharto’s anti-Chinese policy, he had left his homeland to return to “the embrace” of his fatherland. Everyone in the school thought he was strange. First, his attire and his manner were really odd. We all wore plain white and blue shirts in summer, while his shirts were always in bright colours with many different patterns. His hair was always combed extremely neatly, but he put a kind of cream in his hair that we found quite pungent. And he really liked to exercise. On holidays, he would take his family mountain climbing. After school, he enjoyed playing badminton with his ten-year-old son in the empty lot by the teachers’ dormitory.

  Even more important, he had a very particular way of teaching. Other teachers only talked about content; he liked to talk about the stories behind the content—which mathematician had what kind of weird habit, or which mathematician had marital troubles. From his class, we learned that mathematics was a bit like literature, and that it was also connected to daily life.

  In explaining the coordinate plane, this strange teacher told us that Descartes had made mathematics simple and clear, but that he himself had been devoted to occult learning. I couldn’t understand this, because we had learned from our politics teacher that the occult was a kind of idealism, while science was founded on materialism. “How can a person be a materialist and an idealist at the same time?” I wanted so much for Yangyang to be sitting in front of me so that we could discuss the contradiction of Descartes’s life.

  In addition to my incomprehension, I was little bit worried about our mathematics teacher. The distinction between materialism and idealism is a basic standard of right and wrong in Marxism. A Marxist should not only hate idealism but also fight it resolutely. Our teacher obviously had a great admiration for Descartes. When he discussed Descartes, he seemed, judging by his tone of voice, to be promoting idealism. Promoting idealism was counter-revolutionary. And we all knew that being counter-revolutionary was a capital crime. Anyone who was convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes would be sentenced to death.

  Our odd teacher did not stop there. He started talking about something that Descartes had supposedly left behind for the world: a notebook. His choice of words made me extremely nervous. I felt he must know about Yangyang’s notebook. I felt he was staring at me, at someone who was counter-revolutionary, just like him. Agonized, I lowered my head.

  “Many people believe in the existence of Descartes’s notebook. But nobody has ever seen it. That mysterious notebook may always remain a secret, like many details in daily life.”

  I was certain the teacher’s gaze had settled on me. “Right,” I told myself. “Just like Yangyang’s notebook.” This voice from inside my head suddenly gave me tremendous courage. I looked up and discovered our teacher was not staring at me at all. I was sure he could not have known Yangyang. Our teacher had returned to the embrace of his fatherland only after Yangyang left that embrace. Of all the flowers of our great fatherland, Yangyang was the one who had wilted the soonest. Dear Dr. Bethune, he was the earliest of your children to be lost.

  A Beam of Light

  Dear Dr. Bethune, on the second last page of Yangyang’s notebook, there is a drawing of a luxuriant mulberry tree. Two children crouch beneath it, both frightened. I know where that mulberry tree grew. I know those two children were Yangyang and me. The reason we were frightened does not appear in the drawing. There was an unexplained beam of light.

  Silkworms were our common interest. I discovered we shared this interest on the day we became friends, on my second day at the new school. The first time he took me to his place, he told me on the way over that since his father had come back from the May Seventh Cadre School, he had had to reduce the number of silkworms he raised because his father found them disgusting. Yangyang had given some of his silkworms to the neighbour’s children, and he gave me more than forty that day at his home,

  Interestingly, the year we went into Grade 5, it was Yangyang’s father who accidentally discovered the closest mulberry tree to our neighbourhood. I still remember the expression on Yangyang’s face. There was a downpour that day. After early study period ended, Yangyang took me to the end of the hall and excitedly told me that he knew of a very big mulberry tree on the south side of Graveyard Hill. “Now we don’t have to go so far to pick mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms.” He looked around, as though afraid that someone might hear.

  Graveyard Hill was only three or four kilomet
res from where we lived. Prior to that, we had had to take a bus to a mountain valley over ten kilometres away. I asked Yangyang how he knew about this mulberry tree. He told me that one day his father had gotten lost while out walking and happened upon it. His father even wrapped up some leaves with an old newspaper for Yangyang. He told Yangyang it was the most magnificent mulberry tree he had ever seen. Yangyang often told me that his father was like a stranger in his life, and that evening he seemed even more strange. Why would he bring his son mulberry leaves if he hated silkworms?

  Yangyang looked back again and then asked me if I wanted to go with him on Saturday afternoon to look for the mulberry tree. He said his father wouldn’t tell him exactly where it was. “He said it was difficult to find and that the vegetable farmer said the area wasn’t too safe,” Yangyang told me.

  Of course, Yangyang’s father’s explanation made us yearn for adventure.

  It was a rare day of fair weather in spring. The fresh air and the warm breeze put us in the mood to go exploring. We walked happily, stopping every so often to enjoy our leisure. Every time we came to a pond, we took the time to skip stones. Yangyang wasn’t as good at this as I was—a kid from a small country town—but he insisted on competing with me, and wouldn’t let me give him a break.

  It was no longer early when we neared Graveyard Hill. We looked around without finding the mulberry tree until Yangyang suggested we climb to the highest point. The view was fantastic up there. In the cool of dusk, we soon saw a small grove and what had to be Yangyang’s father’s mulberry tree on the edge of the grove at the foot of the hill. “How could he lose his way and end up at a place like this?” I heard Yangyang mumble.

  We did not immediately head toward the mulberry tree. “Let’s rest a bit,” Yangyang said and sat down on the ground.

  I sat down most unwillingly beside Yangyang. I felt uncomfortable on the damp grass in the cool of dusk.