Free The Crazed by Ha Jin Page B

library and went through them in two weeks, but I didn’t enjoy the poem and felt the world remained the same. On the other hand, I was horrified by the filth and torture to which the damned are subject in
Inferno.
When I told Mr. Yang that I had read the poem, he asked me to comment on it. Taken by surprise, I had little to say and just summarized some grisly scenes in hell. My thoughts rambled, and I even talked about the austere woodcut illustrations.
    I was making a fool of myself, because he knew those scenes by heart. A copy of
Purgatorio
was lying on his desk. He must read Dante every day.
    “Where are we now?” he asked me.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Which one of the three worlds described by Dante are we in now? We’re certainly not in paradise, are we?”
    Somehow a popular song came to mind, so I quoted its last line with a straight face, “Our life is sweeter than honey.”
    He burst out laughing. “You have a sense of humor, Jian. That’s good. Humor can make one detached. I wish I had it.” Then his face went somber again. “We’re neither in paradise nor in hell. We’re stuck in between hell and purgatory, don’t you think?” He smiled enigmatically, chewing his lip.
    “Maybe. I’ll think about it,” I mumbled, unable to understand his bizarre notion. I wanted to end our conversation there. There was enough Tang poetry for me to work at, and I had no need for such a huge Christian poem to clutter my mind. I turned my head. On the wall hung a painting Weiya had done for him. In it a tubby, smiley monk was eating a gourd ladle of figs while fanning his naked paunch, on which were stuck a few scraps of fig skin.
    Mr. Yang resumed, “This is my favorite poem. It saved my life.”
    “How?” My interest revived.
    “When the Cultural Revolution broke out, I came under attack as a Demon-Monster because I had translated some foreign poems and once argued that Goethe was a great poet. Sometimes the Revolutionary Rebels on campus planted on my head a dunce hat with my family name written on it. Sometimes they tied a bucket filled with water around my neck to bend my body and keep my head low. Sometimes they made me kneel on a washboard. Even when my knees began bleeding, they wouldn’t allow me to get up. But during the torture I would recite to myself lines from
The Divine Comedy.
They could hurt me physically, but they could not subdue my soul. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the scenes in
Inferno.
If they forced me to open my eyes, I’d imagine that the crazed people below and around me were like the blustering evildoers, devils, and monsters cast into hell. They were cruel and desperate because they were hopeless. While reciting
The
Divine Comedy
in my heart, I felt that my suffering was meant to help me enter purgatory. I had hope. Suffering can refine the soul. Beyond purgatory there’s paradise.”
    “Are you a Christian?” I blurted out, unable to see why he had taken pains to memorize such a long poem.
    “No, I’ve never been truly religious. But at that time, under torture, I often wished I were a Christian so that I could have prayed to God wholeheartedly. Religion is spiritual opium, as Marx has taught us. No doubt about that, yet once in a while human beings need some spiritual narcotics to alleviate pain. The flesh alone cannot sustain us. In any case, this poem helped me, comforted me, encouraged me, tided me over many moments when I thought of ending my life.” With a grimace he lifted his hand and clutched his throat, sticking out his fat tongue. He then picked up the copy of
Purgatorio
from his desk and waved it at me, as if to convince me of the boundless power the flimsy paperback possessed.
    Now his body was confined to this hospital bed while his mind roamed the empyrean, as though the Christian divine spheres could also admit pagans as long as they had been humble and virtuous in their lives. I kept quiet, not to disturb his hallucinatory journey so that he could enjoy