A Comedy of Ducks

A Comedy of Ducks

After the blind Russian poet Eroshenko arrived in Beijing with his balalaika, it was not long before he complained to me:

"How lonely, how lonely—as lonely as being in a desert!"

This was no doubt the real truth. But I had never felt it myself. I had lived there long enough—"one who enters a room of orchids and orchids no longer notices their fragrance after a while"—and simply assumed it was all rather noisy. Yet what I called noise, perhaps, was precisely what he called loneliness.

It seemed to me that in Beijing there was neither spring nor autumn. Old Beijing hands say the climate has shifted northward, and that it was never this warm here in the beginning. But I always felt there was no spring and no autumn: late winter and early summer joined together, and as soon as summer was underway, winter began again.

One day—it was this time of late winter turning to early summer, and it was evening—I happened to have some leisure and went to visit Eroshenko. He had been staying at Zhongmi's house. By then the whole household had gone to sleep, and the world was very quiet. He lay alone on his bed, his high brow furrowed slightly between strands of golden hair, thinking of Java, where he had traveled before—a summer night in Java.

"Nights like this," he said, "in Java are filled with music everywhere. In the houses, among the grass, on the trees—insects chirp in all places, a variety of sounds joining together in a concert, quite marvelous. From time to time the hissing of snakes is woven in: 'hiss, hiss!'—yet even that harmonizes with the insect sounds..." He fell into thought, as if trying to recall the scene from those days.

I could not open my mouth. Such wondrous music—I had truly never heard it in Beijing. So no matter how patriotic I might be, I could no defend against his complaint, for though his eyes saw nothing, his ears were certainly not deaf.

"Beijing doesn't even have the croaking of frogs..." he added with a sigh.

"But frogs do croak!" This sigh emboldened me, and I protested: "In summer, after a heavy rain, you can hear many toads calling—they're all in the ditches, because Beijing has ditches everywhere."

"Ah..."

A few days later, my words proved true, for Eroshenko had bought several dozen tadpoles. He bought them and placed them in the small pond in the courtyard outside his window. The pond was three feet long and two feet wide, dug by Zhongmi for growing lotus flowers. Though no lotus had ever bloomed in it, it was indeed a most suitable place for raising toads.

The tadpoles swam in swarms in the water; Eroshenko often strolled over to visit them. Sometimes the children nearby would tell him, "Mr. Eroshiko, they've grown legs!" and he would smile happily and say, "Oh!"

But raising musicians for the pond was only one of Eroshenko's concerns. He had always advocated self-sufficiency, saying that women could raise livestock, and men should till the soil. So when he met close friends, he would urge them to plant cabbages in their courtyards; he also repeatedly advised Madam Zhongmi to keep bees, raise chickens, raise pigs, raise cattle, raise camels. Later, Zhongmi's household indeed came to have many little chicks running all about the courtyard, pecking the tender leaves of sedum flat-spreading plants flat—this was perhaps the result of that advice.

After that, country people selling chicks came frequently, and each time bought several, for chicks easily overeat and fall sick and rarely lived long. One of them even became the protagonist of the only novel Eroshenko wrote in Beijing: *The Tragedy of the Chick*. One morning, the countryman unexpectedly brought little ducklings, chirping and peeping. But Madam Zhongmi said she didn't want them. Eroshenko ran out, and they placed one in his two hands, and the duckling chirped and peeped in his palms. He thought this was very charming, so once again he could not help but buying—four in all, at eighty cash each.

The ducklings were indeed adorable: covered all over in speckled yellow fuzz, fluffy, waddling unsteadily when set on the ground, calling to each other, always staying together. Everyone said they were fine and that tomorrow they would buy loaches to feed them. Eroshenko said he could pay for it.

He then went off to teach, and everyone dispersed. Before long, when Madam Zhongmi came with broken rice to feed them, the sound of splashing could already be heard from a distance. She ran over and saw that all four ducklings were bathing in the lotus pond, turning somersaults and eating things. By the time they were driven ashore, the whole pond was muddy water. After half a day, when it cleared, a few thin lotus roots could be seen poking out of the mud—and not a single tadpole that had grown legs could be found anywhere.

"Eroshiko, they're gone—the toad's children." In the evening, as soon as he returned, the smallest child hastened to tell him.

"Hmm? The toads?"

Madam Zhongmi also came out and reported the story of the ducklings eating all the tadpoles.

"Oh, dear, oh dear..." he said.

By the time the ducklings had shed their yellow down, Eroshenko suddenly longed for his "Russian mother" and hastened away to Chita.

When the frogs began to chirp everywhere, the ducklings had also grown, two white ones and two mottled ones, and they no longer peeped—they all went "quack quack." The lotus pond could no longer hold them; fortunately, Zhongmi's home was on very low ground, and as soon as the summer rains came, the courtyard filled with water, and they would splash about joyfully, swimming, diving, flapping their wings, and going "quack quack."

Now late summer had already turned to early winter, and Mr. Eroshenko was still without a trace—no one knew where he was.

Only four ducks, yet still going "quack quack" in the desert.

(Liu)