Can Xue - The Embroidered Shoes

So I returned home and lived with my husband and children. My life was easy but sluggish. Then one October day, my father-in-law came. He wore an orange plastic raincoat, and he was shivering with cold. After some blushing and modest declining of hospitality, he finally sat down on the sofa. But he firmly refused our offer of a dry towel and hot tea. With his aged, veined hand he wiped the rainwater from his head and face. Pointing at me with one finger, he said to my husband that the disease I was suffering from was a very unusual one. He found in the medical books that this disease usually occurred among females. It was caused by the distance between their inner vanity and the goal they were after. At the root of my case was the fact that my legs were unique. He could tell at one glance that I would fall miserably. It was unfortunate to have such legs, and there were endless troubles awaiting me. He did not look at me even once while talking, nor did he allow my husband to put in one word. He simply rattled on and on. Like a wizard, he delivered all kinds of prophecies with his eyes crossed. Upon his departure, for some unknown reason, he made a strange sign to me with his hands, stiff with gnarled joints. It looked like both a gesture of ingratiation and a sign of threat.

“Hey, take it easy,” he said.

Father-in-law came increasingly frequently. It started with visits twice a week, then every day. Every time he would bring with him a huge medical book on neuropathology. He had folded down the corners of many pages, so he could always find just the place he was looking for. Then he would put on his spectacles unhurriedly, and read aloud those sentences and paragraphs from the book. After his reading, he would wink at me lasciviously and say, “Vanity cannot bring any benefit in the long run.” He firmly rejected our every invitation of staying for a meal as if he had been insulted.

Once I mentioned to my husband his father’s strange behavior. He smiled and raised his eyebrows, saying, “Can’t you see that he is desperate because of his fear of death?” When I pondered my husband’s remark, I felt as if I understood something, yet I did not understand anything. One thing was sure — my father-in-law took an extreme interest in me, or maybe we could call it extreme jealousy and hatred. But why? We had had no contact with him. My husband had left home at an early age and never took his father very seriously. In fact, he seldom even mentioned him. What had disturbed the old man so much that he decided to come to our house to make such confessions? Was it because of my not-very-great fame in the athletic world? But why should my fame irritate him so much? This whole business was very puzzling.

After about three weeks, he came one day with some pills of different shapes made of Chinese herbal medicine. He suggested that I take all of them. Staring at me, he declared that such pills could “snatch a patient from the jaws of death.” Of course I refused to take them. Then we fell into a real mess of an argument. Quite to my surprise, he slapped my face. In the flurry, I kicked him with all my marathon strength. He squatted down slowly, holding his belly, his whole body trembling. After a long time, he struggled up and limped home.

After three days, my father-in-law was admitted to the hospital. According to my husband, excessive melancholy had destroyed the old man’s physical balance. He believed that the argument had been fatal to him. “He hit you only because he was afraid of death!” my husband said, looking pensive. “The fear of death can make one lose his reason.”

We went to see my father-in-law, who was lying in bed unconscious. Once he came to, he would stare at us in a threatening way with his bloodshot eyes.

On the way home from the hospital, I suddenly felt something wrong with my legs — my left leg, it so happened. I couldn’t bend it, as if something were growing on the joint. My husband carried me onto the bus. By the time we arrived home, I could no longer stand up. We’ve been to hospitals numerous times and have taken numerous X rays. But there appears to be nothing wrong with the bones. No doctor can explain the case. I figure the reason that nothing can be diagnosed is that I am extremely antagonistic to the doctors.

Could it be that I had some subconscious guilty feeling about father-in-law’s illness? Did I feel regretful about my rude behavior at the moment of our fight? Not at all. When I kicked him, I felt the joy of mischief in my subconscious. When I heard he was sick, I was indifferent. I only felt that he looked funny lying in the hospital.

Another strange thing was that my appetite completely recovered after my legs became sick. I ate and ate every day. Soon a ruddy complexion returned to my cheeks. Every piece of news about father-in-law’s critical condition gave me a feeling of relief. Although I could not return to the athletic field, I felt my life had become more meaningful, with my renewed appetite as the sign. Once in a while, I would remember the wizardish glances of my father-in-law and his talk about my legs. Then I felt a little bit uneasy.

One day my husband came home and told me, “Father is wrestling with the god of death for the last time.” Then he said that if he told his father about the problem with my legs, the news would no doubt bring him back to life. But he did not intend to tell the old man. He did not tell me the reason. After a long silence, he said quietly to himself, “The struggle in the dark depths is spectacular. In no sense can an ordinary person reach such a place.”

One year later, I became confined to a wheelchair. Ever since that happened, my visual and audial abilities have been developing rapidly. It seems that the world surrounding me has become a crystal palace, transparent and shining from morning to night. However, at the extreme depth of my vision there is a small, moving black spot similar to a colon in a piece of writing. One night when I woke up I heard a weak noise resembling the clawing of a rat scratching among scraps of paper. I did not turn on the light — because darkness has no existence for me. Looking straight ahead, I could see that the black dot had turned into a small torch that disappeared after bobbing up and down several times. That rat’s noise grew steadily louder, until it became deafening. My husband was startled awake. Sitting up, he mumbled, “Father’s dead, died just now. I didn’t tell him about your illness.” I could feel the hesitation in his subconscious, though it was only a flash. In the end, he had come around to my point of view.

My complete victory increased a certain feeling of safety in me. It seems that my father-in-law was too fragile to withstand a single blow. After he passed away, I became more and more contented with my life in the wheelchair. One day a doctor came and gave me a thorough examination. His diagnosis was that my legs were perfectly normal. Immediately he ordered me to stand up.

“But why?” I stared at him with hatred.

At this moment my husband came in. With great effort he explained to the doctor, emphasizing repeatedly the advantages of my life in the wheelchair, as well as the disadvantages of standing up and walking, and so on. Finally, he said, “It seems to me that it’s good enough for her to be able to live like this. It is much more natural than her running the marathon in the past.”

Blinking his eyes, the doctor was completely confused. After a while he stuttered, “Then why should you ask me to come in the first place?”

My husband said, a little annoyed, “I asked you to treat her cold. These days she has a slight cold. We would like you to prescribe some medicine. But as soon as you arrived, you started to treat her legs indiscriminately. You are too subjective.”

The doctor wrote a prescription and left in a rage. After the doctor was gone, my husband said to me, “Take it easy. Now that father is gone, nobody will come and bother you anymore.”