Can Xue - The Embroidered Shoes

Many people say that the Recorder was a fictitious being because he couldn’t even prove his own existence, and they are right. There was no proof of the existence of the Recorder himself, at least for the middle and late periods of his career in recording. He was shrinking into his strange and unique shell, until finally nobody could see any trace of him. What they saw was only an empty shell that had been abandoned by the roadside. The shell was similar to the most ordinary shell of the river clam. Once in a while someone asserted that he could hear the sound of the Recorder as though from an extremely deep rock cave, but because that cave was so profound, when the sound reached his ear it was almost like the weeping of an ant. Such assertions were of little value.

It’s true that every day we saw the Recorder sitting in the shed by the road in the same posture and behaving in the same way. The strange thing was that whenever we thought of him as being a member of our own species, there would arise unexpected doubts about his personal life, as well as that mysterious communication between him and the dreamers. But these were things that had been explained from his own personal perspective. Without that, everybody felt it would be impossible to make an adequate analysis of him. Almost nobody could remember any specific details about him, such as a word or phrase, a facial expression, a gesture, a line he had written, and so on. Everything about him existed in his own description, yet that description was only dimly discernible and lacked continuity. The key here was that others could not re-create him, describe him, in their own words.

Nineteen-ninety was the tenth year after the Recorder set up his shed by the roadside. There was an unparalleled snowstorm. After the big snow, all the inhabitants swarmed into the streets, stamping their feet and blowing warm breath into their hands while they discussed the storm. When they walked into the run-down shed of the Recorder, they saw that the storm had blown away half of the roof, and inside the snow was piled up more than two feet deep. People found the Recorder sitting quietly in the snowdrifts. His eyebrows and hair were piled with snowflakes. No one noticed that a column of steam was rising from the back of his neck. What kind of energy source was burning inside his body?

“From now on no one will come to discuss their dreamlands,” the Recorder declared to the arrivals in a firm tone. “That era has passed. I have decided this just now.” Nobody was listening to him. Nobody was noticing him. Nobody had ever thought of noticing him.

The Recorder was still sitting by the roadside waiting. Now there was no longer anybody to come to him. That is to say, what he was waiting for was no longer those dreamers. His body was seated straight. His dried, skinny face was always inclined toward the north, and on his face there was an expression of having abandoned everything. He was still indulging himself in that empty image, yet people could no longer discern his reaction toward it. What people saw was a person in rags, perhaps an idiot, wasting time, sitting in a tumbledown shed by the roadside. Such unconventional behavior did not arouse people’s good feeling toward him; instead, now people snubbed him. When they were passing by, they would turn their heads away intentionally, or they would raise their voices, pretending not to notice the shed.

Thus, for the Recorder, external time had stopped. Pretty soon he had lost the feeling of time passing. Once or twice a day he would walk out of his shed to look at the vehicles passing by, the pedestrians, and the sky above him. Of course, it’s more likely he did not see anything but only pretended to be observing. There was no set time for his walking out of the shed — sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the middle of the night. At the beginning he didn’t know what he was doing himself. After several days it dawned on him that he was now classifying time according to his own subjective will. This was a brand-new kind of time. From then on he was going to live in this kind of time, and he had decided this himself.

Once upon a time there was such a Recorder. Yet this was not a very important thing because for us nothing that cannot be proved is important. We only recognize that there existed this person, we saw him and remembered him — we said so in 1990.

The inner world of the Recorder was more and more carefree. He could hear ten thousand horses galloping in his chest, and he felt the temperature of his blood rising and rising. Every thump of his heart would intoxicate him in the extreme. But he still could not see that miraculous image. Even if he had seen it, he could not have described it because he had abandoned his skill and he no longer knew how to describe. That was the source of his secret sorrow. Yet this sorrow itself was the spring of his happiness, and this could never be known by others.

As he walked out of his shed, he felt vaguely, his whole body and heart, that he was walking into that image. He could see nothing, but people saw him watching the passing cars. Thus the time that he calculated subjectively was increasing. He felt deeply that there would no longer be any recording. Yet in comparison to his former recording career, he felt that the present life was fixed, like an iron railroad that drove straight into the emptiness ahead. Although the forms in his imagination were still obscure, he was no longer bothered by this because he didn’t need to express anything. He was only recording inside his own mind. This, of course, was only our guess because nobody knew.

The white-haired old woman had come several times. She stayed longer and longer in the shed. People saw her touching the Recorder’s forehead with her ice-cold fingers, but that’s all. Both sides had kept their silence. This was something that people noticed in passing but forgot about immediately afterward. Every time after the old woman left, the Recorder would go out of the shed at a quick pace. He would stand up straight on a rock placed by the roadside for road construction and focus his glances on the sky, searching anxiously for something. What was there in the sky? Of course, there was nothing. The Recorder would descend from the stone disheartened. He would ponder gloomily for a while, then become cheerful again.

On the street, cars streamed by; the battered shed, resembling a lonely island, shuddered endlessly.

She never arrived when he expected. To put this another way, she always appeared in his apartment just at the moment he thought she would. Every time she arrived he saw in his mind’s eye a clear image — a triangle with a grayish white fog along its edges. Now she had arrived once more. Sitting lightly on the table, she was jabbering something to him. When she sat down, the table did not move the least bit, though her glance was as blazing hot as it had been on other occasions, enough to make him feel a pressure he was very familiar with. She took his cup to get herself a drink of water. After she finished, she tilted the mug toward the sunlight and examined it for a long time. Then she waved it in the air as if she were ladling something. “Gudong-gudong-gudong,” she gurgled, and his Adam’s apple bobbed twice accordingly. Usually every gesture of hers would lead directly to some physical response from him.

Perhaps because she had walked very fast when she came, he could smell the faint sweat on her body. This displeased him a little bit. Oddly, she had seemed never to perspire when she was young, and he had gotten used to her without perspiration. As soon as he sat down, he sank deep into memory. Yet this memory was constantly interrupted by the sound she was making. That sound came from her riffling through sheets of paper. She had picked up a stack of white paper from his drawer and was shuffling the leaves over and over as if she had found a way to entertain herself. Her pointed nails were pressing into those sheets, her shoulders were trembling, and her nostrils emitted a faint whistling full of satisfaction. So he stopped his reminiscing and stared at her playing her game as if he were somewhat fascinated.