Can Xue - The Embroidered Shoes

“Father is suffering some internal agony,” my third sister would say, showing the whites of her eyes. Her voice resembled a noodle hanging in the damp air. She always gnawed at the rims of the bowls at mealtime. As a result, all of our blue china bowls had chipped edges. I saw with my own eyes that she swallowed the chips with her rice. For a cure to her asthma, she had, up to that time, eaten more than a thousand earthworms. Actually, she drank them after melting them down in sugar. “Isn’t that miraculous!” Panting, she would put on an expression of wonder.

“Your third sister, it’s hard to say,” Mother commented in a sarcastic tone. “Did you hear her thumping the bed? The doctors think she’s having endocrinopathy. It’s a subtle ailment.”

I was about to reply when I heard a deafening noise from the upstairs neighbor. According to my reconnoitering, the guy had been fooling around with an iron drilling rod. The cement floor of his apartment was covered with small holes like a honeycomb. Mother continued indifferently, turning a deaf ear to the noise from upstairs: “I can see through anybody’s tricks. I have become so ingeniously skillful that I am close to being a master of magic. Day after day, I sit in this corner, puncturing myself with needles in my fight against the fluids. Sometimes I simply forget you are my children. Whenever I recall the past, the wild mountains and deserted forests appear in my mind’s eye, stars fall down like fireworks, and the black figure of your father hangs from a branch of the tree. Quickly he has turned into what he is now. It’s just too fast.”

At the window pane appeared a pair of huge sunglasses. That was the guy from upstairs coming down to spy on our reaction to his dirty trick. He never forgot to put on his sunglasses, believing that no one could recognize him this way.

“This guy is suffering from ringworm on his feet.” Mother turned her small, flat head distractedly. Every time the back of her head brushed her shoulders, wisps of dry, broken hair drifted into the air. “Can’t you smell the liquid for ringworms? Nearly everyone has some subtle ailment. But everyone racks his brain for ways to appear to be healthy.”

Sunglasses entered the room. Dressed in a white coverall and with a stethoscope hanging at his chest, he appeared full of dignity and dash. To show off, he raised the stethoscope solemnly to listen to the wall for a long time. Then, in an air of pretended wisdom, he said in a lowered voice: “I am a medical doctor. I live at No. 65 on Thirteenth Avenue. Your family has some serious problems.”

“Medical doctor? Perfect, doctor!” Mother shrilled from the shadow. “I’d like you to have a look at my ears! My ears are so sensitive. Is there any way to cure them, like giving them anesthesia?”

He bounced up and down several times on the spot, before disappearing completely.

“This is called the invisible method,” Mother told me quietly.

“A horse in heat, a tragic reality?” My third sister drifted into the room. Softly, she descended on the bedside. Supporting her chin with her fine, vinelike fingers, she was spellbound, staring into the air. “Such people have a special kind of organ,” she added, her eyes filled with rheumy tears. “All disasters are caused by this unlucky smell!” She dashed into her bedroom and started sobbing heavily. In fact, she would have felt much better if she had set herself down to crochet lace. When she was young, she used to sit quietly by the window, crocheting her lace. A slight touch by others would cause her nose to bleed. I was quite surprised to see her becoming so forward.

After dark every day, I started looking for my family members. From this room to that, I found that they had all disappeared totally. The wind swayed the little electric bulb, making the light turn bloody red all of a sudden. The west wind was blowing hard. I was feeling uneasy at not being able to figure out where they were hiding.

Then I formulated a plan. After supper one day, I asked Mother to lend me her needles. “What for?” Her eyes looked like billiard balls ready to roll.

“You always abandon me, thinking that I am useless. But on the contrary, I have my own skill. It may well be that I am more nimble than you are.” While talking I grabbed her sleeve tightly, fearing that she might suddenly disappear.

“I’m-sleeping-in-the-trunk,” she said, enunciating word by word and glaring at me. “Every night you pace around in my room, as anxious as an ant in a hot pot. Once you even stepped on my eyeball. Didn’t you feel it? I just can’t sleep. See the two huge dark rings under my eyes? They’re caused by insomnia.”

At night, I did notice there was a worn-out trunk, on which hung a rusty bronze lock. So I entered her room to look for the trunk, but there was nothing in the corner.

“You’re wasting your energy,” she chuckled drily. “Very often you remember something, but you won’t know that there is no such thing until you try to look for it. Once upon a time, there was some dough in our cupboard, and it was all moldy. Last year, I was digging in the cupboard in our attic, looking for that dough. I had been searching for a year when finally the stairs collapsed and I fell. Your third sister told me that the cupboard was not the original one, I had remembered wrong. Your third sister has her mind stuffed with fantasies about men. I know that’s the source of her disease. There’s no hope for a cure.” She shrugged in resignation. “How do you feel about our apartment?” Her triangular eyes gazed at me with interest.

“I’ve been searching for you. My legs are so sore that I can no longer raise them. I pitch stones on the ground. You must have heard it, haven’t you?”

“What trunk are you talking about? It’s just a story that I told you before. I warned you that it’s a waste of energy. It’s so stupid of you to search everywhere. You also mentioned three-needle acupuncture. You sound like a snake player. Are you really so afraid? Wait till you reach my age, then you won’t be afraid anymore. In your arrogant memory there must be many types of broken trunks. They are hidden here and there. You believe they contain something. It’s a phenomenon of youth, in fact…” She stopped short, impatiently examining the window behind me.

During the day I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t forget to pay attention to those trunks at night. I wondered why I always forgot, and thought I should make a mark at those spots. Yet as soon as night arrived, my memory was befuddled. I turned this way and that, passing a trunk, a broom, a wallet, etc. But I just couldn’t remember anything. Where were my family members? They should at least have left some clue. Rats started a fight in the light fixture. The rats in this house were as big as cats. I covered the bulb with my pale hands to avoid attracting moths. The light was cold, and its rays penetrated to the depths of my heart. On the wall, I saw a projection of my heart. I intended to tell Mother about the summer. Suddenly all the kidney beans she had salted melted into stinking water and the Boston ivy drooped over. In the shadow, the bronze kettle rattled angrily. A cat climbed over the wall, at the foot of which there grew some castor oil plants. My third sister came by whistling. She had two bamboo leaves stuck in her nostrils. They had red spots on them and resembled dominoes.

There was nobody in Father’s room, either. The air smelled of sweat. There was a banana peel on the stool. During the day he told me in secret that he had recently been engaged in catching locusts. With his own eyes he saw mother kill five flowery moths and dump them into the dried-up well at the back of the house. “Tomorrow I will climb the green mountain,” he said, twisting his hips, and tapping the earthenware pot that he held against his chest like a little kid. “The locusts are flourishing there.” He was enjoying the verb he used, his face glowing with health.