Can Xue - The Embroidered Shoes

One morning my legs swelled terribly, but my dizziness stopped unexpectedly. I listened intently. The house was dead quiet. Getting up, I circled through the house, supported by a stick, but not a soul was to be seen. I walked out the door and limped down the street. The sun was hot, glaring down from the branch of a tree. All the joining parts of the walls were puffing out dust. My T-shirt stuck to my back. Raising my head, I saw numerous blue and purple circles.

“Isn’t that Ah-wen?” An old man stopped blankly. “Good, come and have a stroll. Good!” While talking, he scratched his armpit with force and then spat heavily at my feet. I walked away, and could still hear him chasing me and shouting, “Very good! Good sun, good…”

“Be on guard against such people.” The old man’s voice entered my ears like a gust of wind. “He sneaks into a python’s cage whenever he feels like it.”

Blood surged into my brain. In a hurry, I complained to a shadow beside the road: “I’ve been thinking of bestirring myself. I think so very hard. Every day, I hear the leaves rustle in the old camphor tree at the doorway. Just count how many blisters on my lips, and you will understand me. Only if … I’ve met so many people. I tug at their sleeves and mean to tell every one of them, but there is a great obstacle preventing me from expressing myself in words.”

The shadow turned its back on me and remained silent. I could see the sun move to the top of the lamppost. The walls continued to puff dust.

“Good, good sun, good!” The old man was chasing after me. He ran a few steps and then bent down to roll up his extremely long trousers which were dragging on the ground.

The shadow turned back all of a sudden. His vague face was now turned toward me. He spoke each word separately through his teeth: “As a youth, you once had a food phobia.”

On top of my third sister’s bed lay a mountain of cotton fiber she had torn into shreds.

Somewhere outside, a black hand was scratching on the wall: scrtch, scrtch …

“It’s a wire brush.” The pale little face of my third sister peeped out from inside the cotton pile. “It’s like this every night. It has aroused in me an unfounded melancholy.”

“You?”

2. MY THIRD SISTER TELLS OF THE LOAD ON HER MIND

This morning, after I scraped the mold from my tongue and cleaned my scalp, I started decking myself out. Under the lamp was the letter from my aunt that arrived yesterday. It read: “It’s only because you’ve sunk too deep. You should rise with force and spirit in order to save yourself. For example, you can come to visit me and change your environment for a while…”

Bah, change environment! I am too clear about such rubbish! Everybody talks the same, because they all want to prove that they live in some kind of clean, high-class rooms so as to distinguish themselves. To such idiots, past events have vanished like smoke.

Next door lived a man who subsisted by scrounging through garbage heaps for odds and ends. This man had an extremely tiny face, with a huge mole on his chin. I never knew his name, since nobody ever called him by it. He was an independent, unimportant nobody. Yet I noticed that such people usually possessed the highest intelligence and the most definite opinions. When I was in junior high, he often called me to his house for a visit. “I often think,” he said, as he stooped over to kick amidst the rags and rotten paper. The room was choked with dust. He was a hunchback, and the hump on his back jiggled up and down. “If only I could pile up all the odds and ends I have collected in my lifetime, it would make a gigantic mountain. I often lose my way. At those moments, I find myself hiding in a hole like a worm. Whenever I move my head, my face touches something sticky. Recently I discovered that the odor of rotten cloth pours out of my nostrils every morning. Maybe I’m dying. I’ve taken a new measure. That is, I’ve installed a ladder in the middle of the room, and I exercise while sleeping on it. From the ladder, I can see into the distance. I can see the fields, which are pitch dark, with some tiny lights swirling around. Once I fell from the ladder. That must have awakened your whole family, didn’t it?”

“That’s impossible,” I shook my head firmly. “People in this house never sleep. Every one of them has some good game as a hobby. Please go on — black fields, tiny lights, and also little model houses? I’ve seen some little houses, in which people like you live.”

“The wind is whimpering in the fields, somebody is smashing a rock by the roadside. Just wait, you’ll see the rooster on top of the house. Beware of your surroundings. The guy above you is a suspicious character. I saw him with my own eyes spraying disinfectant on other people’s clothes. Never dry your underwear outside your house.”

The hunchback had enormous palms with deep black cracks in them. He rubbed his pointed ears vigorously with his hands until tears ran from his eyes. He called this “exposing the internal pain.” He was forever wandering around picking in the garbage but never went very far. He was also a thief. Whenever he had a chance, he sneaked into other people’s houses to steal an alarm clock, a tea kettle, and other trivial items. But he never had the luck to escape. When he was caught, he was tied high up on that big tree. Despite all that, people didn’t seem to remember his past and continued to throw odds and ends to him. I saw him tied to that tree several times. Closing his purple eyelids, he would fall into sleep. When he was let down, he tapped the dust from his body as if nothing had happened. He hobbled into his hut and sat at the doorway for several days. He sank into his thoughts with his eyes wide open, and he smiled as if entranced.

“Why do you steal?”

“Oh?” He shrugged and paced the room. “At this particular moment, my mind is extremely clear. The little huts that you mentioned, I’ve seen them also. They were in the forest. All kinds of strange creatures lived there. There was one old creature with a pair of bear paws. All day long, he sat at his doorway studying ants and picking his teeth with a bamboo stick. Another guy caught passersby and tied them up with a rope in his dark house. Then he fed them a kind of medicine meant for toothache. There were many houses, resembling ghost’s caves, with all sorts of heads poking out from the holes. They looked like featherless chicken heads. I was completely baffled by the scene and couldn’t control my emotions. At those moments, I couldn’t help taking others’ things so as to stir up some disturbance and transfer my self-absorption. Please notice the hair on my temples. It’s been rubbed down. Sometimes blood drips when I rub my scalp.”

“Those ghost holes, they are so vivid in my mind.”

The hunchback was gradually becoming senile. I saw him passing my house, clutching a wooden stick which he banged on the ground. He had become totally bald. His tiny head hung weakly on his shoulders, and his grieving eyes lingered on my doorway. I got so terrified that whenever I looked out the window and saw him coming, I leapt to the door and closed it. For days I would hide inside, and I vomited every time I heard the clatter of his stick. There was a rumor going around about the hunchback raping little girls. I felt very uneasy, sensing that there was some hint for me in the rumor. My body ran with sweat when I was in bed.

The second day of the rumor, mother yelled in the middle of the room, clapping her hands in joy. “I’ve had a premonition for a long time,” she said. She also called in a doctor to check if I was a virgin, because this was “a vitally important point,” according to her. The detective living upstairs arrived. He turned out to be the doctor that mother was calling for. It could be that he only disguised himself as a doctor. With a gauze mask and a pair of sunglasses on, he declared that he was living at No. 65 on Thirteenth Avenue. When he smiled, he bared a vicious green tooth on the left side of his mouth. I stopped him when his pale sweaty hand stretched toward my chest with a stethoscope. I told him in a confidential air that I had had affairs with sixty-nine males, and my state of sexual desire was extremely high. On hearing that, he beamed with joy. Narrowing his eyes, he asked, “Can’t you find a small piece of wood to dig out my ear wax?”