Can Xue: The Embroidered Shoes

Lao Jiu had also produced letters, though never in written form and never received by him in the mail. However, in those long five years, he had reread those letters constantly, and he knew that Lao Jiu had never let him go.

On the riverbank all sorts of feelings welled up in his heart, and his body felt extremely fragile as though with one slight movement he would fall into pieces. His brain was delicate and juicy, like a tiny melon sprout. Lao Jiu always disdained his brain, never considering it seriously. However, on this day stories streamed out of his brain like a flooding river. His hair hung down into the water. Each strand swirled in its own fantastic pattern.

“I’m not that disheartened,” he started to think, with some reason. “Without parents and brothers it appears like that kind of thing. The matter is becoming clearer as time goes by.”

“It’s okay not to go,” Ru Shu had said. Childishly, she stretched out a finger and drew a big circle in the air. “The blossoms of the broad bean are twinkling.”

Before making the decision, the two of them had pried open the lock of a deserted house and lived there together for three months. The house stood at the very end of a deep, empty lane whose dim and narrow path was piled with rotten leaves. At the entrance of the lane, there shone a tiny electric light that never went off all year round. Every time he entered the lane, he had to fend off a sudden attack of horror. The door was always ajar. Ru Shu insisted that once the door was closed the air pressure inside the room would become so great that her temples would swell with pain. She acted like a deranged person — she feared light, sound, air currents. All she did every day was huddle in the dead air.

“This is such an evil place,” she would say, lying in his bosom, trembling. She felt as hot as a lump of burning charcoal. “It’s our bad fortune that we have stumbled into such a place.”

With much pain and difficulty they held out until dawn. He suggested that they change to another place. All of a sudden, Ru Shu’s white teeth started to shine. Raising her eyebrows fiercely, she declared that she would continue to stay in this house — this good place. If he could not stand the atmosphere, he didn’t have to come anymore. After all, he was not predestined to live in such a ghostly place. But she was different. She considered this house as her foreordained abode. Everything in the house was simply wonderful! The pitch of her voice reached higher and higher, and became a string of shrill notes scattering in the air. In the dim rays of the morning sun, he saw a swaying mottled shadow. From that moment, he made the decision in his mind. This house was not an easy place to make a decision.

The process of splitting up was very painful. Ru Shu stayed in the corner all the time. She refused to step out of the door even during the day. He was determined to consider her behavior as arrogant and presumptuous. Secretly he plotted an insidious and vicious revenge. During those days of stalemate, Ru Shu asked him if it was possible to exist in this world as a ghost of oneself. Take her, for instance — now that she had realized her destiny, would it still be possible for people (including him) to live with her? In the past when they had lived with her, could it be that she was never with them in reality? After she and he had escaped from the mass of people, her life had become simple and under her own control. Could everything that had happened in the past be nothing but illusory models?

Stroking her shoulders, he spoke aimlessly some irrelevant words of comfort. Meanwhile he pondered his scheme for revenge. He believed with indifference that the final solution was approaching. His stroking fingers gradually folded into an iron-hard claw as she sank into desperation. Moving into this house could be her last struggle. This reminded him of a verse for a famous ancient poem: “Amidst dark willows and bright flowers, there appears another village.”

Ru Shu had not been too happy at the beginning. Standing at the doorway for a long time, she had hesitated to enter the house. Listening attentively with her head tilted to one side, she rattled on and on that it would be too early to live here. Maybe it would still be okay without moving in. Would this be too reckless? Would it be more reasonable for them to hide separately in some populous place? Once they had entered the house, both of them would be exposed to each other’s scrutiny. There could be some hidden perils. He knew that she was always prescient. Yet he lost his head so completely in his own zeal that he did not realize the implications of her remarks.

Quickly Ru Shu became active. Once the light was turned off, her rich imagination poured forth a stream of increasingly complex images. She would talk and talk, putting on all kinds of expressions and gestures, as if she were in a performance. As all her unique linguistic features were transformed, every word became transparent and elusive. He knew that, yet he did not want to consider this to be his only life. Since childhood, he had placed higher expectations on himself. Therefore, he left the house early every morning and returned late at night. Upon his departure every day, he could feel Ru Shu’s eyes glued on his back. Gradually she lost all sense of his existence and instead indulged herself in daydreaming. When he returned, she would spin around and smile at him reluctantly, pretending to be calm and indifferent. “Your face is covered with spiderwebs.” She would start the conversation with this same remark every day. Then she would cut off her talk right there.

One night, he made it appear that he was asking her casually what she had done during the day. She chuckled and said she had been extremely busy. During the day she had jumped down from the trains at least six times, and this had caused a crack on the sole of her foot. This could be considered a sign of aging. In the early years this used to be such an easy thing. “By the way, I took time to look at our tree,” she said seriously. With pain, he listened to her lies. Surprisingly, he found a side in her temperament that previously was completely unknown to him. It was obvious that she had never left the room. Staying in the stale air had caused purple spots on her face, and her fingers were getting bonier each day. Only her hair remained as thick as before. It could even be considered full of vigor. Those nights when he had his attacks of fever, he loved to press his cheek against this tender and icy cool thing.

During the day he spent most of his time sitting dully with Lao Jiu in a pavilion in the middle of the boulevard. Although Lao Jiu knew his situation perfectly well, he kept silent. Lao Jiu knew exactly what the matter was with him. He would fool around until dusk before going back to that house. He was so afraid that Ru Shu would see through his tricks during the day that he would scrub the soles of his shoes loudly on the palm bark doormat, pretending that he was weary and worn from a long journey.

“So you’re back!” Ru Shu would jump up like a cat, and put her arms around his waist from the back. “I’m simply worn out. I ran a greater distance than a horse could cover today. Are you listening?”

She appeared tiny, fragile, hopelessly dependent, and pitiful. Thinking of Lao Jiu’s facial expression, he couldn’t help shaking his head.

Nobody knows the history of Ru Shu. It seems that she has been living on this piece of land since ancient times. This has left traces of a faint ironic smile in her eyes. Her random, irrelevant talk always makes people uneasy. As a matter of fact, people have neglected her over the long years. When she reached the age that she could understand her place in the world, she started to exploit her ambiguous position and single-mindedly go her own way. It was exactly from that moment that people started to stare at her body with surprise. Nobody knew where she was from nor how she had come to be like this. Much less did people know what kind of person she would become in the future. It was also at that moment that he met her on the street. Probably that was the prime time for Ru Shu because she was swollen with arrogance, charged with aggression, and full of self-indulgence. Or it might be called naivete and childishness, or perhaps treachery and disgracefulness, or still other things.