Can Xue - The Embroidered Shoes

I believe such rubbish was all caused by his thirst for sex. And such desire was totally imaginary. He had never looked for a girl. He just couldn’t, because my generation in this family has no sexual ability. The cause for this was Mother’s sexless reproduction. Mother was a witch, and she could even play such a trick. I can’t help but admire her. This was why she helped so hard to get the detective and me together. She knew the result! Talking about sex, I recalled that old man dead of a stroke (poor man, his death was so unfair — why should he hang himself?) and the rumor. My mother might really have been surprised if I had had some affair with him. That would have been so far beyond her expectations.

The rain always came at dusk. Once the rain started, rustling sounds could be heard from every room in our building. Such minute sounds are mysterious. Taking an umbrella, you might stand on the street, observing the building. You would find every window covered with a black curtain. Some would be shaking because of the scandals inside the rooms. I listened attentively. As soon as I lay down, I found all the windows pressed onto me from all directions. I was totally encircled. The curtains rustled noisily until they broke and fell down. Looking carefully, I found under every curtain a huge mound of liver and a box of toothpicks. There was an addle-headed old man sitting there picking his teeth. Every pick was followed by a “pooh” toward the window.

There was only one exception among the windows. There sat a girl in a flowery skirt. She was cutting her toenails with a big pair of rusty scissors. At every snip she would clench her teeth and then a long piece of nail flew out the window. Raising her head, she turned out to be an old woman with white hair. She flung her snivel at me, then she folded her black feet covered with sagging skin. She yelled at me, “The conflict between us has no end, never!” To my surprise she was none other than my classmate. So I threw down my umbrella and ran back to my room. I can still hear her shouts: “Glass has started exploding!”

“So that’s it.” The detective fell down from the ceiling. He showed me his palms and said in a self-indulgent tone: “Please notice the two suction discs on them. Aren’t they the result of long, hard practice? I heard you arguing with that female thief. I warned you long ago not to intrude on another’s privacy. You are born with such dirty interests. Since fifteen years old, you have…”

“You have estimated correctly that the old man is very much to my taste. Gone are the days when I was happy and relaxed. I suspect that was a murder.” Patting his belly and staring at the suction discs on his hands, I continued: “It’s better for you to be up again. You’ve gained so much experience up there. I respect the strategies you use to deal with spiders. It’s like the wind sweeping the lingering clouds. My brother believes that the thing on the ceiling is a shark with a monkey’s face. Be cautious, he has a gun. Detective is not a role for your temperament. Nobody takes it seriously. Yesterday Mother told me that she remembered the master pedicurist who treated calluses. The guy had a pair of sunglasses. Where is he now? Look, she considered you as a chap treating calluses. What’s the use for you to insist? Nobody believes you.”

A flash of white light could be seen through the crack around the door. The air smelled of the wet rusty scissors. A string of white teeth fell to the ground, and it walked smoothly for a distance.…

Pushing the door open, I stepped into the corridor. In the dim light, I saw pairs of bare feet lined up by the wall. The woman selling arecas was waving to me: “Attention, hey, just look at my cheeks. The areca is expanding inside. My tongue has no room to turn. For more than thirty years, I’ve been to the top of the mountain, where the ground is covered by fluffy dead garden burnet. When the wind blows, colorful little snakes slither out from it. I am creating a world record. I’ll come back to finish the dream with you when I have time.” She entered a room and banged the door behind her.

Mother’s head stretched out from another door. She looked glum and said: “So you want to disturb more? You want more? Just smell, see if pine moths have filled your father’s knapsack? I’ve been suspicious about this for a whole day and night. Yesterday he sneaked back once. I did not really care. He has grown so thin now, he did not really occupy any space, just like a mosquito net full of holes. When he left, he had only one shoe on. In fact why should he walk back and forth, what is he showing off? What? It is horrifying to think of the things that have happened in this corridor. No matter how far you can see, you just don’t see anything, never see anything clearly, isn’t that true?”

“There was a woman selling arecas,” I told her. “I’ve met her twice.”

“Hush, don’t talk nonsense. That was your aunt.” She winked and grinned. “You need to calm down. How can it be that you don’t recognize her? It can’t be more than ten years? She is the same old self, never changes. She stole my lamb jacket when she left. She’s been very greedy ever since her youth.”

Mother’s remark reminded me of my aunt, who used to live with us when she was thirty-five or thirty-six. She was a celestial, who could fly as lightly as a little bird. Her brows were plucked away completely, and her mouth was dyed bloody red. She nailed two big iron hooks in our bedroom, and on the hooks she hung a string, which held up a bed. This was her hammock. At midnight, she would swing in her bed as if it were a real swing. Standing on her bed and letting down her hair, she would utter strange sounds. Eventually she would slide through the window and fall onto the cinder road. As a result, her knees were forever swollen and bruised, and her hobby was hiding in her mosquito net squeezing the pus. To whoever tried to peep in, she would open her net as if nothing had happened and say: “Strolling in moonlight with neck stretching out, isn’t that a spotty duck? There’s also a shortcut that passes the withered rose. That path is a secret.” She finally fled with a horse keeper for a circus. They walked away valiantly and spiritedly, smelling of horse urine.

As soon as they left, mother wailed and whined, calling the man “human-monger, with a hooked knife in his waist. Little sister has bit the hook.” She jabbered on and on with tears in her eyes, but father was very excited. Standing in the middle of the room, he started his lecture. He talked about the beautiful wish, about the rats’ invasion of the grain at our house. When he was talking about his painful itching syndrome, he became nervous. Rubbing his chest, he searched high and low, stepping on mother’s feet.

Later on I heard Mother talking about the affair between father and the aunt. Mother understood them and supported their relationship in secret, though on the surface she pretended that she knew nothing. However, Father disturbed her plot. Nobody knows where he got this disabled man. The two talked in whispers in the cell for a whole afternoon before the business was done. Mother tried very hard to persuade them that I could substitute for the aunt. She said that although I was only in high school, and pretty young, I was very experienced in this. Otherwise, the garbage collector would not have hanged himself. But aunt was only a baby. She trusted people too easily, and she would suffer for that. Mother grabbed me by the chest and shook me, while shouting: “Just think what kind of person he is! Selling to a human-monger. That spider.” For this she had profound hatred toward Father.

So many years have elapsed, and aunty has come back at night. With those mysterious arecas, she appears in the dim moonlight. I can never figure this out. I suspect that she never left. The walking out was only a trick, and the guy who kept horses for the circus was only a lie. All that time, she was hiding at the other end of the corridor, selling her goods to the wandering spirits. Though she was long past her youth, she could, with some fixing up, still appear a gentle and graceful lady. No one can tell about those things, because the corridor is forever hazy and tricky. Ever since I can remember, a damp steam has spread there. You couldn’t see things three steps away, and you couldn’t hear your own footsteps. Very often similar doors cracked open, and a soft shadow floated out. It gave off some muffled dream talk before it disappeared completely. Sometimes, I went outside. It was different from the corridor, though there were also those soft shadows. The wind smelled like a horse’s mane, and the sky was pitch dark. Only those reddish yellow lights peeped out from narrow windows. They looked very irritating. When I stood on the low-lying land, I felt my body turn into a rock. The raindrops pattered on it. My eyes held water dripping from the eaves. A broken gong banged in the wilderness.