Can Xue - The Embroidered Shoes

The ending came half a year later. In a small, lonely hut next to the highway, the old man died in his bed. People did not discover the body until three days later. Since nobody could determine the cause of death, it was recorded as a natural death due to old age. Only the son-in-law and the two grandsons took part in the old man’s funeral service.

That night, my friend came to my house without invitation. She looked very tired and discouraged. She had lost all her former vitality. Shading the lamplight from her face with a palm, she smiled wickedly and spoke in a low voice:

“So that man has become the first victim. You’ve seen it. Who will be next? At midnight when the patrol passes the street, you can stick your head out of your fifth-story window and see. A soul-stirring murder is being brewed next to the fountain near the front gate of the park. A human figure will jump over the locked iron gate. The edge of a knife will shine like a flash of lightning, and he will drop to the ground with hardly a sound. The hunter will have been waiting at the predetermined place. He will raise his knife without even checking beforehand. When he slashes down, his hand doesn’t feel anything. He pauses only for slashing, and the pause is perfunctory. A wail similar to that of a dying pig will last for only half a second. A meteor will fall in the cold, pitch-dark night. The frozen surface of the water in the fountain will be broken by the heavy corpse. The illness I suffer from is homicidal mania.”

She felt frightened and asked me time and again if I had locked the door. She even ran to the door to check herself. She hid herself in my house for three days, shivering all over, until her husband came to take her away by force.

After that, nothing much changed in her. I often met her in the streets on her way to the vegetable market. Holding her basket, she appeared calm. But in her pupils, I could see a lingering trace of hesitation. She became silent. When I talked, she would listen quietly with apparent attention. Yet I knew that she did not hear anything.

One day, when I was about to leave her after saying hello, she grabbed me and uttered clearly, one word at a time, “He has been admitted to the hospital.”

“Who?”

“Who else? He! My husband! He’s finished! I used the same knife as before. You’ll know it if you go and look. The blood from the burst vessels in his brain will kill him. Who’ll be next?”

So I went to the hospital. Her husband was in a coma. The patient in the next bed told me that X rays showed his stomach to be full of extremely fine steel needles, about an inch in length. The strange thing was that there was no bleeding. The doctors planned to perform a major operation on him that afternoon.

However, this husband recovered miraculously. The next day he left the hospital, and I saw him sitting at home as if nothing had happened. “They made a mistake,” he apologized to me with a smile. “It was nothing but a flu.”

When I met her again, the first thing she mentioned was my poking my nose into her business by going to the hospital. Then she said that since I was so nosy, our friendship had to stop. She didn’t like for others to interfere in her private business. As a patient, she had the right to do something strange. She was sneering as she spoke, her facial expression very determined.

Year after year, we keep bumping into each other. But she never casts even a sidelong glance, as if I no longer exist. When I observe her in secret, I find her facial expression as calm as before, and her steps are very smooth. Indeed, in such a noisy city as ours, she doesn’t appear conspicuous at all.

One ought not close one’s eyes to the awkward way the tender filament of a body stretches from its thin shell to pull itself across the crushed stones and rubble. By some distant predetermination the tomato-colored sunlight has been rendered inconsequential to it. The forest is dense and humid. Carnivorous mosquitoes breed batch after batch at the bottom of the well. Although heaven and earth equal it in their nakedness, they do not have its delicate shell. After crawling, it rests awhile, letting its soft body huddle inside, gathering itself for yet another furtive effort.

“Floating lotus, floating lotus…” These words sound clearly and pleasantly, making people forget the forest as sharp as knives and the pain as keen as if the blades were cutting through their skin.

“Can that which happens on Wednesday recur in a Sunday’s nap?”

When time crawls like this, rough scales encrust its antennae. It’s not that it prefers monotony, but that it is the servant of the transparent fluid recirculating through its body.

In fact, it, too, was born in the tomato-colored sunlight. The memory of that time has been so obscured as to make it impossible for any trace to remain. But one day when a bird chirped, it was startled for a long moment. It could see the mosquitoes doing their usual mad dance along the rim of the well, those old fancy dances that it had grown weary of watching.

A man and a woman debate above it. He claims it can be destroyed simply by spitting on it. She doesn’t believe him. Both of them glare at it.

Now it is in an antique hut, where two middle-aged men sit back to back. Whenever one of them speaks, the resonance in his chest reverberates in the chest of the other, making his lips move involuntarily. In general, each seems to speak independently, yet each hopes that the other will talk as much as possible so that he himself can go on endlessly also.

A: Shouldn’t it be thought a marvel to change kapok into a golden necklace? This is a metaphor for wealth often used in the past.

B: I’ve been feeling afraid of losing something. It could be my urban petit bourgeois consciousness that drives me to constant pursuit. Even though I’m not in good health, I am an essentially solid sort of person.

A: It’s not right to have a goal. Only when you advance counter to it can you possibly return home in one morning.

B: Suppose we try being silent. I think you can feel the resonance all the same. I’ve already heard your resonance.

One man begins to fidget. At this instant, we can hear a variety of drumming sounds echo in the chests of both. The second man starts to thrash about until both of them are exhausted, hot sweat streaming down their heads. Then they both stop simultaneously and sit down back to back again on a bench.

Time flies. A whole season has passed. Yellow leaves drop onto the windowsill, three altogether, arranged neatly.

“There’s no real reason for us to pose this way against each other, like that pet with the antennae. It is driven by a constant desire to find a piece of smooth, muddy ground covered with liver moss. Or at least other people see this as its desire. But in reality, what is the essential motive? What on earth is essential? Why should things be one way rather than another? The existent is manifold. For instance, against the reddish-orange sunlight the forest rises sharp as a blade. We are forever in pursuit of something, but in reality this is futile.

In the rubble outside the hut an old rooster pecks at it attentively. The rooster appears extremely anxious. It pecks while also digging with its claw, rolling the little lump back and forth and refusing to give up. From an outsider’s point of view, this is a soul-stirring spectacle. One can sense that the little thing is not nervous. It simply shrinks stubbornly into its thin, tough shell in a gesture of resignation to its fate. This goes on for half an hour. Then the rooster lifts its head and crows toward the heavens and forgets about the little lump beneath its body.

There was a period when deranged winds swept back and forth from every direction and the dried-up land opened in cracks. Many people pondered this. They thought and thought. Raising their proud heads, their saddened and indignant expressions could be perceived.