Village of Stone

by Xiaolu Guo

  Hoping to find an even more comfortable house for myself, I began to crawl across the beach towards the larger shell. But as I drew closer, I noticed that the larger shell was not in fact a shell at all, but a hand, a hand with a large black birthmark. It was the mute’s hand! Oh god, did that mean that the mute was here? But he never came out onto the beach. What was he doing here? The mute began to walk towards me very slowly. I watched his feet move closer and closer, then come to a stop right next to me. He kicked me with his toe, but I did not even bother to curl back up into my shell because I didn’t think he would be able to recognise me. He stood there for a long while, gazing at me suspiciously. Oh no, had he recognised me? No, no … he couldn’t have. I’m not Little Dog, I’m not Coral, I’m a hermit crab. See? I’m just a little hermit crab. I tried to curl my head and body back inside my shell, but something was wrong. Oh god, what was happening to me? My shell seemed to have cracked. It was him, he, he … stepped on my shell and broke it and now my house had collapsed and I had nowhere else to live. I found myself being thrown into a damp, dark place, but it wasn’t a shell at all, no, it felt more like a hole in the ground …

  I have no idea how much time passed, but one day the mute forgot to retie my hands after he had fed me. Later, I heard a glass bottle crashing to the floor and, before long, the sound of snoring and a door banging open in the wind. I realised that the mute must be drunk. That was the day I made my escape from his house. I escaped with only my bloodstains, my bruises and my scars.

  Once more I found myself on the cobbled streets of the Village of Stone, once more I saw the tides surging back and forth along the coast. The landscape was the same, but I was a stranger to this place. I slowly walked the length of Pirate’s Alley. The alley was so narrow that only a thin ribbon of sky remained visible overhead. As I walked, I gradually began to regain my memory, slowly began to recognise this place, this familiar stretch of sea. I wondered whether the sea still recognised me.

  Do you remember me, sea, do you remember this barefoot seven-year-old girl? Will you take me back, bruises and all, will you accept this little girl who has crawled out of a hole in the ground? If you will still have me, if you will let me walk silently along your shores and look upon you as I once did, if you will let me watch your sunrises and sunsets, see the tangled fishing nets and inky seaweed along your shores, I promise never to leave you again, though I grow as old as my grandmother, though my back grow bent with age.

  Can you hear me, sea, tides, reefs along the shore, sand crabs crawling on the beach, can you hear what I’m saying to you? I’m begging you to listen, because besides you, there is not a single person in this world I can talk to. There is no one else I can tell my story to, not even my grandmother. All I want is to be with you, just sea and tides, no pain, no death, just you, for ever and ever and ever …

  10

  WHENEVER RED AND I are feeling unhappy or have just had a fight, we go to the zoo to gaze at animals even more miserable than ourselves.

  Red and I like to vary the times we visit the zoo. Morning, noon, late afternoon and evening, winter, spring, summer and autumn, they all provide different opportunities for watching those sad animals in their cages. We never pay for tickets because we don’t consider ourselves to be tourists; we are simply two people who have just had a fight. Sometimes we slip into the small alley hidden between the zoo and the Purple Bamboo Park and clamber over a series of small hills, unknown to most people, and down a slope that leads directly to the zoo’s tiger enclosure. Sometimes we climb over the chain link fence of the Russian restaurant beside the zoo.

  Every time we visit the zoo after one of our fights, we notice that the animals look even lonelier than they did the last time. It is more than loneliness; the animals have no purpose in life, nothing at all to do with their time. As soon as they are hungry, their keepers toss chunks of raw meat or pre-prepared foodstuffs into their cages. The keepers seem to think that letting wild animals go hungry is dangerous, particularly when there are small children about, so the animals have grown used to relying on handouts from humans. They have completely forgotten that their ancestors were once hunters, roaming free. Now they live in surroundings designed for them by human beings, and never have to fend for themselves. In hot weather or in cold, their keepers are always there to adjust the temperature to a more comfortable setting. It is a world in which there is no competition and no survival of the fittest, a world in which every animal seems to be playing the part, albeit rather grudgingly, of a ‘kept’ plaything, a stuffed animal to be petted and fed and put on display. And though they are surrounded by an elaborately artificial nature – chlorine-scented rivers and lakes, outcroppings of rocks and exotic trees transported from afar – the animals seem to have no idea what to do with their time. They stay within the confines of their respective, differently sized cages. Now and then one of the animals utters a plaintive roar, though at other times they cannot even be bothered to muster a growl. They simply gaze with tired eyes at the crowds of curious human onlookers who surround them.

  Every time Red and I visit these animals, creatures even more pitiful than ourselves, we resolve not to fight again. Let’s try to get along, we say to each other. Let’s just try to get along. At least we do not have to five every day of our lives surrounded by metal bars.

  Sometimes, at the weekend, when I am not working or when we are so bored that we cannot even be bothered to fight, Red and I spend all day sitting on one of the zoo’s stone benches, drinking soda pop and watching the animals. We have discovered that the animals – elephants, giraffes, peacocks, dolphins, even squirrels – appear different, depending on the time of day and time of year. For example, on summer days when the animals are roasting like meat buns in a bamboo steamer, the zoo is completely silent. It is a silence that seems to conceal some murderous intent. The animals are listless and tired, the sunlight blinding, the heat oppressive. The tigers stay hidden in their dens and the lions skulk beneath outcroppings of rocks. Now and then a throaty growl echoes from the cool shade of their caves. The monkeys that can usually be seen climbing back and forth between the trees are deceptively calm on days like this; they perch like birds among the thick foliage. The leopards, famed for their speed and usually so alert, hang from the boughs of trees like shrivelled fruit. When they open their mouths to roar, they end up sounding like old men coughing up phlegm. It is as if the oppressive heat afflicts every animal in the zoo with a bad case of senile dementia. But on autumn mornings, the zoo seems to regain its spirit and sense of vitality. Animal voices rise and fall, as if the sound were a baton being passed from one cage to the next in some zoo-wide relay race. It begins with the tigers, pacing proudly through their dens. When the tigers finish it is the lions’ turn. Their roaring infects the water buffalo and then the toads, so that soon the entire pond is seething with sound and activity. Even the peacocks in their grove respond by prancing about and unfurling their colourful plumage. Here in the zoo, in the midst of all this animal activity, Red and I finally realise our true identities. We are human beings, after all. Human beings in a zoo, that is.

  And yet we are still alone, left with nothing but our own shadows. Of all the creatures in the zoo, we are the frailest.

  It is a shame that the zoo has none of the sea animals or fish that I knew from the Village of Stone. There are none of the familiar starfish, eels, sharks, sea pricks or little shellfish that we called ‘Buddha Hands’ because they looked like the folded hands of a praying Buddha. The zoo holds no ocean, no waves, no danger.

  Today, as Red and I stand by the monkey enclosure watching a mother monkey grooming her baby, I start to think about starfish. I love starfish, particularly the large, brilliantly coloured reddish-orange starfish that we had in the Village of Stone. At each low tide, starfish would appear on the beach, blossoming here and there like so many tiny flowers. Perhaps what I like most about the starfish is that, beneath its quiet, elegant exterior, it is in fact a deadly killer. The starf
ish is the ultimate beautiful con man. It is hard to imagine that such an adorable creature could be capable of stalking and devouring much larger prey, swallowing them whole, gulping down legions of clams, soft-bodied shellfish and small fish. A starfish will even eat its own young, not to mention its parents, grandparents and other more senior members of the family, swallowing them into its gaping, star-shaped maw. Starfish are creatures completely devoid of emotion; their only instinct is to feed on other life forms, to swallow anything and everything. Starfish have no loyalty; they recognise neither kith nor kin, and so possess exactly the sort of thick-skinned character to which I, Coral Jiang, have always aspired. From the day that my grandfather nicknamed me ‘Little Dog’, I think that it has always been my dream to be like one of those reddish-orange starfish, to possess no feelings, no memory and no pain. Even if I were to feel pain, as a starfish, I would at least be able to devour my own kind.

  I understand starfish instinctively, in the same way that I understand the Village of Stone.

  Starfish are eternally whole. Though they may lose a limb, they are echinoderms and have great regenerative powers. If any of their five limbs is severed, they have the means to grow a new one, unlike human beings for whom the loss of an arm or a leg spells permanent disability and societal discrimination. The starfish can replace the organs within a limb, and thus create a new, working limb. When a fish or shark bites into a starfish, the threatened limb simply detaches, allowing the starfish to leave the hungry predator with one of its tiny legs and make its escape with the other four intact. Until its death, a starfish always preserves its dignity and grace. How much better it would be if human beings could be more like starfish.

  I am so immersed in my own idle thoughts that I scarcely notice Red talking to me.

  ‘We should get a dog. What do you think?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘What are you afraid of? It’s not as if we’re talking about having a child.’

  ‘It’s still a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Trouble is what life is all about!’

  I shake my head again.

  ‘If we had a dog, Coral, you wouldn’t be lonely.’

  ‘Our flat is too small for a dog.’

  ‘That’s true. What if we get a cat instead?’ Red suggests. ‘Cats don’t need as much room.’

  ‘No, that’s no good either. Cats have too much yin, too much dark matter and negative energy. It would be like having another woman around.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? You’d have another woman around the house to keep you company.’

  ‘Why do we have to get a pet? I don’t feel like looking after anything right now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s too much trouble.’

  ‘Pets are not just about trouble. A pet can play with you, too.’

  ‘You mean I’d have to play with it.’

  We are silent for a moment.

  ‘Red, I don’t want a pet.’

  ‘That’s because you only love yourself.’

  ‘I love you, too.’

  I sound so hesitant. I can hear it as soon as the words are out of my mouth, and it makes me wish I hadn’t said anything at all.

  ‘You don’t understand what love is.’ I hear the disappointment and loss in Red’s voice.

  The mother monkey and her baby have stopped swinging through the trees and are nestled in the fork of one of the branches. The mother monkey picks the lice from her baby’s fur and, with one hairy paw, pops them into her mouth. I wonder: Is this love, or simple hunger?

  ‘You say you love me, but I don’t feel it.’

  As he speaks, Red gazes at the two monkeys. The wind ruffles the leaves of the tree. The monkeys rouse themselves from their perch, swing through the branches of the trees and disappear from sight.

  11

  IN THE DAYS I had disappeared into the mute’s house, my grandmother’s hair had gone completely white.

  Her hair had always been sprinkled with white, and she wore it in a coil secured with a silver hairpin. But by the time I escaped from the mute’s house and returned to my grandmother’s home, it had turned as white as snow. She looked like an old madwoman.

  She said she searched everywhere for me.

  She said she thought that I must have been swept away by the Sea Demon.

  But the Sea Demon never took children with nicknames like Dog. The Sea Demon didn’t want children like me, children cursed by fate.

  She said she thought I had disappeared like my father, fated never to return.

  She said she thought my grandfather, now an angry ghost, had spirited me away to join him in the underworld, depriving her of her one and only hope.

  She said she thought that I must have committed some offence in a previous life, some wrongdoing that I was being punished for in this life.

  When she laid eyes on me again, all she could do was to repeat, ‘So the Sea Demon didn’t want you … the Sea Demon didn’t want you after all …’

  It was as if I had become a mute myself. I could say nothing, for I knew that the moment I opened my mouth, I would be devoured by shame. All I could do was hug my grandmother tightly and cry. My grandmother cried with me. Her body felt so frail and emaciated, so terribly small.

  I believe in retribution. The Village of Stone taught me that retribution awaits us all. I would have my retribution sooner than expected. The mute would die.

  He died that same year, during the most destructive typhoon to hit the Village of Stone in decades.

  The typhoon tore the roof from his house, causing the entire structure to come tumbling down. He and his elderly parents died a horrible death, crushed beneath an avalanche of ceramic roof tiles. The same typhoon caused some of the other houses along the shore to collapse as well, killing several other villagers. After the typhoon had passed, dozens of neighbours helped to dig the bodies from beneath the collapsed beams. After a full day of digging, they had pulled five or six bodies from the rubble.

  The bodies were the main topic of dinner table conversation in the village for several days afterwards. After the typhoon season ended, however, the villagers never brought the subject up again.

  And so it was that the death of the mute left no real lasting impression on the Village of Stone.

  Each time I passed the alley where the mute had lived, I would stop and stare at the piles of rocks and baked clay tiles still littering the ground where his house had stood. I felt dazed, unsure what to do or which way to turn. The man whose death I had desired so long had, one day, simply been buried under a pile of debris. I was free to walk along the beach again, free to wander up and down the length of Pirate’s Alley. Never again would anyone follow, threaten or coerce me. Yet suddenly I found myself with no idea where to go or what to do. I spent my days accompanying my grandmother to the Temple of the Sea Goddess on the mountaintop, where I wandered around, watching my grandmother burn incense and recite her sutras for hours on end. Her monotonous chanting, in time to the beating of the wooden fish drums, reverberated through the temple. Life seemed so terribly lonely, like a single blade of yellowed grass growing on the dry, barren mountaintop of the Village of Stone.

  12

  BEIJING CONTINUES RUMBLING along. With each new day, the city seethes. As the scaffolding of newly constructed skyscrapers rises ever upward, well into the path of low-flying aircraft, Red and I remain huddled here on the ground floor.

  If there is any cause for celebration amidst all this, it is that our rent, at least, has not been raised.

  A new tenant is moving into Number 205, the flat directly above ours.

  For the past few days, we have listened to a steady stream of things being removed from Number 205, major items such as refrigerators, washing machines and large wardrobes scraping loudly across the floor. Number 205 must be a real treasure trove, for the removal has been going on for three full days. We have had to turn our television set up to the highest volume just to drown out the clamour. O
ur television now squawks from morning until night, giving us a steady diet of China Central Television – early morning newscasts, English tutorials, Beijing Opera, Chinese cooking shows, programmes on artificial insemination, talk shows, assertiveness courses for modern women, live news coverage and late night weather reports.

  Red, upon returning home from buying some frozen dumplings, informs me of the latest development: the tenant from 205 has finally finished moving things out and now the new tenant has arrived. He excitedly describes the scene outside. ‘It’s a woman with bleached blonde hair, I mean really, really platinum blonde hair, with big permanent waves. She’s wearing one of those tight leopard-print dresses, you know the kind I mean, very low-cut. Judging from her furniture, she must have loads of money. She’s got a red leather sofa – at least I think it’s real leather – and a big flat-screen television set, at least twice the size of ours. The old woman who operates the lift kept looking the blonde up and down, like she was sizing her up or something. Then the old lady told her that she couldn’t allow her to tie up the lift moving her furniture, so she had to use the stairs instead. But the men from the moving company said that they preferred using the stairs anyway because it was less trouble …’

  Red talks much the way a sailor, away at sea for five long months, might describe the sudden appearance of a naked blonde mermaid in the middle of the ocean.