The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  “Is this what you were trying to tell me back at your village?”

  She nodded.

  “Why do you need to get mixed up in this? I don’t want you getting caught. What about all the reformers these days?” I didn’t know what the hell I meant by that. Only that I’d read in the news about reformers like Bo Xilai in Chongqing. With capitalism everywhere, the Communist Party of China saw what was happening. Democracy couldn’t be far off.

  “The reformers are more corrupt than CCP. No one will surrender power. No autocrats do. Not in time. This is the male ego. You hold on for life.”

  “What do you do in this party? Are you terrorists?”

  “No. We are for a New Society. Chinese but freethinking individuals. Without individuality there is no State. No government can serve the people through corruption and repression and censorship. No one my age believes in the party anymore but since ’89 everyone is too scared or passive to do anything about it. The party thinks we are pacified with China’s rising wealth and power, but this is small part of China. Almost nobody. We want representation, not fear. This starts with workers. The head of the DRP, Zhang, I met in college. He is a good man. He sends me to your factory to organize—”

  Her voice trailed off as she read the doubt on my face. The blankets felt very hot and oppressive, and I stood up.

  “They think you can help,” she said. I started pacing the room. “I think you can help. When I met you I know there is more. You don’t even like making your father’s shoes. Once I know you I feel this is someone who maybe can understand our side. Someone who wants to make things better. We never had anyone from your side.”

  “My side?”

  “The private sector. A foreigner. Capitalist. Someone inside. If you want you can actually change things. Others will copycat.”

  When she said that, inside, this current of fear jolted through me and kept pulsing slowly like one of those overhead factory lights on the fritz.

  I realized I was still pacing. I picked up her tank top on the chair and without even thinking I threw it to her. And this anguished look came over her face. She put it on, her head lowered, and the room got quiet again.

  “So is that why you’re with me?” I said. “Using me because I’m on the inside? That’s what this is?”

  “Don’t give words I never said.”

  “Because I’m young. I’m a dumb kid to you. Twenty-six.”

  “Do you think this all along? What the fuck? I don’t care numbers. Do you? What if we switched? Who cares? I don’t have online dating account saying I want this size and shape and hair. I want a person. You.”

  She shook her head. Took a deep breath.

  “I like your age,” she continued, softer. “Okay? I like it. You are exotic.”

  “I’m exotic?”

  “Strong arms. Hands. Wide chest, shoulders. I like this. Good?” She threw her hands up. “Why do I have to explain what I like?”

  “Because,” I said. “Look. I haven’t seen as much as you. You’ve done a lot of shit. You know a lot. And then there’s me. I feel sometimes like some fucking naive kid.”

  “Because your father,” she said.

  “Sure. Maybe. But you drop all of this and I worry. I can worry, you know. That this is some long con. You’re using me to help your cause. That’s what this all is.”

  It was all fucking muddled in my head. Ivy whipped off the comforter and stretched her legs, long and smooth, varnished by the syrupy sodium lights off the street and this tripped my brain, the sudden flash of how she’d sit on a beach, whether she’d dig her feet into the sand or lock her insteps together, and it was such a dumb and irrelevant thought, like any of that mattered. Her eyes were watery now and I couldn’t read her next move. Maybe she was going to just get up and walk out. Or say something. Explain. I didn’t know. You can’t ever know what’s going on inside a person.

  “Alex,” she said, her voice bubbling. “That is not why. Not how I feel about you. If anything this, us, got in the way of everything. My goal is the same if I never met you. But I did. This is never a plan. You have to believe that. It kills me if you think bad of me. Come to Beijing, please. I want you to know everything about me. I never said that to someone before. No secrets. If you don’t want to attend the party meeting, you don’t have to. You don’t. Really.”

  She shooed me away with both hands, like I was supposed to leave my own hotel room.

  I was going around fast in circles in the room and Ivy said, “Are you okay?” holding the sheets in a fist by her chest. A slight tremble in her voice. When I didn’t answer she dropped her chin.

  I believed her that this wasn’t some furtive plan all along. That was way too speculative. And maybe Ivy was right, that I could help. Maybe she was right when she said there was a little Trotsky in my blood. You can’t fight blood.

  So maybe I wasn’t going to storm The Great Hall of the People on horseback with a gold saber and a garrison’s cap, but what if I could help just a little? Get everything aboveboard. No more withholding hukous or IDs. Small pay raises. Little things without sacrificing profit.

  Without realizing it, I was already moving to the bed without any articulate thought formed, the only sure thing I knew was that I didn’t want to be Dad’s flunky, the eternal Bagel-boy.

  I sat beside Ivy on the bed. “When’s the train leave?”

  She smiled and lowered her forehead to my shoulder. I put my arm around her.

  “Only sixteen hours from here on the T98.”

  “First we have to bring Ruxi home,” I said. “Hongjin will help. I know he will. He’ll do anything for a day off. Then we can keep going to Beijing.”

  * * *

  A fitful night of sleep. Ivy burrowed into me and I burrowed into her and it was like we couldn’t get close enough and I only hoped it was really me Ivy desired from someplace deep in herself and not just an idea in her head.

  In the midst of these thoughts, it hit me that Ivy wasn’t even the name her family called her. It was a made-up name. If I was smarter I would’ve put it together earlier, the fact that she was using a fake ID, because the Party watched her. No way she would roll into our factory with her real ID. The Party knew everything. So she was working on forged or stolen papers and this should’ve pissed me off but for some reason it didn’t.

  It was just a name. Trotsky was Bronstein. So what? Didn’t actually matter any more than if water disappeared or evaporated. I squeezed Ivy close. She turned her back to me and rubbed her cold feet against my shins. She pulled my arm over her chest and I cupped her right breast and then it struck me that I might actually love the girl.

  8

  TWO DAYS LATER, on Friday morning, I was in the back of Hongjin’s Jetta with Ivy riding shotgun and Ruxi thawing in the trunk. Hongjin was telling me about how he souped up the car with suspensions and hydraulics, shit I didn’t know anything about but I feigned comprehension. I was right thinking he’d jump at a day off.

  As we drove north, Ivy started telling this story about how back in the day when someone died far from home, people used to walk the body back to his village. This was a real job, shitty but real, walking the dead. Corpse walkers they were called.

  “You remember,” she said, “the roads were no good and there weren’t cars I don’t think. Were there cars?”

  “How the fuck would I know?” Hongjin said.

  Ivy ignored this and said that if the body never came home it was a serious dishonor and failure. The ghost of the dead person would haunt them. It would wander forever. So the family paid guys to walk the corpse covered in a blanket for hundreds of miles sometimes but only certain places would let corpse walkers actually sleep in town. She didn’t know why.

  Hongjin said, “Because they were carrying around a dead body. By the way, Alex, no one believes this shit anymore. This is old thinking.”<
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  Every now and then when the car hit a stitch in the highway we heard Ruxi knocking around in the trunk and Hongjin turned the music up.

  Then they started arguing about all the dying Chinese traditions and that made me think of home, which always made me sleepy and I couldn’t fight it anymore.

  But I didn’t have a dream really. What settled in me was a memory of me and my sister sneaking to the front door with a screwdriver and taking off the mezuzah, the little scroll that every Jew has nailed to the doorpost to let the world know they’re special. We wanted, or at least I wanted, a closer look. Everyone had one but no one ever opened it. It was all a big secret. So I carried it, warm in my fist—it was heavy bronze with a glass face—down into the basement and I put it down on the cement floor and gave my sister a socket wrench off the workbench.

  She insisted she put a handkerchief under it.

  “It’s not alive,” I told her but I wasn’t so sure. Anyway, I got the handkerchief and folded it nice under the mezuzah for her, and I said now do it.

  “You sure we won’t go to hell?” she asked.

  “We don’t even believe in hell. Go.”

  She lifted the wrench over her head and I held my breath, half fearing a swarm of locusts to burst through the hopper window. The glass smashed but that’s all. No locusts. No hail.

  “Now what, dickweed?” my sister said. And I didn’t know the now what.

  I think I vaguely knew it was my grandfather’s and that he probably smuggled it across the Atlantic in his underwear, at least that’s how my mother acted when she found out we broke it, but I just wanted to know the secret. What treasure lay hiding in the sacred case that we all hung on our doorposts?

  My sister and I unrolled the scroll inside—very old, yellow vellum, and it was just miniature Hebrew cursive, the same stuff Mom was trying to write. I don’t know what words could be so important, but they were written in a beautiful hand, black ink, almost microscopically, like you picture a guy in prison writes his life story on a single sheet of toilet paper. Like you needed one of the secret decoder rings from my cereal box to read this thing.

  All I remember next was sitting in that tall yellow corduroy chair in the corner of their bedroom and watching her cry. My mother. Holding the busted case and the scroll, saying faintly, “Shema,” which means “hear” in Hebrew. That’s what was written on the scroll I realized after she’d said it a dozen times. It’s a long prayer. Probably a million books have been written on it, and I’m sure it’s about God or witnessing or whatever, but all I knew was the first word. Hear.

  And right before my mother slapped me I woke up with this upswell in my chest, all unsettled, and we were rushing alongside a stand of pine trees and old broken-down watchtowers, way out in the country, and Hongjin said, “You sleep very good. We are almost there. Probably one kilometer—”

  “Stop the car,” I said suddenly, startling Hongjin, who swerved the wheel hard to the right and skittered in a cloud of dust.

  “Fuck, man,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” Ivy said.

  “We’ll walk her,” I said, almost hushed. This feeling had come over me with something like religious purpose. I trusted the impulse only because it came out of my throat before I knew what happened. Like I’d woken up with this weight pressing down on me, pressing on my face and chest, and the only way to get it off was to do this.

  “We’re going to walk Ruxi,” I said to Ivy. “Me and you. Like you said before. The walkers. They did that, right? You weren’t making it up.”

  “Oh fuck, man,” Hongjin said. “I told you, no one believes anymore.”

  I told him to follow us in the car and then I opened the door and got out. Before me in the evening light were settlements of low cheap houses with red dragon scale roofs. The trunk was wet where Ruxi had defrosted during the ride. I bent my knees and hoisted her out of the car and Ivy helped me stand her up between us. I lifted her arm but she was real stiff.

  “I could just carry her over my shoulder,” I said.

  “No, it has to look like she’s walking,” Ivy said.

  So I pulled her arm up around my shoulder and I snaked my hand around her waist.

  “We need a blanket over her,” Ivy said, “to do it right.”

  I draped the leather hide over Ruxi’s head and it still had that rich earthy tanning smell. You couldn’t see anything but her sandaled feet and ankles. I reached back around her waist and we started to walk. It was hard to get the timing. We had to sort of sway from side to side to simulate her feet moving.

  We wound past a row of houses with brick walls, lurching along. And maybe I was doing all this for Ivy. Or to prove something to myself. I knew I had my reasons even if I couldn’t fully make sense of them.

  When we were about a half mile away, the kids from the edge of the village came running out. Some of them ran straight to Hongjin’s souped-up car but others, two or three, fell in step with me and Ivy, asking questions, tugging on Ivy’s arm.

  “They ask what we are doing,” Ivy said. “Bringing her home, I say.”

  The kids were talking fast.

  Ivy said, “They ask why a blanket over her? Does she have a face? I say, ‘Ask your mothers.’”

  We drew a little group. Maybe five or six children walking with us. A boy dribbling a basketball through his legs. Another pushing along his bike. Two girls hand in hand.

  We passed by a crumbling shadow wall out in front of a broken-down stone and brick house on the outskirts of the village. Big banyan trees grew wild with tendrils dangling down all over the place. The air smelled like burning firewood.

  An older woman hooked her finger into one of the boys’ collars and pulled him back. She spoke in a cold, croaky voice to Ivy and threw me a look that made me shrivel.

  “She wants to know who you are,” Ivy said.

  “Tell her it was my fault,” I said.

  “No,” Ivy said. “They won’t forgive you.”

  She spoke to the woman in Chinese and the woman nodded and smiled at me.

  Ivy said, “I tell her you are a friend. You know Ruxi belongs here.”

  The old woman’s face softened up.

  As we kept walking, more people came out, word going around about what was happening.

  Ruxi started slipping down, and we stopped to readjust. I dug my left hip into her side to help prop her up. As we began moving again I started to think about who she was. I remembered her Baby Love T-shirt. I wondered if a boyfriend had given it to her. If she’d ever been in love.

  In the half-light off to the elbow of the road, I saw a woman sitting on a lashed bundle of bamboo and smoking. She nodded at me. Not a smile or anything but enough to say I wasn’t a stranger any longer. With each step we took together as a group I felt more sure of it. Because I helped bring their daughter home to the place she belonged.

  And when I focused on each step I wound up getting our feet mixed, the kids’ next to me, and the ones in front of me, all the thong sandals and sneakers; you couldn’t tell what belonged to whom. It all got mixed up in my head, where you started or ended.

  We wove through the alleys of the village, and I kept seeing the same graffiti—a Chinese character circled and slashed—spray-painted on every house.

  And then a kid came running up and he froze when he saw Ruxi’s white braided sandals, and that was how I knew he was her little brother, because he recognized right away his big sister’s shoes, like shoes somehow have a way of making themselves heard.

  He knew these sandals in his bones. His nose started trickling, then he started scratching at this one spot on his bare arm, anguish on his face, the kind of pain that I hadn’t seen on too many faces.

  Out of one of the houses came her mother, you could just tell because of how achingly slow she walked toward us, how everyone else watched her. The mother’s
face was creased like C-grade leather, where the cows have all scratched themselves on barbed wire. Ivy spoke to her in Mandarin and I had no idea what was going on but it was pretty clear that Ivy was explaining things, and then the mother hugged Ivy and before I knew it her arms were around me too, and she smelled like copper and rice vinegar and she looked me in the eye and said something in Chinese that I didn’t know, and just as suddenly we were surrounded by people from the village pushing me through the latticed doors of Ruxi’s house.

  A large paddle fan spun above an old woman at the center table with gray-and-silver hair. I looked down at her red shoes with embroidered peonies done in gold silk thread. The toe came to an odd sharp point, and I saw the binding cloth peeking out over the vamp. She had bound feet. Golden lotuses. Must be almost a hundred years old. One of the last of her kind. The wooden soles were flat, concealing her steep cracked arches, her toes folded down, squeezed and pointed like a spade head. She caught me staring so I turned away.

  The family filed into the house followed by Ivy and Hongjin. The mother brought us soup—with soybean, sweet potato, carrots, in a pork broth. We ate sitting on low benches and drank hot tea. For a long time everyone talked in Chinese and I had no idea what was going on except the ancient grandmother kept nudging a bowl of fuzzy, yellow-skinned wampees toward me until I popped one in my mouth. An old man in the corner shaving palm fronds with a dull fishing knife, silent this whole time, finally finished his work, rose slowly with tears in his eyes, and before walking out of the house, he said, according to Hongjin, he was going outside to hang himself.

  The young brother stared at me curious and wide-eyed from behind the door. There was an old framed poster of Mao on the mud wall. A statue of Guanyin, goddess of mercy. I wanted out of there badly. The air was stagnant, no breeze. And for some reason it all made me angry. I thought there’d be something romantic about villages like this, like if you didn’t have a flat-screen TV you were living some pure ascetic life, but no, it was just miserably poor and forgotten and despairing. There was no mercy here. Everyone was over sixty or under ten and the rest had deserted. It wouldn’t do anymore to be farmers. You had to be a giant onstage.