by Can Xue
I’d hidden a hammer at the corner of the house. When all were in their hiding places and everything had quieted down, I felt my way to the window by the dim light from the street. Opening the window, I spat ferociously into the darkness. I saw my sputum flash in a ray of light, until my mouth became numb. My hammer clanged against the brick wall and made a dull, muffled echo. A light from some house flashed once. Who couldn’t hear such deafening noise? Or could it be that my hand could never produce real sound? I hammered the whole night through, but in vain. In the morning I hid the hammer away in shame. My body ached all over. My third sister walked out of her bedroom, yawning. Her mouth smelled, She glared at me sneeringly, shrugged, and spat on the floor.
“Where has Mother gone?” I asked her with a straight face, wondering where she had emerged from.
My third sister jumped up with a scream in the middle of the room: “Stop your dirty tricks! You’re an odd one to put on the face of savior. It’s disgusting! You’re the one who’s sick! And you mistake me as the one! Who’s not clear about such things? In this corridor of ours, this disastrous passage, such soul-stirring changes are taking place, don’t you feel it? We’d be overjoyed if you left us! Yet you never leave; you’re stuck here…”
It was obvious that Mother had disappeared. Why should they remain so straight-faced and deny it? A living being should be seen and touched, yet mother could be neither of these. But whenever I raised the issue, they blew up. Their temper was definitely getting worse.
When I stepped into the kitchen, a large black figure emerged from the cistern. The soaking creature howled at me, “Look out!” It turned out to be the fiancé. How could he hide in the cistern? And what a coincidence that he rose up to threaten me just at the moment when I entered the kitchen. There must have been some ulterior motive there. “I’m a doctor.” Dripping wet, he stood erect and continued. At the same time, he kept poking my cheeks with his wet finger: “Your whole family has that complicated syndrome. Without my care, God knows what misery you would be living in. People in dire straits all want to save face, and they pretend that nothing has happened. When I was living above you, I could hear your third sister hit her head against the bed frame in pain. The reason I stamped on the floor so hard was to reduce her pain, in fear that she might run upstairs and have a fit. You’re the sickest of all your family. I’ve been watching your behavior all the time. I had been hidden in the water for more than two hours when you entered the kitchen. I’m shivering with cold.” His eyes grew dim, and he started sneezing, one after another, until my third sister rushed in and carried him off like a gust of wind blowing away a fallen leaf.
Father had been spreading the rumor that he left home because of unbearable oppression. He also said he had been living on fish and shrimp, but it wasn’t true, because he sneaked back home to steal food. It wasn’t even discreet stealing but brazen robbery. Though at every theft, they all pretended not to notice. They played their roles so well that I was tempted to think they had trouble with their eyesight. Maybe they were able not to see something—for instance, father pilfering food—if they didn’t want to see it. On the other hand, they could always see something, for instance, our disappeared mother, if they wanted to see it. Therefore, they discriminated against people with eyes like mine. Sunglasses once commented about me, “It’s horrifying for a person to develop such an unfortunate temperament as his.”
For several days, I’d felt terribly dizzy. I dared not look at people, or even look out the window. Wrapping my head in a cotton-padded quilt, I had lain in bed for three days and three nights. The fourth day, I supported myself by leaning against the wall and moved to the door muddleheadedly. I stood there clutching the doorframe. In the wind, everything was tilted and had several silhouettes. It was impossible to see anything clearly. Under that dead tree sat my mother. She had her nylons peeled down and was scratching her swollen feet. Because of the wind, her white hair stood toward the sky. She looked like a primitive figure. “Mo-ma!” I called out in a funny way. She turned her head toward me. I saw an unfamiliar, vague face. This was a young woman. “Your illness is serious. You’ve had that disease for a long time. It started from inside, and the hope for recovery is slim. You should keep this fact covered up.” She made a resolute gesture with a sneer.
My mouth felt very heavy, and the wind was so noisy I couldn’t hear my own voice. So I shouted, “I can’t see anything clearly! My head has a bellowing inside! You are young, so why is your hair all white?”
“That’s the problem with your eyes,” she sneered viciously. “From now on, just don’t use your eyes anymore. It’s much better that way. Your dizziness is caused solely by the eyes. I have a relative who is suffering from the same disease. He used his eyes so much that eventually his eyeballs fell out. Since you can’t see things anymore, you have to admit it as a defect. Ambition will lead to no good ending.”
I remembered that red snake berries once grew along the wall. Bending low and closing my eyes, I could feel them with my trembling fingers.
The sky was dim; everything underneath it looked like some kind of fluid. Three white geese flew through the mist like swimmers, then in one white flash they all disappeared. My finger touched a snail. My heart quivered, and my body was covered with goose bumps. Forcing my eyes open, I saw the woman fall back, farther and farther away. My eyeballs expanded so fast that I felt they might drop out of their sockets.
“I’ve also been sick,” she waved her hand at last. “You’ve seen that my feet are swollen like carrots. I feel terrible every time I touch them … I’ve been taking extra precautions to hide it.”
“You, go lie down.” My third sister jabbed my back and said with boredom, “Your spine is like a snake in puberty.”
Half conscious, I felt my way back to bed and covered myself with the quilt. Even inside the quilt, I could still hear the noise of my sister rummaging through chests and cupboards and also the howling and crying of her fiancé being chased and beaten. My third sister was getting more and more unbridled daily. She let down her hair and wore shorts and T-shirts. She beat my quilt with a broom. I had never thought she possessed such strength. In fact, her asthma was only one of her little dramas made up out of nowhere. She always succeeded at whatever she involved herself in. I curled up inside the quilt, soaking with sweat, waiting for the fit to die down.
It was getting dark, and I still couldn’t get up. I dug out a broken mirror and looked into it. I saw a vague lump of a face, with two reddened balls rolling around in it. They must have been my eyeballs. I tossed the mirror aside. It crashed on the concrete floor with an irritating sound.
In the dim red light the fiancé’s round face appeared. It had a gray lining. His tongue flickered in and out, as if playing a new trick. I listened carefully and heard his voice.
“Why are you lying down? The situation in the family is very complicated. You must beware of pine moths. I’m surprised that when I was living in the temple with your father, I felt much more relaxed. Now I’m shaking with fright, in fear of stepping on a pine moth. They are crawling everywhere. Often when you’re about to fall asleep, you’ll find one hidden in your quilt. When the old fellow brought back that pine branch, I anticipated such an unsolvable problem today. It’s been one week that your third sister has been eliminating those poisonous insects. Our quilt has been ruined completely by the beatings. She is never merciful, and she has a stony heart…” As he spoke, he lost his concentration.
“Do you think I have glaucoma?” Breathing with difficulty, I saw him melt into a shadow.
“Ahmm, in the temple, one heard the seeds of the Chinese parasol tree drop to the ground every night. Your father will never come back. He’s got what he wanted, and now he’s boasting about himself to the proprietress.”
The very night when the fiancé warned me about the pine moths, I was attacked by them. They crawled into my quilt and nestled close to my legs, waist, arms—like a carpet full of needles. Turning on the ligh
t, I peeled them away and threw them out the window. Yet hardly had I lain down than they were with me again. They rustled; they pricked. I felt dizzy with pain. So I turned the light on again, and peeled them off, and threw them out, again and again. I was exhausted, but still couldn’t sleep. In the morning, I found no pine moths but only skin made raw from scratching.
“It’s tragic to be attacked by pine moths.” My third sister was staring at me. “There’s no use to try hiding. You have to be whipped severely. When I’m in the mood, I often rip the whole quilt with my whip. Yesterday, I almost whipped the doctor’s eyeballs out. He was in my way. Serves him right whoever dares to block me.” Her T-shirt had dark wrinkles under the armpits. She was standing in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips. Her face had a murderous look. “In the temple, pine moths swarm out of the rotten floorboards every time the mountain wind blows. The day before yesterday I found that father’s hair was filled with such insects. He was sleeping on the floor, and the moths were making nests in his hair. ‘Jingle-jingle,’ a little lamb was eating grass. When the wind stopped, the lamb would run very fast. Tiny pebbles rattled down … Ha, our father, it’s extremely difficult to figure out his attitude toward life.”
“I’d like to consult with others about our obstacles in verbal expression.” My mind was working, yet my mouth was motionless. My lips had turned into a pair of iron clips.
“Hush.” My third sister stopped me. Apparently she had heard the sentence in my mind. “Wild flights of fancy can only worsen your sickness. Let me tell you the cause of my asthma. It was caused by the medicine that the doctor prescribed. He was making fun of my emotions. What a fool I was to believe him. My heart breaks now that I think of it! Don’t you take any medicine. It can only cause a neurosis. Never believe the doctor in this family. When you think about it, you won’t be surprised to find that he is not a doctor at all. I believed it just because I wanted to. These days Mother chats with me about wild bees every night and about her lost wallet. I was moved to tears. In one stretch, I find myself walking on that stone path. When dawn comes, I realize that there is no wallet. She made up the whole story just to get my sympathy. Our mother squats in the corner making up such stories for others. She is immensely proud of herself whenever somebody is taken in.”
One morning my legs swelled terribly, but my dizziness stopped unexpectedly. I listened intently. The house was dead quiet. Getting up, I circled through the house, supported by a stick, but not a soul was to be seen. I walked out the door and limped down the street. The sun was hot, glaring down from the branch of a tree. All the joining parts of the walls were puffing out dust. My T-shirt stuck to my back. Raising my head, I saw numerous blue and purple circles.
“Isn’t that Ah-wen?” An old man stopped blankly. “Good, come and have a stroll. Good!” While talking, he scratched his armpit with force and then spat heavily at my feet. I walked away, and could still hear him chasing me and shouting, “Very good! Good sun, good…”
“Be on guard against such people.” The old man’s voice entered my ears like a gust of wind. “He sneaks into a python’s cage whenever he feels like it.”
Blood surged into my brain. In a hurry, I complained to a shadow beside the road: “I’ve been thinking of bestirring myself. I think so very hard. Every day, I hear the leaves rustle in the old camphor tree at the doorway. Just count how many blisters on my lips, and you will understand me. Only if … I’ve met so many people. I tug at their sleeves and mean to tell every one of them, but there is a great obstacle preventing me from expressing myself in words.”
The shadow turned its back on me and remained silent. I could see the sun move to the top of the lamppost. The walls continued to puff dust.
“Good, good sun, good!” The old man was chasing after me. He ran a few steps and then bent down to roll up his extremely long trousers which were dragging on the ground.
The shadow turned back all of a sudden. His vague face was now turned toward me. He spoke each word separately through his teeth: “As a youth, you once had a food phobia.”
On top of my third sister’s bed lay a mountain of cotton fiber she had torn into shreds.
Somewhere outside, a black hand was scratching on the wall: scrtch, scrtch …
“It’s a wire brush.” The pale little face of my third sister peeped out from inside the cotton pile. “It’s like this every night. It has aroused in me an unfounded melancholy.”
“You?”
2. MY THIRD SISTER TELLS OF THE LOAD ON HER MIND
This morning, after I scraped the mold from my tongue and cleaned my scalp, I started decking myself out. Under the lamp was the letter from my aunt that arrived yesterday. It read: “It’s only because you’ve sunk too deep. You should rise with force and spirit in order to save yourself. For example, you can come to visit me and change your environment for a while…”
Bah, change environment! I am too clear about such rubbish! Everybody talks the same, because they all want to prove that they live in some kind of clean, high-class rooms so as to distinguish themselves. To such idiots, past events have vanished like smoke.
Next door lived a man who subsisted by scrounging through garbage heaps for odds and ends. This man had an extremely tiny face, with a huge mole on his chin. I never knew his name, since nobody ever called him by it. He was an independent, unimportant nobody. Yet I noticed that such people usually possessed the highest intelligence and the most definite opinions. When I was in junior high, he often called me to his house for a visit. “I often think,” he said, as he stooped over to kick amidst the rags and rotten paper. The room was choked with dust. He was a hunchback, and the hump on his back jiggled up and down. “If only I could pile up all the odds and ends I have collected in my lifetime, it would make a gigantic mountain. I often lose my way. At those moments, I find myself hiding in a hole like a worm. Whenever I move my head, my face touches something sticky. Recently I discovered that the odor of rotten cloth pours out of my nostrils every morning. Maybe I’m dying. I’ve taken a new measure. That is, I’ve installed a ladder in the middle of the room, and I exercise while sleeping on it. From the ladder, I can see into the distance. I can see the fields, which are pitch dark, with some tiny lights swirling around. Once I fell from the ladder. That must have awakened your whole family, didn’t it?”
“That’s impossible,” I shook my head firmly. “People in this house never sleep. Every one of them has some good game as a hobby. Please go on—black fields, tiny lights, and also little model houses? I’ve seen some little houses, in which people like you live.”
“The wind is whimpering in the fields, somebody is smashing a rock by the roadside. Just wait, you’ll see the rooster on top of the house. Beware of your surroundings. The guy above you is a suspicious character. I saw him with my own eyes spraying disinfectant on other people’s clothes. Never dry your underwear outside your house.”
The hunchback had enormous palms with deep black cracks in them. He rubbed his pointed ears vigorously with his hands until tears ran from his eyes. He called this “exposing the internal pain.” He was forever wandering around picking in the garbage but never went very far. He was also a thief. Whenever he had a chance, he sneaked into other people’s houses to steal an alarm clock, a tea kettle, and other trivial items. But he never had the luck to escape. When he was caught, he was tied high up on that big tree. Despite all that, people didn’t seem to remember his past and continued to throw odds and ends to him. I saw him tied to that tree several times. Closing his purple eyelids, he would fall into sleep. When he was let down, he tapped the dust from his body as if nothing had happened. He hobbled into his hut and sat at the doorway for several days. He sank into his thoughts with his eyes wide open, and he smiled as if entranced.
“Why do you steal?”
“Oh?” He shrugged and paced the room. “At this particular moment, my mind is extremely clear. The little huts that you mentioned, I’ve seen them also. They were in t
he forest. All kinds of strange creatures lived there. There was one old creature with a pair of bear paws. All day long, he sat at his doorway studying ants and picking his teeth with a bamboo stick. Another guy caught passersby and tied them up with a rope in his dark house. Then he fed them a kind of medicine meant for toothache. There were many houses, resembling ghost’s caves, with all sorts of heads poking out from the holes. They looked like featherless chicken heads. I was completely baffled by the scene and couldn’t control my emotions. At those moments, I couldn’t help taking others’ things so as to stir up some disturbance and transfer my self-absorption. Please notice the hair on my temples. It’s been rubbed down. Sometimes blood drips when I rub my scalp.”
“Those ghost holes, they are so vivid in my mind.”
The hunchback was gradually becoming senile. I saw him passing my house, clutching a wooden stick which he banged on the ground. He had become totally bald. His tiny head hung weakly on his shoulders, and his grieving eyes lingered on my doorway. I got so terrified that whenever I looked out the window and saw him coming, I leapt to the door and closed it. For days I would hide inside, and I vomited every time I heard the clatter of his stick. There was a rumor going around about the hunchback raping little girls. I felt very uneasy, sensing that there was some hint for me in the rumor. My body ran with sweat when I was in bed.
The second day of the rumor, mother yelled in the middle of the room, clapping her hands in joy. “I’ve had a premonition for a long time,” she said. She also called in a doctor to check if I was a virgin, because this was “a vitally important point,” according to her. The detective living upstairs arrived. He turned out to be the doctor that mother was calling for. It could be that he only disguised himself as a doctor. With a gauze mask and a pair of sunglasses on, he declared that he was living at No. 65 on Thirteenth Avenue. When he smiled, he bared a vicious green tooth on the left side of his mouth. I stopped him when his pale sweaty hand stretched toward my chest with a stethoscope. I told him in a confidential air that I had had affairs with sixty-nine males, and my state of sexual desire was extremely high. On hearing that, he beamed with joy. Narrowing his eyes, he asked, “Can’t you find a small piece of wood to dig out my ear wax?”
