Of Lady Su Hui little is known. Some speculate she composed the poem to win back her wayward husband. Many say she succeeded. Sewing those patient, intricate patterns must have taken her many years.
I’m not a sentimental man. I don’t imagine her in her chamber, longing for him, late 4th century A.D. Patterns are radical desire. They are, perhaps, an expedition.
And so I’m here. Yet oddly I no longer wish to find that poem. I’ve found in the all of my home a sheaf of pages. My expedition has already taken an unexpected turn. Often before falling asleep, I imagine the lonely man who wrote them, his scaffolding of blood vessels and bones a shadow-grid over my own.
That strange man, Morrison, who I first met by chance on the street in London, and who taught me Chinese, I wonder what he’d think. When he first came here, he dressed in Chinese costume, wore a fake pigtail, let his fingernails grow long. Spoke only to his Chinese tutor, avoided contact with the wealthy, read Horace, Pope, and Dryden while translating 2.6 books of the Old Testament into Mandarin. Now he’s back in London, having founded a language institute, wearing a gray suit, a fellow of the Royal Society
I want never to leave here.
I have only just begun reading the pages I found in this wall—Each day I wake to them, as if, like Lady Su Hui, they’ll show me a pattern I can enter, a place where, no matter how much I wander, I’ll somehow not get lost—
When you fled you left your laboratory notes behind. Though I carry them with me, mostly I have no desire to see your handwriting in front of my eyes (it pains me to see it). But once, as I unpacked my few things in the woods, a note from Clerval slipped out from your papers, and I read it:
My friend, I know you’re suffering and wish there was more I could do to bring you comfort. I still worry about your fever, though I know it’s much better. I worry about the tremor in your hands, the look in your eyes I find troubling but hard to describe, the way you stay always alone (though I myself mostly prefer to be alone). Sometimes I think you’ve mistaken my tenderness for a kind of frailty, some central flaw, an inability to face the harsher aspects of who you are. But I’m less foolish than you think. We’ve known each other from before I can even remember—an intimacy such as ours becomes almost a separate creature, composed of cells we can’t see or hardly fathom. Maybe in some ways we are simply each other’s native tongue. Caxton wrote in Sonnes of Amyon, “It is sayd, that at the end a frende is known.” I don’t believe this. I understand you’re unknowable to me. Still, I’d have liked to comfort you. Now I’ve decided to go east—it’s what I’ve wanted for so long. I’ve told no one, just you. I wish to live out my life among books, even those written in a language I don’t yet understand. I plan to find a teacher in London, then make my way to China. I hope never to return. Your friend always, Henry Clerval
I hadn’t known a human being could sound like that. He used the words “comfort” and “tenderness.” He called you “My friend.” Nights I’d lie in the woods thinking only that I wished I could see him, and wondered, if he saw me, what might he think? Would he flee from me like you did? But he wrote those words … I imagined him not fleeing.
Now I watch his slender fingers turning pages, the way he’s careful with each one, and a feeling almost of peacefulness comes into me.
Sometimes I imagine he left that note for me, not you. And that, along with Sonnes of Amyon (I have since read many books) he also knew this line from Turner, “rais’d by the Comfort of The Sunne to water dry and barren grounds.”
Clerval rubs his eyes idly with his hands, gets up for a cup of water or to make tea. He’s been reading for hours. Mostly he stays very still, as if the words coming into his eyes demand of him great stillness, the way a harbor needs to be calm for its ships. Often he goes nearly a whole day without eating.
Already noon-light streams in from the small window. I feel like I’ve been in my chair for a few minutes, but it’s been hours.
Never have I read such a curious book. As if the pages were turning to vapor in my hands—I can’t get a proper hold. Every time I think I’ve found a steady voice to guide me, it complicates itself, fractures or leaves and is replaced by other voices (though it’s true the first voice eventually comes back).
The first chapter begins: “This is the opening chapter of the novel. In writing this, the author wanted to recall certain of his past dreams and illusions.” This is written in the same hand as the paragraphs that follow, in which the author, now speaking in first person, says, “Though my home is now a thatched cottage with matting windows, earthen stove and bed of straw, this shall not stop me from laying bare my heart.”
So who’s speaking? And why this shift from third person to first? (This book seems to have many beginnings.)
I’ve learned the author is Cao Xueqin, who exiled himself to the outskirts of Peking. These papers I’ve found in the wall are one of several handwritten copies of his novel, though no two are exactly alike.
Some say he wrote all the pages himself. Some say he found a rough version of it on a stone and spent ten years studying, transcribing and rewriting what he found there, revising it five times before he died, his work uncompleted. Others say he wrote 80 chapters, and the bookseller Gao E got hold of them and wrote the rest, setting the whole in move-able type, then publishing it to great acclaim in 1791.
It’s called the Dream of the Red Chamber.
Interspersed throughout the text are signed commentaries by as many as ten people. In my copy the one who writes the most is Red Inkstone.
Yet some say Red Inkstone is really just another name for Cao Xueqin. Could this be?
Who was the solitary man who wrote day after day about the fate of a neglected stone? Who saw the smoke trees turn red on the hillside, the dust whirl in from the north … Who had not one name, but many. And no clear date of birth (1715? 1724?) or date of death (1762? 1763? 1764?). Who lay on his straw and dreamed of a child who vanishes during the Festival of Lanterns, never to return. Who dreamed of conflagrations, absences, illnesses, betrayals, the corrupt power of the state. Who transformed himself into a novel and the commentary on that novel—a labyrinth, a web, a puzzle. Who insisted he wanted only to bring pleasure, as he ate less and less, and slept on his rough mat, and grew a stranger to the ones who’d known him.
Long after Clerval packs up his reading for the day, slipping the pages back into the slit in the wall where he stores them, I linger over them in my mind, read the working notes he’s left on his table. As if they could bind me to him, myself, anything. Or are they harbors where the ice has finally melted so boats can set sail from them again?
Today he translated this passage:
“When Nu Wa-shi fused the rocks to repair the heavens, she took 36,501 stones of enormous size from Wu Ji Peak among the Da Huang Hills. She used 36,500 of these, and then the one solitary stone which she rejected as useless was thrown to the foot of Qing Geng Peak. Strange to relate, after its ordeal the stone acquired spiritual understanding. It was conscious. It lamented in shame and distress day and night, desolate that it had been rejected. With its magical powers, it could expand or contract, move and change shape, but nothing could heal its sorrow as it lay on the ground no larger than a lady’s fan.”
The stone falls to earth in the form of a boy, Jia Baoyu, who’s born with a piece of clear jade in his mouth. It will suffer and be changed. It will feel human hands on it and kiss human mouths. But what is it, really? Is it a stone, a boy, part of each, or neither? Should I call it “it” or “he”? I think of its solitary fall, how the others were used but it wasn’t used.
Some say that stone is no other than Cao Xueqin who called himself a “useless wretch,” yet wrote of “the waving willows, the bright moon, the fresh breeze of morning,” and said, “these are still mine.” Who, as he turned from the world, still wanted the world. But maybe even that can’t be assumed.
Last light. Clerval finishes his bowl of noodles, washes his dish. Soon he’ll sleep on his stra
w mat as once I lay on mine, wondering if you’d come back, then knowing you never would.
Cao Xueqin, who were you? Each day I translate your pages. I sleep and dream I’m a stone found in the mouth of a newborn boy. I dream I’m the stolen girl sold into servitude who when asked years later, aren’t you the daughter of ____, can only shake her lowered head and say “I can’t remember.” I’m the young nun from Water Moon Convent, and the maid stirring ashes in her mistress’s hand-stove. And I’m old Gardener Ye, designing acres of artificial mountains and lakes, pavilions, rockeries, balustrades, all for one wealthy family I’m the shamed servant girl who drowns herself in the well.
And I’m none of them. I walk among them in my mind, a stranger, a cipher, a man helpless as a doctor writing prescriptions that don’t work. Often in your book someone is mysteriously ailing, unable to eat, fading for no earthly reason—the pulse weak, but why? A girl crouches among pomegranate petals, crying, scratching at the dirt with a hairpin but I don’t know why. Another buries peach blossoms in the garden. So many private rituals and sorrows—pieces of paper hidden away, paper that’s written on then burned or crumpled, paper passed from one stealthy hand to another.
Many think you saw all this as a boy in a rich household with vast gardens where you lived.
But the mind travels far from what it’s thought of as itself, from anywhere.
Often you point out there are parts of the story you won’t tell: “With that he left, but where he went does not concern us.” “The rest of the room need not be described in detail.”
So it’s as if I have blinders on even as I translate. Even in my clearest moments I must look through a thickening mist.
And still I follow you into that house, that garden, that world with its wealthy family and nearly a thousand servants. I think of you sleeping on your straw mat by the end. Poor. Maybe even in this house where I found these pages. Here in this small village where animals stumble blindly through dust, and my hand trembles from tiredness.
“The rest cannot be recorded,” you wrote. And: “easier to unravel a skein of tangled hemp than to recount this.” “The rest of the inscriptions cannot be recorded here.”
Even among so many, many words, this sense of what’s not knowable, not shared—
Sometimes I train my breath—rhythmic, slow—to match Clerval’s own. But it seems his body’s turning into words, there’s no way I can stop it. He translates all day, his hand cramping, ink trailing fine lines on the paper, leaving blotches on his wrist and palm.
Last night I was a stone the size of a sparrow’s egg found in the mouth of a newborn boy. I was iridescent as clouds. The boy wore me on a string around his neck so wherever he went I went with him. It was strange to be thought beautiful, for everyone to want to touch me. Yet I didn’t feel at ease. I was a stone that had fallen to earth, but from where? I couldn’t remember. Then it seemed the stone wasn’t me but Clerval. He felt such sorrow at not having hands, there was no way for him to translate. Then Clerval was also Claire, or was he Fanny or myself or Mary—or were we all a tangled braid of hemp, each bound to the other, inseparable from one another?
Still, I remember that feeling of not being ugly, and how so many hands reached out to touch me.
Clerval Claire Claireval
Father,
I’ve just returned from Canton. Why do I even tell you this? Why do I write to you at all (though I won’t send a single letter)? You who wanted a practical son, a businessman, someone who would move among well-appointed rooms, not this mud and brick rectangle “with its uneven dirt floor.
In Canton, a second city of water exists beside the one on land. (This is the kind of place I dreamed of as a boy.) Nearly 300,000 people live on boats, their entire lives spent on canals and rivers. There’s always the hush of dipping oars and steering-sculls—a faint, continuous breathing beneath the other, broken sounds.
The ones on water are despised by those on land. They’re never allowed to draw near shore.
Almost everything on land has its counterpart on water. Doctors practice from slender sampans, barbershops drift by. Police boats arrive with shrill calls from conch shells. I saw a whole world of businesses thriving on water—fleets of oil boats, rice boats, boats carrying sugarcane and bean curd, boats hauling salt, crockery, clothing, others filled with flowering plants.
(As I write I can almost feel you drifting away. You always grew impatient with my stories which you found frivolous, indulgent. I should get back to my translating, I have so many pages left to go, over a thousand …)
But I’m thinking of the leper boats, hundreds of them filled “with the afflicted who marry, beg, have children, grow old and die out on the water.
Outside the city, there’s one leper village on dry land, a walled enclosure on the edge of the graveyard called Silent City. There, the afflicted make ropes out of cocoa-nut fiber and bring them to the rope-market to sell. I don’t know why they’re allowed to go there but they are. Some of the wealthier ones buy “wives from healthy families. And there are many children in the village, some afflicted, some not. I still see an almost-faceless woman “with a broken rice-bowl begging for money. I see the slave girl who was told by her owner that if she kept a silver coin in her mouth her new owners wouldn’t suspect she was diseased. But of course they found out and threatened to drown her in the river.
When I was making my way east, I made a friend in Italy, a leper. About that, Father, I’m not willing to speak to you.
Still, I thought of him in Canton. I think of him when I get up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. I think of him when I translate and when I dress and make my tea.
It’s said that lepers don’t suffer any pain, only numbness. Often a paralysis of the face ensues. The body dismantles itself bit by bit. And yet the mind, what of the mind?
It’s late now. Time to stop. No need to sign what I won’t send.
Aosta, May 11
My Friend,
By the time you read this I’ll be dead. There’s a man here who’ll make his way to China within the next few years. He’s agreed to take these letters to you. I think often of that day when you passed accidentally through the gate near the tower in which I live. There, in the garden, you extended your gloved hand to me before you left. It had been fifteen years since I’d felt, even through cloth, another’s touch. I still wonder why you weren’t afraid.
You had come to see the ruins of the 15th century castle where René of Chalans is said to have starved to death his wife, Marie of Braganza. Hunger Tower it’s called, and many claim to see on dark nights the white-clad figure of a woman holding a lamp between her hands, but I think this is nonsense.
The hospital of Saint Maurice still supplies me with food and books and clothing A messenger comes once a week to drop them off. Other than that I see no one. I tend my garden and read.
I wonder what you’ve found in China. That day you took my hand and we talked for hours, two strangers, when you asked me to write to you, I refused.
There’s something called the “Mass of Separation.” Do you know of it? It’s a medieval mass spoken by a priest and performed at the site of a leper’s dwelling. This is part of what it said: “I forbid you to touch the rim or the rope of a well, I forbid you to share your house, I forbid you to touch any child or give anything to a child, I forbid you to eat or drink in any company but lepers, I forbid you to leave your house without your leper’s costume or your bell.”
Still, I write to you. My garden’s doing well. But I think it’s too pristine—no one walks in it but me, there are no signs of the offhand, irregular life of another, a twig dropped idly or by accident, a piece of scrap paper, a shopping list’s ripped edge.
I want only to speak plainly to you. I don’t know if I’ll know how, or even what I mean by “plainly.” I feel a distrust of words, a strong dislike of them even. Isn’t any word an embellishment and covering over of something more precise and starker? Mostly I distrust myself.
I think, of you—
Your Friend
Laurie Sheck Page 16