by Lu Xun
I ate much better than I had done at the hostel. Zijun was not a great cook, but she worked hard at it. The efforts she made pushed me to make equal efforts – all our joys and trials we shared equally. She worked without rest through the day, the sweat rolling down her face, her bobbed hair sticking to her head, her hands roughening with the toil.
And still there were Tag and the hens to feed. None of it would have got done without her.
I don’t mind tightening my own belt, I tried to tell her, but I can’t bear to see you slave like this. She gazed in sorrowful silence at me; I decided I had better say nothing, either. And still she went on working as before.
At last, the long-expected blow fell. On the eve of Revolution Day, as I sat staring into space while she washed the dishes, there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, a courier from the bureau handed me a mimeographed sheet of paper. I had a good idea of what it would say as I took it over to the lamp to read.
To: Shi Juansheng
Please be advised that the bureau chief no longer requires your services.
The Secretary’s Office
9 October
I had expected something like this while we were still at the hostel: the dandy next door to us gambled with the son of the bureau chief. He would have had plenty of opportunities to gossip about me. The only surprise was that the rumours had taken so long to bear fruit. I shouldn’t let it get to me: it had already occurred to me I could try freelance copying, or tutoring, or even translating, though it would be hard work. I had a passing acquaintance with the editor of Freedom’s Friend – we had corresponded only two months before. Yet still my heart pounded. But what pained me most was how pale the once-indomitable Zijun went. Lately, her nerve seemed to have been failing her.
‘Who cares about them?’ she began. ‘We’ll find something else. We’ll…’
But she left her sentence unfinished. For some reason, her voice rang hollow to me; and the dim lamplight took an oddly gloomy cast. What foolish creatures we humans are, allowing such tiny things to worry us. We looked silently at each other, then began to come to grips with our situation. Eventually, we decided to stretch our current savings as far as we could. At the same time, I would place small advertisements for copying and teaching work and also write to the editor of Freedom’s Friend, explaining my current predicament and asking for translation work to help me through a difficult time.
‘No time like the present – here’s to a new start!’
I immediately turned to my desk, clearing out of the way a bottle of sesame oil and a saucer of vinegar, while Zijun brought me a little light. Once the advertisement was copied out, I tried to settle upon a book to translate, brushing aside the thick layers of dust that had covered my books (unopened since we had moved in). At last, I set to writing my letter.
As I paused, wondering how to word it, I glanced back at her face, mournful in the dingy lamplight. Such a tiny, trivial thing – how could it have affected the fearless Zijun so deeply? But for some time now, she had started to seem more faint-hearted about life. The change in her began to unsettle me, and suddenly an image of my former, quiet life – the tranquillity of that shabby old hostel room – flashed before my eyes. Then the lamplight swam back into focus.
Much later, I finished the letter – a long letter. I too felt tired, as if exhausted by timidity. The advertisement and the letter, we decided, would go out together first thing tomorrow. We both stretched wearily and, without speaking, sensed the other’s strength and determination; the possibility of new hope for the future.
We drew strength from adversity. I had lived out my days in the bureau like a bird in a pedlar’s cage – given just enough rice to stay alive but never enough to grow strong. In time, my wings would be too stunted for flight even if I were ever let out of my cage. But now I had escaped and could take to the sky, before having forgotten how to use them.
There would, of course, be no instant results from the advertisement. But translation brought its own difficulties. The book I chose I had read before, and thought I’d understood. But once I set down to work, a hundred difficulties presented themselves, and progress was slow. But I was determined to see it through, and two weeks into the work my almost-new dictionary was covered in black scrawls – witness to my application. My editor acquaintance had assured me that Freedom’s Friend never turned away good work.
Unfortunately, there was no peace to be had at home. Zijun no longer took as much care to be quiet or considerate as she had once done. The room was always full of bowls, saucers, cooking smoke – it was impossible to settle to any serious work. Though I suppose I only had myself to blame, for lacking the means to fix myself up with a proper study. Then there was Tag, and the hens. And now the hens were fully grown up, arguments between the two households in the compound became more frequent.
And the meals – the never-ending stream of meals that had to be eaten every day. Zijun’s sense of self-worth seemed tied up exclusively with the preparation of food – for us, and the animals. We ate to work, we worked to eat. Everything she had once known seemed to have been wiped out by the imperative to feed and eat, leaving her entirely insensible to how it might disturb my train of thought. I tried glaring at her at mealtimes, but she just chewed obliviously on.
A full five weeks it took me to make her understand that my work could not be fettered by mealtimes. Though she seemed put out, she said nothing. But my rate of work picked up: I had soon translated fifty thousand words, which, with a little polishing, could be sent off, with a couple of short essays, to Freedom’s Friend. But the question of food was still causing me problems. I didn’t mind eating cold meat and vegetables all the time; the problem was, there was never enough of them. Sometimes, there wasn’t even enough rice, even though my new sedentary lifestyle had substantially reduced my appetite. Tag was fed before me, and sometimes on mutton – mutton that we hardly ever ate ourselves. He’d got so thin, she’d say, she couldn’t stand the landlord’s wife laughing at us.
Then the hens got my leftovers. Following Huxley’s discourse on man’s place in the universe, I eventually came to realize my own place in this particular domestic universe of ours: somewhere between a pug and a hen.
In time, though, and after much resistance from Zijun, the hens made their appearance on the dinner table, lasting us and Tag for about ten days. In truth, there wasn’t much meat on them because for weeks they’d had nothing but a few grains of sorghum to eat each day. As the place became quieter, Zijun became more melancholy – too listless even for conversation. How fickle people are, I thought!
Next to go was Tag. We’d long abandoned all hope of getting any kind of response to my advertisements, and Zijun had run out of even the tiniest scraps to coax him to sit up. With winter bearing down on us and the stove hungry for fuel, his appetite became a heavy daily burden of which we were all too conscious. We could no longer keep him.
We might have got a few coppers for him at a temple bazaar, but we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to do it. In the end, I blindfolded him, took him to the western suburbs and set him loose. When he tried following me back, I pushed him into a shallow ditch.
Back home, things seemed much more peaceful. But I couldn’t understand why Zijun always looked so sad; I’d never seen her so broken-hearted. Because of Tag, of course. But why was she so upset? I hadn’t even told her about pushing him into the ditch.
By nightfall, her melancholy had turned into a kind of icy reserve.
‘Zijun,’ I eventually asked, ‘what on earth’s wrong?’
‘What is it?’ She didn’t even look at me.
‘You look so…’
‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.’
But her tone and body language told me she thought I was heartless. If I’d been on my own, I’d have easily made a living. My pride had prevented me from having much to do with old family friends, and since moving out of the hostel I’d neglected all my former acquaintances. If only I had a free
hand, the possibilities would be infinite. Everything I was putting up with now – all the difficulties, the pressures – it was all for her, mostly. I’d got rid of Tag for her, too, but her grasp on reality seemed to grow weaker by the day, and she couldn’t even see it.
I found an opportunity to hint at some of this. She nodded, as if in understanding. But none of it had any impact on her subsequent manner with me – either she hadn’t understood, or hadn’t believed me.
*
A general drop in temperature – both in the weather, and in her behaviour towards me – made home an uncomfortable place to be. But where else could I go? Though I didn’t get glared at on the streets or in the parks, the freezing wind was about to crack open my skin. Eventually, I sought refuge in the Popular Library.
There was no entrance fee, and the reading room contained two iron stoves. Even though they held only dying coal embers, the very sight of them warmed me. None of the books were worth reading – the old ones were outdated and there were hardly any new ones.
But I wasn’t there for the books. I noticed around a dozen kindred spirits hanging about the place: thinly dressed, like me, and reading as an excuse to keep warm. It was the perfect bolt-hole: wandering the streets, I might bump into people I’d once known who now had nothing but scorn for me. In here, I was safe, because all my former acquaintances had other stoves to gather around.
And though there was nothing for me to read, I did have time to think. Sitting there, bored, alone, I began to go back over the past half year, over how I had neglected everything else in life for love – and first and foremost, the struggle to survive. A person must be able to live before they can love. A way forward always exists for those who are willing to fight for it. Despite all the setbacks, I hadn’t yet forgotten how to flap my wings…
The room and the other readers around me gradually faded away: I saw a fisherman battling the waves, a soldier in his trench, a politician in his motor car, a speculator in a great metropolis, a bandit hero in his lair, a professor at the lectern, a political agitator at dusk, a thief at night… In all this, Zijun was nowhere. She had squandered all her courage – and for what? For Tag and an obsession with generating food. And yet she seemed no thinner, no weaker than before…
As the last, recalcitrant fragments of coal in the stove finally burned up, the reading room grew colder: closing time. I returned to Goodluck Lane, to enjoy an evening of black looks. Though I had, of late, been privileged by the occasional tender glance, which succeeded only in intensifying my suffering. One night, I remember, Zijun’s eyes suddenly took on that old, childish gleam – something I hadn’t seen for a long time – as she smilingly remembered something about our time back in the hostel. But I saw her expression flicker with fear. I knew that my recent indifference to her – greater than hers towards me – was causing her worry. I forced myself to talk and laugh, hoping it would bring her a little comfort. But the moment I did, my falseness echoed mockingly, poisonously back at me.
Zijun must have noticed the same thing, for her manner with me now changed, losing some of its deathly coldness, her new tenderness exposing an anxiety she struggled to conceal.
I wanted to be straight with her, but I didn’t dare. Just when I’d steeled myself to say what I really thought, I’d look into those childlike eyes of hers, and force a smile instead – a smile that mocked my own cowardice, destroying my calm indifference.
It was around this time that she began reviewing our past again, compelling me to reciprocate with yet more false tenderness. My heart slowly filled to bursting with lies and falsehoods, until sometimes I felt suffocated by the oppressive weight of them all. To speak the truth required courage, my troubled mind often thought. If, instead of reaching for this courage, I were to take permanent refuge in falsehood, I would never make a new path forward. Indeed, I may as well never have existed!
One morning – one particularly cold morning – Zijun woke up with a look of sour grievance I had never seen before; or perhaps I only imagined it. In any case, it angered me, as well as bringing a kind of sardonic amusement. How hollow she was – her high-flown philosophy, her fearless speeches, this is what they came down to. And she had not a shred of self-awareness of her own hollowness. She had not looked at a book in – I no longer knew how many months. She had forgotten that survival was the most basic imperative in life; and to survive, people needed either to march together, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, or struggle forward alone. But if one person is hanging off another’s coat-tails – however heroically that other person battles – both are doomed.
Fresh hope, I felt, lay only in our separation; she must resolve to give the whole thing up. I thought suddenly of her dying, then immediately repented of the notion, hating myself for it. Fortunately, it was still early in the day; I had plenty of time to speak my truth. The opening up of our new paths hung on it.
I began talking to her, bringing the conversation round to our past together, to art, foreign writers and their works – A Doll’s House, The Lady of the Sea. I spoke of Nora, and her courageous resolve… All this we had spoken of last year, in that shabby old room in the hostel; but now my words rang hollow. As I listened to myself, I was haunted by the image of a spiteful imp, standing behind me, mockingly parroting my words.
As always, she nodded as she listened, then fell silent. I falteringly reached the end of my speech, the lingering sound dissolving into emptiness.
‘Yes, exactly.’ Another silence. ‘But Juansheng,’ she went on, ‘you seem to have changed recently. Am… am I right? Tell me the truth.’
Perceiving this as a direct blow, I steeled myself again and said exactly what I thought: how unless we followed new paths, made new lives, we were both doomed.
‘You, too, can now go forward.’ I stiffened my resolve, in my closing remarks. ‘You’ve nothing to regret. You asked me to tell you the truth; and people should tell the truth. So here is your truth: I don’t love you any more!… But what an opportunity this is for you: now you’ve nothing to hold you back…’
I anticipated some kind of violent reaction but was greeted only by silence. Her face turned a waxy, ashen colour – the colour of death. An instant later, she revived again – that childlike gleam returned to her gaze, which began darting about, like that of a needy child searching in vain for her mother. She seemed afraid of meeting my eyes.
I couldn’t bear to watch. Fortunately, it was still early, and so I battled through the cold wind to the Popular Library.
There, I saw that Freedom’s Friend had published my essays. I seemed to draw new life from the unexpectedness of it. Many paths are still open to me, I thought; but I must abandon my present one.
I began calling on long-estranged acquaintances, but only once or twice. Despite the warmth of their rooms, the iciness of my reception there bit at my bones. At night, I curled up in my own freezing room.
I felt permanently numbed by the cold, as if it had eaten into my soul. Many paths are still open to me, I thought, I haven’t yet forgotten how to flap my wings… I thought suddenly of her dying, then immediately repented of the notion, hating myself for it.
In the Popular Library, glimpses of my new life often flashed before me, stretching out into the future. She had awoken invigorated with a new courage and walked out of our freezing home, her face wiped clean of complaint. I felt as if I was floating – a cloud drifting through an azure sky, over high mountains and great seas, tall buildings, battlefields, motor cars, vast metropolises, mansions, busy streets bathed in sunlight, dark nights…
This new life, I now sensed, was within my grasp.
This most insufferable of Beijing winters – we had survived it. We were like powerless dragonflies caught by a malicious child, then tied up and tortured, almost to death; and yet not quite. But after it all, we had been left sprawled weakly over the ground, the end in clear sight.
Three letters to the editor of Freedom’s Friend finally yielded a response: an envelope con
taining two book tokens, for twenty and for thirty cents. The pursuit of a fee had already cost me nine cents in stamps – a whole day’s food. Yet more futility. Then the inevitable finally happened.
Once winter began turning into spring, and the wind became less harrying, I spent even more of my time away from the house, wandering about; I never returned home before dark. As usual, I joylessly turned towards home one dusky evening; as usual, my steps slowed even more melancholically at the mere sight of the gate. When I went in, however, I discovered our rooms in darkness. I groped for a match, surprised by the strange sense of desolation about them.
The landlord’s wife came to the window to call me out.
‘Zijun’s father came to take her back,’ she informed me briefly.
I stood, speechless at the unexpectedness of it – as if I had just been dealt a blow to the back of my head.
‘She went with him?’ I eventually managed, after some time had passed.
‘Yes.’
‘Did she… did she say anything?’
‘No. She just told me to tell you when you came back – that she’d gone.’
I could hardly believe it; and yet the emptiness of the rooms spoke for itself. I looked for Zijun everywhere but found only a few dismal, broken bits of furniture, no human figure concealed within their sharp outlines. Next, I searched for a letter, or any kind of note she might have left me. Again, nothing; only salt, dried chillies, flour and half a cabbage gathered in a single pile, a few dozen coins next to them. She had left me the entirety of our joint stores and savings – a solemn, silent instruction to sustain life as long as I could.
Oppressed by my surroundings, I fled into the courtyard, the dusk thickening about me. Bright light shone out of the paper windows in the main room of the house; I could hear my landlord and his wife laughing, playing with their daughter. Despite the heaviness of my heart, an escape route slowly, dimly glimmered into view: high mountains, great marshes, vast metropolises, dazzlingly lit banquets, trenches, the darkest of nights, a stabbing knife, silent footsteps…