Village of Stone

by Xiaolu Guo

  After I had finished watching the evening news, I went into the kitchen to change the eel’s water. I filled the sink with fresh water and went back into the living room.

  ‘Do you know what I hate the most?’ Red asked, swivelling around to look at me.

  The question caught me slightly off guard. ‘No, what? Salted fish?’ I assumed that Red was referring to the stench still lingering in our flat, but he shook his head.

  ‘Um … the smell of salted fish?’ I asked, expanding on my earlier guess.

  ‘No, actually the smell’s not that bad. It’s sort of like …’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a woman’s vagina.’

  Ah-ha. What could I say to that?

  ‘What I mean is, once you get used to the smell, it’s really not all that bad.’

  ‘Then what is it you hate? Living on the ground floor of a twenty-five-storey block of flats?’ I figured this must be what Red hated most, but he declined to comment.

  ‘So, tell me,’ I asked impatiently.

  ‘Ten-pin bowling!’ Red proclaimed.

  ‘Why bowling?’ I had never heard Red mention that he hated bowling. What was so bad about bowling?

  ‘Because it’s loud, smoky, claustrophobic, middle-aged and boring.’

  I had no idea what the man was talking about.

  ‘Think about it. You throw a Frisbee; it flies through the open air. But in bowling, all you do is drop the ball and wait for it to roll along the ground. Frisbee is played out in the open, somewhere outdoors with grass and sky. But bowling is played in a big dark alley with bad air and a whole crowd of other people crammed inside. You have to stay in your own lane and use a big, heavy ball that rumbles down the alley like a freight train. It’s loud and obnoxious. What kind of sport is that? Bowling isn’t a sport – it’s the anti-sport!’

  Red obviously had vehement feelings on the subject. I wondered what had provoked such a hatred for bowling.

  He was probably right, I reflected, but after all, bowling was just another game. If you didn’t like the game, you didn’t have to play it, but it certainly wasn’t worth hating. These were the thoughts that ran through my head, though I did not bother to articulate them.

  Sensing my lack of enthusiasm for a discussion of the comparative merits of Frisbee and bowling, Red dropped the subject. He turned back to his computer, and was soon immersed in the minutiae of his Frisbee scorekeeping system.

  That’s just the kind of person that Red is.

  He has a certain sort of alien logic, although exactly which brand of extra-terrestrial thought it represents, I couldn’t really say.

  All that night I was troubled with dreams in which I was fighting the Eel Demon with a sword. I woke feeling as tired as if I had actually done battle. I couldn’t remember who had won in the end.

  As soon as I was dressed I went to check on the eel. Soaking in water overnight had left it soft and pliable. The tail that had protruded so rigidly yesterday now lay coiled gently around the sink. The salt that had bleached the eel’s skin a ghastly white had dissipated, returning the eel to its original dark greyish hue. I carefully rejoined the two strips of eel to make it whole again, and tried to imagine what it must have looked like when it was alive. Fearsome and powerful, it had ruled the depths of the sea until it had had the misfortune to get caught in the nets of fishermen even more fearsome and powerful than itself.

  As I watched the eel floating in the sink, undulating on ripples of water, I thought how alive it looked, as if it had just awakened from a long night’s slumber. I stroked the eel’s smooth, velvety skin and examined its long tail-fin, and tried to recall some of the traditional eel recipes from my home town. I remembered the bowls of starchy eel stew that the villagers ate at Lunar New Year and during the seventh and eighth moons. The villagers would chop water chestnuts into thin slices and add them to the stew once it was boiling. Why water chestnuts, I wondered, and not something else? Maybe it was because water chestnuts acted to reduce phlegm. The Village of Stone was so damp and dreary that most of the fishermen suffered from coughs and phlegm. Water chestnuts not only helped to clear the lungs but also made the stew taste better. As well as the water chestnuts, the villagers used shredded ginger and shallots to flavour the stew. Were those all the ingredients, or had I forgotten something? I racked my brains trying to think if there was some important step to the recipe that I had missed. Did I need aniseed, maybe, or cinnamon? When should I add the cooking wine, and how much white vinegar should I use? I started to salivate just thinking about the delicious stew, but I was worried that I might not be able to find all of the ingredients. Potato flour was available in any supermarket, but I wasn’t sure whether I could buy water chestnuts at this time of year. My enthusiasm somewhat dampened, I decided that I would have to go back to my original plan and make something simpler, a clear soup perhaps.

  Having made my decision, I drained the remaining water from the sink and rummaged around for a large cooking pot and some ginger.

  I took my time slicing the ginger. It was fresh ginger, pale yellow and pungent. The building was so silent that you could hear each quiet crunch of the knife as it sliced through the crisp ginger. I wondered: had the person who sent me the package even stopped to consider that I might not know how to cook an eel?

  Later, at lunchtime, when I placed a bowl of steaming eel soup in front of Red, I realised that it didn’t matter if I hadn’t got the perfect ingredients, the soup would be delicious anyway. Although Red said nothing, I could see that he was impressed. Now I cook him eel almost every day in the hope that he will come to understand a little of my past.

  9

  IN THE DAYS that followed my grandfather’s suicide, I nearly forgot all about the existence of the village mute. I spent hours every day within the confines of our house, helping my grandmother sort through my grandfather’s belongings. There was nothing of any particular value, just empty bottles of spirits, discarded packets of cigarettes, empty boxes of sweet green bean cakes and several dozen Cultural Revolution-era Chairman Mao badges pinned to a strip of red cloth. Although there was no real use for any of these things, to my grandmother, everything in that room was entirely new. After all, she had not climbed up to the third floor in twenty or thirty years. It was as if my grandfather’s scant few possessions – his bedclothes, pillow, cloth shoes and traditional cotton robe – could provide my grandmother with a better understanding of the man he had once been. My grandmother said that next year during the Festival of Pure Brightness, we would burn these things as offerings for my grandfather to use in the afterworld.

  The second-floor room was silent and empty now. When my grandfather disappeared, so did his footsteps, the sound of his coughing, the clinking of his bottles of spirits. When everything had been removed from the room, my grandmother fastened the little window with the ocean view, so that even the sound of the sea was gone. It was the end of an era.

  Several days later, I descended the stairs and went outside onto the street. It was just before the summer typhoons, and I had a vague feeling of dread. I decided I had to go and find Boy Waiting immediately and ask her father to take me out on his fishing boat. I knew that the fishermen did not usually allow women on their boats because they believed it would bring bad luck or cause the boat to capsize or run aground, but I thought it would be all right because I was still a child. I would swear to the Captain that I wouldn’t bring him any bad luck.

  I walked over to Boy Waiting’s house next door. Neither Boy Waiting nor her mother seemed to be at home, but I saw her grandmother sitting in the courtyard, shelling shrimp. I tried calling Boy Waiting’s name, but there was no answer. Her grandmother, who was completely deaf, did not hear a thing. She kept her head lowered and continued plucking the heads from the shrimp until she finally noticed me standing in the courtyard.

  She informed me in a loud voice, ‘Boy Waiting went to the village clinic with her mother. Her mother’s just had another baby girl!�
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  I stood under the branches of the withered jasmine tree and tried to digest this surprising news.

  As if by way of explanation, Boy Waiting’s grandmother expanded on her earlier statement, ‘Another useless girl!’

  The world moved on so quickly. My grandfather had died, and Boy Waiting had a new baby sister. This meant that the family now had eight daughters, and that Boy Waiting had failed to bring them their long-awaited son. I wondered if her father would beat her for the failure.

  I left Boy Waiting’s courtyard and began wandering down Pirate’s Alley. A gust of salty sea air swept through the alley like the tail of a dragon. When I reached the third turn, I gave a cold shiver. There, standing right in front of me, was the mute.

  And afterwards … and afterwards …

  When I ran into the mute that day, in a corner of Pirate’s Alley, I imagined that it would be the same as all the previous times. He would touch me with his hand, that hand with the enormous black birthmark, he would put his fingers inside me. I would feel the same terror and shame that I had before, but eventually someone would walk by and put an end to the incident. I never expected that this time would be much, much worse. The mute pointed down one of the alleyways adjacent to Pirate’s Cove. He kept pointing in that direction, but I had no idea what he was trying to say. He began to make strange noises in his throat and to point even more agitatedly. I was terrified. My limbs would not obey my commands, but eventually, for some strange reason, I began to walk in the direction he was pointing. As I moved like an automaton along Pirate’s Alley, it gradually dawned on me that the mute was taking me to his house. It was a house on one of the streets that adjoined Pirate’s Alley, a house I never knew existed.

  The mute forced me into his house and quickly kicked the door shut with his heel. Inside it was very dark. Too late, I realised that I was in great physical danger. I don’t know if it was fear of physical hurt or fear of death, but at last, I regained my voice and began screaming at the top of my lungs. At first I screamed for my grandmother. When I realised how futile that was, I screamed for Boy Waiting’s mother, but the mute quickly clamped a hand over my lips and silenced me by stuffing a rag into my mouth. Then he threw me onto the bed, which was as hard as a wooden board. After that, there was only excruciating pain. I was seven years old. I had no idea what was being done to my body.

  If it were possible to measure death against pain, then the pain I endured in that room must have been equal to a hundred deaths. I know I must have died a hundred times that day.

  I have no idea how long I was unconscious. It may have been four hours, a day or even two days later that I finally regained consciousness. When I came to, I saw that my thighs were covered with blood and that the straw mat on which I was lying was stained with congealed blood. I could not remember who I was or which road I had come by, whether I had ever had a mother or father or whether I had been born like this, lying here on this bed. I looked around at the unfamiliar room, at the stove without a shrine to the Sea Goddess and at the terrifying shadows flickering over the naked body of the man next to me, and I began to cry. My tears fell onto my body, mingling with the dried clots of blood that had formed on my skin. Even now, I still remember the dampness, the bitter taste in my mouth, the awful stench of blood. It was the smell of death, the same odour that I had smelled on my grandfather’s pillow.

  The room was filthy, the rafters covered with cobwebs. I noticed that there was no yellow talisman pasted on the door to ward off evil spirits. The only light in the room came from one small shuttered window set high in the wall. There were no ocean sounds, no tides, no winds or waves to be heard. It was a place very much like hell.

  Into this hell walked the mute’s parents. Tied to one corner of the bed, I watched as his white-haired father came into the room. He looked terribly haggard, not at all like a fisherman. He glanced at me silently, shook his head and left the room without saying a word. Some time later, the mute’s mother entered the room. When she looked at me, her expression was as terrified as mine. As she left the room, followed by her son, I noticed that she was trembling. She wore her hair in the familiar style of the fishermen’s wives: a chignon tied with a red ribbon and ornamented with a spray of white gardenia. What was a woman like that doing in this place? I couldn’t understand how the mute could have a mother and a father. How could a monster like that have two perfectly normal parents? Was the mute really like everyone else in the village, born of a woman who wore her hair twisted into a chignon decorated with a white gardenia? How was that possible?

  Shortly after the old woman left, I heard the sound of the mute breaking things in the next room. He was making a strange animal howling in the back of his throat, like a muzzled lion trying to roar. Through the open door, I could see him gesticulating wildly at his poor parents, his fingers gnarled with the effort. These were the same two hands that had invaded my body, that had taken control of my body as if they held some absolute authority over it.

  Although both of the mute’s parents knew what was happening, they never set foot in the room again. I remained bound to a corner of the bed. My pain was an ocean, a boundless sea whose waters stretched to the very ends of the earth. Pain was a tide crashing onto the reef, spreading across the beach, being absorbed into the sand only to emerge once more, flowing back into an endless sea. It was a tide that never ran dry. Although the mute’s mother and father were still in the house, I knew that he had brought me here for a reason: he knew that his parents would protect him.

  Again and again, the mute’s body invaded mine. Sometimes it happened late at night, in darkness so total you could not even see your hand in front of your face. Sometimes it was in the early hours just before dawn, or at some indeterminate hour of sunlight. When I awoke from my pain-filled haze, I would strain my ears, listening for village sounds. I kept hoping that someone would pass by the house, that I would hear the footsteps of one of the villagers carrying water on a shoulder pole, the click of heels on cobblestones, or that my grandmother, calling me to dinner, would come looking for me. But I heard nothing but the wind gusting over the rooftops and the sound of tiny pebbles rolling from the tiles and onto the ground. It felt as if the house were located somewhere far outside the Village of Stone, in some distant underworld. As my hopes of rescue faltered, I began to wish that the village would be hit by a furious typhoon, a storm with winds and rain that would sweep into the Village of Stone, destroying everything in its path. I wanted everything destroyed: the mute, myself, this worthless body, this body that did not seem to be under my own control, this body that, even if I were some day to escape from this living hell, was already beyond redemption. But I knew that there would be no typhoon, no rescue nor anything else. I remained curled in a foetal position, gazing through the high window at a small, gloomy patch of sky.

  Several days later, I heard voices and an unusual amount of activity going on outside the house. I had no way of knowing whether it was a festival, a funeral procession, a temple fair or some other event of celebration or mourning. I tried to cry out, but the rag stuffed into my mouth made it impossible. The mute became terribly agitated, as if he were afraid of being discovered. Even when the noise had passed, he continued to look anxious. Later that night I watched him pacing nervously around his room. After he had walked back and forth several times, he began stamping his feet on the earth floor, as if he were trying to figure out where the ground was softest. Then he dragged the bed with me on it over to the other side of the room and went out. When he returned, he was carrying a shovel and a large sack. He tossed the sack onto the floor, took up the shovel and began to dig a hole in the floor. Bit by bit, he expanded the hole in the ground, tossing shovelfuls of earth into the sack. He continued to dig as if his hands, those terrible hands with the enormous black birthmark, would never tire. When he had filled the sack, he went outside to empty it. Now and then he would stop to take a drink of water or sit down on the bed to catch his breath before resuming his
digging. After two days, he seemed satisfied with the pit he had dug. He untied me from the bed, bound my hands and feet and placed me in it. Then he moved the bed back over the hole. It was a darkness blacker than death.

  Now no one would ever discover the mute’s secret. No one would ever discover my buried shame.

  For days I drifted in and out of consciousness. Sometimes the mute would come down to me and there would be pain, but mostly I was alone. I remember being given bread and water. The mute would take the rag out of my mouth and untie my hands. Then he would pass me down the food. He was keeping me alive, although only just. Even on the brink of death, I remember feeling a powerful will to survive. Even after my tears had run dry, even after I had lost what little was left of my humanity, the only thing I wanted to do was survive.

  Suddenly, I felt the sun shining down upon me. The light was blinding, and I found myself on a sandy beach. But how had I managed to crawl out of that hole in the ground? Hadn’t the mute tied me up before he put me into the pit? Yet I felt no pain and it was easier to breathe. The sky seemed incredibly high, and the nearby rocks, towering and craggy, looked very much like those on the far side of the mountain of the Village of Stone. The fishermen’s wives along the beach looked familiar and yet enormous, as if they had grown to the size of giants. I lowered my head to look at myself and wondered, Is this really me? I hardly recognised myself. When had my hands grown so hairy? And stranger still, why were they so hard and spiny? I tried to spread my hands but found that I no longer had any fingers. They were like tentacles … no, not tentacles but claws. I used my claws to feel around on my back and found there a hard shell, large enough to contain my entire body. I realised I was a hermit crab. I saw that the tide was rising, flooding up onto the beach. Fearing that I would be washed away, I tucked my head into my shell-house and used my claws to block the entrance. When the tide had receded and all was safe again, I poked my head out of my shell and saw that the sand stretched far away in all directions. How wonderful, I finally had my very own shell! I stretched out my claws, which grew from all sides of my body. I began to wonder: was my shell big enough? Perhaps I had grown too large for it? Wasn’t that an even larger shell lying over there on the beach?