by Xue Yiwei
“‘Silence is revolt against absurdity,’ a character of mine had said. I told myself not to say anything, but our conversation did not end with my silence; it ended with the package from Shakespeare’s hometown. I’d always assumed that my wife did not know about the existence of the parcel, and didn’t expect she would refer to it so caustically now. ‘Didn’t you say you wanted to celebrate our day?’ she sneered, as if what she had meant to say was ‘your day.’ ‘Why don’t you celebrate by opening it? To see what’s inside.’ I told myself to keep calm. ‘It’s the perfect occasion,’ she said. I told myself again to keep calm. ‘You should open it.’ Finally, she said, ‘Whatever it is, maybe it’ll give you inspiration for your next work.’ Finished, she walked out.
“This conversation on the eve of our wedding anniversary set the baseline for the rest of our married life. This might be the curse which my ex spoke about on the phone. Our marriage continued for six more years. An unbearable six years. My wife just sank deeper and deeper into a darkness I was unable to dispel, and for the last two years, her nervous system was on the verge of collapse. She was unable to get a peaceful night’s sleep. Sometimes she sat on the balcony the whole night and either zone out or whimper. My attempts at consoling her merely aggravated her anguished nerves. She had three serious episodes and had to be hospitalized.
“Many people had talked to me about it, including her parents, advising me to think about my own future. But I did not want to leave her this way. I hoped to help her make a complete recovery. Then maybe she would take the initiative and leave me. I did not expect that in the end she would choose such a violent means of leaving me. Maybe that wasn’t a choice. Maybe it was the curse. At the time, I was away on a business trip. I rushed back when I heard and took a taxi from the airport right to the crematorium. Her body was waiting for me there. The forensic report listed her time of death as 10:20 in the morning on the previous day. When the personnel in the crematorium asked me if I wanted to walk a bit closer, I indicated that it was unnecessary. I had scarcely ever gotten so close to her body when she was alive, so what feeling would I have for it dead?
“That evening, I returned home exhausted. I fell asleep as soon as I went to bed. But in the middle of the night, I was woken up by a nightmare about the package. I had never opened it. While rummaging through my old manuscripts before I went away on the business trip, I had seen it there on the top shelf, seal untouched. But in my nightmare, it had already been opened. I sprang up and climbed on a chair to get to it. The moment I touched it, I knew that my nightmare had come true. I took it down. I didn’t know what else my wife had seen. All I saw was a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works and two identical T-shirts.
“What role had this package played in the tragedy? It’s been three years, and I have still not found the answer to this question. In these three years, I have never missed a moment of silent prayer at 10:20 in the morning. That time of day is a curse to me. I wear that T-shirt every day. The deep symbolism is also a curse. Absurdly, my life belongs to these two women, to these hateful curses. One of the women decided I had never loved her, while the other believed, utterly falsely, that I had only ever loved the one who sent me the package. I couldn’t write a more absurd play if I tried. So I retired—this was the only way out—and left the city where the tragedy of my marriage played out. The only way out. But why did I then move to the youngest city in China? That’s the question. I was sure it was because I heard she, the woman who had said I would be cursed, had relocated there. But why would I go there because of her? What need of her did I still have? Yes, I did still need her, and only recently have I come to realize this. I also had to sort things out, just as she did when she gave me that call.
“There were two issues to be settled. First, I had to tell her why I suddenly left her. Only I could tell her. It was not just because of her call that I needed to do this, but also because a year later my wife, in a completely different tone, had asked me the exact same question. But there was another, more important need. I needed her to tell me what else was in that package besides the book and two T-shirts. Only she could tell me. Yes, after almost three years of hermitic life, I finally realized these two reasons for needing her. That’s why I agreed to an interview, to reveal my identity. But then the waiting started, and I came to regret my public manifestation. I knew that she would not appear simply because I had revealed myself. We hadn’t spoken in years, not since that call. She would never resurface. Which was to say that I could never know what else was in the package, what it was that had finally pushed my wife into the abyss. And it meant that she would never know (or perhaps she no longer cared to know) why I left her. Maybe this was the famous curse?”
There was a long pause on the tape. Just when I was about to hit stop, the dramatist’s voice appeared again.
“There’s no more need for me to keep living in the city. I will be staying in this little village far from the madding crowd for a week. This village marked the end of our last voyage together and of our incredible passion. We did know it when we arrived. The tragedy only began with the emergence of a particular detail on the day we departed. It’s now been fourteen years since that day, seventeen years since the love affair began. It’s been an incredible time. I’ve had an incredible life. I will move on my return. I will move to a place unrelated to either woman. The two women who have haunted me in life and death. The two women who decided I did not love them.”
At this point, he choked up. He pressed the stop button, leaving a burst of static on the tape. If not for his overpowering distress, I believe that the dramatist would have gone on to tell me that one detail that everybody wanted to know. And maybe he had, and I would have learned it by listening till the end. But then I remembered the short story he had mentioned twice in the newspaper interview. I seemed to see him fourteen years ago. I felt as though he and I were the same person. I don’t know whether he became my character or I became his.
Overcome with emotion, I pressed the record button and left the following lines on the tape: “That year, our passionate love affair took us to Xishuangbanna. Our trip would have been perfect, if not for that one detail. Our passion would have lasted, all the way to Shakespeare’s hometown and beyond. But then, on the day of our departure, in the waiting room for the long-distance bus, a man who had just gotten off the bus glanced at us. He walked excitedly over, calling her name, which she found extremely strange. She did not know who he was. Then he mentioned another name, and she blushed. She seemed to remember who the man was. She did not introduce us. She asked him how the person he had just mentioned was. ‘He … last year,’ the man said. ‘Brain cancer.’
“Soon, we got on the bus. She rested her head on my shoulder, while I just kept looking out the window. Neither of us spoke, but I could feel her sorrow. Her tears wet my shirt. Just as we were about to get off, she said, with a surge of emotion: ‘You know how much I love you?’ I reached out and touched her cheek. Of course I knew. So much so that, starting with our encounter with that man, I went on to suffer the most manic week of my life, drowning in a flood of jealousy, as his swollen corpse and I floated together into an endless nightmare. Tossed on the waves of our affair’s incredible passion for three years, I had finally died. I knew that for me the only way out was to terminate our relationship. No way but this.”
The instant I finished recording these lines, the telephone rang. It was the woman who had seen the dramatist at the airport. She asked me if I knew where he had gone.
I said I did not know.
She asked me if I knew when he was coming back.
I said I did not know.
She asked me if he would come back or not.
Again, I said I did not know.
The Two Sisters
Hesitating between the two men who had been pursuing her for over half a year, the big sister chose the reliable one. Her choice surprised everyone, because the competition seeme
d so totally one-sided. The reliable one was so far behind his rival, whom the little sister had had her eyes on and hoped would become her brother-in-law. The rival already had a successful career and a glorious future. He also had dashing good looks and an urbane manner. He was the youngest executive in a communications equipment company that was planning an initial public offering.
Of course, his conspicuously superior qualities had not escaped the big sister’s notice. It’s just that they didn’t impress her. They scared her. She could not stand how people would look enviously at her when she was standing with him. That kind of gaze sapped her confidence and gave her doubts. Besides, she’d always seen reliability as a man’s most important asset. Career, looks, and deportment were mere decoration that she could do without.
The young executive was a catch, but he did not strike her as reliable. He had an overbearing self-confidence she found objectionable. He’d flaunted his sense of self-worth on their first date, when he took her to the café on the top floor of the city’s poshest shopping mall. He talked nonstop, about everything from the Cultural Revolution to Remembrance of Things Past and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He ended up talking about Vivaldi. He told her with certainty that he could do without everything in his life except for music, especially The Four Seasons, “that soul-gripping work.”
His volubility scared her. As did his take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards life—music excepted. In her personal dictionary, volubility was an antonym for reliability. She had an instinctive distaste for talkative men.
After almost half a year of hesitation she finally made her decision. She chose reliability. Even though he was just a salesman in a real estate agency. Even though he wasn’t cultivated. Even though he didn’t look dashing. Even though he was twenty full centimetres shorter than his rival. Even though he fell short by far in wit and manner. Even though he did not like Vivaldi and had never heard of either The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Remembrance of Things Past. It was just because he struck her as reliable.
He never took her out for coffee or a Western-style meal, let alone a concert. He hadn’t put as much energy into his pursuit of her as his rival had, and materially he fell short as well. But in his down-to-earth gaze she saw his sincerity, and she sensed a passion in him that made him his rival’s equal. He didn’t talk much, which made him seem relaxed and approachable. When he talked he seemed diffident. His slight stutter and tendency to blush struck her as transparency rather than a physical inadequacy. She especially appreciated how he never imposed his own will on her or quoted her little sister, he simply didn’t have a will of his own. He agreed with her on everything.
Even on the topic of children, his answers signalled reliability. She had asked both of her admirers what kind of child they would like. The executive talked a mile a minute, as if delivering a painstakingly prepared report on bullish market indicators. He said he wanted a son. He wanted their child to grow up to be bigger and stronger than him. He wanted him to start learning the violin at age four to make up for his own lack of opportunity to take up an instrument. He said he wanted to attend his son’s recitals and see him on stage playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
The same question had made the real estate agent blush. “I just want the child you would bear me,” he stammered.
So she chose the reliable one.
Her decision had a lot to do with the pressure her little sister had put on her throughout the time she spent making up her mind. At first the little sister did not like the ordinary salesman from the real estate company, though it was more for his disposition than his position. She could more or less bear his diffidence, but she couldn’t abide his lack of will. “Where’s the fun in living with somebody who doesn’t have any opinions of his own?” she asked with disdain. She was also disgusted with her big sister’s criterion of reliability, which to her, was a synonym for mediocrity. She even claimed that “reliable man” is an oxymoron. All men are monkey spawn. Men prefer mobility, not getting tied down. She said the reason why men—actually, people in general—sacrifice their freedom and live with somebody else is simply to make life more interesting. “So there’s no point in living with somebody who does not know his own mind.”
So said the little sister, who did not realize that all of her hard work was having the opposite effect. The stronger her opposition, the more her big sister favoured the reliable one.
The older sister remembered all the mistakes that her sister had made in love, some of them several times. The big sister felt ashamed for her little sister, and she worried about her. Every time the little sister brought home a new boyfriend, she could foresee a fiasco. “None of the guys you have eyes for is reliable,” she used to tell her little sister, with reprimand in her voice. “You’re dreaming.”
And her little sister had always hated the reproach. “Look who’s talking,” she said. “Who still believes she’s found a reliable man?”
What the older sister found hardest to bear was that her sister did not see the mistakes she had made in love as mistakes. She said they were just part of her life experience, to be added to her “personal capital.” The big sister blushed at her little sister’s brazenness. She could not bear to let herself make the same kind of mistake, not even once. She believed that her life and her body should belong to only one man. One reliable man.
These two looked very different and had completely different personalities. This mystery of genetics had confused their parents and everyone who knew them. The strange thing was that their preferences contradicted their personalities.
The big sister was plump, and though she did not like talkative men, she herself was outgoing and sociable. She liked to meet new people. She would always take the initiative, warmly greeting the neighbours. It was easy for her to find a topic to engage a stranger in conversation.
Her little sister was skinny, and though she liked lively, talkative men, she was herself quiet, reticent, and socially inept. She walked quickly, head down, as if afraid that others would see her. She never nodded hello to the neighbours, much less had a deep conversation with any one of them.
The one thing the two sisters had in common was that they had very beautiful faces. But their different brands of beauty also gave people different impressions. The big sister’s beauty was like a landscape that you could admire. People found it welcoming. The little sister’s was like an oil painting, somehow distant.
It was because of the older sister’s outgoing personality that the neighbours knew about their backgrounds. They were from Hangzhou. Two years before, when their father had died suddenly from heart disease, the two sisters left their temperamental mother and came to this strange city to live together. They soon found similar jobs to the ones they had in Hangzhou. The big sister, who had taken finance in university, was working as an accountant at an insurance company. And the little sister, a fine arts major, was working at an advertising agency as a designer.
Although the little sister was greatly disappointed that her big sister ended up choosing the reliable guy, she agreed to do the interior design for their new home. As it happened, she had help from her best friend, a graphic designer at a fashion magazine in Shanghai. The friend happened to be in town on a work assignment when the little sister was starting to think about the decor. Many of the details in the new home resulted from their frequent discussions. They used to be neighbours in Shanghai, and they had been classmates from kindergarten to university. They were intimate friends who had never kept secrets from each other. While discussing the details of the new home, the little sister made fun of her big sister’s stubborn and foolish choice and her brother-in-law’s feeble and insipid character. Her satirical commentary was so funny her best friend couldn’t stop laughing.
The older sister had never liked this former neighbour. She thought this friend was a bad influence on her little sister’s attitude and lifestyle, having made the same kinds of mistakes
in romance and friendship. She was not at all pleased that her little sister was discussing the details of her new home with her.
The new abode was not far from the apartment the sisters had shared. The older sister had chosen the location mainly out of concern for her little sister. She was uncomfortable with her attitude and lifestyle. She did not like the friends—boyfriends and girlfriends—her little sister had made. She believed that if she stayed close to her she could keep her from harm, or at least reduce the risk of her making mistakes.
Her new husband of course had no opinion about where to live. After getting married he was as amenable as before, and in some ways his amenability to his wife’s wishes stood out even more. For instance, he disliked going on business trips more and more, and would rack his brains to think of excuses to avoid them. This pleased the big sister no end. She knew that he cared about their married life and about her. She would not forget the time when he took her to a spring company outing that ended at a famous Sichuan restaurant. The company president had insisted on seating them beside him.
The affable president had had a lot to say that day. At one point he asked his subordinate how he had managed to get himself such a beautiful wife.