by Xue Yiwei
“Isn’t the play of life necessarily a tragedy?” the girl asked, echoing her big sister’s question.
“Shakespeare did not say that,” the dramatist replied.
“Then who cast us in these tragic roles?” she asked.
“Us?” the dramatist asked doubtfully.
“Yes, us!” the little sister said, with certainty in her voice. “Including you.”
The Prodigy
Only I knew the real reason why I did not attend the award ceremony. It was a special event organized by the municipal education commission for my teacher and me. I had come in second place in a national amateur piano competition, in the youth division. When the organizers of the award ceremony informed my parents, they said every media organization in the city would be there and that the deputy mayor, who was in charge of education and the arts, would give a speech and present me and my teacher each with prize money and a certificate.
But twenty minutes before the start of the ceremony, the organizers received a call from my parents. They told them I had a high fever and could not make it. They said I had gotten sick two days before. The doctor had done all he could, but my temperature just would not come down. They offered their apologies and said they could attend and accept the prize and certificate on my behalf. But they would not have the time or the inclination to be interviewed by the media. They hoped that the commission would understand.
The truth was that my parents had no idea where I had gone. At dawn they had discovered I was no longer in my room. They looked everywhere for almost eight hours without success. They had to make that call. They had to lie. They assumed I’d run away from home for the second time. The first time was when they refused to find me another piano teacher. That episode ended when they got a call from the Guangzhou Railway Police Office telling them to come get me. This time, though, they were wrong: I had not run away. I’d been hiding in the power room in the basement of our building since dawn. I decided to remain there until the ceremony had gotten under way.
By the time they were hurrying home from the ceremony, I was already sitting in my room. They were much relieved to find me there. They didn’t ask me anything. They should’ve known that if they hadn’t refused another of my requests, I would not have responded in such a way.
Two days earlier I had asked them to let me stay home from the ceremony. If they had just been more patient in letting me finish my explanation (which I’d even prepared beforehand), the situation would never have gotten that out of hand. But they simply refused, no buts. They said that even if I were so feverish that I couldn’t walk, they would take me to the ceremony on a stretcher.
My parents approached the side of my bed together. They did not reprimand me or ask any questions. They just said it was a pity I had not gone. The deputy mayor had given a rousing speech. My teacher’s account of my rapid progress in the past year or two fascinated all the parents and child pianists in the room. It was the climax of the evening.
I kept looking down, patiently waiting for my parents to finish saying everything they had to say. And when they were finally about to unroll the certificate and give it to me, I looked up and said what I would have told the whole audience if I had gone to the ceremony, “I will never touch the piano again. Not even if you beat me to death.”
Thirteen years have passed, and it’s as if it happened yesterday.
At the time I was only half as old as I am now. At the time I was a prodigy the whole city had taken note of. I was the apple of my parents’ eye and the centre of public and media attention. I was a role model, an example other parents held up when assessing their own children, a pair of exceptional coordinates on the grid of achievement. Everyone knew that on the afternoon of my thirteenth birthday the mayor had called to congratulate me, that I had won a first-class at the provincial mathematics competition and another at the provincial composition competition. Everyone knew that I was reading Harry Potter in the original English. That nobody in town under twenty years of age could beat me at chess. That at twelve I’d not only memorized the surnames, given names, monikers, and places in the seating protocol for all the merry men of Liangshan in The Water Margin, but also read War and Peace and All Quiet On the Western Front.
At eleven, I’d memorized traditional Chinese essays like the “Ode to the Pavillion of Prince Teng” and the “Crimes of Qin.” At ten, I’d discovered a mistake in the language test for the university entrance exam. At nine, I’d been able to extemporaneously report the surface area of Jerusalem and the population of the Republic of Sierra Leone, among other such trivia. And of course, everyone knew a lot more about my piano playing. Like at what age I’d started to play, when I’d gotten my first award, at what age I’d passed which examination.
All of these factoids had been reported over and over again in the newspapers. So parents who wanted to force their children to study the piano used my progress to measure their own children and make demands on them. I was a famous local wunderkind, and the most amazing thing about me was that I didn’t appear to have any of the weird afflictions that tend to plague other prodigies: paranoia, depression or isolation, eccentricity. Everyone thought I was a healthy kid, mentally and physically. I took part in student government. I was a volunteer at the bookstore and the library. I was very polite to my neighbours. And I was modest in front of my classmates. In a word, I was a well-rounded wunderkind, a healthy, happy prodigy. Or so everyone thought.
Only I knew how ignorant all of these people were about me, including my parents. They did not see, nor could they see, the darkness behind the brilliant façade of my life. And they could not know that for a half a year around my thirteenth birthday I’d had a series of very strange experiences, in which I’d met first an angel and then a devil, and suffered mental and physical tumult and torment.
Nobody knew about this. And nobody would have wanted to know. The award ceremony was an opportunity to let everyone know how little they all knew about me. But I suddenly withdrew. I begged my parents to let me stay home. I was all of a sudden unwilling to reveal my trauma to others.
But my parents did not have the patience to let me finish my explanation. They said it was an award ceremony held for me. I had to go. They would be humiliated if I did not go.
They did not know that true humiliation would await them if I went.
Had I gone to the award ceremony, I would have told everyone how I’d met an angel fifteen years older than me. She was my cousin. She arrived in a hurry one evening from Shilong, about a three-hour train ride north of our city. There was no light in her face and no life in her eyes. She looked worn out.
I had not seen my cousin in two years. I had not thought that she could change so drastically in such a short time. She was no longer just my cousin, an innocent girl. She had become a woman, a source of temptation. Even though she looked exhausted, I could still smell a particular aroma on her. It was a kind of message she was sending from deep in her womanly being.
The gentle touch of her hand on my head sent a thrilling and embarrassing palpitation through my body.
At night my mother told me to turn off the light and go to sleep. She also said that my cousin was going to stay with us for a while.
When I asked her why, she said that she couldn’t go on living in her own house anymore.
I again asked why, and my mother asked if I had noticed the scar on my cousin’s left cheek.
It was conspicuous. Of course I had seen it.
Mother said my cousin’s husband had made that mark by hitting her with a boiling hot spatula.
I asked why her husband would do such a thing.
My mother said she did not know and did not want to know. She reminded me never to ask my cousin about the scar.
My cousin stayed with us for two weeks, during which time my mother arranged for me to sleep on the couch in the living room while my cousin slept in my bed.
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br /> Every night for those two weeks I had difficulty getting to sleep. As I tossed and turned, I would hear my cousin tossing and turning in my bed, too. This correspondence made me feel that the night wasn’t just a time, but also a space where we could be together, both then and in the future.
Many times I envisioned a future in which we could be alone together. I saw myself as a dashing youth, while my cousin was still just as young and pretty as she was when I was thirteen. She would be wearing a brightly coloured apron as she brought out my favourite dishes: spicy hot tofu and steamed breaded pork chops. I would stare at her pale white arms, as another of those thrilling and embarrassing palpitations coursed through my body.
It was the most amazing two weeks of my life. My nocturnal excitement and agitation left me dazed during the day. I could not focus on anything. No matter whether it was on the blackboard, on the sheet music, or in the sky. Everywhere I looked I saw an image of my cousin. A bead of sweat on the tip of her nose. The curves at the corner of her mouth. Her billowing hair, her swelling breasts. The tempting crevice between her upper and lower arms when she pressed them together. Every day after school I would rush home as fast as I could, to be with her as quickly as possible. I wanted to smell that womanly scent emanating out of her deepest being.
One Friday evening, my parents went to the hospital to see a colleague who had had a sudden stroke. They ate dinner in a rush and left.
This was the first time (and as it turned out, the only time) I had ever been alone with my cousin. I deliberately ate slowly, because I didn’t want my miraculous meal with her to end. Every time our eyes met, a tender smile would appear on her face. I felt as though that smile belonged to me and me alone. To me that smile was the acme of beauty, a kind that even music could not convey, and that no one else could appreciate. I was infatuated. I felt I’d stepped into the world of tomorrow to become a handsome young man.
“Why did he hit you?” I asked brusquely, incensed.
My cousin smiled at me, but did not seem to think this was a question I should be asking. “Because”—she paused—“because he knows I don’t love him.”
I never imagined that my cousin would respond in this way. “If you didn’t love him why did you get married?” I asked.
My cousin put down her chopsticks, and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know,” she said. “Not everything in life has a why.”
But that didn’t stop me. I had many other questions to ask, many more whys. “Then why don’t you get a divorce?” I asked.
My cousin looked me in the eye. “Because he doesn’t want to get a divorce,” she said helplessly.
I was even sadder than she. I could not understand how anyone could stand being trapped in a relationship like that. “Have you never loved him?” I asked.
My cousin looked distressed. She nodded and said, “I love someone else.”
This mention of someone else was a comfort to me. It was as if that someone else was myself. “Then why didn’t you get married to this someone else?” I couldn’t wait to ask.
“Because I could not get married to him,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because he died,” my cousin said, distraught. “Because he’s already dead.”
Her revelation chilled me to the bone. I did not dare ask any other questions. I did not want to make my cousin unhappy. I looked down, thinking of the first corpse I had seen, a junior high school student who had drowned in the reservoir. I was only seven years old at the time. I had squeezed through the onlookers and seen an alabaster body, and I realized then how terrifying death was, even when it was a complete stranger. How terrifying the death of a loved one would be!
Nobody knew about our conversation. Still less did anyone know about the emotional and psychological effect it would have on me and my life. Love and death had met in my heart, engendering a depression and terror that I’ve never been able to escape.
That evening, under the influence of the emotional shock, I practiced Bach’s Goldberg Variations. As I was practicing the sixteenth variation, I heard a mysterious voice from deep within the music. “He’s not dead, he’s not dead, he’s not dead,” the voice kept repeating for a full minute. It conveyed to me the sublimity of the music and the majesty of my performance. I vowed to practice all the harder to win a prize in the next piano competition, just as everyone expected me to do. I wanted to comfort the wounded angel with an honour, to send a secret message to my cousin—that the man she loved was not dead, that he was growing into a man at an amazing pace.
The sound of the toilet flushing interrupted my thoughts. I noticed that my cousin had just gone to the bathroom. To notice such a thing seemed so vulgar of me that I stopped playing, plunged into shame. I stuck my cheek on the piano keys. I had to escape that shame.
But then, the sound of water appeared again; my cousin was about to take a shower. I became conscious of her taking off all her clothes. I heard the sound of the shower curtain and of the water ricocheting off her body onto the curtain. Shame immediately yielded to a powerful curiosity.
I slowly left the piano bench, walked out of the room, and gently pressed my face against the frosted glass door of the bathroom. I couldn’t see a thing; but I could hear. I could hear in the fluctuations in the sound of the water the changes in my cousin’s posture. Those shifts, full of temptation, made me palpitate violently from head to toe. I was on the verge of collapse. I felt a powerful cramping in the lower left half of my abdomen. A spasm of heat spurt out of my body. I felt ashamed.
I only saw my cousin’s husband once. The time he came to take her away. He looked just as my relatives described him, cultivated and educated. I could not associate him with the person who had smacked her across the face with a boiling hot spatula. As I watched him take my cousin away—or I should say, as I watched my cousin leave with him—I felt an intense hatred. Not for the person who took away my angel, mind you; the person I hated was my angel. “Why is she going with him?” I asked my mother in despair.
My mother said, distractedly, “She’s going home.”
This vague answer cut my wounded heart like a knife. “That’s not her home,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?” my mother asked, still distracted. “Then tell me, where is her home?”
I looked down. I knew I could not tell her that my cousin’s home was far away, in the future. I could not say that her home was my home. I hated my cousin! I could not forgive her for suddenly abandoning me, for leaving with someone she did not love. I could not forgive her for turning my first love into my first loss in love.
This was thirteen years ago, but I remember it all clear as day.
Had I gone to the ceremony, I would have pointed at the bald guy standing beside me, and cried out: “It’s him!” He was my teacher and mentor, a fact that everybody knew. Yet had I appeared at the award ceremony, I would have let everybody know that he was also the devil who had almost dragged me down into hell.
What brought us together was the provincial youth piano competition. He was one of the judges, and I was the youngest prizewinner, not yet eleven years old at the time. After the competition ended, he walked over to my parents, full of praise, and said that he wanted to take me on as his pupil. My parents were thrilled, because he was a teacher with a good reputation, and all parents dreamed of their children receiving instruction from him. His eagerness to take me on was not just an assessment of my present talents, but also a prophecy of my future triumphs.
Indeed, after a year of instruction, I had made rapid progress. It was a happy year, an ordinary year. During every class, my mother would sit beside me, and afterwards give a detailed summary of the famous teacher’s lesson, assessing his pedagogy. She said that I was so lucky to be able to receive such expert instruction. And she had just as much praise for my progress as well. My mother even reassessed her initial reserve about my p
rospects as a pianist. She felt ever more certain that piano should be my lifelong profession.
But then the next summer, things went awry. My mother told me one day that so self-aware an adolescent as me should not need his mother to sit in on every lesson. Later on I learned that this was the devil’s own recommendation. My mother did as my teacher said. She described it as “training” for me—an abnormal training regime, as it turned out.
I soon noticed that the devil treated me very differently when my mother was not there. In her absence, he became much more affectionate, even passionate. There was a lot of hand touching. He would often put his arm around my shoulders and start stroking my back. And when the lesson was over, rather than a simple pat on the head, he would hold me tightly for the longest time, before finally saying goodbye.
The impact my cousin had on me did not escape the devil’s notice. During those amazing two weeks when my cousin stayed with us, he had a temper tantrum every lesson. He reprimanded me for my lack of focus, for seeming to allow my eyes to drift from the music. Yet in the week after my cousin broke my heart, when I was in an even poorer state, the devil seemed extremely accommodating, as if he knew that a change had occurred in my life. He appeared quite pleased that I had experienced such a loss of love. It was like schadenfreude.
One day, for the first time, he put his hand on my thigh, and began to demonstrate the fingering and forcefulness with his fat fingers.
The feel of his fingers on my skin left me queasy. But I did not dare resist him, as he said that this was a particularly effective method he had invented.
He said that a demonstration on my leg would make it easier for me to remember the various techniques, because of the nervous connection between my thigh and my brain. After practice that day, the eager devil not only held me tightly, but gave me a kiss on the lips.