The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  We rumbled over a wooden bridge crossing the Bei River, and down below, a fisherman slipped by in his sampan, an oily cormorant perched in the bow with a noose around its neck, the rope ending in the owner’s clenched fist.

  “Okay,” I said. “You know what? Fuck it, let’s go.”

  5

  AFTER IVY GAVE Jianguo directions, we turned off the highway, riding now past watercress and goose farms, the rustle of rice stalks, wending between the karst mountains. The sound of the tires changed with the terrain: pocked asphalt to gravel to dirt, and we stopped at a village called Yingde in front of a house with a crescent pond. All the houses had wok-handle roofs, curved like a bell in front, with scrollwork of crabs and cranes and roosters. We got out of the van right as a few boys zipped past on scooters and waved to Ivy.

  “Do they know you?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said, pointing to the cottage in front of us. “I grew up here.”

  The whitewash plaster of her house had mostly peeled away from the gable wall and you could see every generation of infill—mud brick, tamped earth, daub and, most recently, cement, as if you were using tree rings to see into the past. We walked through double-leaf doors, and lizards skittered across the mud walls of a tight square room with no furniture. She led me into another bare room.

  “This was my room growing up. No one has lived here for a long time.” I stepped inside and it was a bare cement room. There was no one around. I touched the walls, moist and cool. Aside from the frogs lowing in the pond and the crackling cicadas, it was eerily quiet.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Only old people and babies live here anymore. Everyone left for cities,” she said plainly, as though everyone would agree that working in a factory and staying in a dorm the size of a coffee can was preferable to living here.

  The house had three square bays and a narrow sky-well in the middle. She held out her hand as she’d done that morning at the factory as if she suspected rain to come dribbling down the ridge tiles.

  She showed me a bullet bite in the sky-well. “My grandfather,” she said. “He owned a lot of land here. During the Anti-Rightist Movement they blindfolded him and shot him against his own house, right here.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Neighbors. His own people. They dumped him into the river where you met my grandmother. She moved there after. She’s not Tanka like the rest of the fishermen there. She is just watching over my grandfather.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, like an idiot. She traced her index finger around the outline of the bullet hole in the brick.

  “I told you when he was young he worked for the Foot Emancipation Society. This all seems very long ago, but then, when I look around, I think China is still an old woman with golden lotus feet.”

  “Is that true? You guys are in hyper-speed. You did the West’s twentieth century in about fifteen years.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t mean industry and development. I mean the revolution did not succeed. People are afraid. Since Tiananmen people are scared of being radical. But that’s what it will take. Did you talk to your father about Ruxi?”

  Right then I remembered that I was supposed to meet Ruxi and Shen that evening. I’d completely forgotten. I looked down at my watch. If I left now I could probably make it back in time.

  “I talked to my father and I got a meeting set up with Ruxi.”

  “Thank you,” she said, touching my arm.

  “We can make a new policy.”

  “Why don’t you do what is right?”

  “We’ll make a policy to do what’s right.”

  She shook her head and frowned.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “I already set it up.” I shuddered with guilt and looked away.

  “That is good. Ruxi’s desperate. She is saying crazy things.”

  Ivy led me back outside. The air was much lighter. I took a deep breath as a few elderly women came out of the warren of alleys, faces like blueing leather, and they started talking with Ivy. A bone-thin tabby scratched his ear against a pillar, and when I moved forward he darted away.

  I followed Ivy through a moon gate into a courtyard to a small ceremonial room. A red light swam down the walls from a swaying paper lantern hanging from the ridgepole. Wrappers of spent fireworks scattered the ground. Lizards warmed themselves in pools of sunlight. Along the back wall there was a long table holding ancestral tablets. Coiling smoke of sandalwood incense rose. This was the direction we faced, the two stone tablets with the names of the village families written in beautiful calligraphy, and one small framed photo of a woman. Young. She had that old Shanghai glam. Fox shawl and pearls. Her hair in pinned-back finger waves. Beautiful. Like Ivy. I wondered who she was. I tried to picture my mother in that kind of portrait. She must have looked just as beautiful once, and suddenly all I wanted was a photo of my mother like that. Because owning one said something about you. Said you knew certain things, and you weren’t foolishly young anymore.

  We removed our shoes, knelt on two red plump cushions and I watched Ivy kowtow, lips murmuring, her feet tucked beneath her rear end, as she leaned all the way forward and almost touched her forehead against the ground. I did this two or three times. I didn’t say anything in my head at first, and then, because I felt like I should out of respect, I told my mother sorry for wishing she’d hurry up and die just so I could get a memorial photo of her.

  Then I told Ivy’s ancestors I was sorry. I didn’t even know what I was sorry about. Maybe that their village would have a Starbucks in a few years, maybe that all the people between sixteen and forty-five were away in the cities and never coming back. I wasn’t really sure. It was hot and sweaty and I wanted air-conditioning and I apologized to the ancestors for that too.

  I snuck a peek at Ivy. She was still praying, her eyes closed. A natural wave to her hair. My mother’s wigs looked real. None of the cheap synthetic ones with cowlicks or mesh caps. Once, as a kid, I’d seen through the crack of the bedroom door my mother putting on her wig before dinner. I knew I shouldn’t have looked, but I stood there frozen as she carefully flipped the wig inside out and stretched the lace cap over her head, pink and flaking and wrinkled: her true self. Inside me something stirred. It was ugly and I hated myself for thinking so. Then I watched her pull the wig into place, touch her temples to make sure it wasn’t crooked. She bobby-pinned the hair behind her ears, checked the mirror for flyaways, and before she could turn around I was running down the hall.

  Now Ivy lifted her hand and tucked her hair behind her ear, and this struck me somehow, the sudden view of her ear up close, the whorls and folds of this delicate pink-and-brown ear. When I was little I was always in and out of the doctor with ear infections and they put tubes in my ears. I almost went deaf. Once I’d tried to look at my eardrum in the mirror using a flashlight and a pair of needle-nose pliers and a magnifying glass when my mother walked by and screamed, “Fedor, the moron’s trying to kill himself again!”—again being the time I walked barefoot to the baseball diamond, and Mom shouted from the stoop, “There’s such a thing as tetanus, you know! How do you think Thoreau died?” I was eight. It scared the shit out of me. Years passed before I dared walk across a rug without slippers. But now I was barefoot in a temple, asking Ivy’s ancestors for an otoscope to peer into her ear, down the dogleg of tissue delicate as organza, to the drum softly pulsing, milky and nacreous as a saltwater pearl. Maybe the desire curling in me now like the incense smoke around the tablet was to hear with Ivy’s ears, to understand what the fuck was happening to me.

  All was quiet until Ivy asked, “Can you ride a bike?”

  “A bicycle? Yeah, sure.”

  “Okay, it is just that you are large.”

  “You’re calling me fat.”

  “No, not for your country,” she said.

  Back outside, an old shirtles
s man shook an empty cigarette pack and walked right past without seeing us. Ivy went into a little shed and wheeled out two bikes, one was an old girl’s bike with a basket on front and pink decals on the frame. “Here, try this. My cousin Jin San was the fattest girl in our village.” Then she bent down and picked up a large stick and handed it to me.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Rabid dogs. In case it gets late. At night the rabid ones go crazy.”

  “Great.” I took a few practice swings while riding in circles on the bike.

  “Where are we going?” I called out. Ivy was already ahead of me.

  “To the peach blossom spring.”

  * * *

  My tires skidded on the little dirt trails between the rice shoots. Ivy led us through the banana plantation trails, cool wells of air beneath the leafy trees, and the farmers in the fields looked up from under their conical hats. I saw a water buffalo’s leg stuck in the teeth of a harrow, blood ribboning down, its bald owner down on his knees in mud pulling for their lives, and then they were gone. Geese lunged out of the way of my front tire. We climbed, pedaling hard, I felt the burn in my calves, the bike wheel squeaking with every turn.

  We came to a fork in the trail. Two steep switchbacks up the side of the mountain.

  “Which way?” I asked.

  “I always take the small road,” she said, leaning into the turn, bunch grasses whipping at our legs.

  After a long steep ride, we stopped at a little cottage beside a small pond on a plateau. “It’s beautiful here,” I said, looking out to the small pond and the valley beyond it.

  I got off the bike and leaned it up against the trunk of a bright red crepe myrtle. And instead of putting her bike on the other side of the tree, Ivy leaned hers right up against mine, I noticed that, the handlebars entangled, the seats touching.

  We walked toward a little cottage. A sweet and generous scent of orange jasmine around us. She said they call this the seven-mile smell.

  There was no roof to the cottage, just four walls, very odd-looking, like it was put up overnight. No glass in the windows either, but I saw a stocked kitchen and a sink.

  “This is my house,” she said. “I bought it last year and built it myself.” She was laughing for some reason. “Do you want to see?” We walked in through the door into the one room and I realized the kitchen was actually a design printed on wallpaper, it was a picture of a French homey cottage kitchen with a stove and sink and teakettle.

  “Want some bread?” she asked, laughing and positioning her hands beneath the steaming baguette on the counter as if she were holding it.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s all fake.”

  “I bought this land, but at some point the building codes changed and this was considered residential instead of farmland. They had plans to develop here. We are not too far outside Foshan and as the city grows, people will need to live. To get a residential permit for the land I had to prove I lived here. They sent local officials out to verify. So I built a cottage with four walls and the officials came with cameras and said, ‘These are just four walls, no one lives here, permit denied.’ I said, ‘Give me a week.’ They gave me two days. So I dragged in this sofa from a junkyard and an old straw mattress and found this broken chair on the road and I put up this fake wallpaper of a kitchen. A week later the same officials come out and say, ‘Very nice kitchen. Cozy. We love your place. But you need running water.’ So I point at the sink faucet on the wallpaper with water coming out, and they all nod and take pictures. Then they submit their photos to the government who look them over and agree this is nice house. And I get the permit. It is insane.”

  “I love China,” I said.

  “I did not bribe them or anything. So now this is my house and I have protected the graves of my grandparents. My grandmother and great-aunt both want to be buried here. If the graves were destroyed or removed then their souls would wander in suffering. Eventually the place you saw will be destroyed. The fishing village you saw too. They have only a few years left. And since my sister is dead, and the other grandchildren moved away, one to England, one to America, I am the only grandchild left, so this is my duty.”

  “You must be buried here too,” I said, and I realized I’d asked for a selfish reason.

  “Yes. The dead hold on to the living. I dreamed of leaving and going away, London, New York. To visit these places. Or live. The world is so big. I can have a hundred imaginations about my new life. I know people who can get me out of China for good. Many times I pack my suitcase. But in the end I cannot.”

  Then she knelt in front of an old PLA munitions box in the kitchen, snapped open the rusty latches and pulled out a parchment scroll with two gold handles. It was the only art she owned, she said, a forgery of course, but her grandfather had given it to her. She unwound the scroll using the two gold handles. The scroll was silk painted with black ink. It was called A Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Spring. The left side of the painting was reality: dramatic mountain peaks surrounded in bands of mist and gnarled trees with clawed branches. A stream in the middle of the scroll led to the mouth of a cave where a fisherman crouched, poised to enter this paradise of red peach blossoms and people working, eating, playing.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “The people are too small,” she said. “Compared to the trees and mountains. Like nothing. But maybe I don’t understand art.”

  “What is the story?”

  Every Chinese schoolkid knew it, she said. A nobody fisherman who worked his ass off to scrape out a living for his family got lost one day in his sampan when he smelled peach blossoms. He followed a little stream that led to a cave. He squeezed through the cave and found, on the other side, a village. It was utopia. A garden. The people were happy and well fed and lived in peace. But soon he started missing his wife and kids, and he left the place, promising to keep it a secret. But back home he couldn’t resist telling his wife. So together they went back. They followed the stream but there was no grove, no paradise. He searched all night but never found the place again.

  It must have killed him not to be able to show his wife, but then again he went back for her. He could have stayed. I would have stayed. Wouldn’t I? What a decision to make. And then the rest of this dude’s life was yearning to get back to this place he couldn’t find again.

  I told Ivy the story from the Talmud that my mother believed. Before we are born an angel teaches us everything we need to know in our lives, takes us to the end of our life and back, we meet everyone, see everything, we learn the Torah in the womb by the light of a pale yellow lamp—and right before we are born the angel slaps us on the mouth and we forget everything. And so your whole life you’re just trying to remember what you’ve already forgotten. But in the World to Come, which is sort of like Heaven, you remember everything.

  “That is pretty,” she said. We were silent for a moment then she added, “You never drank Old Lady Meng’s soup.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you drink Lady Meng’s soup you lose your memory. An old expression. Silly. But I think I understand your meaning. I am someone who cannot forget.”

  “It’s not such a blessing.”

  “No.”

  She wanted to know if everyone had their own angel, but I honestly didn’t know. “Maybe I am your angel,” she said, half-joking. “Does the angel hit hard?”

  “Yeah, I mean it doesn’t say if the angel works out or anything, but she hits you on the mouth, right here. That’s why we have a cleft beneath our noses.” I raised my finger, slow to make sure she wasn’t going to push me away. I touched the cleft on her upper lip, a little valley. She smiled and pulled my hand down.

  “But we’re not in the womb or the peach garden. That’s the whole problem. Except you are rich. Maybe you and your father are in the peach garden and your question is the same as the fisherm
an’s. Will you leave?”

  “For you,” I said.

  “Men always promise to return.”

  “But I mean it.”

  “Have we kissed now? Before, I mean,” she asked. “Did we? And have forgotten?”

  She leaned forward and covered my mouth with her lips. She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the bed and we were kissing while walking backward. My hands were on her face and our faces were thrust forward, nibbling on each other’s lips, and then her tongue curled inside my mouth again, warm and insistent, we fell onto the straw bed, she tugged at my belt. I dropped the straps from her dress and there was a coolness on the tops of her shoulders, and I kissed her neck, I kissed down to her breasts, goose bumped, her skin smooth, the nipple the same color as her tongue, and I closed my mouth around it, as she grabbed me there and I jumped in her hand, and pulled my pants down in one motion, as she hooked her legs around my waist and pulled me into her, she was wet there, and we both moaned as I slid into her, farther still, and her head dropped back, she put a hand on my ass and pulled me deeper, said something in Chinese in a half-choked breath, and my knees trembled, and she arched her back saying look at me right as I come. After, when I went to move, she held me inside, folding her arms behind my neck, her muscles faintly twitched, then she turned her head and let out a soft moan as we parted. I fell beside her, both of us perfectly still and quiet.

  We lay there looking into each other’s eyes.

  Then we heard a soft rustling noise outside that seemed to distract her. Her mind moving away. She smiled at me. A last connectedness and it was over.

  She sat up. Turned to the window.

  It was quiet except for the quick trill of the yellow buntings we’d seen everywhere, and I was thinking how we’d just had sex on this giant ancient tomb. Her people below us. In the ground. Generations back. And I was wondering if she was thinking about that too.