The Embroidered Shoes

by Can Xue

  With much pain and difficulty they held out until dawn. He suggested that they change to another place. All of a sudden, Ru Shu’s white teeth started to shine. Raising her eyebrows fiercely, she declared that she would continue to stay in this house—this good place. If he could not stand the atmosphere, he didn’t have to come anymore. After all, he was not predestined to live in such a ghostly place. But she was different. She considered this house as her foreordained abode. Everything in the house was simply wonderful! The pitch of her voice reached higher and higher, and became a string of shrill notes scattering in the air. In the dim rays of the morning sun, he saw a swaying mottled shadow. From that moment, he made the decision in his mind. This house was not an easy place to make a decision.

  The process of splitting up was very painful. Ru Shu stayed in the corner all the time. She refused to step out of the door even during the day. He was determined to consider her behavior as arrogant and presumptuous. Secretly he plotted an insidious and vicious revenge. During those days of stalemate, Ru Shu asked him if it was possible to exist in this world as a ghost of oneself. Take her, for instance—now that she had realized her destiny, would it still be possible for people (including him) to live with her? In the past when they had lived with her, could it be that she was never with them in reality? After she and he had escaped from the mass of people, her life had become simple and under her own control. Could everything that had happened in the past be nothing but illusory models?

  Stroking her shoulders, he spoke aimlessly some irrelevant words of comfort. Meanwhile he pondered his scheme for revenge. He believed with indifference that the final solution was approaching. His stroking fingers gradually folded into an iron-hard claw as she sank into desperation. Moving into this house could be her last struggle. This reminded him of a verse for a famous ancient poem: “Amidst dark willows and bright flowers, there appears another village.”

  Ru Shu had not been too happy at the beginning. Standing at the doorway for a long time, she had hesitated to enter the house. Listening attentively with her head tilted to one side, she rattled on and on that it would be too early to live here. Maybe it would still be okay without moving in. Would this be too reckless? Would it be more reasonable for them to hide separately in some populous place? Once they had entered the house, both of them would be exposed to each other’s scrutiny. There could be some hidden perils. He knew that she was always prescient. Yet he lost his head so completely in his own zeal that he did not realize the implications of her remarks.

  Quickly Ru Shu became active. Once the light was turned off, her rich imagination poured forth a stream of increasingly complex images. She would talk and talk, putting on all kinds of expressions and gestures, as if she were in a performance. As all her unique linguistic features were transformed, every word became transparent and elusive. He knew that, yet he did not want to consider this to be his only life. Since childhood, he had placed higher expectations on himself. Therefore, he left the house early every morning and returned late at night. Upon his departure every day, he could feel Ru Shu’s eyes glued on his back. Gradually she lost all sense of his existence and instead indulged herself in daydreaming. When he returned, she would spin around and smile at him reluctantly, pretending to be calm and indifferent. “Your face is covered with spiderwebs.” She would start the conversation with this same remark every day. Then she would cut off her talk right there.

  One night, he made it appear that he was asking her casually what she had done during the day. She chuckled and said she had been extremely busy. During the day she had jumped down from the trains at least six times, and this had caused a crack on the sole of her foot. This could be considered a sign of aging. In the early years this used to be such an easy thing. “By the way, I took time to look at our tree,” she said seriously. With pain, he listened to her lies. Surprisingly, he found a side in her temperament that previously was completely unknown to him. It was obvious that she had never left the room. Staying in the stale air had caused purple spots on her face, and her fingers were getting bonier each day. Only her hair remained as thick as before. It could even be considered full of vigor. Those nights when he had his attacks of fever, he loved to press his cheek against this tender and icy cool thing.

  During the day he spent most of his time sitting dully with Lao Jiu in a pavilion in the middle of the boulevard. Although Lao Jiu knew his situation perfectly well, he kept silent. Lao Jiu knew exactly what the matter was with him. He would fool around until dusk before going back to that house. He was so afraid that Ru Shu would see through his tricks during the day that he would scrub the soles of his shoes loudly on the palm bark doormat, pretending that he was weary and worn from a long journey.

  “So you’re back!” Ru Shu would jump up like a cat, and put her arms around his waist from the back. “I’m simply worn out. I ran a greater distance than a horse could cover today. Are you listening?”

  She appeared tiny, fragile, hopelessly dependent, and pitiful. Thinking of Lao Jiu’s facial expression, he couldn’t help shaking his head.

  Nobody knows the history of Ru Shu. It seems that she has been living on this piece of land since ancient times. This has left traces of a faint ironic smile in her eyes. Her random, irrelevant talk always makes people uneasy. As a matter of fact, people have neglected her over the long years. When she reached the age that she could understand her place in the world, she started to exploit her ambiguous position and single-mindedly go her own way. It was exactly from that moment that people started to stare at her body with surprise. Nobody knew where she was from nor how she had come to be like this. Much less did people know what kind of person she would become in the future. It was also at that moment that he met her on the street. Probably that was the prime time for Ru Shu because she was swollen with arrogance, charged with aggression, and full of self-indulgence. Or it might be called naivete and childishness, or perhaps treachery and disgracefulness, or still other things.

  During his lonely adolescence he had all kinds of expectations for himself. He believed that during his life he would associate his fate with a certain woman of the same type. He considered himself as belonging to a unique “kind.” Therefore, when he found Ru Shu he was rapturous. Probably their relationship was established only because neither of them had any doubts about it. They met on an old bench in a park. At the moment he was dozing off in the glow of the setting sun. Then all of a sudden here she came. She was both thin and light, resembling a willow leaf. She seemed as if she were waiting for someone impatiently. She would stand up and look around repeatedly. After a while he realized that the woman did not really sit on the bench, but in the air about an inch and a half above its surface. He blinked his eyes with force several times to confirm this unique fact.

  “Those things that everybody considers as counter to reason happen to me every day.”

  When she was talking she did not turn around. Instead she sat quietly in the air. There was nobody else around. Obviously she was talking to him. Only gradually did he begin to focus on her words. He felt goose bumps on his body, and a string of strange associations poured into his mind one after another. The woman kept her back to him, making all his efforts to determine her appearance in vain. It was not until much later that he remembered again to examine her. And then he found that she had appeared in his memory frequently for a long time.

  “Ru—Shu,” with effort he pronounced her name. “Where are you from?”

  His breathing became heavier, and his pupils dilated. In the thickening dusk her silhouette appeared floating and unstable. An old man made a crackling sound sweeping the fallen leaves. It seemed that something inside him exploded, and all at once his face turned white as a sheet. “Wait a minute!” She was running so fast that she might have been flying. Afterward he joked to her that he had never chased a woman like that before, nor even a man. He wondered what kind of feet she could possibly have. Sitting on his lap, she answered, deep in thought: “I have very
similar feelings, but I really do have weight. You can feel it, can’t you? This is a never-ending test.”

  Occasionally she would sink into deep thought. (In fact, it was not deep thought but only empty-mindedness. But to others she appeared to be deep in thought.) At those moments her eyebrows became extremely long. In addition, she wiggled her ears like a little kitten. Finally under the pear tree in front of that house, she told him what kind of woman she was and he also told her what kind of man he was. They were longing to give each other a feeling of reality. The descriptions were incoherent, but clouds of dazzling color floated in them. Almost simultaneously they said the sentence: “You are the person who has been living with me all the time. Together we observed the nests of the birds in the forest.” The leaves above them rustled in the noon sunlight, bringing them a feeling of peace and security.

  He couldn’t make clear his own history either. He did not consider this question until he was thirty. And the more he thought about it the more confused he became. Yet through this confusion there appeared a feeling of purity and newness. When he talked to Ru Shu about this, both of them felt extremely relieved.

  “Once in a while I enjoy making something up,” Ru Shu said. “Nobody needs to make things up. We may suppose that the incident happened on a long, empty street, between the two lamps. This sounds very dramatic. According to others, everything has a beginning. You and I cannot come to this world from nowhere. My job is to knock on strangers’ doors at midnight. I often ask myself: ‘Why should I do this? How do I know there are people inside? Is this a genetic inheritance?’”

  “As a matter of fact, starting from the very beginning we two are in a somewhat dubious position,” he said. “They have told me the limits on me, which seem to have something to do with being a scholar or something like that. Occasionally, I think about the rules, but the next minute I’m capricious again. I have even forgotten how Lao Jiu came into my life. It probably had something to do with my history. Starting from now on, you can observe him, Lao Jiu, attentively. This is a vital matter. You see, I can forget about him so easily. I am forever so careless and undisciplined. In my impression Lao Jiu has been there from the very beginning, like the legs on my body.”

  Casually they wandered on the pebbled road that burned in the sun. Deep inside they hoped to find some trace of something related to present matters that could provide a new passion to the stories they made up. But they also knew that its arrival would be for the most part accidental. It was not at all necessary for them to pursue it purposefully. They only needed to wait. Beside the road sign there was a dark shadow. It was none other than Lao Jiu. A man and a woman passed by them quickly. The man was rattling on: “The truth of the matter disappears like a stone sinking into the vast sea. Everything relevant to it remains in silence. To sum up, the whole thing is a swindle. Here we have too many similar things. It’s time to call an end to it. Why should we look into the straw hat that a certain man threw away on a rainy day in a sudden impulse? Only when we observe this world in silence can we gain real enthusiasm.”

  A train was passing by. Its whistle made Ru Shu jump up, startled. Standing for a long time at the original place, she waited until the last car disappeared in the distance.

  “I jumped down from that train. There was an eagle painted on the gate of the car. At the time you said to me, ‘It’s marvelous.’” She continued as if enchanted, “That can’t be wrong. It’s been stored in my newest fresh memory. There might be a day when I would take a walk with you as we are now. We would be very close to each other. Lifting my feet I would jump up. I was good at chasing the train, and I should have told you about it long ago. How is it that there’s always a railroad at the place where we take a walk?”

  She praised him lavishly for his being able to struggle out her name from absolute emptiness.

  “Very few people have the ability to do that. This is an outstanding work of youth. Everyone is involved in the cheap trick of getting to the bottom of things, while you have almost reached the height of a flying horse galloping in the sky by your own sheer animal strength.”

  He was determined to exclude Lao Jiu from the world that belonged to Ru Shu and him. His mind was made up from the very beginning though he had no expectation about the effect. Lao Jiu was one to worry about. He always maintained a great distance between them, keeping his mouth shut but knowing everything. In his mind Lao Jiu belonged to existence in the prehistoric period—barren, solemn, and indestructible. He needed him as much as he needed Ru Shu, except he never needed to express it outright. Whenever he thought of Lao Jiu, he would appear, every minute, every second. By contrast, Ru Shu never appeared at his expectation. Every memory of her came in incoherent flashes. She explained that this was because she had constantly been in chaotic transformation.

  “It might get better when I grow older.” Her tone was mournful.

  Lao Jiu did not do anything. Every day he did nothing but wander around. He never knew how he had managed to make a living till now. Ever since he could remember, he had seen Lao Jiu wandering around. He appeared to be an ageless man with ice-cold glances. He had no emotional relationship with anybody in this whole world. Once, brazen faced and unreasonable, he had persisted in following him to his house. It was an empty house. The windows were surrounded by withered evergreens. As soon as they opened the door, an old man in rags sneaked in. He looked so much like Lao Jiu that he could have been his father, although Lao Jiu denied it firmly. He screamed at the old man, “Scram!” There was no bed in the house nor quilt nor anything like that. Where did he sleep at night?

  Lao Jiu saw through his doubt. Winking, he laughed in his direction. “Only a fool goes to sleep. But I am an extremely wise fellow.”

  When he sought a reason for it, he had become a friend of Lao Jiu’s because they had some cruel essence in common.

  He had an uncle who was a very headstrong man. When he walked he raised his head high and took giant strides. At night he never turned on the light. Stubbornly, he would sit in the middle of a dark room. Every time he wanted to turn on a light, his uncle would humph coldly, making him retrieve his hand in mid-reach unconsciously. Afterward he felt so angry that he cursed his uncle again and again whenever he remembered him. Yet this still wouldn’t lessen the hatred. Once a brainstorm hit him, and he tricked Lao Jiu into going to his uncle’s house. He didn’t even try to turn on the light. From the beginning his instinct told him that such behavior would not fit Lao Jiu’s manner, and he admired it greatly. Without expressing any emotion Lao Jiu moved a chair in the darkness and sat himself down side by side with the mountainous uncle. He hid himself outside the window and watched this dumb show.

  One hour passed. Two hours passed. Finally the uncle jumped up in a rage. Turning on the light he yelled at him hidden behind the window: “Where did you pick up this bit of a clown? You heartless wolf! Hey?” He was so furious he didn’t know where to focus. His eyes were bulging.

  When he told Ru Shu about this, the two of them laughed so hard that they almost lost their breath. Ru Shu called the uncle a “burly chap” and Jiu a “pangolin.” When these two words slipped from her mouth smoothly, he felt completely relaxed and he couldn’t control his joy. Ru Shu had her particular names for every person and every thing surrounding her. She usually spoke them in a casual way, and then both of them were full of a kind of evil excitement. She had never seen the uncle, yet she could create accurately from her mind the uncle’s pet phrases, such as “Small potatoes have small potatoes’ ideals; they don’t feel the least bit less than others” or “Nobodies are all involved enthusiastically in a competition of personalities. This world is creating genius,” et cetera. Her re-creations made him totally wide-eyed and dumbfounded, believing sincerely that the devil had entered her body. The third day that he got to know Ru Shu she told him that she could not exist with his friends in one world. Lao Jiu had an evil look—there would come a day when he would kill her.

  “But Lao Jiu is not
everywhere, we can easily abandon him.”

  “But in reality he is you, how can you abandon yourself completely? Forgetting is only temporary, swayed by personal feelings. In a moment he would come back again. The person that is going to accompany you all your life will be him and not me. Yet we have to try, because you are my only one.”

  So they started their experiment. They ran far away. They built a tent in the middle of the desert and roasted lamb. Both of them made themselves dusty and muddy, and both of them were burned black by the sun. They appeared healthy, natural, and unrestrained.

  One midnight Ru Shu woke him by pushing hard. He heard her screaming: “He’s here!”

  “Who?”

  “Who else can it be?!” Her face was white as a sheet.

  Sitting at the desk, she dripped red ink one drop at a time onto the stationery. Those were secret codes that could never be interpreted. Afterward she went to the well to wash vegetables. A train ran by, and she jumped onto it. In the five days since she disappeared, he and Lao Jiu could barely leave each other. In his sorrow and emptiness, Lao Jiu could always give him a certain kind of real feeling. The two of them sat in dull silence. They wandered and they dozed, thinking of something gloomy and ambiguous. Finally, they stared at each other and smiled in understanding.

  Soon Ru Shu came back. She said that she had made only a short trip because she was feeling bored. Now everything had returned to normal. He shouldn’t blame her for it, should he? Such temporary separations could not be avoided between them. Now everything was returning to normal and she begged him to please believe her. She dragged him to the pear tree. The rustling of the leaves warmed his blood. Because of the thrill of reunion, both of them had that kind of alien yet familiar feeling. Ru Shu said she would not abandon Lao Jiu anymore, and now she understood it. When the train took her afar, she felt closer to him.

  He said in a flattering tone, “I have run through a lot of train stations looking for one with a painted eagle. Even in my dreams the train wheels were rumbling.”