The Embroidered Shoes

by Can Xue

  “This guy is suffering from ringworm on his feet.” Mother turned her small, flat head distractedly. Every time the back of her head brushed her shoulders, wisps of dry, broken hair drifted into the air. “Can’t you smell the liquid for ringworms? Nearly everyone has some subtle ailment. But everyone racks his brain for ways to appear to be healthy.”

  Sunglasses entered the room. Dressed in a white coverall and with a stethoscope hanging at his chest, he appeared full of dignity and dash. To show off, he raised the stethoscope solemnly to listen to the wall for a long time. Then, in an air of pretended wisdom, he said in a lowered voice: “I am a medical doctor. I live at No. 65 on Thirteenth Avenue. Your family has some serious problems.”

  “Medical doctor? Perfect, doctor!” Mother shrilled from the shadow. “I’d like you to have a look at my ears! My ears are so sensitive. Is there any way to cure them, like giving them anesthesia?”

  He bounced up and down several times on the spot, before disappearing completely.

  “This is called the invisible method,” Mother told me quietly.

  “A horse in heat, a tragic reality?” My third sister drifted into the room. Softly, she descended on the bedside. Supporting her chin with her fine, vinelike fingers, she was spellbound, staring into the air. “Such people have a special kind of organ,” she added, her eyes filled with rheumy tears. “All disasters are caused by this unlucky smell!” She dashed into her bedroom and started sobbing heavily. In fact, she would have felt much better if she had set herself down to crochet lace. When she was young, she used to sit quietly by the window, crocheting her lace. A slight touch by others would cause her nose to bleed. I was quite surprised to see her becoming so forward.

  After dark every day, I started looking for my family members. From this room to that, I found that they had all disappeared totally. The wind swayed the little electric bulb, making the light turn bloody red all of a sudden. The west wind was blowing hard. I was feeling uneasy at not being able to figure out where they were hiding.

  Then I formulated a plan. After supper one day, I asked Mother to lend me her needles. “What for?” Her eyes looked like billiard balls ready to roll.

  “You always abandon me, thinking that I am useless. But on the contrary, I have my own skill. It may well be that I am more nimble than you are.” While talking I grabbed her sleeve tightly, fearing that she might suddenly disappear.

  “I’m-sleeping-in-the-trunk,” she said, enunciating word by word and glaring at me. “Every night you pace around in my room, as anxious as an ant in a hot pot. Once you even stepped on my eyeball. Didn’t you feel it? I just can’t sleep. See the two huge dark rings under my eyes? They’re caused by insomnia.”

  At night, I did notice there was a worn-out trunk, on which hung a rusty bronze lock. So I entered her room to look for the trunk, but there was nothing in the corner.

  “You’re wasting your energy,” she chuckled drily. “Very often you remember something, but you won’t know that there is no such thing until you try to look for it. Once upon a time, there was some dough in our cupboard, and it was all moldy. Last year, I was digging in the cupboard in our attic, looking for that dough. I had been searching for a year when finally the stairs collapsed and I fell. Your third sister told me that the cupboard was not the original one, I had remembered wrong. Your third sister has her mind stuffed with fantasies about men. I know that’s the source of her disease. There’s no hope for a cure.” She shrugged in resignation. “How do you feel about our apartment?” Her triangular eyes gazed at me with interest.

  “I’ve been searching for you. My legs are so sore that I can no longer raise them. I pitch stones on the ground. You must have heard it, haven’t you?”

  “What trunk are you talking about? It’s just a story that I told you before. I warned you that it’s a waste of energy. It’s so stupid of you to search everywhere. You also mentioned three-needle acupuncture. You sound like a snake player. Are you really so afraid? Wait till you reach my age, then you won’t be afraid anymore. In your arrogant memory there must be many types of broken trunks. They are hidden here and there. You believe they contain something. It’s a phenomenon of youth, in fact…” She stopped short, impatiently examining the window behind me.

  During the day I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t forget to pay attention to those trunks at night. I wondered why I always forgot, and thought I should make a mark at those spots. Yet as soon as night arrived, my memory was befuddled. I turned this way and that, passing a trunk, a broom, a wallet, etc. But I just couldn’t remember anything. Where were my family members? They should at least have left some clue. Rats started a fight in the light fixture. The rats in this house were as big as cats. I covered the bulb with my pale hands to avoid attracting moths. The light was cold, and its rays penetrated to the depths of my heart. On the wall, I saw a projection of my heart. I intended to tell Mother about the summer. Suddenly all the kidney beans she had salted melted into stinking water and the Boston ivy drooped over. In the shadow, the bronze kettle rattled angrily. A cat climbed over the wall, at the foot of which there grew some castor oil plants. My third sister came by whistling. She had two bamboo leaves stuck in her nostrils. They had red spots on them and resembled dominoes.

  There was nobody in Father’s room, either. The air smelled of sweat. There was a banana peel on the stool. During the day he told me in secret that he had recently been engaged in catching locusts. With his own eyes he saw mother kill five flowery moths and dump them into the dried-up well at the back of the house. “Tomorrow I will climb the green mountain,” he said, twisting his hips, and tapping the earthenware pot that he held against his chest like a little kid. “The locusts are flourishing there.” He was enjoying the verb he used, his face glowing with health.

  “I’d like to tell Mother something,” I said.

  “Your mother,” he rolled his huge eyeballs with difficulty, trying to recall something. “She is not a reliable thing. Don’t trust such a thing easily.” He jumped high on one foot, spilling all of the sand out of the pot. “I’ve been sleeping in the cotton fiber. It’s so quiet there, and no rats, either. How long have you been suffering from sleepwalking? It’s certainly a painful ailment. I once had it, too. Now about Sunglasses, you don’t need to guard against him, but treat him nicely. That guy is my friend. When dawn comes, we wander around, and at night, we sleep in the cotton fiber. One day when the Chinese scholar tree blossomed all in white, I squatted down at the corner of the street. Taking off my vest, I scratched myself as much as I could—I hadn’t had a bath for the whole winter. Later on, I noticed somebody else squatting there. That was him, he was scratching also. Together we listened to the humming of the mosquitoes, and our bodies felt all warmed up.”

  The door banged open. “I just can’t wash my hair.” My third sister stood between father and me, with her hands on her hips and her hair let down. “Every time I wash my hair, my head gets light and drifty, like a balloon, and floats away from my neck. You simply cannot experience such a thing, no way! I’m just wasting my time.” She sat heavily on the bedside, a hook from her bra strap unfastened. “Who understands my sorrow? In the blue sky, there flies a yellow weasel! Ah? Ah?…” She sang and panted in an odd tone and spat on the floor.

  “She has an enlarged cervical vertebra.” Father’s nose wrinkled up. He threw something at the foot of the bed.

  “Father?”

  “Your mother will come and eat it. Do you know why your mother hides herself? She’s trying to avoid rats. Last time I threw down a piece of cooked meat with maggots in it, but she ate it happily. Her stomach is rumbling with hunger. She eats everything I throw down. You may try, too!” Tightening his pants, he let out the aged, shrunken, smooth left leg. Then he threw his canvas bag onto his shoulder. With high spirits, he said, “I’m going to the green mountains today!”

  I could hear him whistling outside the window.

  Finally, I told Mother the story about the
summer. I repeated it again and again, my face turning purple. Mother appeared half listening, smiling indulgently. With a bare foot she scratched her tightened calf muscle.

  “That’s right, when the sun rises, I will turn into a fat hen.” In that instant, her pupils seemed to be melting. “The whole day, I squat in the woodpile under the eaves. Little children come and throw cobblestones at me. Eventually, one of them will break my spine.” She suddenly stood up, her eyes turned left and right in an equivocal way. “Now I need to change my approach completely. I have displayed fortitude and resolution. Just now I have broken a window. You all believe that I’ve been kept in the dark, don’t you? You, every one of you, what are you crying for underneath your quilts? Every day, just look at your swollen eyelids. I’m also making my own plans. You can’t see through me, but you think you can do everything your own way now! That’s why you’re jabbering such nonsense to me.”

  Since a certain day, Mother had started to frighten us. She hid herself on purpose, yet she was present everywhere—underneath the bed, on top of the cupboard, behind the kitchen door, inside the cistern. Her deformed shadow drifted all over the place. The shadow was fat, swollen, purple in color, and smelled moldy. As a result, we walked quietly and spoke in whispers. Often when I was talking in Father’s ear, she screamed, as if she were about to jump out. It scared the wits out of us. Yet when we looked around, she was nowhere to be found. And the scream was from the radio. At other times, she giggled in the shadow instead of screaming. The sound raised goose bumps on our bodies. My third sister was the first to burn out. Struggling out of her fits of hysteria, she searched for our missing mother, with a spade on her shoulder. At those moments, her face was purple, her neck stiff; she looked valiant and spirited. The base of the walls inside the house, the stove, and everything else had all been dug into a mess.

  The day I suddenly realized that Mother had disappeared from this house forever, father was putting on his leg wrappings. “I’m going to the green mountains to fish for two months,” he told me in high spirits. His cheeks were flushed with excitement.

  “What shall we do about Mother?” I asked abruptly.

  “I’ve raised a poisonous snake in the bushes. It comes out whenever I call it. Are you interested? We can catch locusts together.”

  “There’s a poisonous snake I raised right under my bed.” Mother’s sharp voice resounded in the shadows.

  Taking up his canvas bag, Father dashed out of the house like a young boy, his bag flopping against his skinny hips. “Two months!” he shouted back to me, raising two fingers, while running away.

  I heard a suspicious sound behind me. When I turned around, I saw my third sister smashing her spade down on the dark spot where Mother’s voice could be heard. A string of yellow sparks leapt from the cement.

  “The buttons on that thing must be almost all gone, am I right?” I suddenly remembered.

  My third sister never took me seriously. Dripping with black sweat, she was digging enthusiastically at the cement, her nostrils flared. “I’ve been sleeping too long. So I need to stretch my body a little,” she defended herself. “You’ve been imagining that the house is collapsing. It’s so vague. Why can’t you think of something else? I can’t understand how you’ve become such a misanthrope. Such people make me sick, sick.” At noon, she had her nap half naked. She lay on her bed convulsing, stinking saliva dripping from her mouth. She usually slept like this until dusk and refused to have supper. When Father was home, he would peep into her open door, poke out his tongue and say, “What a miracle and wonder inheritance can play! Following the rule, what kind of decisive turning point will occur?” After such a remark, he felt he had somehow qualified himself to grab all the food in the house and take it away in his travel bag.

  One rainy day, a soaking wet man staggered in. Wiping rainwater from his face, he bawled down to mother’s shadow in the corner, addressing her in a shrill voice: “Hi, Mom!” Like a gust of wind, my third sister dashed over and wrapped him in a huge bath towel that had black spots on it. She rubbed and rubbed until his lips turned red and his eyeballs bloodstained. Then she fell to the floor and cried out, “It’s awful to have a fiancé!” Then she suddenly became so muscular that she could carry the whole bundle wrapped inside the towel all the way to the bed. Carefully she put the bundle down, covered it with a quilt, and patted him to sleep.

  “Its so uncomfortable to have a doctor at home.” Mother’s head stretched out like that of a snake.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Sunglasses, of course. I knew long ago that Sunglasses was her fiancé. Now her illness will be healed. Such an awkward illness. Such things are totally strange.” She drifted back beneath the bed.

  “How could it be that the fence turns green? I’ve lost my stethoscope.” The fiancé was groaning inside the bath towel. “The room is high in temperature. That’s good. I feel sleepy when it’s hot.”

  After the heavy rain, our house was full of spiderwebs. The slightest move would cause them to billow into one’s eyes. My third sister was jumping about chasing spiders. Torn webs wafted all over the place.

  “Oh, her youthful vitality.” The fiancé opened one eye to enjoy the scene. “In my place, I have all sorts of insects. In the full of night, when I was wandering around outside, one of the insects must have sneaked into my bedding. This has occupied my mind, and I cry my heart out for that.”

  “But why did you make such a startling noise above us?” I asked him curiously. “Because of some inner fear?”

  He hesitated. “The illness of your third sister bothers me day and night. It must be a very complicated syndrome.”

  All of a sudden, I had a desire to chat with him. Tugging his ear, I told him: “Every night this apartment turns empty. Everybody hides. Even the doors and windows disappear. It simply turns into a sealed iron box. I wander about, bumping into all kinds of things. In anxiety, I kick the wall till my toenails swell up. My third sister, she must have hinted to you. She believes that I never get up at night. She points out that it is my scattered quilt that proves this. It seems you are not hearing me. Tell me, is there any sound from my mouth?”

  “The room is awfully hot.” He was squint-eyed, his head hanging down, and he started to snore.

  “You always tangle up everyone you meet like a beggar.” My third sister slapped my hand and blew on the reddened ear of her fiancé. She gave me an angry stare, while rubbing his hair, and then yelled, “Scram!”

  For the next several days, she and her fiancé occupied the whole house. Early every morning, they drove me out. Closing the door behind me, they simply turned the house into a lunatic asylum. A broom came flying out of the window facing the street, then a bag of plum cores. Once the thing flying out was Sunglasses himself. He was all black and blue and cried, “Acute changes are going on in your sister’s body. Where did she get all that strength? Endocrinopathy is not a curable disease. The first time I saw her, she had bamboo leaves in her nostrils. That peddler selling popsicles yelled and yelled. It was so disgusting. My back was soaked with sweat, and my silk socks smelled…”

  “It was summer,” I reminded him.

  “True. It was summer. My affliction of foul-smelling feet was cured. Your third sister ordered me to wash with soda water every day. But now I feel nothing is meaningful.” Finally he observed me carefully. “Why can’t a serious person like you involve yourself in some business, such as collecting snakeskins? Every time you approach me, I feel uncertain about you. Your existence is a problem. It seems that you’ve made up your mind that you are stuck here, and you never think of getting into something positive, for instance, snakeskins. You are just too much at ease. After all, this is a disease of the reproductive system. Your family…”

  Once I saw my father while I was wandering around. He dashed out from behind a big tree and ran across the street. He tossed his canvas bag into the air, scattering little fish and tiny shrimp all over the ground. With just one flash of his ar
my-green leg wrapping, he disappeared completely. I ran over and picked up the fish and shrimp, but then I realized that the little creatures in my hands were actually green worms and ants.

  “Have you discovered that Father is completely done?” My third sister bent her two short legs and leaned on a lamppost. She continued: “He pretends that nothing has happened. Wandering around the street, he appears talented and unconventional, but it’s a false image. I’ve experienced the disease of blockage in the urethra, so I know he is in great pain. We shake with laughter when we see him chatting with you in dead earnest about something like the green mountains. Every time he leaves the house, he sleeps in that run-down temple. There’s some straw in the corner, and other people also sleep there. In fact, at the moment when I first communicated my love to the doctor, he was staying there, too. Once when I went there, Father jabbered to me all day about a dogskin vest. Over and over he explained that the vest had fallen beneath the floor of our original house. It fell through a hole in the floor. He also said some kind of dog-shit mold grew there as big as a fist. The reason he was wandering about was to look for that vest. That green mountain, I can see, is only a symptom of urethra blockage.”

  I walked into the collapsing temple, and saw several feral cats scurry away. Two black faces emerging from the straw pile told me that Father was no longer here. I understood that he had become too ashamed when he realized that I’d seen through his lies. I left the place in a hurry so he wouldn’t feel too embarrassed. Turning my head, to my surprise, I found him making faces at me through the window. “I’ve been in the green mountains all the time!” He pointed two fingers at me. I was at such a loss that I felt deeply disheartened.

  “You traitor!” My third sister dashed over from across the street and blocked my way. “Why did you go to that old temple? Ah? Who gave you the right to act on your own? You’ve degraded all of us! Now that old guy is chuckling behind the window. He thought that we instructed you to go there, you fool. So now we have all become the laughingstock of others!” She punched me angrily, and all the seams on her blouse burst open.