by Can Xue
I walked out shakily and saw that he had once more placed the dish of the little rooster’s remains on the floor. He told me to eat that little thing. I didn’t want to. He struck me in the head repeatedly with the wooden club. I passed out and then came to. After a while, I really couldn’t stand this. I decided I’d better suppress my nausea and swallow this little thing. After doing that, I felt ill. I rolled my eyes. I wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t stand up. I lay on my stomach on the floor. The house mouse stuck his head out of the hole in front of me and looked at me with a weird expression. What? Was he waiting to eat me? Just look at his expression! I was nauseated again, and everything blurred before my eyes. Oh, he was nipping at my face! I was losing my mind and stood up. He kept biting me and wouldn’t let go, as if stuck to my face. I thought he must have bitten through my face. I couldn’t move. If I moved, a piece of skin with hair would be ripped from my face. From above, the landlord said, “Snake, oh snake. This is testing your endurance.” I smelled sewage on the house mouse’s body. He was so filthy, and yet the old man let him live in his home and run about as he pleased. All of a sudden, he let go of my face. I rubbed my face with my front claws. It wasn’t too bad—he had probably just chewed a few tooth cavities. The odd thing was that this fiendish thing immediately fell over in front of me, his belly swollen and black blood running out of his mouth. He’d been poisoned! My body was hypertoxic! How come the old man’s disinfectant hadn’t worked? Had he really wanted to rid me of poison, or had he wanted to turn me into a hypertoxic substance and use me to poison the mouse?
He was sitting with his back to me. The view of his back resembled something I was familiar with. I gave it a lot of thought, and at last I figured out what he reminded me of: he was like the person-shaped rock in my hometown! It had come to the surface out of the mud and stood straight up in the center of the pasture. It was like a person, but it wasn’t one. Many of my kin loved to run around it. “You mustn’t stare at me all the time. I came from the pasture,” he said without turning around. Lined up against the wall, my kin listened attentively. Now I saw that all of us had come from the pasture! I remembered the harsh climate, the crystal-clear blue sky, the summer which passed so quickly that it seemed unreal, the countless secrets concealed in the underbrush, the eagles circling in the sky all day without tiring . . . These recollections were killing me. I wished I could abandon my physical body and blend into that place . . . I had no idea how I could remember things that happened in the era of my great-grandfather’s generation and even his father’s. Those things could appear in my mind at any time and be compared with the shape my life had taken now. I knew that, even if it were possible to go back, I would be unable to adapt to that climate. More than half my kin died there every year just as early winter descended. If I were there, I’d surely be the first to die. There was no plague in the grasslands. You just felt bone-penetrating cold, and then your heart stopped beating. And so my kin didn’t say someone had “died,” but said someone had “chilled.” Although I wasn’t there, I remembered that black-tailed guy. He lay there facing up, watching the gray clouds massed above him, opening his mouth slightly, and not moving. He was as cold as ice—rigid. I remembered, too, that year after year, even though new kin were born, our numbers were decreasing. I didn’t remember whether we had fled later. We must have. Otherwise, how could these kin here in the slums, including me, have arrived here? “Let me take the little mouse home, let me take the little mouse home, let me . . .” Auntie Shrimp kept saying this outside the door, but she didn’t come in. Maybe she was afraid of the heat.
The slums were my home. This home wasn’t exactly what I wanted: everything was difficult, and perils lurked at every turn. But this was the only home I had. My only option was to stay here. I used to have a homeland, but I couldn’t go back to my homeland. It was useless to yearn for her. I stayed in these slums of mine: my eyes were turbid, my legs thin and weak, my innards poisoned over and over again. I endured, I endured. That gigantic eagle in the sky over my native place appeared in my mind—and brought me strength.
OUR HUMAN NEIGHBORS
I’m a middle-aged male magpie who lives in the suburbs. Some tall poplars stand next to the primary school, and my home is set up in one of them. Originally my parents, brothers, and sisters, as well as my grandparents, lived here, but now they’ve all disappeared.
Let me tell you about my nest. Sturdy, beautiful, and symmetrical, my nest is something to be proud of. It’s practical and stable, with an ingenious opening. It’s particularly cozy inside. The outer layer is made of mud and grass, and the inner layer is made of fur and feathers. This dark, soft home gives us great happiness. Back then, my wife and I pulled together and worked hard to build this unusual nest. I fancied a certain attractive willow twig. It would serve as the best possible roof beam. Sure, it was heavy, but I was young, and I picked it up all at once in my beak. But just before I could fly to the sky with it, an urchin ran up and pounced on me with an iron-tipped bamboo pole. He hit me hard in the back. My beak relaxed its grip, and the twig fell to the ground. Even now, I can’t figure out why he wanted it. And after he picked it up, he broke it in half and fiercely stuck the two parts into the mud. I was injured and had to stop working on the nest for the next ten days. During that time, my wife kept nagging me: “Don’t irritate those people, don’t irritate those people . . .” I was so ashamed. After that, I didn’t dare look for stuff near the primary school. I went over to a hill and carried wood materials back. It was a long way away, and sometimes this took a whole day. I would carry a load for a while and then rest a while. I admired my wife: she could always find suitable materials in our neighborhood. She was much more efficient than I. The main thing was that she had never provoked those people; I don’t know how she had managed this.
In the end, we did finish the nest before winter. At that time, twenty-one magpie nests were built in these poplars, like babies born to the trees. I had compared all of them to ours. I felt that the nest my wife and I had built was the most impressive and its design the most ingenious. It was also much cozier than the others. Maybe we were congenitally different from the others and had a kind of innate skill? But my wife never thought of it in this way. For some reason, although our nest was well fortified, I felt uneasy, worried that people would shoot us. When I crouched there at night, I was afraid that some schoolboy would quietly climb the tree and smash our nest with a tool. I couldn’t help feeling anxious; this was a consequence of my injury. Still, it turned out okay; our lives were tranquil and meaningful.
Now let me tell you about the small garden. Behind the school was a little garden that no one took care of. Wildflowers grew there—rhododendron, balsam, canna, gardenias. So many varieties! The soil was fertile, and an abandoned pool was filled with dried leaves. The little garden was where we foraged for food; it supported us. We often went there for meetings—we would have discussions as we hunted for food. We made an awful lot of noise. The sound of magpies is hard to take, but the monotonous language is full of warmth—and you can understand it if you only try.
A skinny woman often sat on a stone bench next to the pool staring at it blankly. I observed her for a long time: How were she and the pool connected? Had her children drowned in it? Or was she thinking of committing suicide by throwing herself into the pool? I thought her gaze was eerie. But my wife didn’t think so. She said this woman was intellectual and sentimental. My wife’s perception was always accurate. One time, I was searching for insects under the rhododendron. When I looked up, I saw that the woman had passed out and fallen off the stone bench. At the moment, no one else was there—not my wife and not our neighbors, either. I was extremely worried. I hopped onto the woman and screeched loudly, over and over. Later, she slowly regained consciousness. The first thing she did after she came to was to grab me. God, I’d never been captured before. I didn’t move. My heart was beating like waves in a big river. She stood up slowly, took two steps, and knelt down next
to the pool. The pool was full of water. What was she doing? She pushed me down in the water. I don’t know how long it was before she threw me into the wildflowers and walked away. I recall that when I was in the water, I actually felt sort of lucky. I was drenched. When the wind blew, I shook from the cold. It was then that I finally realized that I hadn’t died. I was still alive. And the several insects I had found were still beside me. I had to carry them back to the nest; my wife was sitting on her eggs at the time. I hastily mustered my energy, spread my wings, and let the wind blow the water away and dry my wings. I shouted to myself, “This is wonderful!”
My wife listened quietly to my story, her eyes shining with emotion. Later, baffled, she asked me, “It’s impossible to understand what’s going on in people’s minds, isn’t it?” I absolutely agreed with her. I certainly couldn’t understand what I had just experienced. Afterward, I ran into this woman one more time. I couldn’t help approaching her, but she didn’t pay any attention to me.
I’d also like to tell you how my magpie relatives gradually faded away. It was really lively back then! First thing in the morning, our singing could be heard everywhere. Human beings thought that our language was too monotonous, too ear piercing, too intrusive. Wherever we gathered in large numbers, people glared. We were too self-absorbed. It was understandable that people reacted this way. To tell the truth, I didn’t like it when we made too much noise, either, but as soon as we got together we couldn’t control ourselves: everyone made a screeching sound. It was really unpleasant. How had we come up with this kind of language? I thought about this frequently, but I couldn’t understand, no matter how hard I tried. When I was a child, I asked my father about it. He glared at me and told me to shut up. He said indignantly, “How dare you doubt your own species?” After that, I didn’t dare ask anyone.
Our silhouettes were everywhere—in the little garden, on top of the nearby classrooms, and in the playground. Temperamentally, we were carefree birds. Why wouldn’t we speak out loud? The weather was so good, there were insects to eat, more family members were constantly being hatched, there was entertainment everywhere, we had new games to play every day—we had millions of reasons to yell and make noise. The kids who chased us with bamboo brooms unexpectedly turned into our playthings, too. We teased them, and they held up their brooms and hit at us repeatedly. Their faces flushed as they struck out at us. They were annoyed. That was truly our golden age, the age of sunshine!
The school gardener was a woman more than fifty years old. She had small eyes and a sallow face, and often wore an artificial smile. She loved watching the children chase us. She raised her long arms and slapped them on her thighs, unable to contain her mirth. This disgusted me. She spent much of her time watching us, as if she had nothing better to do. I thought this was quite fishy. But she treated us well. She dug out the earth next to the shrubs with a hoe, exposing the insects to attract us.
Later, I noticed that it was because of this school gardener that some of us began disappearing. No one knew how they vanished; no one ever saw a magpie being hunted and killed. The plot was carried out quietly. Everyone except my wife and me thought highly of the school gardener. That assessment reminded me of what my wife thought of the skinny woman next to the pool. Could it be that people who were near magpies were all fond of killing? My father said that this woman “clearly understood the profound mysteries of the natural world.” In Father’s eyes, she was almost an irresistible spirit. And so Father sacrificed himself early.
It was a pleasant morning when Father and I went to the playground together. The ground was damp from an earlier shower, and from a distance we saw the school gardener digging there. I was touched, thinking that she was really considerate of us. We flew over and saw the school gardener remove her red-orange work hat and raise it to the sky when she stretched. She looked at us out of the corners of her eyes with a jeering expression. But that lasted only for a split second; then she put on a poker face. On the alert, I put some distance between her and me. As I looked for insects, I kept stealing glances at her. She was so hot that her body was radiating heat. I wanted to run over and peck at her butt! But Father wasn’t the least bit alarmed by her. He followed close behind her, as if he were her pet. On the other side of the playground, children were shouting; they were apparently fighting. Several children fell to the ground, while another group continued fighting. I didn’t like seeing bloody scenes, so I turned my back.
Later on, I ate too much and got sleepy. I lay down under a bush and dozed for a short time. When I woke up, Father was no longer there. The school gardener was gone, too. The red-orange hat had been placed on the bush. I thought Father had gone home, and so I flew back. But Father wasn’t there.
The strange thing was that Mama knew Father had disappeared from the school gardener’s side, yet she kept complaining that Father had “gone off to live a comfortable life alone.” She was rather angry but not at all sad. I didn’t understand why. I unintentionally mentioned the red-orange work hat to Mama. I didn’t expect that Mama would grow excited:
“Oh, that’s it! That hat! Oh, that’s it! That hat! Oh . . .”
She screeched on and on—repeatedly making the same irrelevant point. All I could do was leave.
Later, when I told my wife about this, her reply was also irrelevant. This was the first time I had felt alone.
My wife, however, said something that made me uneasy. She said, “You need to take better care of your mama.”
I felt she was implying more than she said, and so I had to be more careful just in case.
The next day, I went to the school again. The school gardener was still weeding and acting as if nothing had happened. I put a lot of distance between us. In the entire morning, only a few neighbors came by. My ma didn’t show up at all.
When I went home near evening, my wife told me that my ma had disappeared.
“But I was watching the school gardener the whole time!”
“You’re really set in your ways,” my wife reproached me.
My wife didn’t tell me what she had guessed, but I thought she knew what was going on. Sure enough, three days later, as we were at the door to our nest watching the sun set, she said, “There are all kinds of ways to play the game. You have a one-track mind.”
I didn’t utter a word. She was right: in fact, I wasn’t good at considering all angles. I couldn’t imagine where my mother might have gone. I had perched here for ages. Crossing over to the other side of the school enclosure would be out of our domain. If we saw a confused guy fly to the west side of the department store, we would be almost frightened to death. Of course, no one would try such foolish things except for one crazy bird. Sure enough, he had never returned. But Mama hadn’t gone crazy; she was always clear-headed. Still, my wife was quite good at predictions, but she wouldn’t repeat them to anyone.
A few days later, one of our neighbors in the next tree went missing. That was a stretch of scary days: after three months, only ten birds in our clan were left—and that included our two children. That’s when my eyesight began blurring. Time after time, I saw overlapping images everywhere. Even when I looked at my children, I didn’t see two of them but six of them. Only when I looked at my wife did I see just one image. As for the neighbors, they became a large flock of countless things. And so I still felt surrounded by an enormous clan. My wife was happy that I felt this way; she didn’t want me to feel downcast because of loneliness.
But one noon, they all disappeared, leaving only my wife
and me. I stood on a branch of the poplar and saw a lot of children and some adults running around, all grasping long bamboo poles and shouting. Even I—a magpie who was not very nimble—could sense disaster coming. My wife laughed grimly. Not seeming to mind in the least, she was pecking at a hole on the branch, as though investigating whether something was escaping from the inside. Suddenly, I began to suspect that I was seeing a hallucination produced by my double vision. When I asked my wife about t
his, she calmly answered, “That’s it. It’s a hallucination. However, an urchin is climbing the tree; he’s destroying our neighbor’s home. He’s efficient with his tools.”
The whole tree was swaying, and I didn’t dare go over to watch. I said to my wife, “Let’s fly away.”
“No.” She said resolutely, “We’ll go home.”
“Why go home now? He probably intends to smash our home, too. We have no way to defend ourselves from humans.”
But my wife was going home, and I’d better stay close to her and get into the nest.
Snuggling up to each other, we shivered at the door of our home. I heard her heart thumping. How strange this was: her heart was in her chest, and yet I could hear it; my heart was in my chest, and yet I couldn’t hear it at all! At this moment, my vision was very clear; I saw no overlapping images. I saw that red-orange work hat. It wasn’t an urchin just now. It was the school gardener. She climbed up until she came face to face with us.