Can Xue – The Summons

When Old Mu Xi woke up, he found himself lying on a small wooden boat afloat on a pitch-dark river. The silent river was very dirty and so wide that he couldn't see the banks. Nor were there any other boats in sight. The setting sun declined in the extreme west like a tiny red button falling into the black waters of eternity.

Old Mu Xi sat up and stretched, remembering he once had looked forward to this day for a long time, and now it had come, yet in the interim he had managed to forget about it. He looked around and found that the river was not flowing and his little boat was motionless. Furthermore, the boat had no oar on board. Once in a while, a breath of ill wind from nowhere dusted his face as lightly as if it were both there and not there. The little boat would move some distance in the breeze before stopping again. Old Mu Xi thought to himself, Turns out there's not much going on here.

Suddenly out of nowhere, a faint call could be heard: "Old Mu… Xi! Old…"

Old Mu Xi gasped and was dumbstruck, yet the call resounded in his ear. As he heard that baleful voice, his vision began to blur, and his whole body became extremely old and feeble. He struggled, trying for the last time to pronounce a syllable: "Zhuo," he said, then dropped to the deck of the little boat like a piece of firewood, his glazed eyes turned up to the gray-black sky. He was sinking back into memory.

More than a decade before, Old Mu Xi had inherited a sum of money, which he and a friend used for investments. Together, they bought a piece of uncultivated land, where they decided to grow corn. They set to work immediately, but the heavens seemed to be against them. Four years running, they harvested almost nothing because of bad weather. Mu Xi and his friend encouraged each other and continued to work hard. Finally in the fifth year, they were rewarded with a bumper crop. Just before the harvest, Old Mu Xi's friend suddenly suggested a distribution plan, insisting he should get three-fourths of the crop. He also criticized Old Mu Xi for his lazy way of working. He even hinted that the money Mu Xi had used to buy the land came from questionable sources.

All of this struck like a lightning bolt. During the ensuing quarrel, all the villagers took the side of Mu Xi's friend. Old Mu Xi knew that the villagers sided with his partner because he himself was a widower and without family. In the countryside, a widower was an ill-fated figure. Ultimately, Old Mu Xi watched his friend claim all of the harvest and also threaten Mu Xi not to get close to this piece of land-since the harvest belonged to him, the land naturally was his also. All the villagers supported Old Mu Xi's friend.

After several sleepless nights, Old Mu Xi killed his friend with a sickle and began his prolonged life as a fugitive.

He always chose to travel on mountain paths, especially those that ran through dense, primitive forests. He was not afraid of losing his way. As a matter of fact, so much the better if he lost his way, because then nobody could find him. Over several months of rain and wind, he gradually developed a pair of iron soles and an animal's stomach-now he could survive by eating leaves. During that period, the shadow of horror forever hung over him, forcing him to flee frantically. Surprisingly, the animals in the forests never harmed him. Instead, they all went their own way and coexisted without any trouble.

One evening when he had just emerged from a forest, he vaguely heard a gong. He thought it was sounded by people trying to catch him, so he quickly hid in the bushes. The people passed him by, however, laughing and talking. They turned out to be a troupe of acrobats traveling by night.

Perhaps people had already forgotten about the murder he had committed. Perhaps nobody in the village had ever thought of either reporting or capturing him. Perhaps the mountain forest he was in at the moment was far, far away from his hometown. It could be anything. But not once had Old Mu Xi pondered these possibilities. He considered what he had done to be so serious that he didn't believe there could be any pardon. Holding such a belief, he walked hurriedly through the bushes, his body scratched bloody. This character trait was destructive, driving Old Mu Xi to hide out and separate himself from other people.

Several years of dining on the wind and drinking the morning dew passed. Long thick hair grew on Old Mu Xi's body. His clothes had been worn out for some time, and long brown hair sneaked its way out through the holes. One day when he was taking a bath in the river, he was startled to see the reflection of his body. After careful thought, he felt greatly relieved: from then on, he no longer wore clothes. When he met up with people, he didn't feel so frightened because he figured nobody could recognize him. But in his stubborn mind, he refused to accept the possibility that he might get away with his crime. By now, he had become set in this way of thinking.

Life in the forest was extremely monotonous. He couldn't get used to eating meat, particularly raw meat, so he never caught small animals. His daily task was to find tender tree leaves to eat, and he disliked staying in one place-his imagination needed constant refreshing-so he was constantly on the move, picking leaves along the way to keep up his strength. He frequently encountered people as he went; without exception, they screamed and ran away, and at that moment he would feel an unreasonable satisfaction.

Yet the nights were hard to endure, and this hardship had nothing to do with the weather. Old Mu Xi had long adjusted to wind and rain, scorching heat and freezing cold. In winter, there were fewer tender leaves, so he had to eat old ones, but his stomach had become strong. The hardship derived from his feeling of suspension.

Whenever he fell asleep, he felt clearly that he was suspended in midair. Beneath him, the villagers were busy working their fields, barefoot children ambled along the bank between the plots, chimneys gave out a light-gray smoke; yet all of that had nothing to do with him. Hanging in midair, he felt dizzy; it seemed as if his innards were flying out of his body. The nightmare would continue until he was startled awake by his extreme terror. Since fleeing into the forest, he had spent every night this way. Mornings when he arose, he would be pale, his body shivering like a typhoid victim's. Each step was agony. He would struggle to collect a large quantity of leaves to compensate for the strength he had lost during the night. Slowly, he would recover his energy, and toward afternoon he would have regained his vitality almost fully.

Old Mu Xi passed one month after another, one year after another in such a pattern. In moments of desperation, he often dreamed of finding a place that no one could think of or remember. There, one would neither hear the wind chimes echoing in the mountains nor see the leaves changing color with the seasons. The earth and sky would merge. Perhaps in such a place, he would no longer feel suspended in midair, and he wouldn't have to eat all those leaves.

After many, many years, he finally returned to his hometown. He didn't choose the way home purposely. He never chose his way. This homecoming could only be called a coincidence. Even he was surprised for a long time.

On a familiar little hill, he saw the small tile-roofed house where he had once lived, and a few of the same villagers. Like one transfixed, he stood there for a long time, thinking how awkward it had been to be among them back then, when every day had seemed as long as a year. He didn't feel like going home to have a look around, even if they pardoned him; for him, returning home was meaningless, and he could no longer participate in that way of life. Calmly, he jumped into a stream at the entrance to the village to take a bath; then he returned to the mountain.

Many people saw him, yet nobody recognized him. In fact, the incident had happened so long ago that nobody connected him with it anymore. That night, people in the village closed their doors very early and stayed inside. And the topic they discussed was the wild man. Old Mu Xi stayed for a few days in the mountains near his hometown, but he soon became bored and headed north, where the forest was denser. As he left his hometown, he heard deafening firecrackers, which the villagers, fearing the wild man, set off to boost their courage. Old Mu Xi laughed and walked quickly northward through the smell of gunpowder.

One rather strange thing was that his fellow villagers had already forgotten the murder case. They had also forgotten the position they had taken in the dispute, yet they had never forgotten Mu Xi as a person. In folk legend, he had been gradually elevated to a hero of the forest, a powerful and unconstrained hero like a heavenly steed soaring across the skies. One day, they put up posters inviting Old Mu Xi to return, to come home, to return to the people, but he had gone far away and did not see those notices. Even if he had, he would not have believed in the pardon because he was confident he had seen through the people's hearts and minds. Home would not be the place for him. He wanted to go where people had totally forgotten, a place where the sky and earth had merged.

He found that lately, his capacity for food was growing and the blood in his veins had turned green (he scratched his finger once on a thorny vine). Nights had become more and more terrifying. The clear-cut separation of sky from earth forced him to struggle desperately since he felt suspended between them. Old Mu Xi was both startled and scared.

When Old Mu Xi had begun living in the forest, he often mumbled to himself. The language he had used in society obviously was strongly rooted in him. With passing time, Old Mu Xi's desire to speak grew fainter and fainter. One day, he discovered he could not speak a single word. He tried to use the language that had served him in the past for thinking, but it had escaped him. The sound he produced after much effort turned out to resemble baby talk. Quickly, Old Mu Xi discovered the benefit of losing his linguistic memory. His throat became coarse and natural. Often, he didn't need to think to express his urges accurately and easily. Thus he roared, cried, and shouted at will day and night, feeling completely free. One day after several years in his dream world, he felt extremely lucky that he had not gone home, because he could not have endured the sounds those people made. To him, they were shrill and irritating, a completely senseless display of technique. Even little children would twist their lips strangely to make outlandish sounds. Now that he was hidden in the forest, whenever he recalled that he used to talk like that, he would blush with shame.

Although the murder had occurred years before, the image of his victim was still sharp in Old Mu Xi's mind, for he was a born bearer of grudges. Numerous times in those moments before falling asleep, he engaged his enemy in bloody battle, emitting heroic roars. Numerous times, he experienced the pride of triumph and the humiliation of defeat. In these moments of half sleep, his brief human life repeated itself. When Old Mu Xi woke up, his desire for battle had disappeared completely. He would think of the foe he had killed years before and be somewhat surprised: could it be that he had not killed him? Was that forcible seizure of the cropland some kind of illusion? But regardless of the event's authenticity, it or something like it had forced his departure. Old Mu Xi was certain about that, and he felt himself very fortunate indeed. In the same way that he refused to believe in pardons, the stubborn Mu Xi would not make peace with his enemy. In the dim night, as he floated in midair, facing his opponent across two isolated realms, his emotions were clear and unambiguous. On such occasions, he would devise all kinds of unrealistic schemes for murdering his foe, maneuvering again and again, dismissing the idea, then maneuvering again, and then dismissing the plan again in order to conceal his inner horror, to forget the feeling of being suspended in midair.

One day about half a month after he had left for the north, he saw a group of people tramping around in the grassland in the woods. They all cupped their hands in the shape of a trumpet and called into the air: "Old Mu Xi! Old Mu Xi…"

Old Mu Xi's jaw dropped in surprise. The sound seemed famil iar, yet the memory was so distant and vague that he could not un derstand their cries. The people struck him as somehow strange Their pronunciation was not as displeasing as that of ordinary people, yet it was too mechanical. Always they shouted exactly the same "Old-Mu-Xi" without variation, without rise and fall, very unsatisfyingly. From the bushes, he stared at them, restraining himself, expecting that one of them would give out some different sound.

But they didn't know what he was thinking. They appeared to be indulged in their game as they called out forcefully, "Old Mu Xi! Old-Mu-Xi!" Amid the sound were children's loud voices.

Old Mu Xi flew into a rage. Without thinking, he jumped out from his hiding place, ran into the middle of their circle, and shouted, "Ha! Hahaha! Ah! Guaguagua!"

Seeing the longhaired wild man and hearing his piercing cries echo through mountain and forest, everybody fled madly down the slopes, losing their shoes along the way.

Old Mu Xi watched their backs with contempt, emitting one drawn-out syllable: "Zhuo!" The sound stirred up a frenzy in his heart.

Old Mu Xi was still troubled by his shadowy memories, which revealed themselves in dreams at night; his dreams were endless torture. Old Mu Xi's experiences removed the fear of being suspended in midair. What he really feared was the feeling that he was confronting the shadowy human world like a criminal facing execution. There emerged in his vague, groundless memory, for no specific reason, the image of a river. He recalled that its water could completely cut off people's memories of the world. With this vague thought taking hold in his mind, Old Mu Xi set out to find that river.


* * *

Many years passed, quite a few, actually. Old Mu Xi had crossed innumerable mountains. Whenever he arrived at a mountain, he would climb to the top to look around. He had seen all kinds of rivers, each one different. Yet none was the one he was looking for, not at all. From the riverbanks came the faint call: "Old Mu Xi! Old Mu Xi…" More and more, the sound revealed its ominous meaning and seemed to hang in the air forever. Old Mu Xi wrinkled his brow and felt discouraged. He hated that sound.

He didn't know when he began to realize that his health was deteriorating. His appetite was decreasing. Sometimes he wouldn't eat a single leaf all day long, yet he walked without pause, looking more and more determined. His weakened condition lasted for a long time. Then one day, he saw his reflection in a forest creek. It looked like a ghost. The part below his skull had nearly disappeared, leaving only a few thin sticks, a rectangular box, and something lumpy. Long hair grew over the thin sticks, the box, and the lumps. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see more clearly. Obviously, his constitution could no longer stand the enormous exhaustion of his nights. He was disappearing. Then he heard shouting from far outside the forest. For him, the ominous shouts were full of foreboding. He couldn't endure it, so he covered his ears.

That morning when the frost settled over the forest, Old Mu Xi lay down inside a hole in a tree. He plugged his ears with his fingers because the unbearable sound came from afar on the wind. He lay wide-eyed in the darkness, which smelled of decayed wood. He gurgled softly as if groaning, as if complaining. He rolled over and looked out at the white frost on the ground and at little animals searching for food.

It was broad daylight. A beam of light entered the hole. Old Mu Xi could see his own body. It was about to disappear completely. His fingers and toes had become thin as matchsticks and black as the tree's moldy bark.

He began to question whether there really was a river that could erase memories, because his memory of the river was itself unreliable. Finally, he truly felt there wouldn't be any miracle. He closed his eyes and waited in terror for that final emptiness to arrive. He did not forget to plug his ears with his matchstick fingers-in fact, he couldn't forget anything at all. For the first time in his life, he fell asleep in broad daylight. In his dream, he hummed. Outside the hole, there blew a gust of frosty wind.

Old Mu Xi entered the dreamland mentioned earlier. And that dreamland led to all that was written afterward.


Translated By Jian Zhang And Ronald R. Janssen

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