The Embroidered Shoes

TWO UNIDENTIFIABLE PERSONS

It was Lao Jiu (Old Vulture) who led him to see that man. Passing through a dense willow forest, they found him amidst a pile of dried-up weeds on the riverbank. His face covered with a ragged straw hat, he lay on his back sound asleep, the toes on his bare feet spread wide. Lao Jiu pulled him down and thus the three lay together. Soon afterward, they saw the waterfall plunging overhead.

“There’s a landslide quite near here,” Lao Jiu harrumphed. “That guy, he understands everything. All doubt will come to an end here.”

He started to make up a self-deceiving story. Recently such stories came to him automatically and turned in his mind like a revolving lamp.

The sound of bubbles breaking is a delicate one. You can only hear it by touching your ear to the earth. Is the sound of silkworms pulling silk for cocoons more delicate than that?

They had finally reached this place. For a long time, he’d had the feeling that Lao Jiu would lead him to see this man, but he had not guessed that the day would come so quickly. Now the thing had happened before he’d had time to pull the snarled threads of his confused mind out straight.

* * *

The day before, he had argued repeatedly with Ru Shu until they reached a kind of compromise. Clinging together, they stood in the chill wind probing for the image in each other’s mind.

“Don’t go,” she said, laughing softly, a little to his surprise. “Of course, I’m going to write that kind of letter. You’re going to receive a lot of them, piles of them, heaps. There’s virtually no possibility for retreat.”

Instantly, she vanished without sound or shape, as if she were a gust of cold, black wind.

He could not connect the feeling that she gave others now with the bright, sunny days of May. Before the coming of those days every year, he would be sleeping soundly. The naughty children in the neighborhood would take that chance to break his window in broad daylight. When the broken glass hit the floor, he would tighten the quilt around his body, pretending to be a silkworm swinging his head. He was the sort of person who is mentally a little bit slow. He did not count the disappearance of Ru Shu as starting at that time. Instead, he insisted stubbornly on reckoning it from a day five years later. The very concept of time was distorted in his mind. This was unexpected even to Lao Jiu.

Lao Jiu had also produced letters, though never in written form and never received by him in the mail. However, in those long five years, he had reread those letters constantly, and he knew that Lao Jiu had never let him go.

On the riverbank all sorts of feelings welled up in his heart, and his body felt extremely fragile as though with one slight movement he would fall into pieces. His brain was delicate and juicy, like a tiny melon sprout. Lao Jiu always disdained his brain, never considering it seriously. However, on this day stories streamed out of his brain like a flooding river. His hair hung down into the water. Each strand swirled in its own fantastic pattern.

“I’m not that disheartened,” he started to think, with some reason. “Without parents and brothers it appears like that kind of thing. The matter is becoming clearer as time goes by.”

“It’s okay not to go,” Ru Shu had said. Childishly, she stretched out a finger and drew a big circle in the air. “The blossoms of the broad bean are twinkling.”

Before making the decision, the two of them had pried open the lock of a deserted house and lived there together for three months. The house stood at the very end of a deep, empty lane whose dim and narrow path was piled with rotten leaves. At the entrance of the lane, there shone a tiny electric light that never went off all year round. Every time he entered the lane, he had to fend off a sudden attack of horror. The door was always ajar. Ru Shu insisted that once the door was closed the air pressure inside the room would become so great that her temples would swell with pain. She acted like a deranged person — she feared light, sound, air currents. All she did every day was huddle in the dead air.

“This is such an evil place,” she would say, lying in his bosom, trembling. She felt as hot as a lump of burning charcoal. “It’s our bad fortune that we have stumbled into such a place.”

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.”

Lao Jiu did not change the least bit because of Ru Shu’s reappearance. In his memory nobody else’s image had forced itself into his mind besides this fragile companion. He could not see her. Obviously he could not see anybody. During the days when his companion was warmly involved with Ru Shu, he sat amidst the maple trees on the mountain observing his chest, which grew older every day. He even stamped a little green poisonous snake to death with his bare feet. Bathing himself in the sun, he could feel that the poisonous juice inside his body was filling up day by day. He thought of how odd and unique the means of communication were that he had with his companion. This was mostly accomplished by aspiration. Thus his companion could get him whenever he called him.

Contrary to the other two, Lao Jiu had no doubt whatsoever about his own birth history. He had never revealed to anybody his own belief. He only tried to blend a unique manner into every deed. When his companion mentioned with excitement his own ambiguous position, considering it an honor, he only glanced at him sharply, fluttering his eyelashes.

The old man finally had a general explosion. Locking the door, he started wrestling with Lao Jiu. He said, puffing hard, “Some gratitude for decades of raising up the child.… Such a plot in broad daylight!”

With ease Lao Jiu threw him out the window. Then patting the dust from his clothes, he thought of the endless greed of human beings — and the inexplicability of their desires.

His birth was the product of a plot that happened in a quiet ancient residence. He accepted the matter in the year when he was two. Among a group of naughty children, he discovered his companion. The gloomy glance of that child attracted him immediately. Without the child knowing it, he entered his life and became another soul of his. The endless path toward his destiny was empty. It had been his dream to have a young and confused companion. In secret he would guide him to the termination of his journey. He would be the only person that he could remember in the world. Before his appearance, his mind had been vacant for many years. Inside, there were only a few monkeys swinging on dead branches.

“We fall into sleep under the shining stars, and we wake up in the morning glow; in our visions lions run in the jungle.”

In drifting terms he described to the child the scenery at the termination.

“But this place is falling into dilapidation day by day. Within one year you won’t be able to distinguish seasons, and within one day you can’t distinguish day from night. The sky is forever a bleak grayish white. There’s neither jungle nor people. Gradually even you will be turned into a red-colorblind patient. Just look at that floating leaf. What kind of exaggerated gesture!”

The teenager was forever bent over his black leather notebook, his face full of scars of memory, the gloomy expression in his eyes hiding a desire to murder. Lao Jiu was waiting, and the chance was getting closer day by day. On the day when he reached his adulthood, he incited him to throw the notebook that his father had given him (Lao Jiu could still remember the youth’s father) into the garbage can, thus fulfilling the wish that he had had for several years. From that day on the youth was severed from his memory and became an unidentifiable man.

Obviously this left artificial marks on his body. He was not born this way, but he didn’t know at all that it was all Lao Jiu’s arrangement. He only kept feeling surprised.

“I should have a father. This is very strange.”

“The notebook that you have forgotten is his biggest mistake. The old man has cut off his own retreat.”

The marks and scars on his face healed gradually, and the shape eventually stabilized and many unpredictable expressions appeared. Sometimes his glance would startle Lao Jiu at a particular moment. Several times, he raised the issue of the black leather notebook to probe him. The teenager listened without any facial expression. Obviously he was changing day by day.

More and more often, he could hear his upset footsteps in the wilderness at midnight. The footsteps bothered Lao Jiu, making him get up, put a shirt over his shoulders, and listen. From the window he could see a swinging candlelight. The young man was alone. In the small hut behind him there were all kinds of groaning sounds. Originally, he had hoped for a companion, who obviously was not Lao Jiu — had hoped for not the present existence but some discovery. He felt he would die if he couldn’t discover something new. Every day he despised his present existence. He would die of anxiety if some unexpected happiness did not appear. For several months he sat on the benches in the park half dreaming. He was trying to create a kind of strong image, yet simultaneously his mind resembled a dying rabbit. Ru Shu entered his life at that critical moment.

Ru Shu was a woman without roots. He noticed this while sitting on the bench in the park, and it was further proved when she repeatedly jumped from running trains to meet him. But this was not important. The thing that deeply shook his belief was the fact that she had her own pursuit.

“The cold wind blew and blew at midnight. I knocked open a door. From inside stretched an unfamiliar head. All of a sudden it started to talk. I could barely understand it at first, and I made all kinds of mistakes. Now that naivete has passed.”

This was her description of her work. She said that up to now she had seen the goods in every house. There was no way to cheat her even if they wanted to. For example, the uncle. She had certainly seen him. Even with her eyes closed she could imagine him; otherwise, how could she give such an accurate judgment? Talking about him, she had also knocked at his door on a certain summer night in a certain year. At that time both of them were young, a little girl and a little boy. They were farther from resembling each other then than now. She remembered the incident. The reason she went to the park was because of her remembrance of this. At first glance she could see the changes that had taken place in his face over these years and the horror came to her. Then there was the incident of escaping.

“Why should you knock at the door? Since there is no secret whatsoever inside the house?” he asked.

She answered that it was because she did not want to give in, or she didn’t want to lose the game. Since she had already entered the dead end, she had to bother the people inside the house for the rest of her life. That was all her happiness.

That fall, Ru Shu’s searching gradually showed a purity and extremity. In the aging season, her face showed some edges and corners, and her expressions turned indifferent and cold. She came to him less and less; instead she would stay inside the house alone — her house was never located permanently at one place, and he could never decide where she lived. Like their life histories, it was a fabrication.

Using a charcoal pen she drew many thick lines on the wall (those walls were very white and totally empty), and on every line she drew numerous antennas. She told him that those antennas were all memories about nights. Now she was devoting all her energy to this work. Nothing related to daylight could arouse her interest. Of course, daylight did not include him. He also was an antenna that she had drawn, and he belonged to the night. This was revealed by the shadows in his face. Even the blazing sun in the vast desert could not burn that shadow away. The symbols on the walls were all alive. Very often she was so touched by them that she could not stop sobbing!

In a ceilingless house, she pointed at the slim woman who passed by outside the window and said, “She’s wearing such a thin coat. Yet in the place she is going to it is snowing. The whole sky is full of six-cornered floating flowers. She is walking gently, taking into her eyes all the scenery along the way. ‘Fragrant Grassland,’ the name of the place, appears in her mind. But in reality the place in front of her is seeing falling temperatures. When I was young, I had similar experiences several times. Every time I forgot to bring proper clothes. Now that woman is far away, and her figure from behind does not appear that confident.”

“Fragrant Grassland! Fragrant grassland in a snowstorm?” she suddenly shouted.

At the same time he found himself in the middle of a crowded square. Many familiar faces passed by without expressions.

Somewhere Ru Shu was saying excitedly, “I’m the puzzle inside the puzzle!”

He knew what emphasis she made with her vigorous charcoal pen. He could also see her lonely destiny. He did not pity her, but let her go her own way. The narrative about that woman had started before they moved into the room in the corridor. For a long time, Ru Shu would toss and turn in bed, placing her fevered head on his bosom, and then she would lead into that story. According to her that woman was everywhere. She wrapped her head in a kerchief with colorful patterns. She would appear from a dark doorway and she would travel through every big street and small lane. She had been to Ru Shu’s room. Quietly she sat by the desk and one page after another she turned through an old book, her ears pricked up with caution.

“Every time I removed the clutter from the desk, there was always one book that appeared punctually. In the light, her hair was shining, and it was even thicker than mine.”

She asked him to recall from which day the story about that woman started. And he answered that it seemed to have started from that day when the camellia blossom withered away. That day they were circling around and around in the mountains carving their names in the bamboo. They didn’t return to their house until very late. She was so sad that she couldn’t go to sleep the whole night through. Sitting up she told him the story touchingly. She said that the woman had disappeared thirty years ago. Sitting by the window she finished reading one letter, then she walked out and disappeared amidst a vast sea of men. Left over on the windowsill were two glasses, one blue, one white, with tea marks inside.

“Thirty years is not that long,” Ru Shu tried hard to explain patiently. “That woman would come every day because she belonged to a kind of eternity. Time had long ago stopped for her. Is it kind of dull to talk about this?”

She became very nervous and stared at the doorway. She was waiting for the knock on the door.