The Embroidered Shoes (14 page)

“Before dawn, the Seven-Li Fragrance always causes me migraine, and it smells of seawater, too. The Seven-Li Fragrance must be blossoming on both sides of a seaside highway. I can imagine the place.” After these words, he lowered his head and fell into sleep.

He died of an intussusception. It wasn't until three days later that we, together with a doctor, found him under a Chinese chestnut tree. His travel bag was stuffed with stinking orioles and turtledoves killed with an airgun days before. We simply left him there. Out of fear, we pretended to have forgotten about burying him. On our way back, Mother and I kept talking loudly to control our fright. The doctor was walking in front of us. His white coverall was stained with bird droppings, large smears of yellowish green. Every now and then, Mother cast sharp sidelong glances at me with her aged eyes. I knew that she had guessed my thought. So I jabbered on at random, ill at ease. I mentioned a past incident in a watermelon field, and asked if she could remember which day it was.

“That's very odd.” She halted and said hesitantly, “How could I have given birth to you? I have so much doubt about it. Just at that moment, I lost my memory. So the thing cannot be confirmed.”

I carry on my father's dream. Time and again, I feel so vividly that I touch the paving of the highway warmed by the sun, and hear mimicking cock crows. This also happens at the instant just before dawn when I smell the Seven-Li Fragrance. The dreams are drawn out, with an extremely long white thread fluttering behind each one of them just like a kite. But what is the matter with the ostrich? Ever since my father's death, my intestines have started to twist and turn. Glaring at me, Mother ordered simply, “You have to go to the mountains.” Then she threw the blood-stained travel bag at my feet.

I intend to look for a kind of herb that can cure intestinal diseases.

Upstairs there used to live a fellow with sunglasses. This guy was about fifty, though he told everybody that he was twenty-seven. One day he entered our kitchen. With one leap, he jumped into the cistern and refused to come out. He lived in the cistern for several years like a hippo, splattering water all over the kitchen. Every time I stepped into the kitchen, he would let loose a torrent of abuse. He then disappeared with my third sister. One day when the sweet scent of the Seven-Li Fragrance was spreading unchecked, we met on a cliff. My third sister exposed my little trick with a single remark. I seemed to hear them whistling to pigeons in the bamboo forest, but I dared not turn my head, because the turkey behind the rock made me very nervous. Venus rattled past my ear, and a surreal rosy color appeared along the rim of the sky. After that they disappeared together. How very suspicious.

However, a frosty morning still makes me ready to do something—it's my nature. So I put on my cap and shoulder the traveling bag. I purse my wrinkled mouth to whistle, and kick out my legs, causing a messy fit of noise in my intestines—gestures preliminary to a long journey. In the mirror, I see the mask spit and say, “Fifty-seven.” Then I take off my cap and sniff the greasy brim, recalling the secret of my father's artificial leg. He kept this secret from me very carefully. His leg was of high quality and showed almost no marks of being unreal. In fact, I did not know about it until after his death. For several days, Mother appeared to be on tenterhooks. Finally, she couldn't control her urge to tell me that the reason she did not bury my father was because of the artificial leg. She never failed to have an attack of epilepsy every time she saw that smooth pink object.

“His own leg was okay, but he broke it intentionally in order to fix that wretched thing on—one of his wild fantasies. Wearing that stupid thing, he declared forever to people that he had become a young bachelor again. He even boasted to me that the artificial leg was as soft and light as cotton, and claimed his nerves had grown into the leg. He tried to create a special image of himself.”

I found the herb in the house of my third sister's classmate. It was planted in a huge pot placed on the windowsill facing south. It dawned on me that this woman was also once tortured by intestinal diseases. Her room was littered with old newspapers, revealing her unbearable affliction.

Everything that happened in the past is real. At the time when I met my third sister on the cliff, pigeons were whispering in the woods, and it seemed to be drizzling. I had extreme trouble opening my tired eyelids. Then all of a sudden, she started talking from behind me, laying bare my trick.

The little gold ox is pacing back and forth on the tea table. A lump of frozen cloud drifts by the window. A dolphin is trapped between the dead branches of a camphor tree. Numerous roosters are crowing one after another. The mask on the wall is talking again: “Fifty-seven years old.” This mask used to be an old fellow picking odds and ends from the garbage. Purposefully, he hanged himself from our doorframe, naked.

1. O
UR
F
AMILY
S
ECRETS

“What are the long-legged mosquitoes humming about? It's so ridiculous.” Mother's voice came unexpectedly from the shadow behind the bed. She had been hiding in that corner since the last rain. She wanted people to think she had disappeared. Excitedly, she found a big umbrella and covered herself completely with it. “My body is puffed up like an oxygen pillow.” In the drawer she had found a five-headed needle, and she was punching it into her skin. With her teeth clenched, she punched and pressed, saying, “I've got to get rid of some water, or I'll be dead.”

I wanted to tell her something about the summer. Hesitantly, I opened my mouth: “The hornet's nest was humming on the bare branch. Something was swinging in the air … Once I lost a wallet. Obviously you remember the incident. It was stolen by a guy with a beard. The streets at the time were covered by white bed sheets, which shone in the sun. Children were running around carrying torches. Don't you feel that the needles are pushing against rotten meat?”

All my family members had undivulged secrets. They must have seemed like frightening people. My father, for instance, was a very unusual person. I never understood him. To me, he was analogous to insects, because he always gave me a feeling of beetle shells. He would sneak in every night after supper had already started. Darting to the table, he would fill his bowl with rice while scanning the other dishes. He chewed and swallowed all the good dishes before banging his bowl down on the table and fleeing.

“Father is suffering some internal agony,” my third sister would say, showing the whites of her eyes. Her voice resembled a noodle hanging in the damp air. She always gnawed at the rims of the bowls at mealtime. As a result, all of our blue china bowls had chipped edges. I saw with my own eyes that she swallowed the chips with her rice. For a cure to her asthma, she had, up to that time, eaten more than a thousand earthworms. Actually, she drank them after melting them down in sugar. “Isn't that miraculous!” Panting, she would put on an expression of wonder.

“Your third sister, it's hard to say,” Mother commented in a sarcastic tone. “Did you hear her thumping the bed? The doctors think she's having endocrinopathy. It's a subtle ailment.”

I was about to reply when I heard a deafening noise from the upstairs neighbor. According to my reconnoitering, the guy had been fooling around with an iron drilling rod. The cement floor of his apartment was covered with small holes like a honeycomb. Mother continued indifferently, turning a deaf ear to the noise from upstairs: “I can see through anybody's tricks. I have become so ingeniously skillful that I am close to being a master of magic. Day after day, I sit in this corner, puncturing myself with needles in my fight against the fluids. Sometimes I simply forget you are my children. Whenever I recall the past, the wild mountains and deserted forests appear in my mind's eye, stars fall down like fireworks, and the black figure of your father hangs from a branch of the tree. Quickly he has turned into what he is now. It's just too fast.”

At the window pane appeared a pair of huge sunglasses. That was the guy from upstairs coming down to spy on our reaction to his dirty trick. He never forgot to put on his sunglasses, believing that no one could recognize him this way.

“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.