Читать книгу Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao - Jonathan Tel - Страница 7

THE SHOE KING OF SHANGHAI

High columns and gleam and the drapes paper-white, the color of mourning, and murmured conversations and sweat and several varieties of important people, whose definitions he can only guess at, who are mostly dressed in black, negative spaces marking off the histories and levels and types of white, and the absence of tears, the absence of wailing, nobody who seems to be a relative or close friend, midday outside but inside a late afternoon, the light confused and hazy, everyone’s breath rising and gathering in the high-ceilinged hall, This place is a city of its own (the same thought he had a month ago when he stumbled out of the train and there he was at last in Beijing West station), a condensed city, yes, large enough and small enough to generate a smog of its own, and meanwhile wreath-deliverers enter at intervals, trailing their lavish aromas, which mingle with incense and floor polish and an undersmell that might be rotten fruit and money as well as feet, for everyone is shoeless and so slightly abbreviated, celebrities in close-fitting suits are centimeters shorter than normal, a leading businessman is flanked by two bodyguards, dangerous and shuffling in their nylon socks, and he among them (he is the kind of man who is not looked at) painfully aware of his faded shirt and trousers and the hole in the left sock through which the smallest toe pokes, and he is trudging in flip-flops along the dried-up irrigation ditches of Sichuan, midsummer, white dust everywhere, the sheep trailing after, and from curls of conversation he gathers the man’s name was Qin, he was a financier of some sort, at any rate he had financial links with those who have come to commemorate him, debits and credits, it was an overdose of sleeping pills, an accident, it is suggested, and nobody seems upset about this, there are small smiles when death is mentioned, along with long time no see and handshakes, for above a certain income level death is of less account, the rich maintaining their network of connections in Heaven and Hell, the dead puppeteer wriggling his fingers to make the mourners dance, whereas in Sichuan there is sorrow and music, the mourners screeching How could you leave us just when things were starting to get better? and here not only is there no particular sadness there is not even a body, who knows how death is done in Beijing, perhaps Qin is laid out deeper within the villa, perhaps that is where the true funeral is taking place (even financiers have relatives and people who love them), but he jumps back five minutes or so, the long brilliant dark cars double-parked like shoes along the drive, the chauffeurs smoking alongside, and clutching a wreath up against his chest as a shield he shuffles toward the marble stairs, the doorway, and by the shoe rack he nudges off his worn Flying Forward sneakers, and a servant relieves him of the wreath, taking it from his arms, exposing him, peeling off his disguise (yet he remains reasonably invisible), he steps onward and inward till he is back in himself, here and now, he takes one deep breath, holding the moment, and now he stays in this time but reverses space, and without ever having reached the vicinity of Qin, whoever that man might be, nor his ghost, nor the sly greedy god he will turn into, the migrant returns to the shoe rack and slides his socked feet into a pair of rather too large solid black brogues with a decoration of piercings in the upper and an obvious aura of expense, and, taller now, at least part of him wealthy, hardly limping at all, he strides out of the building and back down the drive past the sculpture of a turtle with a snake on its back and into the wreath shop van, now empty apart from a stray petal or leaf and fragrance, in due course he feels the bounce as an unseen driver gets in and a door slams and the engine starts up and he is delivered back to the heart of the city where he does not belong, but Beijing is full of people who do not belong so in a way he does.

He never intended to be a shoe thief. He moves backward and forward, into the past and into the future, retelling and revising his life in the capital, scribbling over it: he is hired at a construction site in Dongcheng (what is to be built is no concern of his, a skyscraper rising, story upon story), and he is a glazier, working with other glaziers, installing a pane and so on to the next pane, the west wind ceaseless above a given height, the entire site surrounded with a scenery wall depicting a joyous building, a concrete-and-glass festivity, and behold a high electronic billboard to count down the days and hours and minutes, the “death clock” they call it, or the “money clock” since when the clock subtracts to zero, the workers will be paid off and laid off, and the odd thing is how peasants recruited from his own village reappear on this site, look! there’s old Bat Ears mixing cement, there’s Crooked Nose in the kitchen tent, there’s Worm Cast operating the controls of an earth-moving machine, here’s himself eighteen floors up gripping a sheet of glass, his flock of sheep baahing in the horizonless urban smogscape; it’s late morning and he’s still up here, the wind pinned to his hair, the sun flying past, his fingers and shoulders concentrating on the job while his stomach dreams of lunch—steamed buns and egg-drop soup, with spicy Sichuan pickles— and he tastes it in anticipation, body and mind burping together, and he feels an odd rush past his face and torso, as if something is coming down from a higher level, though there is no higher level as yet, no workers on scaffolding perched above him, and there is a scream from below, another worker, a man he doesn’t even know, hopping comically and shouting aiya!, and on the earth, next to the fallen man, clear as a diatom viewed through a microscope, a one-yuan coin—his coin, that must have escaped from his pocket, which it is true has a hole in it though surely too small, the coin must have zoomed from his hip like a UFO, and a foreshortened person down there brings over a bandage and winds it round and round the damaged leg-portion, and the victim gets up and more or less stands, and in dumb show the foreman sends him away, for what use is a cripple, however slightly crippled? and now the foreman’s voice travels upward, “You, you’re fired!” and he tries, “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t mine!” “You up there with the limp, come down!” What limp? —but even as he denies it, he feels it, not much more than a twisting in his left ankle, and with some difficulty he descends, and the man below who is led away looks from behind like himself, and he picks up the coin, its chrysanthemum design glowing on his palm, and the foreman tells him to go and not come back.

How can a man live in Beijing? He walks south, then west, he sees street performers, each wounded in his own way: a blind erhu player, a juggler with stick-out ears, a man who lies down on broken glass for a living, a conjuror who produces an orange from a woman’s shoulder blade . . . briefly becoming all these freaks in turn, and then he follows the signs for the public toilet, and outside it an elderly water calligrapher is at work, master of a broomstick with a red sponge at its tip, dipping it into a pail and writing traditional four-character sayings on the paving: ANT DESTROY WHOLE DAM and LAMENT SMALLNESS GREAT OCEAN . . . couldn’t he too write these, how tricky can it be, but if it were that easy everybody would be doing it already, the city would be full of calligraphers gripping sponge-tipped sticks and creating temporary characters on the sidewalks, every step you took you’d be walking on slippery wisdom, and with the unlucky coin he tips the calligrapher, who responds not in speech but in water, to the effect that a certain entrepreneur will pay for top-quality used shoes, no questions asked, and includes the address, also a sketch map, and the calligrapher gets back to his proverbs (the business advice is like a commercial between TV programs; the calligrapher must be paid for promoting the illegal shoe business, here, in this city of crooked motives) EVEN HARE BITE CORNERED and O FORTUNE O CALAMITY . . .

He limps west through Qianmen, earphoned citizens each accompanied by private music, to a restaurant street and a street of antiques dealers, and around the corner there’s another street that is nothing but specialized florists, wreath shop after wreath shop, and a van is parked outside one of them, its shutter rolled up, and somebody says, “Hey you!” (one migrant worker is any migrant worker), summoning him to carry a wreath into the van, and another wreath, and yet another, and he gets in himself, pressed in the aromatic gap between layers of flowers, and the tailgate rolls down, and the dark van jolts off (the character inscribed on the center of each wreath signifies it’s a gift for the dead), with relief he ceases for a while to be here, or now, or himself.

In the midst of the funeral gathering, a tidy smile, a politician rewinding in his head a joke he just shared with a civil servant (the one about the real estate developer and the prostitute), and what is there to regret, Qin had it coming, the timing of his passing suspiciously convenient for certain parties, he peers about, sorting Qin’s allies from his enemies, though among the higher echelons the distinction is a fine one, a nod, a frown, who here did not have a motive to do away with Qin, who would have relished this gathering, squeezed the flesh of all his possible murderers, the ghost of the billionaire is working the room, as the politician stomps in his socks toward the shoe rack, and half-crouches, reaching out with hand and inquisitive foot toward where his brogues should be—but are not, an empty parking space, and wildly he looks around, speculating somebody might have moved them, or his memory might be at fault, one hypothesis as unacceptable as the other, then he understands what happened and he laughs, the impudence of the thief marching right into the funeral gathering, in the presence of bodyguards and security personnel, in the presence of some of the most powerful men in China, in the presence of death, well there’s only one thing to be done, if a stranger steals your shoes you must steal a stranger’s shoes, he inspects the many pairs dozing on the rack like delegates at a party congress, and he selects an excellent example, handmade, discreetly labeled Lobbs of London, and his toes squirm and settle inside them as if his feet had been crafted to suit these very objects, and he bows to do up the laces, he phones his chauffeur but there’s no answer, he texts: “I’m on my way where are you” as he marches, elevated and authoritative, to the exterior marble steps, head fanning in order to pick out his own Audi, and he hears a voice behind him, “Excuse me, you’ve taken my shoes, Mr. Ximen! Excuse me, you’ve taken my Lobbs by mistake!,” he descends, he kicks off the shoes, and why not the socks too, and barefoot as when he was a boy runs over the slimy, gritty surface of the city, and his Audi 12 rolls along keeping pace with him, and he pulls open the door and he too vanishes within its tinted glass as if he never existed.

Striding along in his borrowed brogues, limping along on his borrowed brogues, past a fruit man, past a man urging him to eat fish balls in boiling broth (Didn’t somebody once construct a replica of the Great Wall out of fish ball skewers?) which reminds him of a joke that he cannot quite recall, the shading of it, its inner darkness, a sense of falling down and down through that darkness, and of his childhood, his mother’s face dissolving as she tells him it, once upon a time a woman dropped a shoe down a well, “My child is in the well!” (a pun that works only in Sichuan, “shoe” and “child” being homophones in the local dialect) as he limps along the “traditional hutong” theme mall, a branch of an international coffee chain guarding it like a mastiff, and then into an actual hutong, narrow and winding, following the water-map in his head, and so into a zone marked for destruction, the character for “demolish” in red paint on several walls, builders’ sand as if a beach, stray fluttery memories of months-old newspapers, dog shit, and he finds the promised house, seemingly unoccupied—yet on the door, angled and battered, he knocks, “Excuse me, you in there, excuse me, you if you’re in there, somebody told me you’re looking for shoes.”

Meanwhile the gangster whose Lobbs were grabbed, shoeless on the steps, outraged, the outrage radiating from his heart, bangs fist on chest, trying to beat himself back to life, while his bodyguards support him on either side, holding him upright, and upright he collapses, immortalized in a rictus of hatred and envy, propped up next to the turtle-and-snake sculpture by the marble portal to the house where Qin is not either.

“What have you got?” in a high-pitched voice, the door opened a crack, an ancient face wrinkled yet softening as she admires the excellent brogues, the door creaks further but she does not allow him in, on the doorstep she kneels to evaluate the loot and so they haggle, they sniff each other’s desperation, settling on a price of a hundred yuan—and she accepts the pair as if a gift, unlacing them, taking them off him, petting their hard-soft shell, and she gives him a pair of cloth shoes to wear instead, the kind anyone can get at an Everything for Two Yuan store, “When will I get paid?” “Ah, I’m only the intermediary, I pass the shoes on to a man from Shanghai,” impelling him to exclaim, “Shanghai!” a city he never before had reason to name, while in Beijing dialect she replies, “You know what they say: when a wicked man dies in Beijing, he is reincarnated in Shanghai!” and he presses her, asking when he’ll get his hundred yuan, and she tells him to come back for it at dusk, not long after dusk, and murmurs, “If you could lay your hands on more shoes like this . . . ” hunger and pleading in her voice, she stands holding the brogues and she is short but full-length—scarlet stilettos, apron like a cobbler’s, elasticated floral sleeve protectors, her dehydrated face is a wood ear mushroom, that still has spit enough in it to moisten her thumb, which rubs a mud crumb next to a welt—and he would find more for her too, he would do the old woman this service, though he dare not go back to the same funeral, in this city of millions there must be many deaths, many funerals, millions of lonesome shoes there for the taking.

Time is his to kill; he strolls backward and forward in time and space, the big city with its dense sour atmosphere and NO SMOKING, whereas in Sichuan the sky clear as water, the cigarettes homegrown, one for now and one for later tucked behind an ear, NO SPITTING but what else are you supposed to do with your phlegm, Beijing a bomb site or after an earthquake, he walks by what was once a school and what was once a restaurant and what was once a laundry . . . which is destined to become an elevator-rich glittery complex, a field with plums and peppers and in the far corner of it the stone grave marker by which he and his father burn death-money, not factory-made crisp paper, his ancestors make do with their local straw currency, palms together and bow three times, the city thickening as dusk approaches, a flock of clay-colored starlings weaves overheard, he wanders over to where he can climb on a low wall (half the hutong is demolished already) and peek inside her house, the interior explained by a single fluorescent blob, many pairs of shoes squared up on the otherwise empty cement floor, men’s shoes and women’s shoes, a line of shoes follow each other and turn! and back the other way to the end and turn! . . . like a line dance, like the way you plow a field, the shoes radiant and beautiful and expensive, and now the old woman appears, she caresses them and talks to them, in her passion not un-beautiful in her own right, she sits on a low stool and tries on now one pair, and now another, she sets a golden pump down on a sheet of sun-colored paper, and behind him a car eases up, a black Elantra, so he fades into the shadows, a wince in his bad ankle, the driver is talking into a cellphone and has a mustache, it looks as if it might be the cellphone that has the mustache, a bushiness shared between man and device, night pulls harder at its end, smoothing out the smog-shine, no individual star visible, the river that is the Milky Way having been dammed for the sake of a celestial hydroelectric project, and he is a fixed point, and Mustache is a fixed point and the old woman too, and now she lifts the very brogues he brought, temporarily his ears, into which she whispers.

This hutong is where she grows up, where she is a girl, where she is a young woman, poor but a beauty, where she turns down the marriage proposal of a high-ranking cadre and marries her sweetheart instead, and they have a daughter, and it is from here that husband and wife set out, day after day, year after year, to their assigned jobs as teachers, until one day he is denounced, she must denounce him, her husband is taken from her and her daughter does not forgive her, and she is married off to a former Red Guard, and she remains at her school until she is obliged to retire, and she takes care of her unloved second husband, who is frailer and frailer, supporting his remaining body with a stick, with two sticks, on braces, in a wheelchair, eventually only his eyes survive, goldfish in a bowl, and after decades of eating bitterness she is bereft and free (in her dreams history bites its tail and she is young and beautiful again) the one thing she wants and can still have is a splendid pair of shoes, she is as much entitled as any movie star or politician’s wife, with her inheritance in hand she goes to a boutique in Nanluoguxiang and she splurges it all on one perfect pair of high heels and straps them on her feet and struts out and even as she steps onto the curb the fancy heels snap under her and the lying sole bends and the tongue shrugs, she’s been sold a dud, and there’s no going back, and in the repetitive chime from the crossing light she hears the chimed moral: If a stranger steals your shoes, you must steal a stranger’s shoes.

The moral resonates, jolts him, he finds himself inside the house, confronting her: when will he get paid, is there really a dealer in Shanghai, what use to her are men’s shoes unless she sells them, if she must have shoes why doesn’t she go out and steal shoes for herself, and while she gropes for an answer he turns into his own stolen brogues, for there is no element in the human body, no curve or straightness, no continuity or discontinuity, no soft or hard, that the shoe does not possess—his cheeks are outsoles, his nose an upper, his forehead a welt, his eyes grommets through which the laces of his pupils wind, and his mouth is the secret insole which accuses her until she confesses there is no Shoe King in Shanghai, she’s not a middleman but a collector, all is for herself, the shoes that thieves bring her, they’re never the perfect ones, sometimes almost but not quite, so she keeps on waiting, keeps on hoping, and all she can pay him for shoes are shoes, “Take your pick,” a fine tan lightweight lizardy pair, “Italian,” soft against the skin, as she narrates the legend of the Great Bell of Beijing, how the bronze casters at the foundry couldn’t get the thing to come out quite right and if it failed they would all be executed, and as a terrible last resort they threw a smith’s infant daughter into the molten metal, leaving her tiny embroidered slippers behind, and ever since, when the clapper strikes the bell, it sings out Shoe! Shoe!, the girl pining for her missing footwear.

She locks eyes and he is the image of her first husband on their wedding day, she is a lovely and innocent and vigorous girl with all her life ahead of her, while he looking through her looks through the stained window: Mustache still in the Elantra, then a second unmarked car drifts up, and a third, and Mustache and the men in the other cars get out, and he ollies into a possible future and back again, he stutters upright, shouting, “Get out! Get out at once!,” the old woman stunned as if photographed, among the serried shoes a giantess looming over city blocks, he seizes her arm, a frail corn stalk, “Escape!” willing them both minutes into the future and into the alleyway behind her house at the same time as police churn inside of it, their big black dumb shoes on the treasured shoes, a ram kicks over its bucket, and at the end of the alley a whirly-light car pulls up, more police pouring out of that, he presses the old woman against the dim, crumbly old-sloganed wall, his arms on either side of her, shielding her, and in order to hide her face and his he places his on hers, they pass for lovers, ignored by police who stampede past, they must kiss, they must be kissed, they must become each other, his head-top the honey-smelling fontanel of a baby, her ancient saliva a water that is strangely dry from the bottom of a well or something like a raindrop on the tongue, once when he was a boy he kissed a ewe just to learn what it would taste like: it was straw and soil and boiled cloud in the mouth.

After the police have left, the new migrant and the old Beijinger go back inside—all the shoes, every last piece, gone, the place an echoing emptiness, these two the only survivors in the devastated city. Behold a doorstop, a chunk of ignored granite—older than China, igneous, all but unchanging—ringed by a smog of soft transitory beings.

He wakes—some dream of a vague palace, he was mounted on a throne of sorts, a cloud-capped mountain—it is dawn and he is alone and cold and almost naked, alien items clinging to his feet, his clothing scattered to the close horizon, and whatever happened here no more or less real than his work on the skyscraper windows, than his accompanying a flock along a poor-pastured mountainside, in the course of a day, without any prompting, gradually the flock buoys itself to higher and higher ground, and more of his dream comes back to him, how he made love to a fox spirit with an eight-sided face who cloaked herself in a virgin’s painted skin, he harvests his shirt and pants, groping the pockets, money has not multiplied miraculously, the bubble teeters in the spirit level, a flock breaks into a granary, the foolish creatures eat and eat till their stomachs bloat, the only hope being for the shepherd to plunge his knife in—a terrible wind redolent of fermented corn and bowels blows him out the cracked building, its windows a void, DEMOLISH on its door, and through the doomed hutong till he emerges blinking and flailing in some side street of greater Qianmen, workers with complexions the no-hue of fermented mung bean juice off to their jobs, on the far side of the complicated intersection zany with stoplights and car horns there is a scenery wall, he staggers through a gap in it and men from his village grouped around a fire fueled with scrap wood and garbage scarcely bother to grunt a greeting, he takes off his fabulous shoes and rests them atop the fire, and by the kitchen tent there is a pair of scuffed army boots that will do, he is served soy milk and fried dough, the foreman clocks him in and, his limp vanished, he ascends the building-to-be, to the eighteenth floor of the skyscraper that is already a glory and is destined to become more and more glorious until such time as it will be demolished to be replaced by a yet more magnificent skyscraper, here to install more and more panes. Elsewhere the shoes tumble off the pyre, their glow not so bright in the average sunshine, and walk across the site and out the entrance, and, flaming steadily, emitting a stinking smoke, alongside the many busy Beijingers with things on their mind, the fire-shoes continue their saunter along Qianmen Dajie, unobtrusive in the city that has known it all before and will accept even this.

*

Once the police retrieve the haul of stolen shoes, it remains to return them to their original owners; there is a notice in a local newspaper, and an announcement on the radio, and several Residents Committees are informed, and the Public Security Bureau website has a link anyone can click on: Turn up at such-and-such a location at such-and-such a time, and your long-missing property might be waiting for you.

The municipality operates on the Cinderella system. Young and old, poor and less poor, native and migrant, stand in a line that ribbons and twists back on itself on the sidewalk outside a recreations building, and in fours or sixes, men to the right, women to the left, are allowed into what was and will be again a basketball court, where, studious, they process up and down, poring over the array of shoes, attending to them—the bargain being: if it clutches in the right way, if it seeks to meld with the foot, if it recognizes you, then you consent to recognize it. Some trudge on; some gasp with pleasure—past and future sides of the same coin—at recovering what went astray at a funeral or a whorehouse or a changing room at a gym . . . and some never had anything stolen but are here on the make—Will you be mine, will I be yours, what kind of China might we belong in?