The characters, institutions, and events in this novel are entirely fictional. They bear no relation to real persons, institutions, or events. Any similarities that may appear to exist are the result of coincidence.
Why have I told you the things above in such detail, and why have I dramatized it to this degree with the
hackneyed techniques that I learned from you — I really don't know. Will it do
more harm than good to my story that has been tearing me off into pieces for
months on the way to the completion, -how hard is the art of writing? I wish I
could have known earlier!- Have I bloated the insides of all my readers by
straying down these unnecessary side roads? I think I told it so that there
might be a degree of reciprocity or equality between us. One might also call it
the triumph of the insatiable sense of justice in my heart; as if it’s overthrowing me
and my plans. I may have thought to myself: you have been listening to yourself
through my eyes all this time — now listen to me through my eyes for a while.
After all, while you were benefiting from the colorful blessings of the orderly
life that marriage brought, like a sinner who has unexpectedly tumbled into a
garden of paradise, I thought you might want to know that in my life too, events
were unfolding in exactly the opposite direction — that while you were going up
I was falling down, that we were once more, through observation confirming an
indisputable law of physics. After all, we will never meet face to face, right?
We will never sit across from each other at a table and eat dòu jiǎo qié zi[1],
one of your favorite dishes, or sit across from each other at Barfly under a
dirty yellow light, drinking beer and listening to the melancholy melodies of
amateur guitarists drifting toward midnight. I almost feel as though I can see
you reading these lines with your sardonic gaze, waving your left hand as if
giving way to a pedestrian and saying, "These are technical details, my
dear — let's skip this chatter. Get to the point, return to the story, don't
bore the reader with the small problems of your small life. Who cares about
your unfulfilled desires!"
Yes — while you were settled in your
seat rising toward the Shenzhen skies, I was clutching Hundun and crying, but
to be frank, I myself didn't know exactly what I was crying about. The man I
called my husband, whom I introduced at the beginning of this story as the
purest, most naive, most good-hearted man in the world — that wretch! — had
come to me about two weeks earlier and asked whether we should divorce. There
was nothing in this situation that called for enormous reactions. According to
him, we had been living like two friends in the house, no different from two
prisoners of fate locked up in the same prison; apparently we had run out of
things to talk about, we were looking at others rather than each other when we
were together; apparently our common ground had run dry, we had begun to tire
of each other's presence — both body and soul. Well, well, well — how cunning, how
spineless, how shameless! You leech, you centipede, you desert rat! My husband
of yesterday — tongue-tied, reluctant about every undertaking, sluggish and
lazy — had suddenly turned into a slick politician. But ours is no different
from a coffee machine! Makes a great deal of noise — gurr grurr churr curr —
and the result? Two drops of coffee barely covering the bottom of the cup! Do
you think I'm going to be mocked by these tricks — I was going down those same
roads when you were coming back! Of course I grew suspicious. Someone else has
definitely entered this man's life, I told myself, and I set in motion all
manner of password crackers and technical surveillance applications that I had
never once used on him because I had trusted him infinitely until that day. And
what did I find? It turned out I had been nurturing a scorpion in my bosom
without knowing it. Not one, not two — I found exchanges with at least seven
different women, their sweet-blessings and darling-conversations, their
flirtations decorated with words to conjure up every variety of sexuality, and
even semi-nude photographs taken with some of them — the lentil had gone into
the oven, been cooked, and in fact burned[2].
One evening when I came home I threw all of it in his face; I waited for him to
apologize, to beg me to forgive him, to fall at my feet — but the man — my
husband of years had disappeared, and a libertine who considered philandering
his natural right had come in his place — took the brazen route and began to
blame me. Apparently, I had been very absent-minded lately, paid no attention
to him, always busy with something at the computer. We weren't even eating
together anymore; going out together was a longing he had been deprived of for
years. If I hadn't neglected him, none of this would have happened. Without
blaming him, without shouting and screaming, without unjustly applying
society's universal moral rules to our particular situation, I should first
have stood before a mirror, looked at my own face, and drawn up a list of my
own mistakes. My hands had begun to tremble, my voice to crack, a darkness like
fog suddenly descending on peaks of high mountains had begun to fall before my
eyes. Such insolence, such brazenness, such shamelessness I had neither seen
nor heard in all my life. In the end I had screamed at him to get out of my
house — get out! I also vaguely remember flinging the tissue box on the table
at his head. You deserve neither this home nor me nor happiness. Get out, go —
go into the arms of those women whose insatiable appetite you satisfy. Go, let
me not see your face. Go or I'll call the police. Go, I'll call your mother and
tell her everything...
He had gone. He had hastily packed a
few bags and left the house. After he left, I sat alone in the empty house and
listened to the walls and the furniture. All right — we didn't have a perfect
marriage, but we had peace; we had the deep respect and care we felt for each
other; we had the readiness to be each other's cushion, each other's crutch,
each other's quilt and mattress when the time came. What has happened to all of
that now? Is it all going to be destroyed because of a few loose women? Is the
thick rope we've been weaving together for years going to snap because of a few
people with no self-knowledge? A few days after my husband left, I wrote him a
long letter. Let us sit and talk; you apologize; promise that such betrayals
will never be repeated; and I will pour thick concrete over all this filth and
build a brand-new house on the foundations — new walls, new windows, even
sparkling new furniture. Let this be a house where I can pay closer attention
to you, take your needs more into account, determine our future together with
decisions we make jointly. He told me he had received the letter and would
think it over. What is there to think over, man! You are the one at fault, and
you have been given one last chance. If anyone should be playing hard to get,
it should be me! Before you, stands your wife of twenty years, in all her
magnanimity. What more is there to think about? With what mind, what
conscience, what heart will you think? The foolishness was mine of course! At
that moment I should have realized that this man could no longer come to his
senses, that he had long since entered a road of no return, and that on the
horizon awaiting me only one single option was possible. But it didn't happen —
I couldn't do it. I didn't lose hope; I waited and waited for the evening when
my door would be knocked, when he would appear on the threshold with a bouquet
of roses, carnations, and lilacs in his hand, and looking at me with an embarrassed
smile, say "I'm sorry my love, I was an asshole, I was an idiot, I was an
animal — please forgive me!" I didn't lose hope until the very last
moment. And it is precisely for this reason, I think, that I reacted so
violently. Heart is broken, soul is broken, body is broken — I collapsed and
expelled to the last drop the poisonous molecules of hope that had seeped into
me.
After the divorce proceedings began,
without waiting for the outcome, I moved to an apartment with a direct view of
your building. According to the lawyer — his lawyer; I didn't feel the need to
spread the sordidness I had lived through — even if the process took a long
time, the outcome was certain. Since there was no child involved the judge
wouldn't have difficulty reaching a verdict. Moreover, my husband had stated as
his grounds for divorce that he "desired to have children before growing
too old." Well, the cunning wretch! He can hardly say I want to go on
sleeping with other women! The institution called family is like this, Naci Teacher
— they alone know your weakest point, and they hit it again and again until you
bleed to death, until you hand all the strings to them. Didn't you write in a
story years ago: "Lies, damned lies, and families." How right you
were! I didn't dwell on it much, frankly. Why would I continue with a man who
had written me off in his mind — why would I give him second, third, fourth
chances? I would go my way, find a secluded corner to lick my wounds clean,
heal, and spend the rest of my life in health and comfort. And for this very
reason — before he had even mentioned it — I left the house where we had lived
together for years. I moved to my own apartment where wounds would close more
quickly, where inflammation would dry and scab would mature faster and fall
away without leaving a trace. My new apartment — two hundred meters from yours,
from whose balcony I could see your balcony.
I was free now; I furnished my home
according to my own taste. To make Hundun comfortable in his final days, I put
cushions, water bowls, and cardboard boxes in every room, including the
bathroom. I placed a wooden step so he could climb up onto the sofa by himself.
The poor creature, unaware of all that had happened, hobbled on his back leg
and got used to the new home. In the first days, I too was quite disoriented.
When you live with someone for years, they become a part of you. Let them have
betrayed you as much as they like; let them have become unrecognizable through
what they did to you in recent times. When that piece is torn away, the void it
leaves behind begins to threaten the existence of what remains, like black
holes collapsing inward, like an imploding wreckage. I, of course, in the first
weeks — especially taking advantage of your absence too — blamed myself
abundantly. All right — I can admit that I neglected him, that I spent less and
less time with him, that I didn't pay much attention to his needs. I think this
state of affairs began after you and Canary separated, or it had begun before, but only after Canary had I myself noticed the seriousness of the situation. In
the early days, my approach to you was not very different from a teacher's
approach to a student. The terms of the one-sided contract between us contained
only technical surveillance, status updates, and reporting. I was an entirely
objective and impartial teacher who put you through exams and gave you grades.
But as the years passed, the nature of what was between us changed too. Because
you changed, I changed; the world around us was torn down, and brand-new worlds
were built. At first, you were the child I had lost — I was the mother
spreading a net beneath you as you climbed so you wouldn't fall from the tree.
Then, as I came to know you, as I read what you wrote and watched what you did,
you became in my eyes a young man who had lost his way in China and was always
getting himself into trouble. A man who never quite came to his senses, who
could only get his head out of one trouble by plunging into another — half
reckless, half haphazard, addicted to pride and admiration. While following you
on roads, in bars, restaurants, on the metro, on trains, in shopping centers,
my mind would sometimes fix on your physical features too. You were tall, your
shoulders broad, your hair thick, your face bright, your steps firm. Perhaps
you weren't very handsome, but your nose and eyebrows were enough to charm
Chinese girls. I would see many girls turn and look at you as you walked past,
and inside I would be angry with them. I wanted to go and shout in their faces.
I wanted to say, "What are you looking at — he is mine. Mind your own
business." After all, that was how it was — I was the shepherd, you were
the sheep. I couldn't leave you to the wolves. Yet for all that, I couldn't open
my mouth and say a single word. I stored these shouts inside me. Naturally, these shouts, piling up and hardening, could find a way out and turn into
weapons that cracked the heads of others with no connection to the situation.
My husband, who brought a serving spoon from the kitchen instead of a soup spoon, certainly didn't deserve to be shouted at that much! The man who parked the car
not at the shopping center exit but a hundred meters further and made me walk
in the heat didn't deserve his wife's silent torment of hours of sulking
either. When I fell into your net, when I became attached to you, when I began
to see you not as a foreigner to be surveilled but as a lover to be loved and
kissed and hugged and held to the chest — it was then, I think, that the first
seeds of our divorce began to appear. When I made love with my husband, you
always came between us. Instead of his chubby hands, your large hands would
grip my hips; instead of his full lips, your somewhat thin lips would kiss my
shoulders. When I moved my fingers back and forth through his straight, short,
dense hair, I was in fact stroking your long and curly hair. My fingertips
would get lost in it — my nails with their chipped polish, the wedding ring
strangling my ring finger... I would get lost in those same soft reeds, in the
games of hide-and-seek where the sun appeared and disappeared, in the shadow of
the proud gaze of the long slender reeds weeping with longing...[3]
I would vanish as if not wishing to be found, like a teenager who has quarreled
with her parents and run away from home, beneath the guardian necks of the
broken street lamps. While he entered me and thrashed about on top of me like a
puppet whose strings had partly snapped, performing the same lovemaking routine
for goodness knows how many times, I would see your face, feel your body, hear
your heartbeat, and wind my arms, lengthened by love, around you. When we
finished, and he and I began to sleep back to back, I would hold you, gaze at the
cold light falling on your left shoulder, kiss your neck for a long time,
nibble gently at your ear, and whisper, "Come, let's do it again. This time
let him not come between us at all." Yes — I confess it. Many times I made
love with you in my dreams, in my imagination, in the notebooks I filled with
coded notes. Perhaps they were all nothing but dreams — but for a woman like
me, who lives more by her feelings than her mind, these unions were far more
precious than real ones. But still, I did not come before you, did not try to
turn your head, did not sit down beside you at a bar and
accidentally-on-purpose spill my glass of wine over you. If I had wanted to, I
could have done it easily. Behaving like one of the hundreds of thousands of
Chinese girls who spoke English, I could have spent a night with you — or even
a week or a month. I could have spent a weekend afternoon with you on the
star-patterned sheets of a vast galaxy-wide bed in an out-of-the-way hotel. The
reason I didn't was, of course, first and foremost that I was married. I am
emotional but not stupid or dishonest. To imagine something is one thing; to
put it into practice and act on it physically is something else entirely. If
only my idiot husband had merely fantasized about other women and not slept
with them — but where in him is such intelligence, where in him even a tenth of
the powers of discernment I have. Not that it did me much good. I ended up
being blamed anyway. I became the incompetent wife who couldn't keep her
husband. I became the ungrateful woman who, with the misfortune she carried
around with her, ruined a perfectly good marriage. You wrote somewhere — in one
of your journal notes I think — that talent and curse are in a dialectical
relationship. One carries the other in its womb. When the time comes, it gives
birth to it. And what is born contains itself again. An endless vicious cycle,
a tangle of hope and despair. Ahhh Naci Teacher — couldn't you be wrong just
once in your life?
There was a second reason for which I
did not act on it. It was the worry that drawing close to you, becoming a
visible planet in your orbit, entering each other's gravitational fields and
constructing a new equilibrium, making ourselves indispensable to each other,
would harm us both. I loved you from a distance — the way one watches a wild
elephant stamping through dust and earth, the way one stares with enchanted
eyes at the television images of a volcano ready to erupt, the way one is
entranced by the image of a moss-green forest being bathed in the rays of the
morning sun. Do you know why people love to look at a view, Naci Bey? The real
reason is not at all as commonly believed. It is not the beauty, the grandeur,
or the sublimity of the view that draws a person — it is its distance and
inaccessibility. A person can stare for hours at a hillside full of monstrous
buildings, just as one might lean one's back against the rocks of Paiyashan and
gaze at the shores of Hong Kong while looking out at the Pacific Ocean's waves.
The most important function of a view is to protect you from the distracting
qualities of what is near. What is near is loaded with detail, and this load
inevitably weighs on, slows, and tires your consciousness. When you keep the
distance, you cannot see the details; there is a sea, there is you, and in
between, sun reflections winking at you like broken pieces of mirror,
iridescent shimmer appearing on the surface as the horizon draws near, and
further still a barely visible ship of unclear origin and destination. Or a
dense forest — so dense you cannot see the trees. You cannot see the fox cubs
running among these trees whose existence you have firmly believed... When
everything is this superficial, consciousness relaxes; unable to find a hook to
catch on, it turns to the only thing it can touch — itself — goes deep, brings
to the surface the beauties and evils that were swept under the rug during the
daily bustle. The pleasure a person looking at a view feels is simply the
astonishment of the person who, touching their tongue to the damp walls of
these long-forgotten silent wells, quenches their thirst. In those wells,
incompleteness and frustrations find new names; autumn beats its drying
branches against spring; shame turns to pride, dust to salt, love to reproach.
This is why people love to look at a view, and this is why I loved watching you
from a distance. If you drew closer, skin to skin, eye to eye, heart to heart,
we would both have gone up in flames. From a distance you were beautiful — your
thoughts, your body, and your curly hair tossed by the wind and tickling your
face were beautiful because they made me forget my own incompleteness; I forgot
the reality that I could not become a mother while reading the sentences you
wrote and erased; I ignored the reality that I shared a home with a husband who
did not love me while following you fifty meters behind on deserted streets; I
turned a blind eye to my unhappiness and helplessness while fixating on your
troubles as if they were my own. And it was to ensure the continuation of this
ongoing state that I took this apartment too. Moving to an apartment at what
might be called a reasonable distance from you — and yet at the same time half
a minute's flying distance — what else could it be but the carefully calculated
outcome of my plan to turn you into a view in the true sense, my esteemed Naci
Bey, my dear teacher?
I would imagine you as I sat on the
balcony of my new home and watched your balcony. I knew you would come at the
end of summer, that you would drink coffee and read books on that balcony in
the mornings, that you would while away the time there in your sleeveless vest
and shorts until the weather warmed up. In your absence I watched for days the
empty chair, the flowers on the verge of drying out, and a coffee cup forgotten
on the table — I could tell what it was when I looked through binoculars. I
thought most of all about my ending marriage, asked myself over and over why
this man had waited so many years if his only concern was to have children. Or
was I truly to blame? When I understood that I could not have children, should
I have been the one to suggest we separate? I can't do it, but there's nothing
wrong with you — let us divorce, marry again, build your happy family with your
new wife, and have as many children as you like. For not saying this — for not
being able to say it — should I have been considered selfish? But why had this
man endured it — the prison walls I had built around him without even being
aware of it? Why hadn't he approached me earlier, like a civilized person, and why
hadn’t he told me the rebellions gnawing at him? Questions multiplied upon
questions; sometimes I would see you on the empty balcony, imagine that you saw
me too, and plunge into long conversations with you like two neighbors who have
come out to their windows, heedless of the distance between each other. Yes —
perhaps this was the reason. It was all because of you. All of it had happened
because I couldn't keep you far enough from me. Am I being unfair? To whom? Am
I not the most wronged person here? How could I possibly be unfair to anyone?
You are looking at me and smiling. I hear you saying, "Don't go looking for a
scapegoat." I can hear you even with 10,000 kilometers between us — two hundred
meters is nothing. And that is the problem! You got inside me once and never
came out again. With your voice, your face, your skin — but most of all with
your thoughts — you conquered me. There were times when I didn't know what
percentage of the existence I presented to the outside world was truly my own.
Yes — for years it was not because of my husband but because of you that I was
able to stay on my feet. For me there was you, and you were enough. You were my
child who understood nothing, my wayward son who had come of age, my lover
whose skin I desired rubbing my skin; you were in every part of me, and you were
everything to me. And where was that man called my husband? Busy making the
plump calves of other women quiver. He made his choice; I made mine. I am not
sorry, and I will not be. Let no one — especially my mother's sharp tongue —
claim otherwise and push me over the edge.
