LI WAN

NEEDLE-EYE

translated by Liu Yidian and Anisha Johan

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

—Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

The plain was once covered in lakes and rivers, but now, with so little rainfall, it’s delved into a greyness, streaked with the white of steam. She remembered that if one were to walk east along the province, there would be places lush with grasses, steeped fields, and scattered people who are rarely seen. Clear and clean, the ponds there showed, between blooms of lotus flowers and white oleander, every creature living within its waters, and ancient stone bridges stood as if testaments to the centuries past. It was a pity that there were no such views in the city. The sun’s lone island, its dominion, was rising from its dark lair, growing, close to its full lushness. Yesterday’s transformation from muddled darkness to resplendent light had cut short all the confused, cacophonous dreams. From the window, one could see a barren realm, hot and wild—the rising towers, the vigorous sound. But those inside their homes had nothing to do with that steamy landscape, at least for the time being. They were living in another kind of cave—the kind beset by overlapping peaks of silence.

He rolled over, flinching at the light, so she tiptoed to the windows and drew the curtains. Her mind was still buzzing with an anxiety she couldn’t place—a nagging feeling that had taken her over ever since arriving back at this place she called home. It had been only about three hours since they had fallen asleep, but the sky was already awash with light. The glowing clouds were smouldering cotton, wildly torn apart and tossed into the air, brightly pink like an old silk quilt. She would not stay here for long. A place where spies sought cover in the unknown, where buglers blew out their calls, where Auden had once come and written poems—this central belt of China was still murky. All those officers, engraved then forgotten amidst their cruel wars, had once been so young, marrying their loved ones in this place, and martyrs who never lasted long enough to see their dreams distinguished, they had left behind their everlasting blooms and blood. . . All of it has been eaten up, the colours faded. What could possibly keep its colour anyway? This was a place where bats, turtledoves, and thrushes flew in place of crows, and it was with the songs of these flying creatures that people had suddenly left behind their small miseries. In the damp riverbanks, in the small boats suffused with lotus fragrance, in the crowded and criss-crossed streets and alleys, the people here once lived their many-hued days of singing and crying, of love and regret.

They had arrived precisely at the peak of a torpid summer, and the rains were late to come. Perhaps it was because she had tried to pray the rains away for his arrival. Rather than delusions of a rich, grassy islet, it was better that travellers see the heart of this barren desert. It’s too early to be awake, she thought. It’s a dream. So she once again turned on her side, thinking that the flowing lava would surely overlook a stone as stubborn as her, that it wouldn’t burn her away. But in reality, she had already reached the darkness, its sticky density. She failed to understand that her body was on the verge of becoming a different substance altogether—a witness and keeper of this silent time. Slowly, he pried her open, as if he was kneeling at the edge of the sea and digging away at the silt. With a blinding light, he pried open her eyes, he pried open her teeth, but what he found was not an unanticipated seashell but a fossil of the past, one which required a single, stranded whale to respond to a migratory call’s melody, to dive into the sea’s depths and wash away with a wave the layers and layers of mud that had gathered upon its relic of a body.

“You’re remembering it wrong. . . That tattoo’s not a rose, it’s a desert lizard. In this kind of weather, it can only keep half of its body above the sand, shifts around to keep from get burned. That is how I feel right now.” “You know some ‘primitive’ tribes, they have these games of knots that use extremely subtle designs to express natural objects. The patterns aren’t concrete figures or abstract symbols, but rather some union of idea and image—like the wonder of seeing something for the first time.” He spoke often about yesterday, yesteryears, those times of adolescence that seemed to stretch out unendingly. When he arrived, she felt as though she was naked in freezing air, meeting the snow of his body with a sudden, furious fever, seemingly forgetting all about the sequence of events, the layers of rhetoric. Their five- or six-year relationship had tumbled down like hardened plaster, building invisible walls that kept out those gradually accumulating winds and rains. Words would make the walls come crumbling down. 

In hopes of ushering in continual prosperity, her city had become stuck in an incessant cycle of metamorphosis, blotting out whatever remained of the past’s flourishing and decay, replacing it with gleaming white cement. A magical assortment of architecture had accumulated along the river—hotels shaped like boats, grand buildings inspired by Southeast Asian colonials with glimmering temple-like roofs. Gardens and terraces stretched out beneath the shadows of these giant beasts, their gray, pebbled walls decorated with a different era. “What colour did that house use to be?” “It was like a cigar—glowing red at dusk but plain in the daylight.” “Must’ve been lovely.”

Yes, the colour of tobacco, the fading ornaments. Her mother had taken pictures of the cigar-coloured buildings in the American mountaintops with her first camera. She hadn’t seen the buildings for herself, being an uncultured gull. Because of him and his island, she had been forced into the role of a wandering bohemian, venturing into distances where crying was of no use, where one could only laugh and kiss passionately. He would inspect those small objects—the hollow spoon shaped like a flower in photographs, or earrings she’d forgotten on the table. . . She used to be embarrassed to talk about these things, afraid of seeming like a child in his eyes. In the end, it was him who kept bringing them up. 

The summer sun was too powerful, and sweat seemed to be pouring out of their every pore. He let go of her hand. In the past, they had moved through the streets while smiling into one another’s eyes. They would swallow the pills they needed to swallow, walk into some dim breakfast stand, and sit face to face, their eyes marking a natural distance, but with an unfamiliar weariness. The number of people in the stand was exactly right—not so many that they’d feel annoyed, but not so few that they’d feel lonely. There was always the difficulty of seeing one another, there was always that moment of separation to come. Occasionally glancing out the door, the street outside was still narrow, cobbled by uneven stones, presumably to stop people from slipping in the rain by slowing them down. People walked slowly here, unimaginably slow. She had lived in this city for twenty years but felt like she was really looking at it for the first time. The place was simultaneously familiar and strange, the streets were ordinary, just as the two of them were ordinary. The old houses lining the streets had wide gaps between them, the mosaic tiles of their doorsteps laid with the small patterns of vines, in harmony with the blooming trumpet flowers. This scenery seemed too delicate to them. It wasn’t like the past, when people would hurry by while eating their boxed lunches—though occasionally they still saw the traces of sewage water. Looking up, she could see a riot of oxalis, cyclamen, gardenia. Ever since she was thirteen or fourteen, her heart had been dyed hazy by the shadows and fragrances of these flowers. Perhaps it was this seduction that sparked this instability, that set her off in search of some impossibly elusive music across the waters. They ate, sharing bites every now and then. Only these trivial details were likely to stay etched in her memory, and they were the ones she hoped to save. At this early hour, some still lay sleeping, while others were already in their little cubicles. 

Her home was across the river, not far from the shore. On the edge of another tributary, a weak wind still swayed the willows. She had wanted to tell him: this place used to be different. There was just a dam, the earth, people playing flutes, people using chalk and paints to make hopeless, peaceful little drawings. Some people worked the fields and buried their whole lives in them, never sparing a single breath for love or for death. Those houses you see are blackened by the coal plants, and they’ve been like that for the last fifty years. In the evenings, my father and I used to watch people lower their fishing nets into the water. Further that way is where they say Boya and Ziji met. That house, with that gorgeous roof, is in the Song dynasty style. You always see those kinds of houses here—that’s what sets us apart from Beijing. Lotus flowers swallowed every inch of the lake like boats, you could see a naked man plunge into the waters and come back up, his arms full of with lotus pods, and he would put them into a sack until it was ready to rip at the seams. Those kinds of people are never afraid of anything. . .

But she didn’t say any of it, and her silent words were carried away in a gust of hot wind. He lit up a cigarette, the smoke curling towards the river. Far into the distance was the railway that had snaked through this land since Zhang Zhidong’s time. The freight train rushed past, and the cargo ships, pulling their coal, waded slowly through the narrow river. Giant black whales floated to the water’s surface, moving so evenly, so calmly, oblivious to the people watching idly from shore.

That drift of black coal sent a wave of shock rippling through her. She opened her eyes again, and just like when she had closed them, sparks leapt outward, tirelessly and endlessly from the cracks. At night, whenever she fell into the cavern, she would lose her breath, feeling faint, as if from that same illness. Forgive me, mother, I couldn’t keep my promise. I was a little careless, just a little. Some. . . Even small, simple truths, I still have to find them out for myself. It’s all just the brief time of a body and the small workings of a dewdrop. There’s always a kind of labour that brings neither food nor love, but something greater than both of those things, greater than the two combined. . . Mother, I no longer question or reject the life you have given me, or even the pain you’ve added to it. All of the light in the world is held in two hands that have known pain and work. Forgive me my moment of weakness. Forgive me for saying to him, “I don’t want to leave you.”

By the firelight rising from the river, she could see that no time had passed. It was five or six in the morning, and she had closed the curtains herself. Somehow, she slipped back into sleep, and heard someone distantly calling her down from the stage. She didn’t really want to go. “The great thing about seeing a film is is feeling as though you’ve been to the places in them.” These moving frames were their ties to this city. Words. Architecture. Theatre. The strange logo of a foreign club from the last century. She thought that he knew none of this, but when she turned to him, she saw—he was already sitting on a sand dune, his hand on her leg, looking at her, his eyes growing dimmer in the dusk. Ashes fell from a narrow door, landing on her chin, her shoulders, her whole body. It was if he was looking at something he could no longer reach, and she felt as though he had placed himself in a tiny little box. Secretly, she hoped that it really was so. Then, that part of her would no longer need to think, worry, calculate, or move on. The part that was left would take her place, would rise and walk to the land of the sun, to the end of the road. There, in that Buddhist temple that seemed some combination of a Nanyang Temple and a gothic church, delicate curtains are hanging down. Bhikkunis are lined up in two rows, chanting scripture, beating their wooden fish and chimes. A cool stream of water would flow over the crowd, none of whom are familiar with the good fortune of a peaceful mind—at that moment, she would feel as though her original thoughts could finally be buried, and she’d calmly talk about her dreams as if they had nothing to do with her: “I went to your place, and so many of your clothes were laying around. I washed them, folded them up, and I felt sad.” Had she been sad in the dream, or in reality? In the moment she decided to change her answer, to say it was only in the dream. This kind of talk seems to be that of a writer’s instinct, with no need for questions. Because words are too small. They can change the body’s channels and pores, but are powerless to alter the passages of the world, just as they are powerless with love—“so small, it can pass through the eye of a needle.” The needle is held by an invisible hand, but that bit of blood really did seep out of our skin, out of the texts we wrote upon the water. Forgive that lost, sweaty sheep. She will often recall that needle in her tongue, like a slender threads of gray in a lover’s black hair. It’s like this, mother, this is why you have brought me here.