The Red Thread Read online

  “But I tell you, someone goes past my window every night. I tell myself, perhaps it’s Kálmán, and my heart nearly screams out like a bird that’s caught. Perhaps it’s Álmos-Dreamer, and my tears soak the pillow . . . Or it’s the night watchman, so I just sigh—but the candle still burns till dawn, I simply can’t get resigned to living this way. But how else should I live?”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to her friend, Miss Maszkerádi folded her arms.

  “In old Russian novels people asked such questions, behaving like cardboard characters . . . But today it’s totally different. Novels only show you how to die. I don’t even know who my father was. One thing for sure, he never thought of me. My mother had no way of knowing, either, that I would be here some day. I came into being and grew like an icicle under the eaves. This is why I’ll never have a child. I just can’t recommend this lifestyle for you, Eveline, although I know you want me to. Well, each to her own . . . suit on suit, heart to heart,” mocked Miss Maszkerádi.

  “Malvina, you’ll never be happy,” prophesied Eveline, speaking as if from the pages of some novel.

  “I must always look within myself, for everything. I believe only in myself, and myself alone, and don’t give a damn about others’ opinions. I view each of my acts as if I were reading about it fifty years from now, in a newly found diary. Did I do something ridiculous and dumb? I ask myself each night when I close my eyes. I think over each word, each act: will I regret it, come tomorrow? I am my own judge and I judge myself as harshly as if I’d been lying in my grave these hundred years, my life a yellowed parchment diary, its end known in advance. I will not tolerate being laughed at or cheated. I want to know this very minute what I will think ten years from now about today, about today’s weather and about this night . . . Will I have to be ashamed of some weakness or tenderness? Is there one circumstance worth disrupting my life for, rising an hour earlier, or using more words than usual? I try to modulate my decisions and my emotions by looking ahead and seeing whether I’d regret it tomorrow. And I’m never nervous, it’s simply not worth it.

  “Had I been born a man, I would have been a Talmudist, an Oriental sage, a scholar who delves into decaying millennial mysteries. Too bad, I was not admitted at the university. But if possible, I would still marry a great, gray-bearded, immensely wise rabbi or Oriental scholar. Possibly Schopenhauer . . . or my first teacher, Gyula Sámuel Spiegler, if that little old Jew were still alive . . . Oh, you won’t catch me crying on account of rival women, actresses, danseuses! The hell with the strumpets! What do I care if my husband sometimes sees them? As long as they stay away from me with their dirt.”

  Eveline heard out these words of wisdom with eyes closed. All her life repelled by women of easy virtue, she still envisioned them to be like the first one she had ever seen, in her childhood in the Inner City, near her convent school. A fat, ungainly, wide-mouthed, coarsely painted towering idol of flesh that passed by with petticoats lifted, like a killer of men, cruelly smiling. The little schoolgirls had nightmares about this otherworldly monster who probably roamed the town to entice inexperienced men to her cave in the mountains where she would devour them like a dragon. Ever after, the educated, curious and clairvoyant young woman still imagined fallen women to be like that. (She was most amazed at the Pest racing turf one summer Sunday when she attended the St. Stephen’s Cup races with her lady companion, and Kálmán pointed out from afar a gentle, unimpeachably clean-cut angel, all blonde English-style curls, as one of the city’s most depraved creatures who spent her days in the company of elderly counts.)

  Miss Maszkerádi, all her Talmudic wisdom notwithstanding, loved to refer to women of easy virtue as wondrous creatures who lived off their bodies. She preferred French novels that described life in brothels, and would have given much to clandestinely observe the goings-on at some sordid club one night. She was convinced that the best way to get to know a man was by witnessing his coarsest words and acts.

  “Had I a father or brother, I would send them to accompany my would-be fiancé on a visit to the filles de joie. I’d want to know how my future life-companion acted, how he behaved there . . .” Miss Maszkerádi insisted. “But I don’t want to get married. Because then I’d have long ago become an expert in midwifery, and in all the seductive practices of loose women.”

  And on this childish note the wise Miss Maszkerádi closed the evening’s proceedings. She went to bed in her room, smiling in quiet scorn at Eveline, who would listen all night long for the sound of footsteps coming and going around the house. She knew it was nothing but the spring wind fidgeting out there.

  Translated from the Hungarian by John Bátki

  SHUI LING

  Qiu Miaojin

  SHUI LING. Wenzhou Street. The white bench in front of the French bakery. The number 74 bus.

  We sit at the back of the bus. Shui Ling and I occupy opposite window seats, the aisle between us. The December fog is sealed off behind glass. Dusk starts to set in around six, enshrouding Taipei. The traffic is creeping along Heping East Road. At the outer edge of the Taipei Basin, where the sky meets the horizon, is the last visible wedge of a bright orange sun whose radiance floods through the windows and spills onto the vehicles behind us, like the blessing of some mysterious force.

  Silent, exhausted passengers pack the aisle, heads hung, bodies propped against the seats, oblivious. Through a gap in the curtain of their winter coats, I catch Shui Ling’s eye, trying to contain the enthusiasm in my voice.

  “Did you look outside?” I ask, ingratiatingly.

  “Mmm,” comes her barely audible reply.

  Then silence. For a still moment, Shui Ling and I are sitting together in the hermetically sealed bus. Out the windows, dim silhouettes of human figures wind through the streets. It’s a magnificent night scene, gorgeous and restrained. The two of us are content. We look happy. But underneath, there is already a strain of something dark, malignant. Just how bitter it would become, we didn’t know.

  • • •

  In 1987, I broke free from the draconian university entrance-exam system and enrolled in college. People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money. The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fact that I was pure carrion inside.

  That fall, in October, I moved into a second-floor apartment on Wenzhou Street. The leaseholders were a married couple who had graduated a few years earlier. They gave me a room with a huge window overlooking an alley. The two rooms across from mine were rented by two sisters. The young married couple was always in the living room watching TV. They spent a fair amount of time on the coffee-colored sofa. “We got married our senior year,” they told me, smiling. But most of the time, they didn’t say a word. The sisters would spend all night in one of their rooms watching a different channel. Passing the door, you’d hear bits of lively conversation. I never saw my housemates unless I had to. Just came and went on my own. Everyone kept to themselves.

  So despite the five of us living together under one roof, it might as well have been a home for the deaf.

  I lived in solitude. Lived at night. I’d wake up at midnight and ride my bike—a red Giant—to a nearby store where I’d buy dried noodles, thick pork soup, and spring rolls. Then I’d come home and read while I ate. Take a shower, do laundry. In my room, there was neither the sound of another human being nor light. I’d write in my journal all night, or just read. I became obsessed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. I devoured all kinds of books for tortured souls. Started collecting issues of the independence movement’s weekly. Studied up on political game theory, an antidote to my spiritual reading. It made me feel like an outsider, which became my way of recharging. At the break of dawn, around six or seven, like a nocturnal creature afraid of the light, I’d finally lay my head—which by then was spilling over with thoughts—down onto the comforter.

  That’s ho
w it went when things were good. Most of the time, however, I didn’t eat a single thing all night. Didn’t shower. Couldn’t get out of bed. Didn’t write in my journal or talk. Didn’t read a single page or register the sound of another human being. All day long, I’d cry myself sick into my pillow. Sleep was just another luxury.

  Didn’t want anyone around. People were useless to me. Didn’t need anyone. I started hurting myself and getting into all sorts of trouble.

  Home was a credit-card bill footed by Nationalist Party voters. I didn’t need to go back. Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility—from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterward. That system had already molded me into a flimsy, worthless shell. It drove my body to retreat into a self-loathing soul, and what’s even scarier is that nobody knew or seemed to recognize it. My social identity was comprised of these two distinct, co-existing constructs. Each writhed toward me with its incessant demands—though when it came down to it, I spent more time getting to know my way around the supermarket next door than I did getting comfortable in my own skin.

  Didn’t read the paper. Didn’t watch TV. Didn’t go to class—except for gym, because the teacher took attendance. Didn’t go out and didn’t talk to my roommates. The only time I ever spoke at all was in the evenings or afternoons at the Debate Society, where I would go to preen my feathers and practice social intercourse. All too soon I realized that I was an innately beautiful peacock and decided that I shouldn’t let myself go. However lazy, a peacock still ought to give its feathers a regular preening, and having been bestowed with such a magnificent set, I couldn’t help but seek the mainstream of society as a mirror. With that peacock swagger, I found it hard to resist indulging in a little strutting, but that’s how it went, and it was a fundamentally bad habit.

  The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-­awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

  Since there’s time to kill, you have to use boredom to get you to the other side. In English, you’d say: Break on through. That’s more like it.

  • • •

  So she did me wrong. If my old motto was I’m sentencing her to the guillotine, my new motto contained a revelation: The power to construct oneself is destiny. If only it weren’t for you, Shui Ling. In spite of everything, the truth is I still can’t take it. I can’t take it. Really, I can’t. No matter how far I’ve come, it’s never far enough. The pattern was already in place.

  It must have been around October 1987. I was biking down Royal Palm Boulevard and passed somebody. I remembered it was their birthday. It was at that precise moment that all of my pent-up grief and fear hit me at once. I knew more or less that I’d been rejected and that was the bottom line. But somehow, I was convinced I had to get even.

  She’d just turned twenty. I’d turned eighteen five months earlier. She and some friends from high school walked past me, and I managed to glance at her. But as for what significance that glance held, it was as if my whole life had flashed before my eyes. Though they were off in the distance, I could still feel the glow of her smile. It left me with the acute sense that she never failed to elicit the adoration and affection of others, that she was someone who radiated a pure, childlike contentment.

  Even now I’m still in awe of her innate power to command such devotion—not only her charms but how it felt to be deprived of them. She maintained only a handful of friendships. In the past, the people around her had clung dearly to her, giving her their entire attention. She didn’t need any more of that, but she didn’t have much of a choice. She was trapped and suffocating. Whenever I was around her, I’d become clingy, too. If I wasn’t by her side, I felt distant from other people, when in fact she was the one who was distant. That’s how it worked. It was her natural gift.

  I didn’t see her my entire senior year of high school. I was careful to avoid her. Didn’t dare take the initiative, though I longed for her to notice me in the crowd. An upperclassman and my senior, she was an ominous character, a black spade. To shuffle and draw the same card again would be even more ominous.

  • • •

  The lecture hall for Introduction to Chinese Literature was packed. I got there late and had to sheepishly lift my chair up higher than the rostrum and carry it all the way to the front row. The professor stopped lecturing, and all the other sheep turned and gawked at me and my antics.

  Toward the end of class, someone passed a note from behind:

  Hey, can I talk to you after class?

  Shui Ling

  She had sought me out. I knew it would happen. Even if I had switched to a different section, she would have sought me out all the same. She who hid in the crowd, who didn’t want anyone to see her with her aloofness and averted eyes. When I stepped forward, she stepped out, too. And she had pointed with a child’s wanton smile and said, “I want that one.” There was no way I could refuse. And like a potted sunflower that had just been sold to a customer, I was taken away.

  This, from a beautiful girl whom I was already deeply, viscerally attracted to. Things were getting good. There she was, standing right in front of me. She brushed the waves of hair away from her face with a seductiveness that painfully seared my heart like a tattoo. Her feminine radiance was overpowering. I was about to get knocked out of the ring. It was clear from that moment on, we’d never be equals. How could we, with me under the table, scrambling to summon a different me, the one she would worship and put on a pedestal? No way was I coming out.

  “What are you doing here?” I was so anxious that I had to blurt something out. She didn’t say a word or seem the least bit embarrassed.

  “Did you switch to this section to make up a class?” She didn’t look up at me. She just stood there, dragging one foot behind her in the hallway, and didn’t say a thing, as if this one-sided conversation had nothing to do with her.

  “How’d you know I switched?” Abruptly, she broke her silence. Her eyes were shimmering with amazement, and I could finally meet them. She was now looking right at me, wide-eyed.

  “Well, of course I’d know!” I didn’t want her to think I’d been noticing her. “You finally said something!” I said, heaving an exaggerated sigh of relief. She smiled at me shyly, even teasingly, and I let out a huge laugh, relieved that I’d made her smile. The glow on her face was like rays of sunshine along a golden beach.

  She told me that she’d started to feel nervous as soon as I walked into the room. She wanted to talk to me, but didn’t know what to say. I pointed to her shoelaces. She gingerly leaned forward to tie them. She said when she saw me, she couldn’t bring herself to speak, and then she didn’t want to say anything, so then she just stood there. She threw her purple canvas backpack over her shoulder and crouched on the floor. As she started talking, I felt the sudden urge to reach over and touch her long hair, which looked so soft and supple. You don’t know a thing, but I figured it all out in an instant, I told her silently in my heart. I reached over and held her backpack instead, and feeling mildly contented by the closeness of its weight, wished that she would go on tying her shoes.

  It was already six when class ended. Shadows had lengthened across the campus, and the evening breeze lilted in the air. We grabbed our bikes and headed off together. We took the main thoroughfare on campus, keeping with the leisurely pace of the traffic on the wide open road. I didn’t know if I was following her, or if she was following me. Within a year, the two of us would come to cherish our ambiguous rapport, at once intimate and unfamiliar, and tempered by moments of silent confrontation.

  “Why’d you come over and talk to
me?” In my heart I already knew too much but pretended to know nothing.

  “Why wouldn’t I talk to you?” She sounded slightly irritated. The dusk obscured her face, so I couldn’t read her expression. But as soon as she spoke, I could tell she’d had a tough freshman year. There was a curious note of dejection in her answer. I already knew her all too well.

  “I’m just an underclassman you’ve seen, like, three times!” I nearly exploded.

  “Not even,” she said coolly to herself.

  My eyes were fixed on her long skirt as it wafted in the breeze. “Weren’t you worried that I wouldn’t remember you, or wouldn’t want to talk to you?”

  “I knew you weren’t like that.” Her reaction was perfectly composed, as if everything to do with me was already set in stone.

  We reached the school gates, not quite sure what to do next. She seemed to want to see where I lived. The way she suggested it conveyed a touch of familial kindness, like a tough but pliable cloth whose inner softness made my heart ache. Besides, as they say, if the floodwaters are rushing straight toward you, what are you going to do to stop them? This was how she treated me, for no apparent reason. I took her toward Xinsheng South Road, back to Wenzhou Street.

  “How’s this year going?” I tried to break through her gloom.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced slightly, lifting her chin in a hopeless look.

  “You don’t want to tell me?” I was practically edging her onto the road. I was sure she was going to get hit by a car.

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to tell anyone.”

  “How did you get this way?” It pained my heart to hear her speak such nonsense.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve changed.” Her eyes flickered with haughtiness, underscoring the boldness of her statement.

  Her answer was so immature that I felt tempted to tease her. “Into what?”