Five Spice Street

‘‘I’m exhausted from talking. The topic of my talk today has been the connection between the blanket and my cousin. I haven’t expressed the gist of what I wanted to say very well. I’ve been distracted by this and that because that irrelevant issue kept interfering with my train of thought and mixed me up. Only by rousing my last little bit of energy to get hold of myself could I finally rid myself of outside interference and approach the essence of the matter. But the moments were fleeting, and the interference returns. It gets worse each time until it finally saps all my energy. The ideas I want to express are still misty. The end. You degenerates!’’ (She suddenly fell to the ground, her legs and arms twitching. After about twenty minutes, she came around and indignantly departed.)

The Lame Woman’s Report

‘‘You mustn’t believe anything about mirrors: that’s all make- believe, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all a pretense-a sleight of hand to distract your attention. You walked into a certain person’s home one day, saw mirrors of all sizes all over the tabletop, and saw the person gesture as if something real was occurring. You all clamored like a pot of boiling water: Wow! A miracle! Her supernatural ability is really incredible! After I unfold the real picture, you’ll raise a hue and cry all over again. Your greatest failing is that you’re gullible and impulsive. None of the comments has anything to do with the incident per se. The true picture is permanently buried deep. You talk as if you know a lot, but it’s doubtful that you do. What you see is far from the essence: instead, it’s a kind of lie, an artificial sport.

‘‘Now let me tell you about the so-called origin of what happened that afternoon. It was an eerie afternoon; death was vaguely in the air, making people extremely nervous. People jumped at each little noise. You’d sit by the window, and the curtains might suddenly be lifted by something and you’d see a sheep’s skull. I walked more than two hours along an endless gray wall and finally arrived at that manipulator’s home. She was sitting with her back to me and giggling. When I approached her, she was poking at an anthill with a rusty dagger. She poked it repeatedly and also stomped on it. The ants fled in a panic.

‘‘ ‘There’s something wrong with your husband. Everybody’s talking about it.’ I patted her back, doing my best to appear casual.

‘‘‘Shhh! Nonsense!’ She took stock of me with narrowed eyes. ‘Everything is going according to the predestined plan.’

‘‘With that, she hauled me forcibly into her little pitch-black room and asked me to take a seat on a worn-out iron bed. Then she moved over a huge wooden trunk, opened it, and told me to look inside. In it were men’s socks of all sizes, more than a hundred pairs of them, arranged in apple-pie order.

‘‘ ‘Every pair he’s worn from the time he was born until now is preserved here. This is one of my secrets. He doesn’t know about it.’ She eagerly told me to look. ‘Look at this pair with a hole in it; he wore it when he was eight, and it was torn because his toenails were too long. It amuses me to think of this: where could he go? Do you want me to turn a light on? No, okay then, I won’t. As soon as the light is turned on, the cutworms start moving around and our vegetables are ruined. Year in and year out, this trunk is locked tight. I don’t care. Where could he go?’ she reiterated, and shrugged.

‘‘By the light coming in from the small window, I got a good look at that woman’s face. She was like a thirteen-year-old girl, barefoot and wearing two bows in her hair, prancing around in the room like a locust. What rubbed me the wrong way was that she showed no respect: she just kept setting out her playthings in front of me (a wrap-around that she hadn’t finished knitting, a glass-bead necklace, a cartoon, a little plaster dog, and so forth). She intended to affirm her being with these miscellaneous things and establish a certain self-confidence, even hubris. Think about it: even such a pitiable thing struggled to stand out and finally climbed into her husband’s head and took control over him and staged this scene. You, with your petrified brains, wouldn’t have expected this!