Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao. Jonathan Tel

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