Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao. Jonathan Tel

atmosphere and NO SMOKING, whereas in Sichuan the sky clear as water, the cigarettes homegrown, one for now and one for later tucked behind an ear, NO SPITTING but what else are you supposed to do with your phlegm, Beijing a bomb site or after an earthquake, he walks by what was once a school and what was once a restaurant and what was once a laundry . . . which is destined to become an elevator-rich glittery complex, a field with plums and peppers and in the far corner of it the stone grave marker by which he and his father burn death-money, not factory-made crisp paper, his ancestors make do with their local straw currency, palms together and bow three times, the city thickening as dusk approaches, a flock of clay-colored starlings weaves overheard, he wanders over to where he can climb on a low wall (half the hutong is demolished already) and peek inside her house, the interior explained by a single fluorescent blob, many pairs of shoes squared up on the otherwise empty cement floor, men’s shoes and women’s shoes, a line of shoes follow each other and turn! and back the other way to the end and turn! . . . like a line dance, like the way you plow a field, the shoes radiant and beautiful and expensive, and now the old woman appears, she caresses them and talks to them, in her passion not un-beautiful in her own right, she sits on a low stool and tries on now one pair, and now another, she sets a golden pump down on a sheet of sun-colored paper, and behind him a car eases up, a black Elantra, so he fades into the shadows, a wince in his bad ankle, the driver is talking into a cellphone and has a mustache, it looks as if it might be the cellphone that has the mustache, a bushiness shared between man and device, night pulls harder at its end, smoothing out the smog-shine, no individual star visible, the river that is the Milky Way having been dammed for the sake of a celestial hydroelectric project, and he is a fixed point, and Mustache is a fixed point and the old woman too, and now she lifts the very brogues he brought, temporarily his ears, into which she whispers.

      This hutong is where she grows up, where she is a girl, where she is a young woman, poor but a beauty, where she turns down the marriage proposal of a high-ranking cadre and marries her sweetheart instead, and they have a daughter, and it is from here that husband and wife set out, day after day, year after year, to their assigned jobs as teachers, until one day he is denounced, she must denounce him, her husband is taken from her and her daughter does not forgive her, and she is married off to a former Red Guard, and she remains at her school until she is obliged to retire, and she takes care of her unloved second husband, who is frailer and frailer, supporting his remaining body with a stick, with two sticks, on braces, in a wheelchair, eventually only his eyes survive, goldfish in a bowl, and after decades of eating bitterness she is bereft and free (in her dreams history bites its tail and she is young and beautiful again) the one thing she wants and can still have is a splendid pair of shoes, she is as much entitled as any movie star or politician’s wife, with her inheritance in hand she goes to a boutique in Nanluoguxiang and she splurges it all on one perfect pair of high heels and straps them on her feet and struts out and even as she steps onto the curb the fancy heels snap under her and the lying sole bends and the tongue shrugs, she’s been sold a dud, and there’s no going back, and in the repetitive chime from the crossing light she hears the chimed moral: If a stranger steals your shoes, you must steal a stranger’s shoes.

      The moral resonates, jolts him, he finds himself inside the house, confronting her: when will he get paid, is there really a dealer in Shanghai, what use to her are men’s shoes unless she sells them, if she must have shoes why doesn’t she go out and steal shoes for herself, and while she gropes for an answer he turns into his own stolen brogues, for there is no element in the human body, no curve or straightness, no continuity or discontinuity, no soft or hard, that the shoe does not possess—his cheeks are outsoles, his nose an upper, his forehead a welt, his eyes grommets through which the laces of his pupils wind, and his mouth is the secret insole which accuses her until she confesses there is no Shoe King in Shanghai, she’s not a middleman but a collector, all is for herself, the shoes that thieves bring her, they’re never the perfect ones, sometimes almost but not quite, so she keeps on waiting, keeps on hoping, and all she can pay him for shoes are shoes, “Take your pick,” a fine tan lightweight lizardy pair, “Italian,” soft against the skin, as she narrates the legend of the Great Bell of Beijing, how the bronze casters at the foundry couldn’t get the thing to come out quite right and if it failed they would all be executed, and as a terrible last resort they threw a smith’s infant daughter into the molten metal, leaving her tiny embroidered slippers behind, and ever since, when the clapper strikes the bell, it sings out Shoe! Shoe!, the girl pining for her missing footwear.

      She locks eyes and he is the image of her first husband on their wedding day, she is a lovely and innocent and vigorous girl with all her life ahead of her, while he looking through her looks through the stained window: Mustache still in the Elantra, then a second unmarked car drifts up, and a third, and Mustache and the men in the other cars get out, and he ollies into a possible future and back again, he stutters upright, shouting, “Get out! Get out at once!,” the old woman stunned as if photographed, among the serried shoes a giantess looming over city blocks, he seizes her arm, a frail corn stalk, “Escape!” willing them both minutes into the future and into the alleyway behind her house at the same time as police churn inside of it, their big black dumb shoes on the treasured shoes, a ram kicks over its bucket, and at the end of the alley a whirly-light car pulls up, more police pouring out of that, he presses the old woman against the dim, crumbly old-sloganed wall, his arms on either side of her, shielding her, and in order to hide her face and his he places his on hers, they pass for lovers, ignored by police who stampede past, they must kiss, they must be kissed, they must become each other, his head-top the honey-smelling fontanel of a baby, her ancient saliva a water that is strangely dry from the bottom of a well or something like a raindrop on the tongue, once when he was a boy he kissed a ewe just to learn what it would taste like: it was straw and soil and boiled cloud in the mouth.

      After the police have left, the new migrant and the old Beijinger go back inside—all the shoes, every last piece, gone, the place an echoing emptiness, these two the only survivors in the devastated city. Behold a doorstop, a chunk of ignored granite—older than China, igneous, all but unchanging—ringed by a smog of soft transitory beings.

      He wakes—some dream of a vague palace, he was mounted on a throne of sorts, a cloud-capped mountain—it is dawn and he is alone and cold and almost naked, alien items clinging to his feet, his clothing scattered to the close horizon, and whatever happened here no more or less real than his work on the skyscraper windows, than his accompanying a flock along a poor-pastured mountainside, in the course of a day, without any prompting, gradually the flock buoys itself to higher and higher ground, and more of his dream comes back to him, how he made love to a fox spirit with an eight-sided face who cloaked herself in a virgin’s painted skin, he harvests his shirt and pants, groping the pockets, money has not multiplied miraculously, the bubble teeters in the spirit level, a flock breaks into a granary, the foolish creatures eat and eat till their stomachs bloat, the only hope being for the shepherd to plunge his knife in—a terrible wind redolent of fermented corn and bowels blows him out the cracked building, its windows a void, DEMOLISH on its door, and through the doomed hutong till he emerges blinking and flailing in some side street of greater Qianmen, workers with complexions the no-hue of fermented mung bean juice off to their jobs, on the far side of the complicated intersection zany with stoplights and car horns there is a scenery wall, he staggers through a gap in it and men from his village grouped around a fire fueled with scrap wood and garbage scarcely bother to grunt a greeting, he takes off his fabulous shoes and rests them atop the fire, and by the kitchen tent there is a pair of scuffed army boots that will do, he is served soy milk and fried dough, the foreman clocks him in and, his limp vanished, he ascends the building-to-be, to the eighteenth floor of the skyscraper that is already a glory and is destined to become more and more glorious until such time as it will be demolished to be replaced by a yet more magnificent skyscraper, here to install more and more panes. Elsewhere the shoes tumble off the pyre, their glow not so bright in the average sunshine, and walk across the site and out the entrance, and, flaming steadily, emitting a stinking smoke, alongside the many busy Beijingers with things on their mind, the fire-shoes continue their saunter along Qianmen Dajie, unobtrusive in the city that has known it all before and will accept even this.

      *

      Once the police retrieve the haul of stolen shoes, it remains to return them to their original owners;