E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
Zou Ninth Building
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7398225-1-4
Verlag: Honford Star
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-7398225-1-4
Verlag: Honford Star
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Zou Jingzhi is highly regarded in China as a fiction writer, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is a founding member of the Chinese theatre collective Longmashe. As a screenwriter, the films he wrote for Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar Wai have been well received at film festivals across the world. His plays and operas have been performed in China as well as internationally, and his poems and essays have been very influential, going into multiple reprints.
Weitere Infos & Material
Specimens
My specimen collection, wedged inside a magazine, got sold to the rag-and-bone man. It consisted of three or four morning glory blossoms, five or six dragonflies, as well as three different breeds of cockroach and the feet of a dead hen. Fang Yong cut off those feet with scissors and dried them in the sun, before presenting them to me. All these things were preserved inside a journal of the technical economy, which also contained pictures of apartment blocks just like the one I lived in, Ninth Building.
I sold them in front of Ninth Building, Door Three.
At the moment of the transaction, I'd expected the man to flip through the magazine and was looking forward to his rage and shock as flowers and insects tumbled out. Perhaps he would stamp on them? But no. He only looked at the cover and tossed it onto his scales along with the rest. Three jin, including the weight of those specimens.
Maybe those old magazines ended up in a junkyard somewhere, and in the night stray cats would drag them out, moonlight gleaming in their eyes as they flicked the pages with their tongues, and when they found them, gnawing those dried chicken feet beneath the stars, crunch crunch crunch. My specimens would turn into food, like the dry-pickled vegetables I enjoyed.
*
A squished mosquito is a drop of blood. Once, I used a rolled- up newspaper to kill a mosquito, flattening it against the wall. When it had dried out the next day, there was nothing left but a couple of lines like an ink smear. I never collected mosquito specimens. If I had, sticking them in rows on a sheet of white paper, they'd have looked from a distance like a poem. Sounded like it too: wenzi (mosquito) and wenzi (words).
Qiao Xiaobing asked me to accompany him to the savings center on Lishi Road to withdraw some money. I said I would, but he'd have to let me look at his pet lizards.
From beneath his bed, he pulled out a cardboard box containing a thick hardcover book that had been hollowed out. Lined up neatly in the space were two medicine bottles of the type usually found in clinics, each of which held a lizard.
He brandished these, and I could clearly see the four- legged snakes' white bellies pressing against the glass as they breathed shallowly. When they looked at me, their eyes were absolutely unwavering.
"Of course they're alive. They were tiny when I caught them, and now they've grown too big to crawl out of the bottles. I feed them flies every day, live houseflies. I pluck their wings off and stuff them in, and they get swallowed up quick as lightning. Four-legged snakes have no facial expressions, only when they eat something their cheeks puff up a bit. Have you seen an insect with only one wing? It tries to fly with just that side of its body, so it goes in circles, but can't take off. It's fun to watch. The faster it tries to move, the more it's stuck."
I asked if the lizards ever took a shit.
"Sure, I just pour the crap out."
He put the bottles away and said, "We should go, it's almost noon."
Before we left, he shouted behind him, "Sis, I'm going out, I'll be back around noon. Have lunch without me."
We walked about forty minutes to get there. His right hand was stuffed into his pocket, where I knew he had a passbook with five hundred yuan in savings. Before his mom and dad were caught, they sewed that passbook into his trousers. His dad was Qiao Binghao, his mom was Cui Hong. They were both spies and had been detained two months ago.
He said the day they were taken, he'd been waiting downstairs to swap his bronze hook for Fang Yong's yellow marble. He saw a bunch of grown-ups painting a slogan on the garage wall. They pasted white paper over the surface, then wrote the words one after another. First, "Overthrow Central Committee scum." He thought this was a strange thing to say, then he saw the character "Qiao," but didn't imagine it had anything to do with him. When they wrote "Bing" after it, he started to think it might be his dad, but didn't expect them to write "Cui" next. So his mom was marked too. Then a big red cross after the black words. He said he didn't have any thoughts at the time, only he forgot all about the swap with the marble.
When he headed home, he saw his sister watching him from the window.
"Her face was blank as a mirror." As he spoke, his right hand guarded his pocket.
"From that time, she never came downstairs again. I've always been close to my sister. When she was younger, she used to talk nonsense and say we'd get married when we were grown up. Silly. I've always known—this is incorrect thinking, you know that too—but I've always known she was my little sister, more important than myself. You know what I mean?"
The first place we went was wrong. The clerk said this is Bank Branch Number One, you want Number Two. I started to regret agreeing to walk this far with him. His lizards weren't as great as other people seemed to think.
I asked, "Where are your mom and dad now?"
He said, "I don't know, they might be dead. Spies in the movies always die in the end."
"Were they really spies?"
"Maybe. I used to hear them talking about it all the time, on and on. You know they've both been to the Soviet Union, even our radio at home is Russian, and so's the record player and my sister's violin. When the Russian expert visited, he came to our house. I have a picture of me being hugged by a man in a Western suit. He's tall and fat, and I remember he reeked of alcohol. I smell it whenever I look at that photo. He gave me a Russian name, Vasily, but it didn't stick. While he was hugging me, he must have been thinking of another little boy called Vasily."
We filled in two withdrawal forms before getting it right. The grown-up at the window asked if he was sure he wanted to clear out the account, and he said yes. She said it was so much money, why hadn't an adult come to collect it? He said they just hadn't. She handed over five hundred yuan plus interest and he put it in his right trouser pocket. On the way back, I walked to his right, the side with the money, thinking I'd been with him all morning without getting anything for my trouble, and he'd exchanged that little book for all this money.
"I sold all the books in the house and a carpet. I knew about this passbook but didn't think it was time to use it yet. Now we have the cash, my sister and I can start our lives again. She still has three dresses and two blouses. If that's not enough, I'll get a pink one made for her. Her face is so pale, she'll look lovely and neat in a pink dress. Our uncle sent a letter saying he'd take in my sister, but I felt there was no need, and she didn't want to go. We ought to grow up together. Do you think five hundred yuan is enough for us to grow up on? We'll spend it day after day. Spending money, spending time.
"I've never seen so much money before. It should be enough to buy a whole train, one with glittering lights, just me and my sister inside. When it starts, we'll watch trees speeding past the windows, then we'll stop for a meal. We'll follow it wherever it goes. Other people can come too. We'll wait for a new era, a new beginning or else an ending.
"Five hundred yuan. I don't know how to pull off the first banknote to spend it. What would I buy? A bunch of spinach, some ground meat, or else salt and flour. In the summer should I buy a watermelon? Tomatoes might not be bad either. This money is more than the whole apartment is worth. What if someone steals it? Should I buy a popsicle for my sister? She's still plays violin, she's practicing etude number twenty-three from Kreutzer, the one that goes do mi do mi. Even if all her strings break, we'll have money to replace them. Or just get rid of the violin and do something else. Weave change purses out of fiberglass. Lots of girls seem to be doing that these days. I should bring her downstairs to play. Even if people curse at us for our parents being spies, so what? Hardly anyone in Ninth Building would hold that against us.
"She won't dare come downstairs. She's so timid. One night, I woke up with a shock—she was standing there. I asked what happened, she said she'd dreamed mom and dad were dead and blood had spilled on her hands. I said let them die, who asked them to be spies. When those words left my mouth, she cried, but like a grown-up, not making a sound."
When we said goodbye at the foot of the block, he didn't ask me not to say anything about the money. His trust in me made me decide to keep quiet. The next few times I went over, I admit it wasn't to view the lizards again, but to see how he was doing, if he'd bought his spinach and salt, or else violin strings. I wanted to know how he'd spent the five hundred yuan, and of course, to see his sister. Each time she stayed in her room, not making a sound. I spoke as loudly as I could, but didn't hear any movement.
She was found several months later.
When the Red Guards searched his apartment again, they discovered his long dead sister, a tiny dried-out corpse.
She was already dead the day I accompanied him to the bank, already desiccated. The grown-ups gossiping in the courtyard said a little girl's body wouldn't give off a stench.
When they took his sister away, I saw him standing by the window and...
