Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)
On the other hand, I could see that my dieh was no pushover. He was hard as nails, not soft as bean curd, a man who’d done and seen plenty in the nation’s capital, where he’d lopped off a truckload—maybe a shipload—of heads; a power struggle between him and Magistrate Qian would be like a fight between a dragon and a tiger, and I could not say who would come out ahead. Now, at this critical moment, I was suddenly reminded of my tiger’s whisker. Truth is, that treasure was never far from my mind. According to my wife, it was my amulet, which could turn bad luck into good as long as I kept it with me. So I jumped onto the bed, reached over to the wall, and retrieved my red bundle, which I frantically unwrapped to make sure the curly, golden-tipped tiger’s whisker was still there. It was. As my little treasure lay in my hand, I felt it move, little flicks, sort of like a hornet’s stinger, against my palm.
A huge white snake, as big around as a water bucket, stood in front of the bed and thrust its head toward me, a purple forked tongue darting in and out between its red lips. “Xiaojia.” It was my wife’s voice! “What do you think you’re doing?” Heaven help me, how could you do this to me? You know I’m afraid of snakes, and so you made sure that’s what my wife is. Someone I’ve frolicked in bed with for the last ten years without knowing she was a snake. My own wife, a reincarnated white snake. Of course, The Legend of the White Snake, now I get it. Back when she was on the stage, she played the part of the white snake, and I’m the scholar she married, Xu Xian. But why hasn’t she sucked out my brains? Because she isn’t all snake. She has a snake’s head, but arms and legs, too, and breasts. And there’s hair on her head. Still, well and truly frightened, I flung the whisker away like a piece of hot charcoal and broke out in a full-body sweat.
My wife stood there sneering at me. Since I’d just had a glimpse of her true form, seeing her now as my wife was both strange and unsettling. That big, fleshy snake living inside her could break through the flimsy skin covering and take its true form any time it wanted. Maybe she already knew that I’d seen her true form, which would have explained the strange, forced smile on her lips. “Well, did you see it?” she asked. “What am I behind this human façade?” Cold rays of light shot from her eyes, eyes once beautiful but now ugly and malignant, the eyes of a snake.
A foolish grin was the best I could manage to mask my terror. My lips had stopped doing my bidding; my skin tingled. She must have released a cloud of noxious airs onto my face. “No, I didn’t,” I stammered, “I saw nothing.”
“Liar,” she said with a sneer, “I’m sure you saw something.” A chilling, foul odor emerging from her mouth—snake’s breath—hit me square in the face.
“Tell me the truth, what am I beneath all this?” She smiled in a peculiar way, and light glinted off the shiny, scaly things on her face. I could not tell the truth, not without harm to myself, and I was suddenly no longer the fool I’d always been. “Really, I didn’t see a thing.” “You can’t fool me, Xiaojia, you’re a terrible liar. Your face is red, and you’re sweating. So, come on, tell me. Am I a fox? Or maybe a weasel. Or how about a white eel?” White eels are members of the snake family, real close members. She was trying to trick me. But I was not about to be fooled. The only way I’d let my tongue betray me was if she came out and admitted that in reality she was a white snake. The surest way to have her take on her true form was to tell her I’d seen that she was a reincarnated white snake. She’d open that bloody mouth wide and swallow me up. No, she knew I always carried a knife, and if I wound up inside her, I’d slice her open. That would be the end of her. So instead, she’d open a hole in my head with her tongue, which was harder than a woodpecker’s beak, and suck out my brains. Then she’d suck the marrow from my bones, followed by my blood, reducing me to a pile of hollow bones wrapped in human skin. You cannot pry the words out of me, not even in your dreams. My niang used to say to me, “Pretend you know nothing, and the spirits will have no control over you.” “Honest, I saw nothing.” This time she reacted by laughing and changing form. Laughing made her look more human and less snake-like. Pretty much all human. She began crawling out of the room, her body soft and pliable, saying on her way out, “Take that treasure of yours and see what animal your dieh is after spending forty-four years killing people. This is just a guess, but I’ll say eight or nine chances out of ten, he’s a poisonous snake.” More talk of snakes! I knew she was like the fleeing bandit who yells “Stop, thief!” and I was not about to be fooled by that.
I put my treasure back in its hiding place in the wall, beginning to wish I’d never gotten it in the first place. The less you know, the better, most of the time. Knowledge only gets you into trouble. Knowing a person’s true form is especially dangerous, because that’s something you cannot get past. Now that I’d seen what my wife really was, that was the end of it for me. If I’d been ignorant of her snake background, nothing could have stopped me from wrapping my arms around her in bed. Think I’d dare do that now? That was reason enough not to want to know what my dieh was. I was already pretty much a loner, and now that my wife was a snake, my dieh was all I had.
So I hid my treasure and went into the living room, where I got the shock of my life. Heaven help me, there on my dieh’s sandalwood chair sat an emaciated panther! It turned to look at me out of the corner of its eye. I’d seen that look before, and it didn’t take a genius to know that it was in fact my dieh in an earlier form. It opened its mouth, making its whiskers twitch. “Son,” it said, “so now you know. Your dieh was the preeminent executioner at the Great Qing Court, the recipient of accolades from the Empress Dowager Herself. It is a calling that must stay in the family.”
My heart skipped a beat. Heaven help me, what was that all about? In the story my niang told me about the tiger’s whisker, she said that after the man hid the whisker he’d gone up north to get, he could only see people as people—his dieh was not a horse and his niang was not a dog. I’d tucked my whisker back into a crack in the wall, so why was I now seeing my dieh as a panther? My eyes must have been deceiving me. Maybe the effects of that thing lingered on my hand. I was already having trouble accepting the fact that my wife was a white snake, and now that I’d discovered that my dieh was a panther, well, for me the road ahead was a dead end. In a state of panic, I ran into the yard, where I scooped up a pail of water and frantically washed my hands and rinsed out my eyes. Then I buried my head in the water. One weird occurrence after another that day had swelled my head, and I was hoping that a cold-water bath would bring it down to size.
I returned to the living room, only to find the panther still sitting in my dieh’s sandalwood armchair. There was a look of disdain in those eyes, disappointment that I hadn’t made much of myself. A red-tasseled skullcap was perched atop its large, furry head; two hairy ears were pricked straight up in a state of vigilance. Dozens of long, wiry whiskers fanned out from the sides of its wide mouth. After licking its chops and the tip of its nose with a spiky, slurpy tongue, it yawned with red grandeur. It was wearing a tea-colored short jacket over a long robe, from whose wide sleeves fleshy, clawed paws emerged. It was such a strange, comical scene, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. At the moment, those claws were deftly manipulating a string of sandalwood prayer beads.
Niang once told me that a tiger manipulates Buddhist prayer beads to give the impression of goodness. She never said anything about a panther.
I backed up slowly, barely able to keep from turning and running. My wife was a snake, my dieh a panther. This house was no place for me. I’d be in real trouble if either one of them reverted back to its original form. Even if what we’d meant to each other kept them from eating me, I don’t think I could stand the crushing anxiety of doubt. I forced a smile, hoping that would keep him from getting suspicious. It was my only hope. That panther was showing its age, but its hind legs, folded into a crouch in the armchair, looked to have plenty of spring left—leaping a good five or six feet would be no problem. Sure, its teeth had worn down over the years,
but those steely fangs would have no trouble crushing my throat. And let’s say I had the leg strength to get away from the panther; there’d still be the white snake. According to my niang, a snake that has gained spirit status is half a dragon and can move like the wind, faster than a racehorse. She said she’d actually seen a snake as thick as her arm and as long as a carrying pole chase down a fawn in the wild. The young deer had run and bounded through the grass, fast as an arrow off the bow. The snake? With the front half of its body raised off the ground, it parted the grass with a whoosh. In the end, it swallowed the fawn whole. My wife was as big around as a water bucket and had reached heights of Taoist cultivation way beyond that of the snake that ate the fawn. I could run faster than a jackrabbit and still not escape something that could soar with the clouds and mist.
“Where are you going, Xiaojia?” A gloom-laden voice sounded behind me. I turned to look. The panther had risen up out of the sandalwood chair, its forelegs pressing down on the armrests, its hind legs now touching the brick floor. I was caught in a withering glare. Heaven help me, the old-timer was ready to pounce, and could easily make it out into the yard in one leap! Don’t panic, I told myself to boost my courage; calm down. Heh-heh, I feigned a laugh. “I’m going to take care of that pig, Dieh. Pork must be sold when it’s fresh. It’s heavier on the scale and it looks better.” The panther smirked. “It’s time for you to take up a new calling, son,” the panther said. “It too involves ‘killing,’ but pig-killing is one of the three debased occupations, while man-killing has been elevated to one of the nine chosen occupations.” I kept backing up. “You’re right, Dieh. From today on, I’ll stop killing pigs and learn from you how to kill a man . . .” At that moment the white snake raised its head, a head covered with glistening, scary coin-sized scales all the way down its white neck. “Cluck cluck cluck cluck” . . . a strand of laughter sounding more like a laying hen sputtered from her mouth. “Xiaojia,” she said, “did you see it? What animal was your dieh? A wolf? A tiger? A poisonous snake?” I watched her scaly white neck rise up as the red jacket and green pants she was wearing slid off her body like a multihued snakeskin. Her red-tinged black tongue was within striking distance of my eyes. Niang! I lost it then, jumping backward in terror, and—bang! I heard what sounded like a thunderclap and saw stars—Niang! I passed out, foaming at the mouth. My wife later said I’d suffered an epilepsy attack. Nonsense! How can someone who’s not an epileptic suffer one of those? What happened is that in my panicky jump I hit my head on a doorjamb nail. The pain knocked me out.
A woman was calling me from far, far off: “Xiaojia . . . Xiaojia . . .” I couldn’t tell whether it was my niang or my wife. I had a splitting headache, and when I tried to open my eyes, I couldn’t—my lids were stuck shut by something gummy. There was a perfumed smell in the air, and then the smell of crushed grass, and finally the heavy, rank odor of boiled pig entrails. The calls kept coming: “Xiaojia, Xiaojia . . .” Then something cool and refreshing pelted me in the face, and my mind was abruptly as clear as a bell.
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a rainbow of dancing colors. Then I saw brilliant flashes of light, followed by a big, pasty face that nearly touched mine. It belonged to my wife. “Xiaojia,” I heard her say, “you scared me half to death.” She was tugging me with a hand that felt sweaty, and finally managed, very clumsily, to pull me up off the floor. I shook my head. “Where am I?” “Where are you? You’re home, you poor fool.” Home. Feeling a sense of agony, I frowned, as everything that had just happened came back in a flash. “As heaven is my witness, I don’t want that tiger’s whisker, I don’t! I’m going to throw it into the fire.” She smirked and put her mouth up close to my ear. “You big fool,” she said, “did you really think that’s a tiger’s whisker? It’s one of my hairs.” I shook my head. It hurt, it hurt like crazy. “No, that can’t be. You don’t have hair like that. But even if you did, how do you explain the fact that when I held it in my hand, I could see your true form? And I saw my dieh’s true form even when I wasn’t holding it.” “Tell me, then,” she said, her curiosity piqued, “what was I?” As I looked into that fair, fresh face, then down at her arms and legs, before glancing over at my dieh, who was slumped in his armchair, everything suddenly cleared up. I must have been dreaming. My wife as a snake, my dieh as a panther, it was all a dream. She laughed a strange little laugh. “Who knows, maybe I am a snake. Yes, that’s exactly what I am, a snake!” Her face lengthened, and her eyes turned green. “If I’m a snake,” she added venomously, “I’ll wriggle my way into your belly!” Her face grew longer and longer, her eyes a deeper and deeper green, and scales reappeared on her neck. I covered my eyes with my hands and screamed: “No, you’re not, you’re not a snake, you’re human!”
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3
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The gate to our compound flew open.
There stood the two yayi my father had sent packing, except that now they were gray wolves in human clothing. Hands resting on their swords, they stood one on each side of the door. Scared out of my wits, I shut my eyes in hopes that this would rescue me from my dream. When I reopened my eyes, I saw that they now had yayi faces, but the backs of their hands were coated with fur, and their fingers ended in sharp claws. I was struck by the sad realization that my wife’s hair was more powerful than any tiger’s whisker could ever be. The whisker worked its magic only when you held it in your hand, but all my wife’s hair had to do was touch your hand to hold you in its supernatural power, and then it made no difference whether you kept it or threw it away, whether you were aware of its existence or not.
After the wolf-yayi took their positions by the sides of the gate, a four-man palanquin was set down on the cobblestone street in front of the gate. The bearers—a quartet of donkeys, with big, floppy ears hidden under stovepipe caps, but with easily identifiable faces—rested their glistening front hooves on the chair shafts, slobber oozing from their mouths as their breath came in snorts. By all appearances, they had run the whole way, their hoof-encased boots covered with a thick layer of dust. The legal secretary, Diao, whom everyone called Diao Laoye—he was a pointy-faced hedgehog—grabbed a corner of the chair curtain with his pink paw and pulled it open. I knew it was Magistrate Qian’s official palanquin, the one Xiaokui had spat at to bring the wrath of its owner down on his head, and I knew that the person about to step out was Gaomi County’s Magistrate, His Eminence Qian Ding, my wife’s gandieh. Logically, that made him my gandieh as well. But when I told my wife that I’d like to go along to pay my respects to him, she flatly refused. Fairness requires me to admit that Magistrate Qian had generously exempted us from paying taxes over the years, saving us a lot of silver. But he really shouldn’t have broken Xiaokui’s leg just because he spat at his palanquin. Xiaokui was a friend of mine, after all, even though he’d said to me, “You really are a fool, Xiaojia. Magistrate Qian has given you a cuckold’s green hat, so why don’t you wear it?” Well, I went home and said to my wife, “Dear wife, Xiaokui said that Magistrate Qian has given me a green hat. What’s it look like? Why won’t you show me?” “You idiot,” she cursed, “Xiaokui is a bad person, and I don’t want you spending time with him. If you do, I won’t sleep with you anymore.” Before three days had passed, some yayi had broken Xiaokui’s leg. Breaking somebody’s leg just because he spits at you makes you a very cruel man, Magistrate Qian. So now here you are, and I want to see just what you used to be.
I watched as a white tiger head, as big as a willow basket, emerged from the palanquin. Heaven help me, Magistrate Qian was a white tiger in human form! No wonder my niang said that the Emperor is a reincarnated dragon and that high officials are reincarnated tigers. A blue official’s cap sat atop the tiger’s head, while its body was sheathed in a red official’s robe with a pair of strange-looking white birds—neither chickens nor ducks—embroidered on the chest. Bigger than my dieh, a skinny panther, this was a very fat tiger. It was doughy white, my dieh coa
l black. The tiger stepped down and lumbered in through our gate, taking slow, measured steps. The hedgehog dashed ahead of it into the courtyard and announced, “His Eminence the County Magistrate has arrived!”
The tiger and I were face to face. It snarled, and I shut my eyes in fear. “You must be Zhao Xiaojia.”
Bent like a shrimp, I replied, “Yes, yes, I am Zhao Xiaojia.”
While I was bent over like that, he hid the bulk of his original form, leaving only the tip of his tail showing beneath his robe and dragging it along the muddy ground. I had a very private thought: Tiger, there’s pig’s blood and dog shit in our compound mud, so pretty soon flies will be landing on your tail. My thought still hung in the air when flies resting on the wall swarmed over, buzzing and raising a din as they landed not just on the Magistrate’s tail, but on his cap, his sleeves, and his collar. “Xiaojia,” the Magistrate said amiably, “go inside and announce that the County Magistrate has come calling.”
I said, “The Magistrate can go on in. But my dieh might bite.”
The legal secretary reverted to human form and said angrily, “Are you really so reckless as to disobey the County Magistrate? Go inside and tell your dieh to come out here!”