“The Cabin on the Mountain” – Can Xue
Behind my house, on the desolate mountain, stands a small hut built of wooden planks.
Every day, I clean out the drawers at home. When I’m not cleaning the drawers, I sit in a wicker chair with my hands flat on my knees, listening to the howling. The north wind fiercely lashes the shingled roof of the hut made from cedar bark, and the wolves’ howls echo through the valley.
“You’ll never finish tidying those drawers, humph,” my mother says, giving me a false smile.
“Everyone’s ears are broken,” I say, holding my breath to continue, “Under the moonlight, so many thieves linger around this house. When I turn on the light, I see countless finger holes poked into the window glass. In the room next door, your and father’s snores are unusually loud, shaking the bottles and jars in the cupboard. I kick the bedboard, turn my swollen head to the side, and hear the person locked in the hut furiously banging on the wooden door—a sound that lasts until dawn.”
“Every time you come into my room to look for something, you scare me to death.” My mother cautiously watches me, retreating toward the door. I see the flesh on one side of her face twitching comically.
One day, I decided to go up the mountain to see for myself. As soon as the wind stopped, I climbed the mountain. I climbed for a long time, the sun scorching me until I was dizzy. Every stone seemed to flicker with little white flames. I coughed and tossed about on the mountain. The salty sweat from my eyebrows dripped into my eyes, blurring my vision and deafening me. When I got home, I stood outside the door for a moment, seeing in the mirror a person with shoes caked in wet mud and two large purple circles floating under their eyes.
“This is an illness,” I hear my family laughing in the shadows.
By the time my eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the house, they had already hidden themselves—laughing while they hid. I found that they had rummaged through my drawers while I was away, scattering dead moths and dragonflies on the ground. They knew perfectly well those were my treasured possessions.
“They helped you reorganize the drawers while you were gone,” my little sister told me, her gaze fixed, the left eye having turned green.
“I heard wolves howling,” I deliberately scared her. “The wolf pack is running around the house outside, even squeezing their heads through the cracks in the door. Every time it gets dark, this happens. In your dreams, you’re so scared that the soles of your feet sweat. Everyone in this house sweats through the soles of their feet in their sleep. Just look at how damp the bedding is.”
I was feeling chaotic inside because some things in the drawers were missing. My mother pretended to know nothing, lowering her eyes. But I could feel her glaring viciously at the back of my head. Every time she stared at the back of my head, that spot on my scalp would go numb and swell. I knew they had buried my box of Go pieces by the well at the back—they had done this countless times before, and I always dug it out in the middle of the night. When I dug it out, they turned on the lights and poked their heads out the window. They were indifferent to my resistance.
At dinner, I told them, “On the mountain, there’s a small hut.”
They all kept their heads down, slurping their soup, as if no one heard me.
“Many big rats are running wildly in the wind.” I raised my voice, putting down my chopsticks. “The sand and stones on the mountain are rumbling down toward the wall behind the house. You’re all so scared that the soles of your feet sweat. Do you remember? Just look at the bedding. When the weather clears, you all hang your bedding out to dry. The clothesline outside is always covered with your bedding.”
Father glanced at me quickly with one eye, and I felt it was a familiar wolf’s eye. Suddenly, I understood. Every night, father transforms into one of the wolves, running around the house and howling mournfully.
“White things are flashing everywhere,” I gripped mother’s shoulder with one hand, shaking her. “Everything is so blindingly bright that it brings tears. You can’t get any impression of it. But when I come back to the house, sit in the wicker chair, and place my hands flat on my knees, I can clearly see the shingled roof made of cedar bark. The image is so close. You must have seen it too. In fact, everyone in this house has seen it. There really is someone crouching inside, with large purple circles under their eyes from staying up all night.”
“Every time you make that slab of stone by the well thud, your mother and I are suspended in mid-air. We tremble and flail our bare feet, unable to touch the ground.” Father avoided my gaze, turning his face toward the window. The window glass was speckled with fly droppings. “At the bottom of that well is a pair of scissors I dropped. In my dreams, I secretly resolve to fish them out. When I wake up, I always realize I was mistaken, that nothing was ever dropped. Your mother insists I’m wrong. I can’t let it go, and the next time, I remember them again. Lying there, I suddenly feel regret, thinking about the scissors rusting at the bottom of the well. Why didn’t I retrieve them? I’ve been tormented over this for decades, my face lined with wrinkles as if carved by a knife. Finally, one time, I went to the well and tried lowering the bucket. The rope was heavy and slippery. My hands gave out, and the bucket crashed loudly into the well and shattered. I ran back to the house and glanced in the mirror. The hair on my left temple had turned completely white.”
“The north wind is so fierce,” I hunched my shoulders, my face blotched with purple and blue. “Small ice blocks have formed in my stomach. When I sit in the wicker chair, I can hear them clinking.”
I’ve always wanted to tidy my drawers, but mother secretly opposes me. She paces back and forth in the next room, making a constant tapping sound, which fills my mind with wild thoughts. To forget the footsteps, I open a deck of cards and count aloud: “One, two, three, four, five…” Suddenly, the footsteps stop. Mother’s small, dark green face appears at the doorframe, buzzing as she speaks: “I had a disgusting dream, and now cold sweat is dripping down my back.”
“And the soles of your feet,” I add. “Everyone’s soles sweat. Yesterday, you hung out the bedding again. This sort of thing is very common.”
My little sister secretly came over to tell me that mother had been scheming to break my arm because the sound of me opening and closing the drawers drove her mad. Whenever she heard that sound, she was so tormented that she soaked her head in cold water until she caught a severe cold.
“Things like this don’t just happen by chance.” My little sister’s gaze was eternally fixed, piercing my neck and causing red rashes to appear. “Take father, for example. He’s been talking about those scissors for, what, twenty years? No matter what happens, everything has its roots in the past.”
I oiled the sides of the drawers and practiced opening and closing them gently, making no sound at all. I tried this for days, and there were no footsteps from the next room—she had been fooled. This showed that many things could be muddled through as long as you were a little more careful. I was thrilled and worked through the night with great enthusiasm. The drawers were finally about to be tidied up, but suddenly, the lightbulb went out, and mother let out a cold laugh from the next room.
“The light from your room irritates me so much that my blood vessels throb, like drums beating inside me. Look here,” she pointed at her temple, where a fat, bulging worm squirmed. “I’d rather have scurvy. Every day, something’s rattling in my body, here and there, making noise—you wouldn’t understand the taste of it. Because of this problem, your father once considered suicide.” She placed a plump, icy-cold hand on my shoulder, water dripping continuously from it as if it had been chilled.
Someone was making a racket by the well. I heard them repeatedly lowering the bucket, which banged against the walls of the well, making a rumbling sound. As dawn broke, they threw down the bucket with a thud and ran away. I opened the door to the next room and saw father in a deep sleep, one hand with bulging veins gripping the edge of the bed in discomfort, moaning miserably in his dreams. Mother, with her hair disheveled, was furiously sweeping the floor with a broom. She told me that just before dawn, a large swarm of longhorn beetles had flown in through the window, crashing into the walls and falling all over the floor. She got up to clean them, but when she slipped her foot into her slippers, a beetle hiding inside bit her toe. Her entire leg swelled up like a lead pillar.
“He,” mother pointed at the sleeping father, “dreamt that he was the one bitten.”
“There’s also someone groaning in the hut on the mountain. The black wind carries a few leaves from wild grapevines.”
“Did you hear it?” Mother pressed her ear to the floor intently in the dim light. “Those things hit the floor and fainted from the pain. They stormed in the moment dawn broke.”
That day, I did go up the mountain again. I remember it very clearly. At first, I sat in the wicker chair with my hands flat on my knees. Then I opened the door and walked into the white light. I climbed the mountain, where white flames flickered on the stones. There were no wild grapevines, and there was no hut.
(Originally published in People's Literature, Issue 8, 1985)
Deng Xiaohua (Chinese: 邓小华; pinyin: Dèng Xiǎohuá, [tə̂ŋ ɕjàʊxwǎ]; born May 30, 1953), better known by her pen name Can Xue (Chinese: 残雪; pinyin: Cán Xuě, [tsʰǎn ɕuɤ̀]; lit: 'lingering snow'), is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957.Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticism of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Can Xue has been described as “China’s most prominent author of experimental fiction,” and most of her fiction has been translated and published in English. She is frequently mentioned a favourite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.