“I have always tried to be fair in my thoughts and words concerning the ideas of others. There are enough schools of thought for us all, and each man should be allowed to choose his own.” He turned to Liu Ch’a. “Now, your way of thinking, sir, seems to leave out more than it lets in. You sit your life away here in this room, never allowing anyone near. You know much about your own mind, but you don’t know the least thing about anyone else’s. Here you have a young woman washing your clothes every day and she is nothing more to you than one of these cushions. This is not only an inhuman way to live, Mr. Liu, it can also be very dangerous.”
“What are you saying?” The Buddhist tried not to see the girl.
“I am saying that a woman whose one passion is turned away will soon find another, perhaps a fouler one, to consume her.” The magistrate asked the girclass="underline" “Was this the first man you ever loved?”
She hesitated a time before she answered.
“No, he was the only.”
“So you would have no understanding of what he could not give you, of those ties of love that his philosophy teaches him are only ties of suffering. Is there any bitterness,” the magistrate reflected aloud, “greater than the bitterness of being ignored?”
In the awful quiet of the room, she whispered: “He never looked at me. Never.”
“Then look at each other now!” Magistrate Ti rasped, while the neighbor stared at the girl, then at Liu, wholly lost. “Look at each other: the man without a man’s body and the woman who schemed to have his body separated from his head!”
“What?” the Buddhist choked.
“You came here twice this morning, didn’t you, Miss Li?”
“No,” she murmured.
“The second time was for the robes, but the first time — very early — was for the sandals and the earthenware bowl, am I not right?”
“No.”
“It must have been at first light when you carried the sandals and bowl past Mr. Keng’s hut to the still-deserted southern end of the park. There, you must have fitted your own feet into the shoes, scuffed back northward, taken them off again, and walked back barefoot off the path to wait for the Confucian to come out with his broom. Then you broke the bowl over his head and hurried back here to replace the sandals and start your daily work, assured that the bowl and the footprints pointing here would be more than enough to pay this man back for his uncaring. This is how it happened, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“There is no other possible interpretation!”
Miss Li stood and flinched, shaken, but her eyes and face were dry. It was as if a long, brooding hurt had scorched most of the womanhood out of her. She fought back one last time. “And why couldn’t everything have been done as you said by Mr. Liu himself?”
In answer, Magistrate Ti reached into his robes and brought out something small and diaphanous that he held out to show them. A stray spark of the yellow afternoon light outside entered and glanced in a prism off the lens of a shattered wing. He was holding the minute half of an insect.
“The blue ying fly,” he said with reverence. “The very same that was praised in our Book of Songs so long ago. I found this in one of the marks near the body of Mr. Keng. The other half of it, or another half of another, may be seen on the bottom of one of the sandals over there. The fly had been stepped on, cruelly and without thinking, as I myself would step on stones.”
The girl did not understand. Neither did the neighbor.
The magistrate exhaled. “Don’t you see? Those footprints — made by sandal or by foot — could never have been made by Mr. Liu here. It is not in him. Oh, I suppose some Buddhist might be moved by a great anger to take the life of a rival, but nothing could ever let him kill through sheer carelessness the living beings of the road beneath his feet. This is why so many of them will carry along an alarm-staff to scare off small animals or a broom to sweep ants aside from their path. I imagine this accounts, too, for the strange shape of Mr. Liu’s sandals — flat and broad, so that he can slide through the dust instead of stepping. If you had only understood this, Miss Li, you would never have robbed Mr. Keng of his only life for nothing greater than a woman’s meaningless jealousy.”
She looked at Liu then, at the unspeaking man she had followed with her eyes and thoughts for so many days, and her face became the face of a child who meets death for the first time with fury and despair.
“Him and his sitting and his thinking and his closing his eyes to hum! He thinks of nothing, he believes in nothing! He looked through me as he looked through paper screen. And you!” she turned to the magistrate. “What makes you think him so devout? He doesn’t even pray!”
“Miss, I meant he has lost his orthodoxy,” Ti told her. “I did not mean he has lost his mind.”
A shadow appeared in the yellow doorway then, that of an official from the city’s own magistrate, but the girl saw nothing. She was staring down at the robes finally dropping from her hands, trying to feel a certain texture she could never hope to grasp.
The straight-backed neighbor walked Magistrate Ti back through the park, leaving him wordlessly just before they reached the dead man’s hut. There was no one else about. The authorities of Wei had come for the body and the wife, and the crowd had dispersed to return to the workday that was hurrying ahead without them. They had left the path pocked and scarred with the erasures of curiosity and confusion, so that all that could be made out now was a blur of footprints and a haze of yellow dust.
Ti looked around at the lifeless hut, at the sparkling park, at the busy clatter of work and play in the surrounding streets where already the people were forgetting. There was a ghostly loneliness in the air that preserved the scene and he felt suddenly that no matter how long he stood here, the sun would not move overhead.
Then he saw, rolled aside beneath a bush, the Confucian’s crude broom. After a long moment, he bent to pick it up and then bent again to begin sweeping. It took him a long time to wipe away the intruding, disrespectful footprints of the citizens of Wei, but when he finally set the broom aside, its handle waiting for the next pair of hands, the path was as clear and new as if it had lain unbothered for over a thousand years.
Midnight Pumpkins
by James Powell
Be prepared to be reminded of a story by Robertson Davies we published last December — but only in the fate that befalls young Count Sonderborg in this enchanting new tale by James Powell. Be prepared to feel the greatest compassion for young Count Sonderborg.
“Tell the royal nitwit to stop pestering my goddaughter,” said Donnabella through clenched teeth. “Tell him to waltz right on by if he runs into her at another ball. Tell him I’ve got bigger and better plans for her.”
“Maybe we should let the young lady decide that for herself,” answered Sonderborg sharply. He regretted his tone at once, for Donnabella’s eyes flashed fire and her wand appeared from behind her back, making runic notations on the air as it came. The light tap sent a cold, electric thrill through Sonderborg’s body.
Suddenly his shoulders slumped violently down into a terrible stoop while his knees rocketed up past his ears. Donnabella and the doorway were looming high above him now. Deep inside him, from the very depths of his soul, a small hard bubble was making its way upward toward the light and growing as it came. Though he struggled with all his might to repress it, the bubble crowded up into his mouth, bulging out his cheeks and the skin below his chin. He fought to hold it back, refusing to make the admission the bubble demanded. Suddenly he couldn’t hold out any longer.