The Other Shore (14 page)

(
Simulates action of opening a door.
) Strange, she can’t open the door, how could she be so stupid? How could she possibly lock herself in?

(
Crawls all over the room in a circle around the pile of man’s clothing, the jewellery box and the detached arm and leg.
) She can’t find the key! How can this be possible? She remembers clearly that when she opened the door she was holding the key in her hand, but now she’s forgotten where she put it. Where could it be?

(
Stops, staring blankly at the detached arm and leg.
) She just can’t understand, can’t understand what’s happening here. Her home, this warm and comfortable little nest of hers, has turned into a horrifying abyss overnight, how could this be?…She’s got to get out.

(
Shouting.
) She wants to get—out—, but nobody hears her, nobody cares, she’s in her own room, she’s locked herself in, she’s got in and now she can’t get out….

(
She kneels on the floor and looks around, at a loss what to do.
)

(
Clown comes out from one side and backs up the stage until he reaches the centre, his head hanging down and looking at the floor. A rat appears from where he came from. The rat, under his guidance and enticement, crawls gingerly and timorously to his feet. The audience then discovers that he is actually pulling a very fine thread in his hands. He puts the rat into his pocket and exits.
)

(
The tick-tock of an electric clock is heard, gradually increasing in volume.
)

Woman :

(
Murmuring.
) She doesn’t know what time it is, she doesn’t dare look at the clock, she doesn’t want to know whether it’s midnight or dawn, she can’t pull up the blinds, she has no strength, she has no courage to…

(
At the back of the stage, the shadow of a woman appears, her back facing the audience. She is carrying an umbrella and marking time.
)

Woman :

(
Staring at the woman’s shadow.
) She says it appears that she sees a woman waiting in the rain, she’s all alone, she doesn’t know how long she’s been waiting, she doesn’t know when she’s going to stop waiting, but she’s still waiting, waiting for that someone she hasn’t got a date with, she knows he won’t come, yet she still insists on waiting in vain. She wants to warn her, she wants to tell her that to live is to be destined, destined to be alone all your life, so why keep on dreaming an impossible dream? But she refuses to come to her senses.

(
The woman slowly turns around. She is still marking time, her face hidden by the umbrella as before.
)

Woman :

(
Quietly approaches.
) Who is this woman? She can’t help wanting to know, but she keeps on turning this way…then that way…she can’t see anything, she can’t see her face clearly. (
Disappointed, she covers her face with her hands.
)

(
The woman suddenly disappears.
)

Woman :

(
Lifts her head, dejected
.) She’s just realized that she’s the one who’s lonely in the whole wide world, not the other people, whose loneliness she has been observing. Other people may be waiting, downcast, forlorn, and all by themselves, but after all they’re still waiting, and they know in their hearts where they want to go, but she doesn’t, she doesn’t know if there’s anything left for her to do, or if there’s anywhere else she can go.

(
Very troubled.
) So she tries to search her memory. Where did she come from? Why is it that she hasn’t been able to control herself, why does she have to be down and out like this? Has it been a dream all along? And merely a dream?

(
Closes her eyes.
) Ah, what a strange dream!

(
Opens her eyes.
) Just now, at that fleeting moment…she saw it, she saw a wall, its plaster was crumbling away piece by piece,…exposing the cold and damp concrete, a coffin was lodged there,…it was placed there neatly, sideways, buried in poured concrete…

(
A large wall appears back stage. The wall is dark grey and is illuminated from the side. There is no coffin in the wall.
)

Woman :

(
She wobbles and feels her way along the wall, her head leaning against it.
) She doesn’t know what this dream means…No, she knows, she knows that right now her mind is not clear, she needs to sort things out, how did it all begin? There’s got to be an end to all of this somewhere, nothing’ll go wrong as long as she finds a clue.

(
Turns, leaning against the wall.
) But she can’t even remember a single incident from her childhood! Does this mean that she has never been alive, or is she just a shadow, the shadow of some nonexistent person? Is her existence just an illusion? No! She definitely had a childhood, she remembers! (
Determinedly gets away from the wall.
)

(
The wall gradually disappears.
)

Woman :

She says she’s got to pour it all out. It was a long time ago, at that time, her family still owned this small house…It was an old building, and everywhere there were rats scurrying around…The family had an old cat, so old that it was too lazy to run after the rats, and it was always dozing off on top of the stove in the dingy kitchen…She wants to say that it was an old building, when a gust of wind blew you could hear it creaking and squeaking, and the lumber would give out a musty smell. The old cat’s always crouching on top of the stove, and when the fire went out completely, one could see nothing but a pair of green eyes glowing in the dark and spying on her every move. She seems to remember the first time she discovered her own nakedness in the mirror, and the old cat was right there behind her…

(
A small house made of toy blocks appears centre stage.
)

Woman :

That’s right, her room was behind that window on the second floor.

(
Smiles and starts to narrate, facing the house.
) Downstairs just past the front porch was the living room. There was a rocking chair, her grandpa always sat on it. He had a head of white hair, when he died nobody knew how old he was. The house had no doors, only windows, and more strangely, her family always locked themselves inside, it was so dark and so damp. The first one to escape from the house was her father, then it was her mother, and they’d never come back since.

(
Becoming more interested.
) He, she’s talking about her father, escaped during the night. Later they only found a string of footsteps in the rain-soaked muddy ground under the window. The next one to go was her mother, they said that there was a man, whenever he passed by the window, he’d always be humming a popular tune, it’d been like this for some time, and her mother must have heard him, then she disappeared. And then it was her brother, he always screamed and yelled and generally made a big racket. Once he knocked down a really old vase in the house, her grandpa said it was an antique and a family heirloom. The last one to escape was herself. She thinks the building is still there, in her memory it’s wobbling, as if it’s going to collapse any second.

(
Somewhat delighted.
) She says this is a children’s story, maybe it’s a fable, she’s always wanted to talk to people about something, to talk about something that happened in the past, or to talk about her memory, or better yet, to tell a story, a fable.

(
Totally immersing herself.
) She says when she was small she was always curious, she yearned to get out of the house to take a look at the outside world. She grew up in a town, and the house was located at the edge of the town, a building all by itself, on top of a small hill. She also says that she’d never seen the places beyond the wall in the yard.

Of course she knew every thing within the wall inside out, she knew where there was a peach tree, where there was a doghouse, even where there was a vegetable plot with tomatoes growing in it, but when the tomatoes had grown ripe and fell to the ground to rot, she refused to go there any more. She says she can’t remember how her grandpa died, they all said he’d swallowed opium, his whole body was in unbearable pain, there was something wrong with all his joints, according to the present day doctors, it was probably cancer spread to the bone marrow, he’d scream out loud at night, it was very scary, he screamed that he’d burn the whole house down. She knew that actually her grandpa couldn’t get out of bed, he needed someone to hold him even when he tried to turn his body a little…

She doesn’t believe her grandpa killed himself, especially by swallowing opium, it seems like a made-up story. She doesn’t know why she’s telling all this, perhaps she’s beginning to make up stories, making up a childhood she never had, but she still wants to make up some more things, something beautiful, make up some…some…She says that her arrival in this world was entirely a misunderstanding, but isn’t life a series of misunderstandings?

But she does recall a young boy,…he used to stand under her window in the snow waiting for her to appear, at the time she’d hide behind the curtains, she thought that it was fun, a bit laughable perhaps, and she also felt a bit sorry for him, but in the end she still held back, because her best friend in her class told her that she’d also received a love letter from the same boy. Afterwards she stopped going out with both of them.

She wants to tell a romantic story. Besides physical contact there should be some poetry in the relationship between a man and a woman, but everything has been so hypocritical, hypocritical, so hypocritical that it’s made her utterly sick and tired of the whole thing.

She remembers that her mother had two lovers, whenever her father was out on business, her mother’d make herself especially beautiful. She spent all her money on herself, she never cared about what her children were wearing, and she’d lose her temper about almost anything and everything. Once a girl student came to ask her father something, they were together for a long time, until dinner it was, and her father asked her to stay and eat with them. Suddenly there came the sound of banging dishes from the kitchen, and her heart cringed, because she was sure that once the girl student left, her mother would blow up. Afterwards, she heard her mother and father quarrelling in their room as expected, her mother said her father had something going with the girl student, he repeated many times that there was nothing, but her mother insisted that she saw the whole thing through a crack in the door! She couldn’t stand her mother the most, as soon as she got upset she’d whoop up a storm.

Oh yes, and they also had a neighbour, a single woman, she was also unbearably neurotic. She was keeping this dog she called Sicko. Here, Sicko! There Sicko, run! She’d keep horsing around all the time with the dog until it yapped and yelped and never stopped, and then she’d caress it with all her tender loving care as if it was her lover.

Her mother was the same, she only quieted down when she was on her deathbed. She had broken her spine in a car crash, when she died she was still quite young, the skin on her arm was smoother and fresher than hers is now, but her head was all wrapped in bandages, her lips swollen, all pale and ashen. It was the first time she’d been so close to death. When she died she didn’t cry, she only felt a bit surprised, a bit regretful, she cried only after she’d left the hospital and stayed up alone at night, suddenly she felt she’d lost something…(
Covers her face with her hands.
)

(
A woman appears behind her. She is completely dressed in white, and her head is wrapped in bandages except for her mouth and her nose. She is wearing a necklace with a small watch attached to it.
)

Woman :

She choked and burst out crying, was she crying for herself or was it because she’d lost her mother? She couldn’t say for sure. She and her mother were never close, there was always a barrier between them which could never be removed. The necklace she has on now belonged to her mother, she knows that one of her lovers gave it to her…, she had her eyes on her mother’s small silver watch inlaid with sapphire even when she was a little girl, once she wore it without telling her, when she found out, she jumped down real hard on her and she cried her eyes out for a long time. She gave the watch to her before she died, as something to remember her by, and she also whispered in her ears, begging her not to hold anything against her.

When she was alive she always said that it was difficult being a woman, she says her mother said women suffer five hundred times more than men. She didn’t understand why women had to suffer from so many more deadly sins. She also knows that it wasn’t her mother but an old woman who had said these words first, perhaps women like to talk about these things when they’re together, and her mother just repeated them to her. Yes, sins, she’d brought sins upon herself. Whenever the lover, the one who gave her the watch, came calling, she’d have to make a real fuss of it, she’d bath and dress herself up from head to toe for him and then she’d look for some excuse to send her away, all this got her really peeved and that was why the relationship between mother and daughter became so tense. Today, well, of course she’s forgiven everything. (
Turns around.
)

(
The woman turns around, still behind her.
)

Woman :

But at the time (
Pauses.
) she only wanted her attention, so that she’d notice her, notice her anger, that was why she stabbed a scissors blade into her middle finger. They say that the ten fingers are linked to the heart, and she wanted her heart to suffer the pain too.

(
Looking at her hand.
) She watched the blood oozing out, it streamed down the centre of the palm along the middle finger, and then it seeped through the fingers to the back of the hand, she could have stopped the bleeding, but she didn’t, rather she hoped the blood would bleed much faster. She watched her wrist turn purple red, (
Raising her arm.
) but she still let the blood flow, she just wanted to drown her whole body in a pool of blood. She didn’t know how much longer she could hang on like that, she just felt faint and dizzy. At last she heard her mother calling out after her, the water’s all gone, the kettle’s going to be burnt into ashes, go take a look! Her mother found her in her room and asked her why she had pretended to be deaf and dumb. Only then did she see that her hand was covered in blood, she immediately snatched the trembling scissors from her and gave her a big smack across the face. (
Raises her head.
)