‘‘On this three-mile-long street of ours, Madam X and Mr. Q are bewildering and out of line. We don’t want to admit this, for as soon as we do, it’s as though we’re making them the center of our lives, as though they created our history. Of course, this is nonsense. What kind of people are they? One is like an extraterrestrial who dropped down from who-knows-where and put down roots in the earth and doesn’t plan to move again. The other is a masked, invisible man; even his features exist only in our guesswork: it’s absolutely possible that he’s headless or has a serpent’s face and a human body. At first, we didn’t have any extra energy to contemplate or be concerned with these two people who weren’t much connected with us. In the beginning, we thought: let them live and die by themselves. They couldn’t go on very long. Old Meng from the pharmacy reckoned that after five years, they would change into scaly anteaters and ‘go through the wall and leave’ Five Spice Street. Then the sun would shine everywhere, and there would be peace in the world. And so we would pass the time as we usually did, every day organizing our dust-covered albums, replacing them and hanging up large color photos, arranging for all kinds of large-scale and medium-scale group photos, and making rules for highway maintenance and the area for cooling off outside. We were so busy that we were almost about to forget these two. We were intoxicated with our heroism and merely gazed at the stretch of distant undulating mountains.
‘‘We avoided talking about these two people for a long time and deliberately substituted ‘H’ and ‘L’ for their names. We almost got used to this, as if those two had disappeared from the street. The ones we talked of were two new people, much more worth noticing than X and Q. X and Q? No one could remember who they were; we had only ‘H’ and ‘L.’ Only this animated couple greatly interested us. They were special! But whether you pretended not to notice them, whether you used different names for them, these two low-down people were always secretly manufacturing a demagogic hullabaloo. Finally, ‘the beginning’ saw the light of day, and everyone on Five Spice Street began dashing madly here and there all day long-never able to get anything done. Everyone was suffering from serious worries and couldn’t let anyone see how sick he was (that would hurt the struggle). All anyone could do was complain implicitly. For example:
‘‘ ‘We should have new laws to crack down on ‘‘H’’ and ‘‘L.’’ Unfortunately, our present laws are imperfect and have no provisions for dealing with people who have theoretically broken the law even though there’s no evidence of it. Someone has been making use of this situation. Just think about it, it actually began, and with that, my ‘‘spare-time recreation’’ was destroyed. I’m not saying that I was impotent. This is just a kind of psychological reaction.’
‘‘‘I kept imagining that ‘‘H’’ and ‘‘L’’ had turned into two ‘‘mosquitoes.’’ They were buzzing in the sky and disappeared without a trace. Peace and prosperity were coming back, flowers were blossoming, and life was beautiful again. Am I leading too befuddled a life? Yesterday, I unconsciously held out my hand and realized that my thumb had been numb for a long time.’
‘‘ ‘Now we need to talk openly about sex as a scientific issue. Didn’t those two people take advantage of our excessive seriousness, our virginal sense of shame, to set their defiance into motion? We have to cure our vegetative nervous disorder and boldly reveal our viewpoints. At the right time, we can also beat back their savage aggression with a public performance to show that we are totally open-minded.’
‘‘ ‘This probably started a long time ago, and probably there has never been a real beginning, for what we thought was clear was actually covered by mist. It broke out at this point, no sooner and no later. Was it aimed right at us? How can my legs be as weak as they are? A voice is constantly whispering in my ear: ‘‘Two ears, three legs, two ears, three legs…’’ ’
‘‘ ‘The one who made this long speech was motivated by the expectation that his listeners would poke through the layer of tissue paper and reveal the vivid prototype. His adversary understood his intention well, but was sophisticated and astute enough to keep his own views veiled. That was the profundity of the game. If someone ignorantly shouted out his real views, he was just asking for scorn from the crowd.’
‘‘This writer always wanted to take a fair-minded stand and write objectively about this incident’s beginning. This doesn’t mean that other people’s vivid depictions were non-objective, inaccurate nonsense. The writer simply wants to try hard to string these diverse viewpoints together like pearls, bring them into focus, and achieve a static view, like the way the sun-before it sets-grasps the whole of the universe. ‘Things will eventually get sorted out,’ anyhow, and ‘the whole thing will be obvious.’ As the writer sat at home, eyes closed, pondering all of this, the uninvited crowd kept interrupting. These people were all swayed by their own emotions. They pulled the chair away while the writer was sitting on it, and brandishing clubs, they intimidated the writer by saying that while he was writing, he had to ‘be practical and realistic,’ ‘be candid,’ and then in a babel of voices, each person poured out his own views, which included a high-level sense of history and responsibility. They endlessly analyzed their superiority and inferiority, their achievements and their shortcomings, from the time of their birth until well into the future. As for the beginning of the incident between X and Q, they skimmed over this, dealing with it at one stroke-or not dealing with it at all. Totally forgot it. Yes, it was a minute, unimportant matter. They had come here to express their own passions. The matter of X and Q was nothing but an excuse that brought them together. In other words, the matter of X and Q was merely a fuse detonating individual passions that had been stored up a long time. After they finished expressing themselves, they started attacking each other.
‘‘The much-admired widow said that Ms. B was ‘a toad lusting after a swan.’ She was ‘an ugly woman who didn’t know herself, who disgusted people with her crazy ideas. Would he (Mr. Q) bother to stare at you?’ She stood up straight and pounded Ms. B’s belly with her arms. ‘You don’t even know what color his eyes are. You just talk nonsense about his eyes being as big as an ox’s. I’ll tell you the truth: His eyes are triangular! You even made up the time of the beginning. It was midnight when he came, and gray piglets were running all over the streets. A hooligan was blowing a whistle. I left my house to go to the toilet and saw this with my own eyes. Even though no one saw me, I couldn’t keep from blushing. Even now as I recall this, I still blush. You told us he came at noon, so your nonsense messed up such a good beginning. You and all egotistical demons ruin all the good things in the world. It’s only because you’re here that those two could take it easy and get along. One after another, you kept talking nonsense, and you’ve completely lost the last little bit of sober reason you might have had. You’ve dragged everyone into the dark abyss, and yet you think you’re witty, you think you’re brilliant, while those two took the advantage, got what they wanted, and were home free a long time ago. You guys have brought an end to the fineness of our generation.’
‘‘Ms. B didn’t chicken out, either. She kept trying to trip the widow with her foot and shouted ‘Down with dictators!’ She stressed that she ‘was born in the spring, the productive season, and so she was diligent and great at logical reasoning.’ She said the widow ‘was unlikely to have any extraordinary sex appeal.’ ‘She’s just jealous, that’s all.’ As she talked, she finally tripped the plump widow, who fell to the ground. The writer had to jump down from the table and intervene.