I screamed just to draw the attention of others. My voice resounded in the air. A guy squatting on the ground smashing a jar remained indifferent to my scream. I fixed my eyes upon him, only to realize that the whole street was empty, and not even one soul was watching me. An old lady stretched out her head to empty a basin of dirty water. She didn’t even see me. There must have been some kind of mistake. Residents in a city had never seen such an animal. They pretended not to notice it just because they were not used to it and they did not want to admit it. What would happen if they finally recognized the undeniable fact and if I made public the magnificence of my sitting on the back of a camel?
It had disappeared however. According to my daughter, I was no more than a bundle of rags with a kind of flamboyant character. Therefore, I decided to look for it. I had a bronze mirror, an heirloom from my grandma who told me that I could see a fire dragon at the very center of the mirror. I decided to go far away with the mirror. I still remembered that the camel had gotten up as soon as my son told it that the ground was dirty. It was such an obedient beast. But when I told this to my third daughter, she replied that I was finishing a dream. She told me that I had said the same thing repeatedly ten years ago. I was also making a strange sign with my hands (she tried to mimic the sign for me). She also told me that while I was talking, there appeared on the wall behind me a red torch, shining and dazzling. I was totally confused by what she said. Her specialty was to mess things up, thus making people desperate.
At midnight on the third, I heard a tricycle passing my door. At the moment, my sick ear was running pus. I pulled out the cotton ball, fearing that I had heard wrong. Pus dripped onto my left shoulder.
“Don’t turn on the light, or the pigeon will be scared,” my son warned me. I could see his apelike arms swinging through the air. He was playing at Chinese boxing, while mumbling about the crazy spiders that were running rampant.
There was a passenger on the tricycle. It was a short man with one leg. On his chin there was a big tumor. I could hear his coughing from afar. Once that tricycle passed underneath the grape trellis, leaving behind an extremely long shadow. It was simply too troublesome to move out of the house. It was not worthwhile to move those broken things which had no value at all. (In the mess, I threw away a kettle.) But nobody was willing to consider such a serious matter as the camel. When I was on the street, I almost broke my vocal cords from shouting. I saw only some very small images sliding by. They could have been some tricks of the sun, not even images. Pedestrians in the distance were as straight as poles.
My family members indulged in the foolish deed of feeding pigeons. At midnight disturbed pigeons would shrill as if they wanted to take the soul out of me. The whole house was littered with their excrement. Sometimes, they even sneaked into the wardrobe, attempting a terrorist attack. When I inquired about the pigeons during the day, everyone acted like a gentleman and denied their existence with a serious face. Pigeons? Where are the pigeons from? Then they smiled with contempt. By the foot of the guy my third daughter seduced, there lay a big gunnysack. Something was moving inside. I certainly knew what it was, but I attempted to stamp on it pretending not to know what animal was in there.
Before I could raise my foot, I was pushed to the ground by my son. They were birds of a feather. Approaching my ear, he shouted, as if I were deaf: “There are red rabbits in the wilderness. A mosquito is waving. Go there, it suits you.”
To him, I was out of date, no more than “something old and broken” at home. My son understood me. When he was twelve, he got a big mirror and placed it in front of my bed, saying in a serious tone: “Mama, what a magnificent son is rising up inside you!” I felt joyful though I knew he was lying, because what he said was exactly what I was thinking. “This is not a lie. When she was young, there must have been a tremendous explosion in her mind, which left fatal scars. What reason do we have, as her offspring, to tease her? Who hasn’t chased a leaf, a beam of sunshine? How can we stand the idea of exposing her last hope just for that and turning her into a beggar? Mother now is as weak as a baby. We have to treat her dearly.” He was so full of righteous indignation that his eyes were filled with tears. Finally, he declared that he would “firmly share sorrow and worry with old mom” and “protect her fragmentary soul.” Later on, my third daughter told me that it was my son who had “instigated” the fleeing of the camel. At dawn, he “threw stones” at the back of the beast. But I had many doubts about this, because she wore a challenging expression.
Every evening, the guy seduced by my third daughter swaggered in, his gunnysack on his back, waiting for the fall of darkness. Before the sky darkened, the couple was extremely busy. Putting on their big-mouthed masks, they ran in and out, back and forth several times. My third daughter was hot tempered, and she’d been afflicted with vain hopes ever since youth. However, this was the first instance of such publicizing. The most annoying thing was that my son might also have been in cahoots with them. I was determined to give them a blow. I hid in the wardrobe, waiting for that guy to release the pigeon. As soon as the little thing flew into the wardrobe, I grabbed it and broke its neck, then I threw the bloody body outside before going back to my bed. The two set up wild shrieks and howls the whole night.
The next morning, though their eyes looked like walnuts, they said to me indifferently: “Mother, such gloomy weather is not good for planting vegetables.”
Holding back my pleasure, I replied: “Such weather is no good. I did not sleep deeply, so I feel very tired. I saw my camel hiding in a bathroom, eating the cement on the ground.”
“I heard,” the guy said in a rush, because my third daughter had given him a kick in secret. “In the gunnysack there’s an animal that is harmful to the health. This is only a wild guess. In fact, nobody can tell if there is anything inside the bag. Therefore, illusions occur, gossip follows, unfair criticism comes…” He stopped short as my third daughter was ordering him to “scram.” She complained that his mouth “stinks”; it was caused by “eating rotten stuff the whole year round.”
In those days when I set out to look for the camel, my sister ran away with a geomancer. That guy had only half of a real body. At night, I saw him disconnect the other half, while talking to me offhandedly: “As a matter of fact, half is enough.” When he lay down, he looked as if chopped in half with a knife. “Some kind of insect has grown on my body. They have eaten up the other half. The whole process was carried out without my knowing it.”
Before the elopement, my sister and I squatted in the kitchen, discussing the series of strange things that had happened in the corridor. Blushing, she told me that she had seen a bloody rooster pecking the wood on the doorframe when she opened the door to the corridor early in the morning of the thirtieth. Headless nuns streamed past. “They looked full of thoughts. I could see that from their chests.” While talking, she glanced at me in fear that I did not believe her. The incident happened one midnight. I opened the door to the corridor with a yawn, and immediately I realized that something had happened. Every door was tightly closed, yet the corridor was swept by beams of electric light, as if people were pointing their flashlights from above. This was very absurd. The north wind was blowing outside. A thin man came toward me.
“That’s your son.” My sister tugged the corner of my clothes with excitement. “I’m instructing him to cultivate another kind of lifestyle. Be careful, be careful, don’t bump him. This is a successful try. Of course, I have to teach him how to wipe his rear end. I didn’t see much hope at the beginning.”