Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (21 page)

“Run along,” he said. “Go home. I want to be alone now.”

His nephew shuffled to his feet without protest. Suddenly he looked as expressionless as always, excepting the brief fever of his last speech. He gazed at length around the room, as if he had forgotten where the door was, and then said in a slight whine:

“Uncle! When will you be speaking with the Head Censor?”

Oh heavens, not again! Requests, petitions, mumbling, sniveling, muting of conversations as I come through the door, vanishing around corners, muttering behind my back, tugging at my sleeves —

“The Head Censor does not visit me!” he answered sharply.

“But couldn't you … for old times' sake …”

Suddenly Wu's blood boiled in his veins.

“Out!” he roared. “Scram!”

His nephew left; Wu did not see him out. He merely watched the young man's hunched back totter down the hall, and shook his head: how old he looks! At thirty-one I looked my thirty-one years, but I aged differently. There was a powerful current of youth, and a powerful current of old age surging against it, and their waters mixed with a roar, like a dam bursting. But him — he's a ditch full of dried-up mud.

He saw this image with absolute clarity, but he did not think
it, and if he had had to describe his nephew's aging, he would not have found the word
water,
nor the word
ditch,
nor the word
current.

When Wu entered the years of River (also known by the flowery name “midday mountain time,” signifying a man's most powerful age, from forty to fifty), he created and discovered things with great ease. He was singularly ambitious and, thanks to his years in the monastery, remarkably disciplined. His inventiveness seemed bottomless.

The annual tradition of preparing a completely new chicken dish in honor of the emperor's birthday began at this time and for many years seemed completely unproblematic. He felt sure that he would have new ideas as long as he lived, and that it would always be in his power to create something that did not yet exist. Wu never presented his guests with the pinnacle of his art at any particular time. In the fermenting abundance of his inspiration, he offered one of many possible versions. He saw a geyser of creation inside himself, an inexhaustible source of innovation.

At first he had no inkling that
Wu's new chicken
would become a custom the whole empire would make its business. He did not even know that this era — this court, this land, this configuration of planets — worshiped tradition and misused it as a defense against its own unpredictability. Time hurtles forward, changes howl furiously at the boundaries of existence, tatters of the ages whirl in the winter wind, but one thing remains certain: year in, year out, on the emperor's birthday, dignitaries from all seven provinces gather to taste the new chicken of Master Wu.

Chicken was as integral to the emperor's birthday as the emperor himself. A ritual had developed around the tasting. Understandably, it was a great honor. The number of guests varied over the years, but had finally stabilized at twenty-two of the most powerful, who on that day were permitted only tepid water for
breakfast, whom the heavens forbade to take lunch, and who, with the rising of the tiny autumn evening star, would finally receive a deep bowl containing five or six morsels of the new chicken. — Wu sometimes wondered whether he had succeeded in educating even one true gourmet who would esteem his art as only an expert could. Certainly he had terrorized those twenty-two people to such an extent that they slavered at the sight of the meal and did not speak until they had swallowed it.

For years Wu had no idea that, in addition to fame, this custom would earn him the title of chamberlain (to use Zenoic language), then later high chamberlain, and finally a nebulous position as one of the most powerful men in the empire, whose choleric shrieks over his skillets decided the fate of the court more surely than did any government petition.

Even Wu himself could not pinpoint when he had first lost his certainty that this year's recipe was completely different from the last. Perhaps it was the chicken with sesame, nine years ago. The sesame was in and of itself nothing novel. Its originality resided elsewhere: from the moment it hatched, the fledgling was fed a special mixture of herbs and grains soaked in hot infusions. It was incredibly ingenious and horrendously laborious, but even so, the result did not have a particularly innovative taste. The twenty-two guests consumed their portions with no less enthusiasm than before, which relieved Wu somewhat, while arousing in him an ill-focused feeling of contempt.

After all, there had been years that were incomparably better, more inventive, more distinctive. For instance, the clerical election year, when he had found a truly exceptional flavoring, known ever since as
I mourn you, lost love, my betrothed Li.

(A note: these names were not Wu's doing; it was the emperor's literary office that thought them up, or more accurately classified them according to a classical key. The betrothed Li came from a fable, probably connected in some complicated way with the ruler's ancestry and thus especially in favor. But Wu himself did not know the story; it did not interest him and he had certainly never
mourned her.)

Li
owed her fame primarily to the fact that she was made from chickens not raised in their land. Wu had imported them from the south. Their long necks gave them a foreign air, true, but above all it was the masterly work Wu had done on them.

En route, several of Wu's chickens had expired from the tremendous heat. When he discovered this, a fearful rage overcame him, and he nearly beat to death the two laggards sauntering alongside the wagon. He was around fifty at the time, quick-tempered and quite brutal. However, after incalculable effort, hours suffering over the slow flame of enlightenment, he realized how to make use of the chickens' slightly spoiled tinge, and created a dramatically unusual dish.

It was then he learned the secret that as a deviation from the norm, a mistake serves just as well as anything. For a time he even flung himself into new experiments involving deliberately spoiled ingredients, and it must be said that, despite the morbid domain, he made some interesting discoveries.

Equally splendid was the year of the princess's engagement, when he had mixed the meat with the sweetly pungent juices of a local tree and made what was almost a dessert; and then the year (he could not remember which) when he froze the chicken until the pieces tinkled delicately in the bowls; and the year of chicken mousse whipped into a stormcloud. There were years when all he had to do was concentrate and an idea came as quickly as a cringing servant handing him a fork.

But for four years now his inspiration had lain mute. Five, actually, since the celebration was just around the corner. In five years he had not managed to find a new flavor.

There were moments when Wu thought he could not bear his impotence anymore. He did not give in to despair, because he was foremost a man of battle, but for the first time he was faced with the very worst: battle with the nonexistent. If he had seen a way forward, he would have followed it till he dropped, but for five years now it seemed he would drop right where he stood.

Many a time he had been willing to believe that the circle had closed, that there were no new flavors to find. Incidentally, there was a sect of astrologers, right in the palace, trumpeting the coming end of the world, “once all the words have been said,” but the attitude toward them was one of silent reserve.

Wu still lived in the hope that once more the circle would break, that he would resist the grip of the nonexistent and find an herb that no mortal had ever tasted. He would get hold of something banal, something right in everyone's view, but hidden by the magic of its obviousness. Then the source would be forced to yield and to gush forth from the center of its being. But the celebration was approaching, and as the sun rose he would stand over a pile of dirty bowls and then fall reluctantly into the fitful sleep of the elderly, of which he rarely remembered a thing.

There was a certain comfort in the fact that he did not really have to expend the effort. He knew full well that not one of the guests had a gustatory memory that could span thirty-six years.

Over time Wu had realized that it was he who was abnormal. But he had not yet fathomed that aside from his exceptional culinary imagination, he was a rather ordinary person. His tongue was a miraculous floating island in a sea of superficial education, unrefined sensibility, and quite unexceptional intelligence. He was like those feeble-minded twins from Košice who can multiply five-digit numbers in their heads but will never understand how a toilet flushes. Or — going further back in history! — like the Paris garage attendant who speaks thirty languages fluently but only reads comics and invoices, because his spirit reaches no farther than the metal grating of his garage. — Wu knew that he could offer any of the last thirty-five chickens without anybody recognizing them, but that option still seemed impermissible.

All it took to make him soak his deathbed in sweat was to remember how last year he had stood all day in the Meadow Pavilion, staring for hours into the water. The low, heavy sky turned gray toward night, and the raging river carried with it wrecks, carcasses, beaten trees, and drooping clusters of water narcissus.

Here is how this ignoble story unfolded. He had announced chicken stuffed with stalks of river greens, but the day before the celebration the river flooded and the plans had to be abandoned. Everyone understood, and no one even raised an eyebrow. Wu alone knew why specifically river greens, which, incidentally, were sour and unpalatable. Eight days before — eight days in which he had depopulated the hen-house, like Herod, slaughtering a generation of chickens — a certain foreigner had come uninvited to the court. More precisely, it was a suspicious-looking friend of his nephew's, most likely in flight from some arm of the law, who in the dead of night had begged Wu for shelter. He said that floods had begun on the Five Rivers and that whole villages had fled wailing into the mountains. Early the next morning he disappeared without a goodbye and no one ever saw him again.

Wu had lived long enough to know how to seize the day. With considered trepidation, he announced his river-greens plan the morning after the boy took off. Then there was no alternative but to wait. He did not know who would come out on top, he or time.

He stood for hours, eyes fixed on the horizon. For the first time in his life he burned the porridge. He did not speak for four days.

At least the heavens granted him this one belated favor. The flood came a day early. The celebration ground to a halt, the whole court was thrown into terror, an evacuation was planned. On a day of impatient surrogate celebration, Wu left the palace early and spent the whole day by himself in the Meadow Pavilion, until the empress herself sent a message, telling him to forget about the stupid chicken and to come make her a handful of beer-roasted almonds.

One such memory is more than enough, and the year was again mercilessly drawing toward autumn. The festivities began tomorrow. There was nowhere to call for help. Wu's “where” — more than just a place inside him — had vanished with the same inaudible treachery as his inventiveness.

When Wu was very young, he had been a large hungry container the whole world poured itself into. Later (around fifty,
when he was proudest, fiercest, and also unexpectedly powerful, which took some getting used to) he had formed the impression that he and the world were equal partners. It was a matter of his will what and whom he opened up to, and he would take the first move, extending his hand, accepting things rationally and voluntarily. But now the end had come. There was nothing to contain. He had had what there was to have. He was living off himself alone. The world's nozzle had gradually shut off. These days no one gave him anything at all.

His outside world had narrowed to the smallest possible dimensions, the mere shell of a corporeal body which moved with him through space. But recently even this had been further constrained. He never left the kitchen, banquet hall, and the two adjoining corridors. In the day as he slept, at night as he paced from corner to corner like a wild beast, he was plagued by the imminence of his fate. Day after day, time lost its patience. The world was as cramped as a small shoe. In addition, Wu was extremely nearsighted, although no one even suspected it, and thus he had learned to live in the immediate, ever more strictly attuned only to what was within his reach.

They had already painted the great staircase vermilion in honor of the emperor's birthday. Wu locked the kitchen and transferred the burden of daily work onto his staff. Once or twice he sent out for spices. He had them bring large quantities of ice. He requested a bucket of river sand and a tiny vessel of white ointment used only for cosmetic purposes.

In the final three days nobody saw him. A cloud of black smoke would occasionally pour from his windows, and then a cloud of white smoke. Bowls were frequently heard smashing against the wall.