[Guardian][謝曉紅小說英譯] Woman Fish by Dorothy Tse, translated by Nicky Harman

心雪

Woman Fish by Dorothy Tse, translated by Nicky Harman
Summer in the city brings a strange transformation in this short story from Dorothy Tse, Woman Fish

---

    Dorothy Tse, translated by Nicky Harman
    guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 March 2013 13.24 GMT       

---

All that was left of the woman were her smooth, muscular legs' ... a fish eye in close up.
Photograph: Graeme Robertson

He knows his wife will never be able to tell lies again.

All night long, the weary sound of water dripping from the air conditioner, slowly eroding into coral dreams. He wakes from the sleep which bore him like an ocean, and sees the buildings outside, packed cheek to cheek. People squeeze breathlessly through the cracks in the city, looking forward to finding a Christmas tree in the shopping mall, though it's only August. One of the bulbs on its plastic branches has a burnt-out filament, a blind eye amid brilliant illuminations.

Outside the mall, the stagnant air has been beached too long – it feels as if all things have come to an end. People look up and the tight-shut, overcast sky opens its toothless mouth and spatters their faces with rain. He opens his umbrella and the raindrops pelt down on it like deafening bullets. He seals himself inside his house – the thrumming of the downpour extends to every pane of glass.

"It doesn't matter how much I wash my eyes, things still get twisted out of shape until I can't tell what they are. I can feel my brain shrinking like a dried-out sponge. Faraway things are too small to make out." His wife's complaints had been fragments of countless lies floating around in his head, fragments he hadn't been able to reassemble into a complete picture. One morning he realised his wife's sleek, pale head was completely without hair. Her mouth was huge, protruding like a ship cleaving the still waters of the sea. Her eyes had slipped to the sides of her face. Her breasts were two melting glaciers, slowly sinking into her body. When she walked naked towards him, all that was left of the woman were her smooth, muscular legs. Apart from that, she had transformed completely into a fish.

He used to wake from watery dreams to the whitish, other-worldly light from the computer screen. She sat at the keyboard, joyfully making collages of photographs for some popular magazine to publish with the news stories she concocted from his strange, early-morning dreams. He knew then why he could always smell the odour of dreams in the grave faces of the television newsreaders, in the front-page banner headlines.

Every morning, as she gulped down a can of viscous, green slimming shake, his wife used to say with a shrug "It's just a pack of lies". But he kept searching her photographs for the river of his dreams, a river of surreal blue which enveloped all that had disappeared on land. He was looking for his dead mother, her white hair spread across her shoulders, walking with the dog which died when he was 13 years old. The dog's pale-gold eyes narrow to a slit, then open again, round as walnuts. An ice lolly in red, green and blue is wedged in the coral reef, and a shoal of fish swims over a floor tiled in a diamond pattern. The broken clock tower which once stood on the jetty floats in the river, shattering the water into innumerable wavelets as it rocks and sways.

But the rivers in his wife's collages were often murky. A figure squatting at the water's edge looking round, eyes bulging like a frog, pulling a fishing net, a mesh of eyes from its unfathomable depths and shaking out discarded tyres, dead phones, dirty needles, lumpy, unravelling sweaters, the maimed limbs of some animal with four fingers (possibly human) – all ready for recycling into a rainstorm to drench the earth with a fantastic whispering, re-entering the world's flesh through the trees, the beasts and human skin.

Some sounds are lost forever. He will never hear his wife tapping at the computer again. She never sits on the sofa, looking down at her fingernails as she slowly paints on layer after layer of scarlet varnish, looking up to tell him some invented story about a helicopter or a cat. Now his wife's rounded shadow rarely slants across the window pane – outside the city is gradually getting colder. Her ice-cold hands have shrunk to little fins, which will never again touch things on dry land.

Sometimes, she soaks herself in the bathtub, lying back to reveal her pasty fish's belly. He sees long, slender legs stretching from her belly, muscles running up her thighs towards spiralling genitalia. Sometimes they make love. His wife's huge mouth opens and shuts, sending out bubbles with a fishy smell which fill the room. He shuts his eyes – he can no longer distinguish ecstasy from anguish in his wife's shrill gasps.

Hidden eyes in the corridor open slowly to reveal a razor-sharp gaze. One narrow evening he notices them on a dried-out city street, making ripples on his wife's skin. They walk into their usual Japanese restaurant and the chef takes a quick look at his wife, then silently takes a slab of dark red flesh from a glass shelf covered in gutted fish. The chef throws the chunk down on to the white counter. His eyes fix on the gleaming silver knife in his hand, then flick towards her. He presses the blade down into flesh. There is an odd, sharp hiss as he slits it open. Her lips part, but no sound comes out from between her sharply-pointed teeth. Her round eyes pop wide, revealing black centres buried in the silver surround.

He imagines waking from a nightmare to find his wife has gone out through the unlocked door alone, losing herself in the city's lawless back streets, ending up auctioned off in an underground seafood restaurant. Or maybe she'll be spotted by pimps and installed as a diversion in a brothel. He sees his wife flattened out, studded with glinting light bulbs on an enormous poster. Just one bulb has blown and the filament sticks in his head, the scene before him gradually fading into darkness.

His wife has stopped eating. He fills a huge fish tank for her and sets it up in the middle of the sitting room. When she puts her head into it, he hears a gurgling sound and a stream of bubbles rises to the surface. But most of the time she sits motionless on a chair in front of the picture of a river hanging on the wall. In her eyes a torrent of ambiguous colour surges past, gradually narrowing until it vanishes into transparency.

All night long he can hear the waters pulling back. He tries making another map of the city in his head and tracing the course of the river. Driving round the outskirts they can't find where it starts. A river flows in blue paint on the wooden hoardings which enclose the city's waterways. Behind the boards he can hear machines dumping silt.

The car shoots across a collapsing bridge. Distant factory chimneys belch thick smoke like fiery, inverted rockets. The ground splits and cracks into fissures as enigmatic as oracle bones. His lungs swell silently until they almost burst. He does not know if they have arrived at the river, but he can smell an appalling stench. The humidity keeps rising and his wife, overcome with excitement, beats her body against the car door handle – a slapping sound on the glass.





• Dorothy Tse's short story collection Snow and Shadow, translated by Nicky Harman, will be published by Muse Books later this year

• Supported by the national lottery through Arts Council England

---

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ ... -harman-short-story