Village of Stone Paperback - 2005

Excerpt

I

It all started with a parcel of dried eel. A parcel of dried, salted eel posted by some nameless sender from some unknown address in the Village of Stone.

It is a large marine eel, approximately eighty-five centimetres in length, with the dorsal, rear and tail fins still attached. The tail fin is extraordinarily long. I imagine that the eel must have been prepared in the traditional manner of the Village of Stone, which means that it would have been dried in the sun after being salted with two kilograms of coarse sea salt for each five kilograms of eel.You can still see the scar where the blade of the knife sliced into the eel’s silvery-white belly, before being pulled out again to shear the eel slowly from head to tail, shaping it into a pair of long strips connected at the centre.

Such an enormous eel, I decide,must have been caught during the seventh moon of the lunar calendar, when eels are said to be at their plumpest and most delicious.The eel would first have had its entrails pulled out and then been hung from a north-facing window to dry for the duration of the winter fishing season.When it had hardened to the consistency of a knife blade, some hand – whose hand I know not – must have taken it down from the rafters, parcelled it up and mailed it to a city one thousand eight hundred kilometres away, this city Red and I call home.

As I lay the fishy-smelling package on the kitchen table, Red is standing at my side, watching. Red, my best friend in this city and the one and only man in my life, asks me suspiciously where the parcel is from.

‘The Village of Stone,’ I answer absently.

‘The Village of Stone?’The words seem to perplex Red, as if he were hearing the abstruse syllables of some remote antiquity.

The package is heavy. When I draw the enormous eel from its wrappings and set it on the table, Red freezes in shock.The eel is eerily lifelike.With its monstrous tail protruding upwards, it looks poised to swim away from us at any moment.

And in an instant, the salt scent of the East China Sea and the smell of a Village of Stone typhoon come rushing back to me, as if from the body of the eel. Synapses connect, the floodgates are thrown open, the torrents of memory unleashed.They rush through the tunnels of the past, threatening to flood the earth and blot out the sky.

I spent the first fifteen years of my life in the Village of Stone, but I have left it far behind me. I now live one thousand eight hundred kilometres away, with a man who knows nothing about my past, in a city as diametrically opposed to the Village of Stone as any place could possibly be. It has been years since I corresponded with anyone in the village, and yet now I find myself thinking about it, about the things that happened there and the people who lived there – those whose lives I passed through and whose lives passed through me.

Had it not been for that parcel of dried, salted eel sent from a faraway place, I would never have started to remember those events, all the things that happened in the Village of Stone.

That was how the memories began.