Page 141 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Years earlier, Ms. Wen had looked forward to this kind of exercise. She had
looked forward to being in a large building of uncertain design and groping her
way into a strange room. But this had come about only in her old age. She had
now done this many times. The more she exercised, the more the building
expanded—that is, there were more and more strange rooms and floors. It was
almost impossible to figure out which room or floor one was in, or where the
corridor led, or where the entrance could be found. Once, she had groped her
way to the end of a corridor. As she hesitated to take the next step for fear of
stepping into emptiness and falling, the corridor turned again. And so she
involuntarily entered a windowless room that was terribly small—only one
square meter. The moment someone closed the door behind her, it became
unbearably stuffy. She wanted to leave, but the more she struggled, the smaller

the room became. The four walls pressed in on her, and she dozed off in terror.
She slept standing. Finally, at dawn, she heard the voice from the tape recorder
say, “This room is in the southwest corner of the seventh floor. It’s a storeroom.”
Just then, Ms. Wen discovered that she was standing in the corridor; on her right
was the staircase going down.
There was no elevator in this building; Ms. Wen found it exciting to climb the
stairs late at night. Once, she recalled, she had alternately climbed and rested
until at last she had climbed twenty-five stories. The twenty-fifth was apparently
the top floor; the corridor extended in all directions. It was like a gigantic tower.
The faint light glimmering above seemed about to be extinguished. When she
steeled herself to open the door to the roof garden so that she could go outside
and look around, she found that there was no roof garden. Instead, there was a
staircase continuing to go up. A little afraid, she closed the door and turned
around, intending to go down the stairs. But she couldn’t find the down staircase.
No matter which direction she took, when she reached the end of the corridor,
she came to the up staircase, as though being forced to continue to climb up. Ms.

Wen sat down on the wooden bench in the corridor to nap for a while. A noise
awakened her: someone was coming down the stairs with slow, heavy steps. It
was an old man, wearing a tartan duckbill cap. He walked over to her, and
looking into her eyes, he said, “It’s always heartwarming to run into old friends
in foreign countries.” She knew she had answered him, but she didn’t remember
what she had said. They walked to the end of the corridor, and as they rounded a
corner, they exited the building. Ms. Wen looked back. The only thing behind
her was an average-size six-story concrete building. The roof was slanted and
covered with ornamental tiles. The old man left in a taxi. Ms. Wen wanted to go
back inside and look around, but someone had closed the main door and was
locking it from the inside.
That building was on the same street as her home: it was a place for senior