Color Wolf

My mother had warned me to watch out for color wolves, but I did not believe her. Maybe as a child I had, when tales of the ghosts that walked the hinterlands still had the force to haunt my dreams. But at twenty-four, I thought of myself as a modern girl—a modern girl in a modern world. All that superstition was a part of the old China that we young Chinese had left behind. I no more believed in color wolves than I did in the ghosts of my ancestors. We might sweep their tombs on Qing Ming Jie, but no one under thirty believed that the spirits were really there. We might make nods to tradition, but the old ways had never set roots deep in our hearts.

I was a medical student in Suzhou that summer. The supervisory doctor needed somebody to go to Fujian province to collect some data on patient care in the rural hospitals. He picked me not because he had great faith in me. It was actually just the opposite. Dr. Li had ten medical students under his supervision. Seven were men, which automatically gave them the top slots in Dr. Li’s mind. Of the three women I was the quietest, and this Dr. Li seemed to equate with stupidity. I think he sent me because he saw me as the most expendable.

“This trip will do you good, Zhang Xiaojie,” he told me. “Maybe it will help you find your tongue. A doctor needs one sometimes, you know.”

That only made it sound like punishment to me, but as with a prisoner who has just received his sentence, I didn’t really have a choice.

It would be more dramatic if I could tell you it was my first time to take such a trip, but I had taken trains by myself many times. My hometown in Jiangxi province is about a twelve-hour ride from Suzhou, and twice a year during my undergraduate days I had made the long journey home, usually alone. The trips were typically weary but uneventful and certainly nothing to fear.

I had bought my ticket a few days before I left. The hospital had given me a little money for travel. In one way, it covered the cost; in another it wasn’t nearly enough. As anyone who has traveled by train in China can tell you, the price of the ticket varies by the level of comfort. If you’ve got enough money to get a sleeper berth, you can read for a few hours and then fall asleep and wake up the next morning near the place you’re going. But if you have to spend the minimum, you end up on a hard seat feeling each shake of the train as it snakes its way through the night. The hospital gave me enough money for a hard seat. I didn’t have the money to move up to a sleeper, so I bought the cheap ticket and braced myself for a long night. I’ve had foreign friends tell me that they would never travel this way, but for Chinese students, it is the usual way, and we only dream of the day we can ride in the sleeper.

The train was set to leave at 8:30 in the evening, and I arrived at the station just under an hour before that. Although the sun had nearly set, the June heat had not lifted, and the skin of the people sitting on the ground outside the building glistened with sweat. The guards herded the crowd through the security check, and I felt the warm flesh of so many bodies pressed together and thought of all the germs passing between us and of all the sickness in the world and of how little a doctor could really do to cure it.

The Fujian train came only a few minutes before the departure time, and all the people who had formed a line at the gate made a dash to the platform, knowing that the margin was slim. As I walked along the train toward car number seven, I saw through the window some passengers at rest on their sleeper car beds. I envied them.

The train began to move less than a minute after I boarded. Car number seven was crowded, with every seat taken and the poorest of travelers, seat-less, stranded on the metal floor between cars like a flock of birds with clipped wings. I found the seat on my ticket already taken by a man with weathered skin sleeping with a straw hat in his lap. I tapped him gently on the shoulder, but he did not stir.

“Duibuqi,” I said and shook him with a little more force. “Zhe ge wo de zuowei.”

He opened his eyes and stood up and joined the other lost birds on the metal floor. He departed with eyes downcast and the deference that had been instilled in him since birth.

That was when I first noticed the color wolf. He was in the seat next to mine with a newspaper half-concealing his face. But his eyes were above the paper and fixed on mine, not on the page. They were wider than the average Chinese man’s eyes and somehow darker, so wide and dark that I could see clearly the doubled reflection of myself in them. The sight made me shudder, though I don’t know why. He dropped the paper into his lap and smiled at me—a smile that was more mocking than friendly. When his thin lips parted, the teeth that emerged were oversized and stained from tobacco. I turned away and sat down and tried not to think of him.

Like so many who travel by train in China, I had brought a simple dinner along—a cup of noodles that could be cooked with the hot water available between cars. I got up to fill my cup. So many passengers were eating in the mid-evening that a noodle scent filled the air—strong enough to drive out the days’ sweat and even the waft of cigarette smoke that floated in from the floor between cars.

When I returned to my seat, the color wolf had folded the newspaper on his left thigh, and he appeared to be sleeping. Yet when the noodles had finished cooking and I began to eat, I had the discomfiting sense of being watched. I looked a little closer and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. He was in the same position, with his legs stretched out and his head back and his arms folded. His eyes were closed, but not fully so. There was there narrowest of gaps at the base of both lids. He was watching me through a screen of lashes.

I lost my appetite and only managed to eat half the noodles. Across the aisle, a group of six students were laughing as they played cards. That made me feel safer—to be in a well-lighted place with others nearby. But the color wolf’s eyes stayed on me, burning like a low bulb that begins to hurt if it’s held for too long near the skin.

Aiming for distraction, I took out one of my medical textbooks and tried to read. The words rushed through my brain and left as quickly as they came in, hardly making an impression. I stole a few glances at the color wolf over my book. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, but it was not tucked in and bore a brown stain the size of a small coin beneath the pocket. His light brown pants were stylishly cut but frayed at the bottoms. He wore sandals rather than shoes, and no socks. On each big toe, a few hairs popped out over the leather. He was lean all over, but his bare arms were muscular and showed that he might have surprising strength. His hair was a little long and disheveled, and above his lips a downy mustache had begun to grow.

Within an hour or so, the card game waned, and most of the players began to nap fitfully. The air in the car was heavy, and sleep floated about like a sickness. Soon, I too drifted off and dozed with my hands folded on the open book. I woke not with a start but with the almost imperceptible sense of being touched. The color wolf appeared to be sleeping beside me. His eyes were fully closed now, and his head tilted to the side, so near to me that his hair brushed lightly against my shoulder.

But it was not his hair that alarmed me, not his hair that stirred me from my sleep. Instead, the color wolf rested with his right arm stretched across his waist and his open palm cupping my hip. I tried to shift away from him, but something restrained me. No matter how much I willed myself to move, my body remained motionless. The color wolf opened his eyes and smiled at me—the same smile I had seen on him when I first took my seat. His hand began to move slowly, around and around my hip in ever widening circles and then down the outside of my thigh until it found the hem of my skirt well below the knee. I trembled all over and struggled to shift away, but I could not break the spell. I felt his fingers begin to crawl up the skin of my inner thigh like the damp legs of a spider.

Suddenly, the train violently shook, and the lights flickered on and off. Had we hit something on the track? The train steadied its course, but the shock of it had awakened the passengers, who now looked about with bleary eyes. The color wolf’s hand had stopped high up my thigh, his fingers stilled by the commotion. The old woman sitting across from the color wolf looked at his hand and then into my eyes. Then she turned quickly away and kept her eyes on the floor.

I don’t know if it was the shaking of the train or the shame that I felt under the old woman’s gaze that set me free. I jumped out of my seat, surprised by the strength I had reclaimed.

“Jiuren! Ni zuo shenme!” I shouted. “Stop! What are you doing!”

The card players looked on with moderate curiosity, peering sleepily at what they probably thought was a lover’s squabble. The old woman stared out the window into the featureless dark. The color wolf smiled at me and twitched his fingers on his knee.

I grabbed my bag and took refuge on the metal floor. It would be the longest night I’d ever spend, standing and shaking through the night. But I could not go back there with the color wolf waiting in his lair. Discomfort was a small price to pay for safety.

The man in the straw hat waited for a while and then, seeing that I had no intention to return, reclaimed the seat I’d taken from him. We Chinese are a resourceful people; what one person discards another will surely treasure. And, as everyone knows that color wolves have little taste for aging men, what had he to fear? He had his seat, and I had my safety. We could both consider ourselves happy.

----------------------------------------------------

This is the way I have told the story the few times that I have told it—to my cousin, to my closest friend, to the Englishman who later became my husband. It is the way I usually tell it to myself. It is mostly true but not wholly so.

Maybe memory works this way, taking raw facts and reshaping them in ways that make it a little easier for us to live with ourselves. My mother warned me to watch out for color wolves, but I did not believe her. I do believe in color wolves now. I believe in them because one still lives within me. They cannot be driven out by something so simple as the shake of a train or an old woman’s gaze. And once a color wolf gets inside you he will never come out. He is with me when I see a certain kind of man on the street—a man who has that look in his eyes, a man with a body that is hungry and lean. He is with me when my husband touches me, taking over my husband’s body, taking over me. He is with me in my dreams.

The old woman's eyes could not break the spell, though she surely saw, the only one who knows besides the color wolf and me. And the shame did not come from the woman’s eyes. It comes from within me, from knowing that I did not/could not/would not refuse his touch and that, intermingled with the horror was—and here I must pause for I can hardly think the words—something much too close to wanting to tell the story whole.