Silk of Sins by Christina Janousek
Young Zhi Zhou was roaming the hilly countryside of his village one balmy Sunday afternoon. From afar, the twelve-year-old proudly admired the just completed construction of the Ivory Wall. It was his first great accomplishment in which he was allowed to participate together with his and other families. This fortress-like structure far surpassed the Great Wall of China in its defensive function and had become indispensable after months of foreign looting attempts. Zhi's people were preached to daily about the virtues of thrift and renunciation of extravagance, and he dutifully wrote them down in his red diary. However, the ostentatiousness of the wall with its net-like, finely branched patterns and its robust threads dangling from the battlements seemed to be part of the deterrent design. It was as if it simultaneously entranced and captivated the onlooking attacker with its sublime beauty to delay if not completely thwart a potential invasion. In fact—Zhi now had to admit to himself—he had never noticed this sublime and delicate nature up close. What did it stem from? A feeling? A lack thereof? Something even greater beyond comprehension? He waited a while until the last workers, who had been frolicking on the new wall, had left. He had seen them happily lifting their children into the air, so that one day, they too could marvel at its magnificence and possibly expand it across borders.
When the wall was in its final stages of construction, the ingenious Zhi had learned a few secret routes that led him to the “Heart of the Wall”. At least that is what the oldest and wisest man of today's China, Feng Tse, had referred to it one time. He was rumored to be the last descendant of one of the rulers of the Western Zhou Dynasty, which had produced great thinkers such as Confucius. Feng, who hardly spoke in riddles, was doomed to take this secret to his grave, because before Zhi could confront him, he had already departed this life. At that time, it was the beginning of April in the Year of the Snake, Feng had announced that the summer monsoon would occur a month earlier. Even the wild cherry blossoms that sprouted around this time and were the only ones to be found throughout China were to experience a decline.
Although this was truly the case and Feng secretly represented a greater authority figure for Zhi than his parents had been for him, let alone would ever be, he dismissed the old man's words as senility and did not give them any further credence. Not even Feng’s wife, Li, owner of a silk plantation and head of a small handicraft workshop she had founded with Feng years ago, could get a word out of the now frail man. Feng had increasingly, and inexplicably for that matter, turned his back on her and the rest of the people since the beginning of the looting attempts. (Occasionally, Zhi’s parents would joke that the invaders might be 'new' Huns or Uighurs who were rebelling against the Chinese state.) It was as if all that he had learned and taught with conviction had become void, and as if, despite his one hundred and eight years, he had not so much succumbed to his infirmity as suffered a derangement from which he could not recover.
When Zhi finally entered the wall, he counted off the battlements with each step he took. This served as a guide for him to get to the Heart of the Wall as quickly as possible. The path always followed the same precise, pentagon-like pattern, which became smaller and smaller and finally lost itself into the depths, similar to a fear hole of medieval European castles serving as a prison. This time, however, Zhi noticed that the workers had already carried away the ladder. He almost changed his mind and returned home, when he suddenly noticed a slithering thread hanging loosely from the outer edge of the hole, snaking its way into the ever unusually brighter depths.
“Never ever will this thread be able to support my weight. Even if it does, it might be so worn out that it will tear when I eventually climb up again,” Zhi thought hesitatingly. He reached for the thread, immediately felt its slickness, and tugged at it vigorously to test its steadfastness. No matter with what force he jerked and pulled at it, it would not tear. Just out of spite, he lastly decided to put his pocketknife to use, a present his father had given him nearly a year ago for his eleventh birthday. Before any friction could occur, the tip of the knife broke off and shattered into little pieces. The thread, on the other hand, remained completely unharmed, not even a tiny scratch had come of it. At that moment, a sound like wind chimes rang out. But at the same time, it seemed as if it had not been created for the human ear.
“Am I the producer of these sounds?” Zhi pondered intrigued, flattering himself. He thought that he was using the knife to tune the thread, just as one tunes a guitar. Zhi couldn't help but grab the thread and scramble down into the depths. With each increasing movement he created more vibrations, which a being within his grasp seemed to follow, because after only a few seconds, Zhi collided with someone else’s head.
Thread by thread I weave along,
my silk is beyond what one calls strong,
neither iron, nor steal can break my will,
to call my work ivory makes me ill,
to think that the silk moth produces upmarket clothing gives me chills,
in my more than hundred and eight years I’ve seen the world with my own eight eyes,
my silk was once fought for at a high price,
even worn as armor on battlefields and perfect for disguise,
without it the Chinese Silk Roads would have suffered a great demise,
and yet, some still know the secret of where my silk lies,
but your folk takes credit for the worldwide nets I create,
they fear me, but depend on me, and so they hate,
what they cannot possess themselves.
But you, young Zhi, have seen my work from afar,
I heard your instincts, having led you to the hole left ajar,
tell me, what is it that makes your kind trust me less and less each year,
that they unavailingly try to keep me prisoner in my own net here?
Befuddled by the fact that this creature—one of a kind whose existence he had not known of until now—knew the boy’s name and could speak, Zhi accidentally let go of the thread, he was so caught off guard. But the creature felt the vibration just in time and spoke to Zhi: “Hold on tight to my stomach and pull on the tip of this new thread.”
Zhi did as he was told, even if he applied a little too much force in his panic so that the creature writhed slightly. In an instant, Zhi was wrapped in a cocoon of that even more iridescent thread. Like a roll-down yo-yo, Zhi landed unharmed in the hole, the place where construction of the wall had begun. It took him a while to realize that, as he hardly recognized the surroundings. Everywhere he looked, he saw carefully stacked silk drafts and 3D models of the most beautiful buildings in all architectural styles known to mankind. Until now, he had only known them from photographs. Amongst those were mainly government buildings such as the Pentagon, the Duma, or the British House of Commons.
“What are you? Did you really design and create all this? But how? I laid brick by brick with my own two hands,” Zhi replied aghast, stretching his hands that were still stained with clay and cement mortar as if to prove it. The creature smiled warmly. She was touched by the fact that the somewhat naïve boy had never seen a spider, despite his love of nature, his adventurousness and modern technology such as the internet.
“I am what your kind would call a spider. And yes, it is true, to this day, the sweat and sweet blood you poured into the wall cling to me and to my thread. Who do you believe tended to your wounds when you were fast asleep? But after you and all the other families went home after the work was completed in your minds, I had to reposition almost every brick for the sake of statics. What you call mortar and cement has indeed been mixed in through my silk. After many a person found out about it, but wanted to keep the secret for their agenda, I was driven all the harder to produce silk as quickly as possible as to not raise any suspicion. However, I couldn't always deliver in the time it was requested, since my glands had to recover from the excessive production first. The highly esteemed Li, the owner of the silk plantations, who offers her textiles on the international market at any price and is in competition with other renown silk suppliers, also secretly exerts pressure on me and occasionally threatens to tear the silk from my body. There is no point in me rebelling against all of this because I, who descend from the very first family of arachnids that ever set foot on this planet, am the last one of my kind. Yet, the other spiders who discard me as merely a subspecies abandoned me and therefore do not want to form alliances. It seems to me that they fear me even more than humans generally fear spiders,” the spider sighed with a touch of resignation and sorrow.
Zhi looked at the spider thoughtfully. Could this secret have precipitated Feng’s death? Was the silk what lured all the intruders, foreign and domestic alike, to his village? Did his parents know about these circumstances? Would they deny the spider’s existence? Was there more that the spider withheld from him to fit her narrative? The spider had already felt the vibration of Zhi’s vacillating thoughts, “I can sense you are full of doubts, but you Zhi Zhou, who is even named after my kind, deep down know that if I wanted to harm you, I could already have done so effortlessly.” Zhi admired the spider’s confidence, practicality and rhetorical persuasiveness, traits that were indispensable for a great leader, so he was taught. Due to her youthful and timeless grace, he would never have estimated her to be over a hundred years old. He promised the spider to guard the secret like his life depended upon it. Still, he couldn't shake off the thought that she had another concern at heart. It was as if now he too could feel her vibrations. Or was it rather that the spider-like abilities had already rubbed off on him and compromised his humanity?
As if to tell Zhi that his doubts were unjustified, the spider suddenly produced another thread. But unlike the one she had used for transport or craft, this one was close to invisible, and it took Zhi a moment to figure out what the spider tried to hand to him. “It is the only thread that I do not produce in mass, it is basically the only one. As long as it is with you, we shall be connected, without you leaving any traces. Your keeping it will give me strength to create more passionately and beautifully,” the spider uttered. Highly honored by what Zhi assumed was a gesture of partnership and an enriching business deal, he pressed the thread to his heart and returned home.
On the first of May, it was Zhi’s thirteenth birthday, the wall was officially opened with great parades and was accessible to every Chinese citizen, honoring the workers that made the country’s economy, industry, and society go around. In fact, Zhi's village was the one that could provide the greatest economic growth internationally in the first half of the year, and all the workers were granted a special privilege. So it happened that Zhi received a rather unusual birthday present from his parents—an eight-day trip abroad to a country of his choice. He had never been outside of China, and since he wanted to stay somewhat connected to what reminded him of the spider, he decided to pay a visit to his grandparents in Northern California who had moved there in the 1980s. The first couple of days Zhi used the spider’s thread to communicate with her, even initiating the conversation, feeling homesick. Through it, the spider too felt the calming breeze from the most northern tip of the California coast as if she were present herself. Even though the two were miles apart, they ironically had never felt as close as they did now, while she exchanged her new design ideas with Zhi which made the latter even more euphoric and zealous. Moments like these, moments of reciprocation and fondness, were balm for their souls, so much so that Zhi felt that he and the spider expanded the wall by only applying their thoughts.
After Zhi had acclimatized a bit and survived the worst of the jetlag, he asked his grandparents with great curiosity about the hut, fringed by groves, that he had spotted on the cliff. “It’s not just a hut. According to its owner, it is a slaughterhouse. Yet, I have neither seen or heard him slaughter, nor have I witnessed the cry the animals make the moment the hatchet falls. Every year, this man named Octave T., a retired politician, who is younger than his appearance would indicate and who is a former secretary of state for foreign affairs from France, seems to make a literal pilgrimage here. With each time he weighs only half as much as the year before. Still, he is indefatigable. I also did some research on the house itself—and had some done unofficially—you won't even find anyone gossip about it. Besides, would a slaughterhouse not have this distinct iron-like smell? As a former butcher in China, I would know. Even if he had used bleach, one would still be able to discern that significant stench,” the grandmother confided to Zhi.
As Zhi’s stay in California was gradually coming to an end, his need to scout the hut grew. But he felt an untamable urge not to let the spider notice this under any circumstances. He wanted to ask his grandfather to accompany him, but as he was working at the hospital, there was already a shortage of staff and now the new nurses were also absent, there was no need for Zhi to further pursue his intentions. Every time he felt the thought of the hut sprouting up in him and it was time again to contact the spider via the thread, he tried, by intensely forcing himself, to think of something else or to change his attitude towards his grandmother's report, thus trying to conceal his curiosity as indifference and to manipulate the vibrations by all means. Nevertheless, he could not suppress them completely. On the day before Zhi’s departure, he snuck out to the cliff. After having reached the hut, he peered through the glassless windows. From the frame overgrown with thick moss, small protruding and pupil-like circles suddenly peeped out in a multitude. Had someone beaten him to it? Maybe, Zhi thought without a hint of fear, Octave is having his hut surveyed, perhaps even by the men his grandmother had authorized which indicated that she was having her grandson watched as well. But almost disappointedly, he found out that these pairs of ‘eyes’, that seemed to be able to pierce the darkest shadows that lay thickest upon a little grass patch in front of a rock, belonged merely to a butterfly, applying its not so conspicuous camouflage technique. It was even more unspectacular than his grandmother's descriptions had led him to believe. Secretly, he had hoped for a sign of something unusual, something out of place or at least the presence of this infamous Octave. His grandmother had probably also exaggerated her statement that Octave’s regular visits to the hut were encouraging his slow decline. With her husband being on medical conferences all the time, solitude must have stimulated her imagination, and facilitated her need for conversation material that would satiate her for the rest of the week.
What a washout! Zhi imagined how much he and the spider would laugh at this incident after his return to the wall. For a moment, he even regretted having left her. He was just about to give her a certain degree of anticipation, already aiming for the thread, when the unimaginable happened. It tore within a split second! Yet, Zhi could not determine the following: Did this suddenly appearing and beguiling resonance, a multiplicity of the same octave-like-frequencies, yet also a euphony so miraculously unique, result from the rupture of the thread? Or did the crack make him much more receptive to new, even better sounds that he had been exposed to eight days ago?
Come along, come, and see,
what you are meant to be,
let go off all those strings too weak for thee,
for they will only make you stumble,
false are those who are humble,
born for consumption is what you must be,
better to always be wary,
than to constantly worry,
cabals, not cannibals,
male not meal,
lack of knowledge shall not kill our appeal,
the hourglass-mark for which we are distinct,
is truly visible for those who are convinced,
one has already changed his name to fit our mark’s shape, correctly led,
unable to get the consonant frequency out of his head,
yet we can tell, the eight-day difference between her and us is like an octave instead,
do not be caught in the Wall Spider’s thread!
It was not one, but several voices that enthralled Zhi. But unlike the delicacy of the Wall-Spider’s tone, which seemed to be less aimed at external or theatrical effects, let alone at getting a restless crowd to listen, this consonance which almost sounded like an appeal was less intended for private meditation and concentration. Oddly enough, these spiders, which called themselves black widows, looked confusingly like the Wall Spider, with the same bristling of the little hairs when sensing the vibrations, the manner of crawling, the same rhetorical elegance and persuasiveness. But this branding, which they sang about and that itself enriched their melody, surpassed every single work of art of the Wall Spider. Their mere existence was art in and of itself. If Zhi could have had his way, they wouldn't have had to spin webs for the rest of their lives. He was equally fascinated by the variety of different age groups, so he didn't even have to be fussy. Now, so he believed, he had found truly invisible threads, even if he didn't want to completely give up the torn thread of the Wall Spider just yet.
It suited him that the spiders didn't know his name, let alone ask about it. He admired their lacking conscience, their indifference as freedom, that they did not scold his need to enjoy two desirable options he initially had believed to be irreconcilable. Rather, he asked himself, did the black widows as sisters and friends not make him more truthfully human than the Wall Spider ever could? Did they not just impart to him that love and passions could be shared and were not meant to be possessed? Was their attitude towards life not dissimilar to that of the workers back home who revolution after revolution had fought for land and resources to be exploited collectively, for everyone, and to their fullest extent, rather than have those divided selfishly for exclusive use? And was the Wall Spider not rather the one who wanted to entrap and possess him with her thread whereas the black widows understood that he was entitled to his own freedom? Was this a lesson the Wall Spider had never learned?
Picking up the torn thread, Zhi encouraged the black widows to connect the ends by lacing them with a viscid substance that would numb the Wall Spider’s senses. That way, she would be unable to trace their pheromones that were otherwise still discernible to Zhi. Since time and space were suspended when the thread tore, there was no way the Wall Spider could make sense of all this. At the same time, her future craft would be tempered with exactly this other substance that had now intermingled with her nature and become part of it. Her perception would match that of Zhi. She, on the other hand, would not possess the knowledge of any of this.
For a while, this plan bore fruit. The spider formed even faster and more productive than it did before. But after a while, she noticed that her patterns, which were otherwise characterized by their evenness and finely woven ramifications, lacked that unique feature, that which had once sparked Zhi’s interest in her. The spider then felt as if she no longer recognized herself in her work. Entrusting herself to Zhi, she was convinced by him that she had nothing to be concerned about. Years, even decades could pass. At some point, Zhi studied International Affairs at a private university and became the youngest mayor of his village. Yet, he would now as before stick by his unwavering word. With every reassurance attempt he grew leaner and leaner, forever enchanted by what he reckoned to be the most wonderful octaves in this universe, so much so that he considered converting them into human notes and making them accessible to everyone. He envisioned them as music to which people would rise in the mornings and which they would listen to before going to bed.
One day, however, in the middle of the eighth month of the Chinese calendar, when the harvest moon was at its fullest and when the whole country was in full preparation in honor of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Wall Spider somehow managed to leave the fear hole unobserved, passing through the nearby cemetery. It was the same day the Annual International Summit Conference took place, just a couple of months after Zhi had turned twenty-eight. (By that time, the wall had already taken on divine proportions and, as a kind of third Silk Road, now also included the Western part of the USA, Australia, and South and North Africa.)
By chance, the spider crawled over Feng’s tombstone standing opposite of the Moon Temple. Bathed in silver moonlight in the dusky vastness of the night, its need for new offerings did not escape her. But ever since the Year of the Snake the premature monsoons had been plaguing the village with droughts, crop failures and food shortages. Therefore, the traditional customs were a little more unconventional. The Wall Spider remained there for a while, frowningly lingering at the wall where small stalls selling silk suits, silk ties, silk undergarments and some traditional silk costumes containing labels in all kinds of languages had been put up. These were meant to make an impression on the conference's assessors and to set a sign of maintaining fruitful diplomatic ties.
“I know I should take pride in all of this, in being part of something bigger than myself, for the sake of the greater good, with Zhi on my side. Yet, I feel like I have forsaken myself. Why is this?” the spider mused on the verge of tears. Although she muttered these words that had not been addressed to anyone but herself only half aloud, the spirit of Feng emerged from the depths of the grave in form of a butterfly as if to answer her prayer.
My dear Wall Spider, do not sorrow,
I have witnessed the marvel you keep in your hollow,
aware of everyone’s transgressions, even those of my once love Li,
shame on Zhi, shame on her, and shame on me,
for I have seen you being misused by envy, fear, and hate
far too late,
and now my body withers here under my grave plate.
But one thing I do owe you indeed, it is the least I can do,
after what you have unknowingly been going through,
do not fall in despair about what you are about to hear,
but born misguided, Zhi did interfere,
with your work, with whom you are,
when on his thirteenth birthday with him I travelled afar,
your thread had been torn,
no reliance on your senses, the sublime forlorn,
put together and laced with the black widows’ scorn,
flown inside of you,
to not know false from true.
And yet one option remains, only one thing you can do.
The grateful spider wiped away the tears that flowed like beads down her hair. After she had composed herself to some extent and weighed each of Feng's words with caution, her mind was made up. She harbored no resentment against Zhi and the others despite her disappointment. She was not even capable of it. All these years had sapped her strength, and she felt that her end was nigh. Nevertheless, she had not lost the will to devote herself to this final mission without it appearing to be an act of vengeance or bitterness but rather out of necessity. The summit was in full swing, when the spider’s body began to spread even more on the gravestone. Taking in all the vibrations, all the laughter, all the frequencies including those ominous octaves, she sucked out all the threads that had been holding together every net, every connection she had ever created in all shapes and forms all over the world. It was not long before eventually most of the buildings, starting with the wall, crumbled to pieces, and turned to dust and ashes, taking Zhi with them. Yet, the bricks fell in such a way that they dodged the dragon carried by the children and erected for the parade. It was as if they were repelled by a magnet.
And then there was still the corrupted thread, the one that was one of a kind and that had been placed in the wrong hands. The spider was saddened by the sight of the crushed Zhi. What had once been a delicately chiseled and lovable face now barely resembled that of a human. Yet, the spider felt that the collapse of the wall only played a minor part in this, and that there had already been other forces at work. She embraced the thread. With her last breaths the Wall Spider extracted the secretion until it was fully removed. Wholeheartedly touched by the spider’s last action, Feng's soul picked up her thread, unfolded his wings, and with it he flew away, never ever letting go of it.