The Real Story of Ah-Q (17 page)

Disappointment quickly gave way to a sense of the tragic injustice of it all. His paltry harvest, next to the bumper crop enjoyed by the vilely hairy Wang: what an extraordinary affront to his dignity it was! He searched desperately, and yet in vain, for a couple of outsized specimens, eventually turning out a middle-sized example of the genre. He stuffed it vengefully into his mouth and bit hard down on it; and yet still the resulting crunch was nothing to the percussive effects that Wang was achieving.

‘Hairy slug!’ he spat, his ringworm scars scarlet, throwing his jacket to the ground.

‘Talking to me, you scabby dog?’ the hairy one levelled his eyes contemptuously at Ah-Q.

Even though Ah-Q had become more imperious of late, thanks to the greater portion of public respect he had grown accustomed to accepting as his due, his courage usually sank to his boots whenever he encountered his regular tormentors among Weizhuang’s idling population. This time, however, he rose heroically to the occasion – was he to stand by and let someone with facial hair like that insult him?

‘Takes one to know one!’ He stood up, hands on hips.

‘Looking for a thrashing, are we?’ Wang now joined him on his feet, pulling his jacket back on.

Anticipating Wang’s imminent flight, Ah-Q lunged forward to punch him. But long before the blow had struck home, Wang had grabbed hold of him. Ah-Q now staggered forward, permitting his opponent to drag him by the queue over to the wall, to give his head its customary bashing.

‘ “A true gentleman fights with his head, not with his hands!” ’ Ah-Q quoted, his head twisted to one side.

Ignoring Ah-Q’s salutary moral injunction in a rather ungentlemanly way, Wang gave Ah-Q’s head five smart cracks against the brickwork, then issued a hefty push that left him sprawled over the ground at six feet’s distance. Satisfied at a job well done, he walked off.

This, in Ah-Q’s mental logbook of his life’s achievements, probably counted as his first true humiliation. Because of the man’s appalling whiskers, he had never had anything but pitying contempt for this Wang, who was too contemptible even to despise him back – much less raise a hand against him. But now here he was giving him a thrashing! Ah-Q struggled to make sense of it: perhaps it really was true what he’d heard in the town, maybe the emperor
had
abolished the civil service examinations
⁵
and the younger Zhao’s success didn’t count for anything any more – had his own reputation also suffered, by association?

Ah-Q remained where he was, pondering perplexedly.

In the distance, yet another of Ah-Q’s
bêtes noires
was now approaching, yet another individual for whom Ah-Q felt the greatest disgust: Mr Qian’s eldest son. Some time past, he had gone off to town to enrol in one of the newfangled Academies of Western Learning, then somehow gone off again to Japan. Six months later, he was back, goose-stepping like a foreigner and his queue gone with the fairies. His mother had wept inconsolably, while his wife had tried to commit suicide three times by jumping into the well. Eventually, his mother took to putting it about that ‘wicked people had got him drunk and cut off his queue. Otherwise, he’d have had a top posting by now, but as it is he’ll have to wait till it’s grown back.’ Ah-Q was having none of this, and knew him only as the ‘Fake Foreign Devil’, or ‘Traitor’. Whenever he saw him, his stomach silently churned with invective.

It was the false queue he wore that lay behind Ah-Q’s bottomless contempt for him. The wearer of a false queue was sub-human; if his wife didn’t pull off her suicide on the fourth jump, she would never redeem herself in Ah-Q’s eyes.

And here he was now.

‘Bald… ass…’ On previous occasions, Ah-Q had kept his insults safely confined to his own head. This time, however, in his furious desire for revenge against a harsh, cruel world, they crept softly out into the open.

The bald villain stormed over, a varnished walking stick in his hand. Realizing, at this instant, that another thrashing was coming his way, Ah-Q braced himself and waited. Predictably enough, a hard object cracked emphatically against his head.

‘I meant him!’ Ah-Q pointed to a nearby child.

Whack! Whack, whack!

This, in Ah-Q’s mental logbook of his life’s achievements, probably counted as his second true humiliation. Fortunately, once the rather discordant crack of stick on head had ceased, the whole matter seemed closed and his spirits began to lift. He slowly walked off, setting his great talent for forgetting – the jewel in the crown of his cultural heritage – to work for him again. By the time he reached the entrance to the tavern, he was feeling rather pleased with life.

A young nun from the Convent of Quiet Cultivation advanced towards him. She would have got a heckle out of him at the best of times, and now, with the memory of his recent humiliations fresh in his mind, was no time to hold back. Bile rose up at the memory of the day’s debacles.

‘Here comes my bad luck!’ he thought, as he strode over and noisily spat at her.

Ignoring him, the young nun carried on her way, head bowed. Moving closer still, Ah-Q reached out to rub her shaved scalp.

‘Bald as a coot!’ he laughed moronically. ‘Run back home to your lover-monk!’

‘How dare you…’ the nun protested, her face flushed scarlet, trying to escape.

The tavern roared with laughter. ‘Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander!’ he quipped, now pinching her cheek, delighted his remarkable exploits were getting the recognition they deserved.

Another great roar of mirth from the tavern. Unwilling to disappoint his public, a euphoric Ah-Q gave the offending cheek another, harder twist before finally letting go.

This great struggle and ultimate victory banished all memory of the hairy Wang, and the Fake Foreign Devil; fitting revenge, it seemed, had been taken on the day’s misfortunes. The curious thing was that he now felt even lighter of heart than he had done after his second beating – so light that he was in danger of floating off into the ether.

‘May you die without descendants, Ah-Q!’ the nun could be heard sobbing, as she fled.

‘Hahaha!’ Ah-Q laughed merrily.

‘Hahaha!’ his audience joined in, with only slightly less enthusiasm.

There are, it is said, some victors who delight only in victory against worthy adversaries; to whom the conquest of the weak or stupid is as dust or ashes in their mouths. There are others again who, after overcoming everything and everyone in their path, when the field is strewn with the corpses of the slain, with the obeisances of the surrendered; when there is no enemy left to fight, no friend with which to celebrate – then, and only then, do they feel the desolate solitude of victory. This was not a weakness to which our Ah-Q, in his inexhaustible delight with himself, was susceptible – living proof, perhaps, of the global superiority of Chinese civilization.

See him now: walking on air after a busy day of moral victory!

This latest victory, however, did bring an unusual twist in its tail. Eventually, he floated off to the Temple of Earth and Grain, where, according to well-established custom, he should have immediately lain down and begun snoring. Inexplicably, however, this particular evening he had difficulty keeping his eyes closed. There was something very curious about his thumb and forefinger: both felt softer, silkier than usual. Had something on the nun’s face attached itself to his fingers, or had her face rubbed them smooth?

‘May you die without descendants!’ echoed in the cathedral of Ah-Q’s mind. ‘She’s quite right,’ he thought to himself. ‘I ought to have a woman. If I die without descendants, I’ll have no one to offer a bowl of rice at my grave… A woman’s what I need.’ For in the words of one or other of the ancient sages: ‘There are three ways of betraying your parents, of which dying without descendants is the most serious.’ Or then again: ‘Those without descendants will become hungry ghosts.’ His thinking on this point was, therefore, fully in line with scripture; a pity, then, that his approach to resolving the difficulty erred on the unorthodox side.

‘Woman…’ he thought. ‘Must… find… woman…

‘Sauce for the goose…’ he thought some more, ‘… must… find… woman!’

As to when, exactly, Ah-Q began snoring that evening, we have no reliable information. The only point on which we can be certain is that he fell asleep with that light-headed feeling of satiny smoothness still on his fingertips. ‘Woman…’

Irrefutable proof that women are at the root of all evil.

The great majority of Chinese men in history would have become saints and sages had they not been ruined by women first. Just look at the Shang dynasty – destroyed by the licentious concubine Da Ji; while Bao Si performed the same service for the Zhou. The Qin dynasty, now… well, the sources aren’t entirely unequivocal on this, but were we to surmise there was a woman involved somewhere, we probably wouldn’t be wandering too far from the truth. Moving swiftly on to attested fact and the Later Han,
⁶
it was of course yet another concubine, Diao Chan, who led Dong Zhuo to his death.

Until this point in his career, Ah-Q had been blessed with a character that was rigid in its uprightness. Although we have no way of knowing whether he had ever received personal moral guidance from any celebrated spiritual authority, he had always strictly upheld classically ordained prohibitions concerning the segregation of the sexes, and rejected – with righteous bile – the conduct of heretics such as the young nun or the Fake Foreign Devil. All nuns, as he saw it, were having affairs with monks; any woman walking the streets had designs on strange men; any man or woman in conversation, wherever they were, must be up to no good. He was always disciplining them with his Angry Glare, or with a few sentences of penetrating criticism; if there was nobody else about, he would cast a pebble at them from behind.

Yet here he was, at the age of thirty – the year in which Confucius enjoined men to ‘stand firm’ – losing his head, in a thoroughly un-Confucian way, over a nun. What abominable creatures women truly were; if only that nun’s face had not been so bewitchingly smooth, or if it had been modestly veiled, Ah-Q would not, in turn, have submitted to being bewitched. Some five or six years past, wedged within a packed opera audience, he had taken the opportunity to pinch a woman’s thigh, but her intervening trousers had protected against this debilitating light-headedness. That heretic vixen of a nun, with her shameless naked face.

‘Woman…’ Ah-Q went on thinking.

Ah-Q often kept women he suspected of having designs on strange men under close surveillance, but they never smiled at him. He also listened carefully to women who spoke to him; but they never tried to seduce him either. Further proof of female perfidy: they were all of them hypocrites, pretending they were pure as the driven snow.

One evening, after a day spent husking rice at Mr Zhao’s, Ah-Q sat in the kitchen smoking a postprandial pipe of tobacco. In other households, casual labour went back home after dinner, but at the Zhaos’, dinner was served early and exceptions occasionally made to the rule against keeping the lamps on after dinner. When the Zhaos’ eldest had been revising for the examinations, he had been allowed a lamp to study in the evening. And when they hired Ah-Q for odd jobs, he was permitted a lamp to get on with his rice-husking after it got dark. And so it was that Ah-Q came to be sitting in the kitchen, taking his time over his pipe before he went back to his work.

Once the dishes were done, Mrs Wu, the Zhaos’ only maid, sat down on the bench to chat to Ah-Q.

‘The mistress hasn’t eaten for two days, because the master is going to buy a concubine…’

‘Woman… Mrs Wu…’ Ah-Q thought. ‘She’s still young… a widow…’

‘The young mistress is having a baby in the eighth month…’

‘Woman…’

Ah-Q put down his pipe and stood up.

‘She’s – ’ Wu chattered on.

‘Sleep with me!’ Ah-Q suddenly rushed forward, dropping to his knees before her.

There was a moment of stunned silence before she fled the room, shuddering, her screams rippled with sobs.

After staring perplexedly at the wall a while, still on his knees, Ah-Q placed both hands down on the empty bench and propelled himself slowly back to his feet, assailed by a sense that he could have somehow handled things better. Having distractedly tucked his pipe into his belt, he decided to return to his rice-husking. At which moment a heavy object landed, with a thump, on his head. Spinning round, he discovered the village genius – the Zhaos’ eldest – standing in front of him holding a large bamboo pole.

‘You filthy little…’

Down came the bamboo again. Covering his head with both hands, Ah-Q took the weight of the blows directly on the joints of his fingers, which caused him no little pain. He rushed out of the kitchen, taking a valedictory strike to the back as he went.

‘Bastard!’ The man of letters honoured him with a touch of scholarly invective.

His fingers still stinging, Ah-Q took solitary refuge in the rice-husking room, feeling deeply unsettled by this ‘bastard’. No common-or-garden term of abuse around Weizhuang, it was a usage favoured by the well-to-do, by those with official connections. He was no longer in any mood for romance. But since the bamboo and the expletive seemed to have brought the whole matter to a close, Ah-Q set to his husking again, as if a heavy weight had been lifted from his mind. Soon, beginning to overheat from the exertion of the work, he paused to remove some layers of clothing.