The Real Story of Ah-Q (19 page)

‘Well, Ah-Q,’ the manager began, nodding at him. ‘Long time no see!’

‘Reckon so.’

‘Made a pile, I see… in…?’

‘In town!’

By the following day, the news had spread through Weizhuang like wildfire. Everyone wanted to hear about the rise of the new Ah-Q, with his new jacket and ready cash – a story that gradually leaked out in the tavern, in the teahouse and under the temple eaves, to universal gasps of admiration and respect.

As Ah-Q told it, he had started out helping in the household of a local bigwig who had passed the provincial-level civil service examination. (An awed hush fell over his audience as this detail was revealed.) The scholar in question went by the name of Bai, but because he was the only provincial examination laureate in the entire town, no one ever needed to refer to him by his real name. For thirty miles around and about, everyone – and not just Weizhuang – thought his full name was Mr Provincial Examination. To work in the house of such a grandee was, of course, a mighty achievement in itself. But, Ah-Q told his listeners, he got fed up with being a servant, because the revered gentleman was, to state the facts simply, a pain in the damn neck. A delicious sigh of happy regret now rippled through his audience: no one had imagined for a moment that Ah-Q was worthy of working in the household of Mr Provincial Examination; and yet to throw in such a position was still a shame.

As Ah-Q told it, he had come back because the people in town got on his nerves: with their ‘narrow benches’, and their shredded onions, and – a new failing Ah-Q had had opportunity to observe – the women’s failure to wiggle their hips properly when they walked. But the town had its points, too. The peasants of Weizhuang, for example, gambled with bits of bamboo – only the Fake Foreign Devil knew anything about ‘moh-jang’ [
sic
]. In town, though, even the lowest lowlife were experts at the game. Pit the Fake Foreign Devil against a ten-year-old beggar from town, and he’d be mincemeat. (At which disrespect, every listener blushed.)

‘Ever seen an execution?’ asked Ah-Q. ‘Now, that’s a sight. They’re always executing revolutionaries. Oh, it’s a sight, a sight…’ He shook his head excitably about, stars of spittle moistening the face of Zhao Sichen opposite. His listeners’ wonder was now edged with dread. Looking about him, Ah-Q suddenly raised his right hand then sliced it down on to the outstretched nape of a rapt hairy Wang.

‘Hwah!’

The terrified Wang pulled in his neck as quick as he could, while everyone else enjoyed a pleasurable frisson of horror. For days afterwards, Wang was far from his usual self. Neither he – nor anyone else for that matter – dared go anywhere near Ah-Q.

Although to claim that Ah-Q’s status, in the eyes of Weizhuang at large, had now risen higher than that of Mr Zhao would have been an exaggeration, we would not be overstating the case to say that the two men were now, more or less, on a level.

Soon after, Ah-Q’s new celebrity spread to the ladies’ chambers of Weizhuang. To put this in a little perspective, there were only two serious establishments in Weizhuang – the Qians’ and the Zhaos’ – and so the great majority of the village’s boudoirs were pretty poor sorts of places. All the same, given Ah-Q’s record with women, this latest development was not far off miraculous. Whenever the local women met, they would be sure to mention that Mrs Zou had bought a blue silk skirt from Ah-Q; true, it was second-hand, but it only cost her ninety coppers. Then there was Zhao Baiyan’s mother – though some said it was Zhao Sichen’s mother; further verification required – who bought a child’s shirt of dark red muslin, barely worn, for only two hundred and seventy-six coppers. Suddenly, Ah-Q was the man of the moment: those deficient in silk skirts wanted silk skirts; those deprived of muslin shirts wanted muslin shirts. Now, not only did Weizhuang’s women stand their ground when they caught sight of him, they sometimes even called him back after he had walked off.

‘Any more silk skirts, Ah-Q? No? Or muslin shirts, got any of them?’

Eventually, the news seeped into even the great boudoirs of the village. Excessively pleased with her purchase, Mrs Zou invited Mrs Zhao to admire her silk skirt, of which the latter spoke – in the most elevated terms – to Mr Zhao. On discussing the question at the dinner table with his learned son, Mr Zhao concluded that while the exercise of caution about the house would be advisable (as there was doubtless something fishy about this business with Ah-Q) he might have one or two decent things. It just so happened that their esteemed wife and mother was currently after a good fur waistcoat at a reasonable price. And so a clan resolution was passed, to the effect that Mrs Zou would be deputed at once to seek out Ah-Q, and a third exception made to the no-lamps-after-dinner rule.

The lamps burned, and burned; still Ah-Q did not appear. Anxiety, fatigue, resentment rippled through the assembled Zhao clan: indignation at the skittishness of Ah-Q, impatience at the slowness of Mrs Zou. Mrs Zhao expressed concern that Ah-Q was too frightened to come, because of the events of last spring. Mr Zhao batted her worries away: this time,
he
had personally commanded Ah-Q’s presence. At last, fully proving that Mr Zhao could never be wrong, in came Ah-Q, behind Mrs Zou.

‘He keeps on saying he hasn’t anything left,’ Mrs Zou reported, rather out of breath. ‘I said he should tell you in person, but he still kept on, so I said…’

‘So – Mr Zhao!’ Ah-Q took up position beneath the eaves, the corners of his mouth flirting with the ghost of a smile.

‘We hear that life outside Weizhuang has treated you well,’ Mr Zhao walked over, sizing this new Ah-Q up. ‘That’s excellent – excellent. We’ve… also heard that you’ve picked up some second-hand things along the way… Bring them over to show us, will you… just in case…’

‘I already told Mrs Zou. I’ve nothing left.’

‘Nothing?’ Mr Zhao faltered.

‘It all belonged to a friend of mine, and there wasn’t much to begin with. They’ve all been sold to other people.’

‘There must be something left.’

‘Only a door curtain.’

‘Bring it over,’ Mrs Zhao quickly commanded.

‘Tomorrow will be fine,’ Mr Zhao did not sound particularly enthusiastic. ‘But next time you have anything, show us first.’

‘We’ll pay better than anyone else!’ said the village genius. His wife glanced across at Ah-Q, to see if this had any impact on him.

‘I want a fur waistcoat,’ Mrs Zhao said.

After signalling his assent, Ah-Q slouched out so indifferently that no one could tell whether he really meant it. The whole disappointing encounter vexed Mr Zhao so much that he quite stopped yawning. His son was equally agitated by Ah-Q’s attitude: We should watch ourselves around this bastard, he warned. Maybe we should tell the constable to throw him out of Weizhuang. Mr Zhao resisted the idea, wary of making an enemy of Ah-Q. As likely as not, someone in his line of business wouldn’t shit on his own doorstep. The villagers had nothing to worry about; they just needed to take a bit more care at night. The learned son immediately submitted to the wisdom of the father, retracted his previous advocacy and exhorted Mrs Zou to say nothing, under any circumstances, of it to anyone else.

But when she took her skirt to be dyed black the following day, Mrs Zou spread the word concerning the suspicions about Ah-Q’s character. Even though she made no direct mention of the village genius’s idea, the damage to Ah-Q’s reputation was done. First of all, the constable called on him to confiscate his door curtain, refusing to return it even when Ah-Q told him Mrs Zhao wanted to look at it, then demanding a monthly offering from him to demonstrate his respect for the agent of the law. Second, the villagers’ attitude towards him underwent an abrupt change: although they still did not dare provoke him as they once had, although the dread generated by his execution monologue had faded, they gave him a wide berth – kept a respectful distance, you might say.

All except a handful of Weizhuang’s wastrels, that is, who were determined to get to the bottom of the business with Ah-Q. Delighted to crow about his exploits, Ah-Q proudly spilled the whole thing out. He’d been, they learnt, the pettiest of petty thieves: incapable not only of clambering over walls, but also of wriggling through holes. His sole talent was to stand outside the entry point to a house and take the goods as they were passed to him. One particular night, after only one bundle had emerged, a volley of shouts broke out when their ringleader returned inside, at which point he ran through the night, out of the town and all the way back to Weizhuang, his stomach for this line of work quite gone. This story did further damage to Ah-Q’s already fragile reputation. Those who up until then had kept a respectful distance for fear of making an enemy of him now discovered that he didn’t even deserve their fear – that he was a thief too spineless to steal.

On the fourth stroke of the third watch of the night of the fourteenth day of the ninth month of the third year of Emperor Xuantong’s reign
^*
7
– the day on which Ah-Q sold his purse to Zhao Baiyan – a large boat with a black awning docked at the Zhaos’. It arrived under cover of darkness, unnoticed by the sleeping villagers, though its departure around dawn was widely noted. Persistent inquiry eventually traced its ownership back to none other than Mr Provincial Examination.

The boat brought with it great disquiet to Weizhuang; by midday, the village was in the grip of a full-scale panic. Although the Zhaos were keeping very quiet about the reason behind the boat’s arrival, the gossips in the teahouse and tavern were saying that the city was about to fall to the Revolutionary Party, and Mr Provincial Examination had taken refuge in the village. Only Mrs Zou stoutly refuted this version of events, countering that the boat had contained nothing more than a few old trunks that the great scholar had wanted to store in Weizhuang, and that Mr Zhao had already sent back. Mr Provincial Examination and the younger Zhao – the proud possessor, you will recall, of a county-level degree – were not, in truth, on any kind of terms; they were unlikely to become foul-weather friends. And since Mrs Zou lived next door to the Zhaos, she probably had her ear closer to the ground on the question than most of Weizhuang.

But still the rumours flourished: although the great man of learning had not come in person, it was reported, he had sent in his place a long letter tracing out a distant family connection with the Zhaos. After careful consideration, Mr Zhao decided it wouldn’t do him any harm to hold on to the trunks, and stowed them under his wife’s bed. The revolutionaries, others said, had entered the town that very night, dressed in white armour and helmets, in mourning for the last emperor of the Ming, whose suicide three and a half centuries earlier had left the imperial throne open to the invading Manchus.

Revolutionaries were old news to Ah-Q: why, earlier that year, he had watched them being executed. Back then, he had had an intuition – why, he couldn’t say – that these revolutionaries were rebelling against the established order of things, and that rebellion would make his life difficult; and so he had conceived a violent hatred for them. But here they were, putting the wind up even Mr Provincial Examination – a man famous for a whole thirty miles around and about. This – taken in combination with the state of dread into which the villagers, now twittering like frightened birds, had been thrown – struck Ah-Q as all rather delicious.

‘Hurrah for revolution!’ Ah-Q thought. ‘It’ll do for the whole rotten lot of them!… I’m going over to the revolutionaries as soon as I get the chance.’

His sense of grievance against the world sharpened first by the rather embarrassed circumstances in which he had recently found himself, and second by the two midday bowls of wine he had drunk on an empty stomach, Ah-Q floated ruminatively along his way. Suddenly – by virtue of some mental alchemy – it seemed to him as if he himself was the Revolutionary Party, and all Weizhuang his prisoner.

‘Rebel! Rebel!’ he began shouting jubilantly.

The residents of Weizhuang looked fearfully at him, their newly abject terror as refreshing to Ah-Q as a mouthful of snow on a high-summer’s day.

‘Hurrah!’ he yelled again, his spirits soaring higher. ‘I take what I want, I spare who I like.’ It was high time for a few more lines of opera:

Zhao Senior and Zhao Junior stood at their gate with a couple of their relatives, discussing the Revolution. Head held high, Ah-Q swept obliviously past them, still singing at the top of his voice.

‘Q, my friend,’ Mr Zhao called timidly out to him.

‘Clang clang-clang,’ he sang on, too nonplussed by the word ‘friend’ to connect it with his own name, supposing he had misheard. ‘Tum, clang, clang-clang, clang-clang!’

‘Q, my friend.’

‘Woe is me…’

‘Ah-Q!’ The village genius tried a more direct approach.

‘What?’ Ah-Q asked, finally drawing to a halt and turning to face them.