The Real Story of Ah-Q (21 page)

One night, strolling back as usual to the Temple of Earth and Grain after closing time at the tavern, he suddenly heard a strange kind of banging noise – one that was assuredly not firecrackers. With his inveterate love of minding business that was not his own, Ah-Q immediately headed off into the darkness in search of its origin. He thought he could hear footsteps somewhere in front; as he listened, someone suddenly sprang out of the night. Quick as he could, Ah-Q ran after him, twisting, turning and finally stopping when the man in front did. He now saw there was no one behind them, and that he had been pursuing D.

‘What’s going on?’ a disgruntled Ah-Q asked.

‘There’s… there’s been a robbery at the Zhaos’!’ D panted out.

Ah-Q’s heart began pounding. His piece said, D disappeared. Ah-Q also made off, pausing every now and then. But he was, let it not be forgotten, someone who had been in this line of work himself: a man who could screw his courage to the sticking place. Creeping out to a turning in the road, he listened to what seemed to be a good deal of shouting. Taking a closer look, he thought he could see a great crowd of people, in white helmets and armour, carrying out endless cases and miscellaneous household objects, including the Ningbo bed belonging to the wife of the village genius. Though he couldn’t see quite clearly enough to be sure, his feet refused to carry him further forward.

A perfect peace seemed to reign over Weizhuang that moonless night – as perfect as in the time of the ancient sage emperors. Ah-Q watched until he was bored with the business: on it went, endless toing and froing, and moving of cases, objects, the Ningbo bed… Incredulous, and yet resolved to go no closer, he returned to the temple.

Locking the main gate, he groped his way to his own room through an absolute darkness. He lay down and eventually composed himself. The men in white, he concluded, had come, but not for him. They’d taken a great load of things but left none for him. It was all the fault of that Fake Foreign Devil, not letting him rebel. What other explanation could there be? The more he chewed it over, the angrier he got. ‘So I’m not allowed to rebel, am I?’ he raged, nodding bitterly. ‘So only you’re good enough for the Revolution? Damn you, you Fake Foreign Devil. Fine: rebel, then – but I’m going to inform on you! Then I’ll get to see you arrested and executed in the county town, and your whole clan with you – hwaaah! hwaaah!’

After the robbery at the Zhaos’, Weizhuang – Ah-Q included – was abuzz with a kind of pleasurable terror. Four days after the event itself, however, Ah-Q found himself being dragged through the middle of the night into the county town. Under cover of darkness, three squads – of soldiers, of militiamen and of policemen – and five detectives stole into the village and surrounded the Temple of Earth and Grain, propping up machine-guns opposite the main gate. Yet Ah-Q failed to make a dash for it. After a lengthy wait, uninterrupted by any kind of noise or movement, the captain grew anxious enough to offer a reward of twenty thousand coppers, at which two of the militiamen at last bravely volunteered. Once the vanguard had scrambled in over the wall, the forces outside rushed in to capture Ah-Q, who didn’t begin to wake up until he was parked, a prisoner of the law, to the left of the machine-gun outside the temple.

It was midday by the time they reached the town. Hauled into a dilapidated old yamen, then up and down its corridors and passageways, Ah-Q was at last shoved into a small room. As he stumbled forward, a heavy, barred wooden door slammed behind him. Walls made up the remaining three sides of the room, which turned out to contain – when he made a closer survey of his surroundings – two other people.

Although a little perturbed by the morning’s events, he wasn’t particularly downcast, because his room in the temple had been no more uplifting to a man’s spirits than the one he currently found himself in. As his new room-mates both looked to be men from the countryside like himself, he gradually fell into conversation with them. Mr Provincial Examination was, he learnt, chasing one of them for rent owed him by his grandfather; the other man didn’t know what he was in for. ‘I wanted to rebel,’ Ah-Q replied frankly, when they asked him what had brought him here.

Later that afternoon, he was yanked back out through the barred wooden door and into a large hall, at the far end of which sat an old man, his head shaved perfectly smooth. Ah-Q wondered first if he was a monk, until he spotted rows of soldiers, together with some dozen important-looking individuals in long gowns, lined up on either side of the room – their heads either clean-shaven like the old man, or their hair allowed to hang a generous foot down their backs like the Fake Foreign Devil – all glaring savagely at him. At this point, he realized this was an encounter with Authority; his joints automatically weakened and reduced him to his knees.

‘Be upstanding! Kneeling is strictly prohibited!’ the men in their long gowns roared.

Even though Ah-Q had some grasp of what they were saying, he felt that standing lay beyond him. As if now refusing to take orders from him, his body fell back into a squat, before subsiding again on to its knees.

‘Pathetic!’ the long-gowns sneered; but left off telling him to stand.

‘Confess now and save yourself unnecessary suffering. I already know everything there is to know,’ the bald old man intoned, riveting his gaze on Ah-Q’s face. ‘Confess and you will go free.’

‘Confess!’ the long-gowns echoed.

‘All I wanted to do was… to… surrender…’ Ah-Q mumbled haltingly, after a pause for confused thought.

‘Well, why didn’t you, then?’ the old man benevolently asked him.

‘The Fake Foreign Devil wouldn’t let me!’

‘Nonsense! It’s too late now, in any case. Where are your accomplices?’

‘What?’

‘The gang who robbed the Zhaos’ house.’

‘They didn’t come for me,’ Ah-Q remembered, his bile rising again. ‘They took everything for themselves.’

‘Where did they go?’ the old man pressed, even more benignly. ‘Tell us and you can go free.’

‘I don’t know… they didn’t come for me…’

The old man motioned with his eyes, and Ah-Q was dragged back off to the cell. On the morning of the following day, he was hauled out a second time.

Everything was as it had been the previous day: the bald old man at the back, Ah-Q on his knees.

‘Have you anything else to say?’ the old man said, in still benign tones.

Ah-Q gave the question some thought: ‘No.’

One of the long-gowns then took up a piece of paper and brought it over to Ah-Q, together with a brush, which he attempted to stuff into our hero’s hand. Ah-Q was scared almost witless: this was the first time in his life his hand had come into contact with a writing brush. As he tried to work out how to hold it, the man pointed at a place on the paper and commanded him to sign.

‘I… I… can’t write,’ Ah-Q confessed – ashamed, afraid – grasping the brush.

‘Just draw a circle, then!’

Although Ah-Q wanted to draw a perfect circle, his hand shook uncontrollably. So the man then spread the paper over the floor for him. Bending over, Ah-Q focused all his energies on the drawing of this circle. Afraid of looking ridiculous, he was determined to make it round, and yet that wretched brush weighed heavy in his hands, veering disobediently to one side as he struggled to make the two ends meet.

Though Ah-Q felt this melon seed of a circle had covered him in shame, the man seemed unbothered, confiscating both paper and brush. A mass of people now shoved him back, for the second time, behind wooden bars.

He did not, in truth, feel too badly about things, this second time. In the rich tapestry that is life, he considered, a man is destined sometimes to be hauled out of places, at others to be shoved in, at others again to draw circles on paper. The only blot on his copybook was his failure to make his circle round. Soon enough, however, his heart was easy once more: only idiots can draw perfect circles, he thought. At which he fell asleep.

Mr Provincial Examination couldn’t sleep at all that night, brooding over a tiff with his captain of militia. The former had argued that the most urgent task was to go after the booty, while the latter countered that someone needed making a public example of. The captain had of late been showing a distressing want of respect for the esteemed man of letters. ‘Kill a chicken, and you’ll scare the monkeys!’ he declared, thumping the table. ‘It’s less than three weeks since I joined the Revolution, and there have already been a dozen robberies, none of them solved. It’s making me a laughing stock! Here we are, the case solved, and you’re fussing like an old woman. I’ve had it up to here – keep your nose out of this!’ Still the discomforted scholar insisted that he would resign forthwith from the civil administration if they didn’t go after the stolen goods. To which the captain responded: ‘Fine! Resign!’ Mr Provincial Examination failed to sleep that night; but neither, happily, did he resign the following day.

It was the morning after this spat that Ah-Q was yanked out from behind the wooden bars for the third time. When he entered the hall, the bald old man was sitting, as before, at the back of the room. As before, Ah-Q knelt.

‘Do you have anything else to say?’ the old man repeated his question, just as politely.

Ah-Q gave the question some thought: ‘No.’

A crowd of men variously clad in long and short gowns now dressed him in a waistcoat of white calico, inscribed with a number of black characters. This, Ah-Q found sorely troubling: because white was the colour of mourning, and mourning was a deeply inauspicious activity to find yourself engaged upon. At the same time, both his hands were tied behind his back and he was hauled outside the yamen.

Ah-Q was lifted on to an open cart and some men in short jackets took their seats on either side of him. The cart immediately started up, led by a squad of soldiers and militia shouldering foreign rifles. Crowds of open-mouthed spectators thronged to either side; what lay beyond them, Ah-Q could not see. Was he on his way to an execution? he suddenly wondered. His vision began to darken, his ears to buzz, as if he were about to faint in panic. Yet he remained conscious, veering between fear, calm and the dawning sense that, in the rich tapestry of life, a man is destined sometimes to have his head cut off.

He recognized the road they were on. Why weren’t they taking him to the execution ground? he wondered. He wasn’t to know they were making a tour of the streets, to make a public example of him. Even if he had known, though, it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. In the rich tapestry that is life, he would have concluded, a man is destined sometimes to be made a public example of.

In time, it occurred to him that this was the slow road to the execution ground; that his head was definitely going to come off. He looked despondently about him – to one side, then another – at the ant-like audience following his progress. In among the crowds, he happened to spot Mrs Wu. That’s why he hadn’t seen her for ages, he thought; she must have left Weizhuang to work in town. Ah-Q was suddenly ashamed of his absence of spirit: of his failure even to croak out a few lines of opera. His head whirled through the possibilities:
The Young Widow
lacked grandeur, while the ‘Alas!’ from
The Battle of the Dragon and the Tiger
was too plaintive. ‘I will thrash you with my mace’ was assuredly his best option. He tried to brandish his fist in the air but remembered that both hands were tied; ‘I will thrash you’ was discarded also.

‘In twenty years, I shall return…’ Ah-Q plucked an unrehearsed line out of his panicked subconscious.

‘More!’ A howl – as if generated by a pack of jackals, or wolves – started up from the crowd.

The cart rumbled on. Amid the cheers, Ah-Q turned his eyes in the direction of Mrs Wu, but she seemed too transfixed by the guns on the soldiers’ shoulders to notice him.

Ah-Q looked back at the cheering crowd.

His mind swirled again. Four years ago, at the foot of a mountain, he had encountered a hungry wolf that had followed him, at the same dogged distance, all the way back to Weizhuang. Half dead with fear, only the axe he had with him had given him the courage to get back to the village. He had never forgotten the wolf’s eyes, fierce and cowardly, flashing fiendishly, burning into his flesh. But the glazed eyes he was now staring into were more terrifying still: slicing into him, gulping down his words, ravenous for something more than his flesh, following him along at the same distance.

A monstrous coalition of eyes, gnawing into his soul.

‘Help…’

But Ah-Q said nothing. His eyes were blind, his ears were buzzing, as if his body was scattered into so much dust.

It was Mr Provincial Examination who felt the effects of the business most keenly, because they never ended up going after his stolen property. Misery and distress for him and his. Next in line were the Zhaos, for not only did the village genius have his queue cut off by rogue revolutionaries when he went into town to report the crime, but the family was also stung for the twenty-thousand-coppers reward offered to smoke Ah-Q out. More misery and distress for them and theirs. From this point on, they steadily began to regret the passing of the good old days.

Public opinion in Weizhuang was undivided: of course Ah-Q was a villain – he wouldn’t have been shot otherwise. The verdict in town was more ambivalent: death by firing squad, the majority of them felt, wasn’t a patch on decapitation. And the condemned had been a miserable specimen. In that whole extended tour around the streets, he hadn’t managed to choke out a single line of opera; they had followed him for nothing.