The Real Story of Ah-Q (23 page)

But a new inspiration swiftly came to him. Tell the servant, he ordered, to go and buy a bottle of White Lotus liquor on credit. All the shopkeepers, he knew full well, would try to call in their debts tomorrow. If anyone refused credit now, they might not get a penny back the following day; and serve them right.

The bottle of White Lotus duly obtained, two swiftly downed cups brought some colour back into his pale face. By the time dinner had been eaten, his spirits were a little on the mend. Lighting a long Hatamen cigarette, he picked up a book of avant-garde poetry and lay down on the bed to read it.

‘But what will we say to the shopkeepers tomorrow?’ Mrs Fang had come in after him and was now standing at the foot of the bed, looking directly at him.

‘Tell them… tell them to come back on the afternoon of the eighth.’

‘I can’t say that. They’ll never believe me. They’ll never agree.’

‘Why not? Tell them to check at the ministry – they’ll find out no one’s getting paid till the eighth.’ His finger, pursued by Mrs Fang’s eyes, described a semicircle in the air beneath the mosquito net, then returned to the experimental poetry.

Seeing the mood he was in, she fell briefly silent, then tried changing the subject.

‘We can’t go on like this, we have to find some other way of getting by.’

‘What else am I fit for? I don’t write well enough even to be a copyist; if I joined the army, I wouldn’t scrape into the fire brigade.’

‘Didn’t you send something to a publisher in Shanghai?’

‘That publisher? The one in Shanghai? They pay by the word and don’t count the spaces. Just take a look at my free verse: almost every other word’s a space. I probably wouldn’t get more than three hundred coppers for a whole book. Anyway, I haven’t heard anything from them for six months now. Distant water won’t put out nearby fire. I can’t wait for ever.’

‘How about writing for one of the local papers?’

‘To get into one of the decent ones, I’d have to call in a favour from an ex-student who’s now an editor at one of them. And even so, it would be a few coppers per thousand words. I’d be working all hours for a pittance. Anyway, I don’t have enough to say.’

‘How are we going to get by after the holiday?’

‘I’ll go back to the ministry… Tomorrow, when the shopkeepers want their money, just tell them the afternoon of the eighth.’ He made as if to return to his experimental poetry.

‘I think,’ she stammered out, afraid her opportunity would be lost, ‘I think we ought to buy a lottery ticket on the eighth…’

‘Rubbish! What an idiotic idea…’

He suddenly recalled something that had happened after his ejection by Jin Yongsheng. Walking dejectedly past a shopping arcade, his heart had leapt at a busy large-print advertisement for a
TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR PRIZE
. But even as he slowed down, a reluctance to part with the last sixty cents in his wallet hurried him resolutely on. Reading vexation on his face at her vulgar superstition, Mrs Fang quickly retreated, leaving her sentence hanging in mid-air. Stretching out, Fang Xuanchuo decided to leave his response equally unfinished, and went back to mumbling his experimental poetry.

June 1922

It was well past noon by the time Chen Shicheng was back from seeing the results for the county-level civil service examinations. He had set out early and begun searching for the surname Chen the instant he saw the list. Though there was no lack of Chens clamouring for his attention, none was followed by the all-important words
shi
and
cheng
. Carefully, methodically, vainly he made a second search through the twelve-page roster. By the time he had finished, he stood alone before the wall opposite the college of examinations, the crowds of other interested onlookers long dispersed.

A cold wind was ruffling his short, greying hair, as he soaked up the warmth of the early winter sun. Dazzled by its brightness, his exhausted, puffy eyes glinted strangely within his ashen face. The list now swam before him, a shoal of black circles.

With the county competition behind him, he could have tried his luck at the provincial level, soaring through the ranks of government… All the best people would try to marry their daughters off to him, worshipping him like a god, regretting their earlier, short-sighted lack of respect… He would get rid of the tenants who had rented rooms in the derelict old family house – though likely as not, they would all have deferentially moved out of their own accord, to make way for him. The whole house would be made good as new, its gate embellished with a flagpole and plaque… If he preferred to work behind the scenes, away from the cut-and-thrust of local politics, a cosseted job in the capital would be his; otherwise, he could settle for a lucrative post in the provinces… Like a tower of barley sugar attacked by rain, his glorious future crumbled about him, leaving only fragments at his feet. He turned dejectedly towards home, numb with disappointment.

When he reached the door to his house, seven schoolchildren began reciting in chorus. His ears buzzed – as if a brass gong had just been struck next to them. Seven heads and seven queues swayed before him, black circles dancing in the gaps between them. As he sat down, they handed their homework to him, contempt written over their faces.

‘Off you go,’ he managed miserably, after a brief hesitation.

Throwing their books into their bags and tucking them under their arms, they scattered into the afternoon.

But the plague of tiny heads and black circles went on dancing before him, sometimes in chaotic freestyle, sometimes in strange, decorous formations, until they slowly faded into a single, blurred mass.

‘Failed again!’

Who said that? He jumped to his feet, the words ringing in his ears, and looked around him: no one in sight.

‘Failed again!’ the voice repeated, his ears still buzzing.

He held up his hand, counting on his fingers: eleven, thirteen, sixteen times, counting this year – sixteen times not a single examiner had known a good essay when he saw it. A pitying laugh escaped him. Fury succeeded: from the bottom of his bag, he whipped out transcribed examination essays and poems, and made for the door. But as he approached, the light shone uncomfortably in his eyes again and a flock of chickens cackled with laughter. He retreated back inside, his heart pounding.

He sat down, the same curious glitter to his eyes. Objects – a crowd of them – swam before him: his future lay before him like a crumbled tower of barley sugar, a monumental heap blocking his way forward.

The smoke from his neighbours’ chimneys had vanished into the evening, their bowls and chopsticks washed up and put away, but Chen Shicheng made no attempt to prepare a meal. The other families lodged in his house knew that whenever the examination results were published, the same wild look came into his eyes, and the best response was to shut their doors as early as possible and ask no questions. Quiet descended, then out went the lights – one by one – as the moon glided alone out into the cold night.

The sky hung over him in an ocean of blue, the occasional cloud drifting across its surface, like pieces of chalk dipped into inky water. The polished, mirror-like moon concentrated its frigid, penetrating waves of light on Chen Shicheng.

Calmer again, he paced up and down the courtyard beyond his rooms; around him, all was quiet. But turmoil suddenly returned.

‘Turn to the left, turn to the right…’ a low, urgent voice now whispered into his ear.

He nervously listened again.

‘To the right!’ the voice repeated, louder this time.

Now he remembered. In the days before his family fell on hard times, he and his grandmother would sit in this courtyard, enjoying the cool of summer evenings. He couldn’t have been much older than nine: lying on a bamboo couch, listening to her marvellous stories. Once, she told him, she’d heard
her
grandmother say that, many generations past, theirs had been one of the great local families. One of their ancestors had buried unimaginable quantities of silver beneath the floor of this very house, for a lucky descendant to find – though no one ever had. A riddle told of its hiding place:

‘Left, right, forward, back; gold and silver, sack upon sack.’

In calmer moments, Chen Shicheng had often secretly pondered its meaning, but whenever he thought he had finally solved it, doubts would begin to gnaw at him. Once, he’d convinced himself that it lay beneath the rooms rented out to the Tangs, but he hadn’t dared ask them to let him dig it up. And soon enough, his sense of certainty had begun to fail. A few scars over the floors of his own rooms recalled earlier attempts to uncover the hoard, shameful testimony to the delirious aftermath of other examination defeats.

This evening, however, the moon’s cold light enveloped and persuaded him, countering his doubts with proof – compelling his gaze back inside.

A white fan of light flickered through his rooms.

‘It must be under here!’

He strode, proud as a lion, back inside. The moon immediately abandoned him to a dilapidated old room sunk in hazy darkness, a number of shabby desks lurking in its shadows. But as he paused confusedly, his eyes slowly adjusting, the white light returned – stronger than ever, burning brighter than sulphur, finer than dawn mist – to fall on a desk by the east-facing wall.

A lion once more, Chen Shicheng strode over to the door. As he reached for the hoe propped up behind it, his hand jarred against a bony black shadow. An unaccountable fear taking hold of him, he fumblingly lit a lamp: it was just the hoe, leaning against the wall. After moving the desk, he dislodged four large, square flagstones, then squatted down to examine the ground. As on his previous attempts, the first layer was of fine yellow sand. Pushing up his sleeves, he scraped away at the sand, until he revealed black soil below. He dug as carefully and quietly as he could, but the regular thump of iron blade on earth reverberated through the still night.

Around two feet down, with still no pot of gold in sight, Chen Shicheng began to feel anxious. Then came a brittle clink, jarring his wrist, as the hoe struck a hard object. He flung down his hoe and scrabbled around in the hole, finding at its base another large, square slab. His heart thumping, he concentrated his thoughts and energies on dislodging it; underneath he found the same black earth as before. On he dug through the inexhaustible ground until, at last, he struck against another hard object: round this time, a rusty copper coin perhaps, alongside a few indeterminate fragments of china.

He worked on frenetically, unthinkingly, his body covered in sweat, his heart pounding massively – as if suspended within a void. He encountered another strange object, shaped like a horseshoe, but brittle, flaking to the touch. Carefully, he unearthed it and picked it up. The lamplight exposed an ancient-looking bone, mottled with rot and crowned with an incomplete row of teeth. The jawbone, as he now recognized it to be, began to twitch into a ghoulish smile.

‘Failed again!’

A chill ran down him. Releasing the bone back into its hole, he fled out into the courtyard. He glanced nervously back at the room: the lamp burning as brilliantly as ever, the jawbone still mocking him. Averting his eyes, terrified, he took refuge as far away as he could, struggling to calm himself in the shadows beneath the eaves.

‘There’s nothing for you here,’ the voice needled him again through the stillness. ‘To the mountains…’

Had he heard something like this once before? He did not need to be told again; the path forward was clear. Looking up, he saw the moon was now slanting towards the west. The western hill, some dozen miles from the town, now loomed darkly before his eyes, bathed in a glittering white light.

The white light lay before him, far in the distance.

‘To the mountain!’ he resolved, with a heavy heart.

Doors and gates opened and shut; then all fell silent within the compound. Patterned lamplight flickered across the empty room and the hole in the earth, then guttered and shrank into nothingness, the oil exhausted.

‘Open the gates!’ Over by the town’s western wall, a fearful wail of hope pierced the dawn light.

At noon the following day, a corpse was found floating in the Lake of Myriad Currents, around five miles from the West Gate. When the news reached the local constable, he ordered a local to fish it out: it turned out to be a male, around fifty years old, of medium height and pale complexion, clean-shaven and completely naked. Perhaps it was Chen Shicheng. But since none of his neighbours could be bothered to go and look, and there were no relatives to identify the body, the constable was obliged to take charge of an anonymous burial himself, once a coroner from the county government had carried out his examination. There was no controversy over cause of death: corpses stripped of their clothing were always washing up; there was no reason to suspect foul play. At any rate, the coroner proved quite satisfactorily that the dead man had fallen into the water before drowning, as his filthy fingernails – deeply inlaid with silt from the lake bed – offered clear evidence of his having struggled underwater.

June 1922

One summer, the wife of my youngest brother, who lives in the courtyard behind the main house, bought a pair of white rabbits for her children to play with.

They seemed barely weaned – both had this look of vulnerable, animal innocence about them. All the same, the moment they arrived, they pricked up their long, delicate, pink ears, noses twitching, eyes apprehensively alert. They could probably sense they were in a strange place, with strange people; that they were away from the comforting security of home. You’d have got them for no more than twenty coppers each at a temple bazaar, but as she’d sent her servant out to a shop for them, they’d cost my sister-in-law two whole dollars.

The children crowded round them, squawking with delight, of course; the compound’s adults also joined the welcoming party, as did a small dog, S, who approached at a trot, sniffed at them, then pulled back, sneezing. ‘S!’ my sister-in-law scolded, giving him a slap round the head. ‘No biting!’ S retreated and, from this point on, kept his teeth to himself.

The pair spent most of their time outside, in the little courtyard at the back, apparently because they grew too fond of tearing the wallpaper and grazing on the furniture legs. They feasted upon windfall mulberries from the tree growing wild in the courtyard, leaving barely any appetite for the spinach they were given. When crows and magpies showed an interest in landing, the rabbits would arch their backs and spring forcefully into the air like balls of snow, terrifying all feathered intruders into flight. After a few such warnings, the birds kept a respectful distance. But crows and magpies, my sister-in-law analysed, were no threat – all they wanted was a few beakfuls of food. No, the real danger was a large black cat, often to be found perched on the low courtyard wall, glaring ferociously down. Happily, S and the cat were old enemies – so perhaps there was nothing to worry about.

The children were always playing with them. Confined in small, cupped hands, the rabbits would sit docilely enough, pricking up their ears and twitching their noses. But the moment an escape route opened up, they’d be off. At night, they slept in a small wooden hutch, carpeted with straw, set beneath the eaves overhanging the back window.

After a few months, they began to burrow, their front paws clawing at the earth, their hind legs kicking it away. Within a morning, a deep hole had been made. Surprised observers discovered – on more careful examination – that the belly of one of the rabbits was much larger than the other’s. Much of the following day, they were busy lining the burrow with dry grass and leaves.

The discovery was general cause for rejoicing, for now there would be even more little rabbits to entertain us. For the time being, my sister-in-law prohibited the children from picking them up. Even my mother was delighted at their fecundity. Once the babies were weaned, she decided she’d ask for a couple for herself, to keep in her own courtyard.

They now lived in the burrow they had dug for themselves, emerging occasionally for something to eat. Then they disappeared altogether. I wasn’t sure whether they’d moved food underground, or whether they were simply eating less. Some ten days later, my sister-in-law told me both of them had come back out. She thought the pregnant one had given birth, but all the babies had died – though the female was swollen with milk, she never seemed to go down into the burrow to feed her children. She sounded rather aggrieved by it all, but there was nothing she could do.

One warm, sunny day, so still even the leaves refused to rustle, I suddenly heard laughter. Looking over, I saw a crowd of people leaning out of my sister-in-law’s back window, watching a little rabbit leaping about in the courtyard. Even though it was still much smaller than its parents had been when they had first arrived, it was already able to bound and jump. The children clamoured to tell me they’d seen another one poke its head out of the burrow, then duck back in again – presumably its baby brother.

Whenever the baby rabbit found some grass to eat, its parents would hustle over to snatch the food out of its mouth – even though they didn’t then eat it themselves. When the children laughed too loudly, the little rabbit would dart nervously back underground, its parents following on behind, pushing the baby’s rear in with their front paws, then sealing the mouth of the hole with mud.

There were always people around the courtyard, or stationed at the back window, observing the comings and goings.

Then the entire family of rabbits disappeared. For days, the weather remained overcast, with my sister-in-law fretting about the black cat again. They were just hiding from the cold weather, I argued. They’d come back out the moment the sun did.

But when the weather warmed up again, there was still no sign of them. And soon everyone forgot about them.

Except for my sister-in-law, that is, who had still been in the habit of leaving spinach out for them. One day, she discovered in one of the corners of the courtyard another burrow. On re-examining the original burrow, she could just about make out a cluster of claw marks – too big to have been made even by the parent rabbits. Her suspicions about the black cat growing, she decided to investigate further. Returning to the courtyard with a hoe, she dug down, still hoping beyond hope to find the little white rabbits. All she discovered was a pile of rotten straw mixed with rabbit fur, laid out – she imagined – during the period of confinement. But not a trace of the two babies.

Anger, disappointment and sadness drove her on to excavate the new burrow in the corner. As soon as she began disturbing the earth, the larger pair of rabbits scurried out. Overjoyed to discover they had moved house, she went on digging until she discovered that this burrow, too, was lined with straw and rabbit fur, on a bed of which seven tiny, pink rabbits were asleep. Bending down to look, she saw that their eyes were not yet open.

The mystery had been cleared up, and my sister-in-law’s original hypothesis proved correct. This time, to guard against further fatalities, she placed the seven tiny rabbits in the wooden hutch, moved it into her own room, then put the mother rabbit in, too, so she’d have no choice but to feed them.

Henceforth, my sister-in-law not only conceived of a violent animosity towards the black cat, but also revised downwards her opinion of the mother rabbit. The first litter, she deduced, must have contained more than the two that were killed; the others must have died because they didn’t get a fair share of the milk. There was probably a good deal of truth in this, for two out of the present litter of seven were very thin and weak. Whenever she had a moment, she would hold the mother rabbit down, and give the babies equal turns against her stomach, to make sure they all got the same.

She’d never heard of anyone going to such extraordinary lengths to raise rabbits, Mother remarked; they’d broken the mould when they made her daughter-in-law, truly they had.

But the whole compound rejoiced to see the family of rabbits flourishing as never before.

Somehow, though, I couldn’t quite shake off a sense of melancholy at the whole business. I would sit under the lamp, deep into the night, thinking about those two tiny creatures, their lives extinguished so anonymously, without even a warning bark from S. Years ago, I remembered, when I was living in a guesthouse in Beijing, I’d got up one morning to discover, beneath a large locust tree, a scattered heap of pigeon feathers – the leftovers of a hawk’s feast. By noon, the servant had swept the yard clean again, removing all traces of the massacre. Another time, passing by Xisi Arch, I saw a small dog close to death after being run over by a cart. But when I came back that way later, its body had been tidied away, with pedestrians passing unknowingly over the spot where a life had been ended. On summer nights, I would sometimes listen to the long whines of flies – bitten by spiders, I expect. But I soon forgot about them; and no one else ever even heard them.

Then who is to blame? The Creator, perhaps: for generating, then destroying life with such irresponsible excess.

A couple of yowling cats began scrapping outside my window.

‘Xun! Did you just hit the cat again?’

‘No, they’re fighting each other. Why would I have hit it?’

Knowing, and disapproving, of my grudge against cats, my mother got up to investigate, doubtless suspecting me of a vendetta on account of the rabbits. I did, it is true, have something of a family reputation as a cat-hater, often lashing out at them unprovoked – especially if I caught them mating. It wasn’t the act of procreation I objected to; it was their sleep-murdering screeching. They didn’t need to make so much noise, I thought.

After the black cat killed the little rabbits, I felt more justified than ever in my hatred. Mother, I felt, was far too soft on them – which is why I allowed an edge of impatience into my reply.

Well, if I can’t beat the Creator, I might as well join him in his little game of wilful destruction.

That black cat won’t be stalking up and down that wall for ever, I resolved to myself, glancing at the bottle of potassium cyanide in my book cabinet.

October 1922