The Real Story of Ah-Q (24 page)

‘This place is so lonely,’ the blind Russian poet Eroshenko once complained to me, not long after he and his balalaika had arrived in Beijing.
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‘As lonely as the desert!’

Though there was probably truth in what he said, I couldn’t feel it myself. I’d lived here too many years. Spend too long in an orchid-house, and you lose your sense of smell. To me, the city was an unending babble of noise – maybe that was what made him feel lonely.

The absence of spring and autumn in Beijing – now that I noticed. The earth’s warmth had shifted northwards, people who’d grown up and grown old in the capital told me; the weather was much milder than it used to be. But I never felt we had a proper spring or autumn; winter ran seamlessly into summer, and once summer ended, winter took over.

Finding myself at a loose end on one of those nights when winter was busy ending and summer getting ready to begin, I decided to call on Eroshenko. Since arriving in the city, he had lodged with my younger brother Zuoren and his family. As it was late, the household – indeed, the whole world – was peacefully at rest. Except for Eroshenko: propped up in bed, a slight frown knitting his high forehead, his long blond hair cascading down, he was reminiscing about summer nights in Burma.

‘There was music everywhere. In the houses, in the grass, in the trees, a magical symphony of insects. Then there was the hissing of the snakes, harmonizing away…’ He slipped deep into thought, as if trying to lose himself in the memory of it all.

I didn’t know what to say. As I had never heard anything remotely comparable in Beijing, there was nothing to be said in my country’s defence – however much I loved it. Though his eyes were sightless, his hearing was excellent.

‘In Beijing,’ he sighed, ‘you don’t even hear frogs croaking.’

‘Yes, you do!’ I now managed to protest. ‘After the heavy summer rains, you hear frogs and toads everywhere, in the drainage ditches.’

‘Really?’

And within a few days, we were indeed visited by frogs: a dozen tadpoles introduced into the house by Eroshenko, and placed in the small pond in the centre of the courtyard outside his window. Around three feet long by two feet wide, the pond had been dug by my brother and intended for growing lotus. Although the lotus had never taken, the pond looked a perfect home for the tadpoles.

The tadpoles swam in shoals through the water, Eroshenko often strolling over to visit them. ‘Mr Eroshenko,’ one or other of the children would report from time to time, ‘they’ve grown legs.’

‘Really?’ he would beam.

But tending to his amphibians was only one of Eroshenko’s projects. Practising self-sufficiency had always been another of his notions: women, he was often saying, could concentrate on the livestock, while their men worked the land. He was always trying to inveigle friends to grow cabbages in their courtyards, or advising my sister-in-law to keep bees, hens, pigs, cows and camels. In time, and probably in capitulation to Eroshenko, Zuoren’s courtyard became a run-around for chicks – skittering everywhere (on and above ground), pecking at the tender young leaves that carpeted the yard.

The household would often get visits from a farmer selling chicks, and would usually buy a few. Because chicks have delicate stomachs and easily fall ill, very few reached maturity; one of them, indeed, became the hero of the only story that Eroshenko wrote in Beijing – ‘The Chick’s Tragedy’. One morning, the farmer brought along a gaggle of noisy ducklings. Just as Zuoren’s wife was sending him away, Eroshenko rushed out to investigate. Captivated by the cheeping creature the farmer released into his hands, he immediately bought four of them, for eighty coppers apiece.

The ducklings were, in truth, irresistible: tottering along in a golden-yellow phalanx, chirping away to each other. The following day, everyone agreed, someone would go out and buy loaches for them to eat. ‘I’ll pay,’ Eroshenko said.

Off he then went to teach, with everyone else dispersing to their various tasks. When my sister-in-law returned in a little while to feed them some leftover rice, she heard the sound of splashing. Running over to investigate, she discovered the four ducklings having a bath in the pond: turning upside down, probably looking for food. By the time she had got them back on to dry land, the pond water was murky with silt. When at last it cleared again, only a few tendrils of lotus emerged into view. The tadpoles, and their new legs, were nowhere to be seen.

‘Mr Airyshego,’ the smallest of the children rushed over to tell him, as soon as he returned that evening, ‘the frog babies are all gone.’

‘What?’

Zuoren’s wife now emerged, to report on the ducklings’ banquet.

‘Oh, no…’

By the time the ducklings had shed their yellow down, Eroshenko began yearning for Mother Russia, and hurried on to Chita, in Siberia.

By the time the frogs began their summer chorus, the ducklings were fully grown up – two white, two piebald – and their chirps had deepened into quacks. Though the lotus pond was now far too small for them, luckily my brother’s house was built on low-lying ground, and the courtyard flooded the moment the rains fell. And there they spent the summer – splashing, bobbing, flapping, quacking – as happy as could be.

Though summer has now given way to winter, there is still no news of Mr Eroshenko. I’ve no idea where he is now.

But the four ducks are still there quacking, in the middle of our desert.

October 1922

Counting back through the last twenty years, I’ve seen only two Chinese operas – and neither of them in the first ten, finding myself without the desire or the opportunity to do so. On both occasions, I left early, thoroughly unenlightened by the experience.

The first time was in 1912, the first year of the Republic. I’d just arrived in Beijing, and a friend told me I should go, just for the experience – Beijing opera being the best in the country. Telling myself it would be fun, I rushed zealously off with him to a theatre. Too late to catch the start of it, I could hear the crashing of the gongs as we approached. We squeezed in, the stage in front of us flashing red and green, the audience below it a mass of bobbing heads. Gazing around us, we caught sight of a couple of empty places, but when we jostled our way over to claim them, someone started arguing with us. ‘You can’t sit here!’ I eventually made out, my ears buzzing with the noise. ‘They’re taken!’

We beat a retreat to the back of the theatre, where a man with a glossy queue led us to an empty seat by a side wall. I say seat; it was, more accurately, a skimpy species of trestle – its upper surface three-quarters the width of my thigh, standing on legs twice as long as my shins. Reminded of nothing more than a medieval torture rack, I walked out, scared witless by the very prospect of clambering up.

After putting some distance between me and the theatre, I suddenly heard a voice: ‘What on earth’s wrong?’ I turned round and discovered my bewildered friend trailing along behind me. ‘Why didn’t you answer when I called you?’ he wanted to know.

‘Forgive me,’ I replied. ‘My ears were ringing so much I couldn’t hear a thing.’

Whenever I thought back to this curious experience, I concluded that either the opera had been abominable, or evolution had not equipped me to survive in a theatre audience.

I forget which year my second excursion took place. It was around the time they were raising funds for the Hubei floods, and the celebrated Beijing opera singer Tan Xinpei was still alive. A donation of two dollars bought you a ticket for a charity opera at Supreme Theatre, performed by a whole galaxy of stars – of which Tan Xinpei was one. Once I’d bought a ticket, mainly to get the fundraiser to leave me in peace, some other busybody began lecturing me on the unmissable talents of the great Tan. Promptly forgetting the aural torments I had suffered last time, I found myself rolling up at Supreme Theatre – though in no small part because I’d spent so much on the blasted ticket that I felt I had to get some kind of value for money. Tan Xinpei, I learnt, would be making a late appearance, and as the theatre in question was a fairly modern building, I imagined there would be no need to fight over seats. Setting out overconfidently at nine o’clock, I soon discovered that – yet again – the theatre was packed; that even standing room was in short supply. I squeezed into the crowd, and began watching some squawking actor impersonate an old woman far, far away on the stage itself. Noting two burning paper spills sticking out at the corners of her mouth, the soldier – made up to resemble a demon – standing alongside, and the later entrance of a monk, I eventually deduced that she was meant to be Mulian’s mother, waiting for her legendary Buddhist son to rescue her from the torments of hell.
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Ignorant of which opera star was playing her, I asked a tubby gentleman squeezed in to my left for enlightenment. ‘Gong Yunfu!’ he tossed out, treating me to a scornful glance. Blushing at my operatic illiteracy, I vowed not to ask anything else. I watched a couple of female leads, then an old man, and a few more unidentified roles; I saw large and small choreographed fights – from nine o’clock until ten o’clock, from ten till eleven, from eleven till half past eleven, from half past eleven till twelve… And still no Tan Xinpei.

I’ve never waited for anything so patiently in my life; much less in such adverse circumstances – with my overweight neighbour panting to my left, the gongs and drums clanging away on stage, the gaudy banners whirling back and forth, all the way up to midnight. Suddenly, reason reasserted itself: evolution, I realized again, had not equipped me to survive in such an environment. I spun round and began shoving my way out of the crowd. The moment I retreated, I felt a fleshy presence pressing in behind me; my corpulent neighbour, I guessed, had quickly expanded to fill the new space available. Given that a return to my place was now impossible, there was nothing for it but to push on, until eventually the main exit was mine. There was little coming and going on the street outside, apart from a column of rickshaws waiting for fares from the audience and a handful of people outside the main entrance, craning their heads up to study the programme notice, or gazing blankly around them. They must be watching for the women to spill out at the end of the performance, I thought to myself. They had a wait ahead of them, thanks to Tan Xinpei’s non-appearance.

I felt refreshed, as never before, by the sharp cold air of the Beijing night.

That night, I bade farewell for ever to Chinese opera. And for years, I never gave it so much as a thought, striding obliviously past the capital’s theatres as if they existed in a parallel dimension.

A few days ago, though, I chanced to spot a Japanese book – its title and author, regrettably, now escape me – about Chinese opera. The point of one of the chapters seemed to be that Chinese opera – with its noisy gongs, shouting, jumping and general talent for stupefying audiences – is far better suited to outdoor than to indoor performance. Viewed at a distance, in the open air, it has its own, easier charm. This observation struck me as something I must have felt subconsciously, though never directly, because I once saw an excellent opera in the open air. It may have been the memory of this that seduced me into my Beijing debacles. I wish I could remember what the book was called.

The opera I’m thinking of was years ago – I couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven at the time. In Luzhen, it was the custom for married women – while their mothers-in-law were still running the marital home – to go back to their own parents’ home for the summer. Although my paternal grandmother was in robust enough health, my mother had already taken over some of the household responsibilities, so she couldn’t spend the whole summer away. The longest she could snatch back home was a few days, tucked in after a visit to the ancestral graves, when she took me off to see my other grandmother. The house was in a isolated little village called Pingqiao, on a riverside near the coast: fewer than thirty families – all farmers and fishermen – and a tiny odds-and-ends shop. But I always enjoyed these visits: everyone invariably made the most tremendous fuss of me, and I gained a few days’ respite from my dusty Confucian texts.

I had crowds of friends: because I was an exotic visitor from town, the village children were given special leave by their parents from their regular chores to entertain me. When one family had a guest, the entire village took responsibility for him. Though we were all of an age, most of them were born one or even two generations above me, and since everyone in the village shared the same surname, we were all of the same, loose clan. But for the most part, we got on famously: even if, in our occasional arguments, I ended up taking a swipe at a distant great-great-uncle, no one accused me of disrespect for my elders. Most of the children – ninety-nine per cent of them, I would estimate – were illiterate.

Most of every day was spent digging up earthworms, threading them on to copper-wire hooks and lying on our stomachs on the river bank fishing for prawns. Prawns are waterborne dolts: they will happily insert a hook into their own mouths with their own pincers. In no time at all, we would catch ourselves a great bowlful, most of which ended up in my stomach. A second pastime was herding the oxen, but they were much trickier creatures. Neither oxen nor buffalo take orders from strangers, and I was easily intimidated, preferring to follow them at a respectful distance, while my friends all laughed at me, forgetting they had ever been impressed by my knowledge of classical poetry.

But the thing I looked forward to above all else was the trip to the village of Zhaozhuang – about two and a half miles away, and much bigger than Pingqiao – to watch opera. As Pingqiao was too small to hold its own opera, every year it would chip in funds to put a production on with Zhaozhuang. It never occurred to me to ask why there had to be an opera every year – maybe to celebrate the spring, to placate the Earth God.

That year – the year I turned ten or eleven – the long-awaited day of the opera at last came around. To everyone’s dismay, however, on the morning of the performance we discovered there were no boats for hire: Pingqiao had only one passenger boat that set out every morning and returned in the evening, but it was far too big for our purposes, while all the other boats were too small to be of any use. Inquiries in neighbouring villages came to nothing: every boat had long been promised elsewhere. Grandmother began sulking at the rest of the family for their lack of foresight, while Mother tried to convince her that it didn’t matter; that the operas we saw in town – several of them a year – were much better than the village ones. Afraid of Grandmother’s temper, Mother implored me to keep my disappointment to myself. I couldn’t be allowed to go with other people, either, because she was afraid Grandmother would worry.

I was, in short, to abandon all hope. By that afternoon, my friends had all left to catch the start of the opera. I seemed to hear the echo of gongs and drums in my ears, as I imagined them sitting in the audience, drinking soybean milk.

That day, I had no appetite for fishing – or anything else much; Mother was at her wits’ end with me. At dinnertime, Grandmother eventually noticed: she couldn’t blame me, she said; it was no way to treat a guest. All the children who’d been to Zhaozhuang gathered after dinner, happily chattering about the opera. Noticing my silence, they all sighed sympathetically. ‘What about my uncle’s boat?’ Shuangxi, the brightest of the bunch, suddenly piped up. ‘That should be back by now!’ A dozen or so of the other boys clamoured agreement, offering to escort me. I instantly cheered up. But Grandmother was still worried about my safety – they were just children. We couldn’t ask one of the adults to take them, Mother objected. They had to work all day – she couldn’t ask them to stay up all night, too. ‘I’ll make sure he’s all right!’ Shuangxi shouted through their misgivings. ‘It’s a big boat, and Xun’s got a head on his shoulders. And we’re all good swimmers!’

That was true enough: and two or three of the dozen could even hold their own in the sea.

Their doubts allayed, Grandmother and Mother smiled and raised no further objections. Off we went, chattering and laughing.

My spirits lifted – even my body felt somehow light with happiness. A little way from the house, beneath the moon, a boat with a white awning lay moored by the bridge. Once everyone had jumped in, Shuangxi took the front pole and Ah-fa the back; the younger boys sat with me in the middle of the boat, while the older ones gathered at the stern. By the time Mother had followed us out to remind us to be careful, we had already pushed off against the side of the bridge, retreating a few feet before gliding forward under it. Once we’d set up two sculls – two to each oar, each shift a third of a mile – we seemed to fly towards Zhaozhuang, chatting, laughing, shouting amid the burbling water, both sides of the river bank lined with dark green fields of beans.

Fresh, vegetable scents – of beans and waterweed – mingled with the mist rising off the river, hazily enveloping the moon. Far off inland, the dusky black of a mountain range rushed past the stern, curved like the spine of an iron beast coiled back to spring. Though the going still felt slow to me. After four shifts at the sculls, Zhaozhuang began to drift dimly into view: we thought we heard singing, and glimpsed torches – from the stage, perhaps, or fishermen’s boats.

I was probably hearing bamboo flutes, their calming, beguiling sweetness seeming to invite me to float with them on the fragrant night air.

The torches, we discovered as they drew closer, belonged to fishing boats. And now I realized that what lay before me was not yet Zhaozhuang – directly opposite the stern was a copse of pines I’d visited last year, a broken stone horse collapsed on the ground, a stone sheep crouching in the grass. Past this wood, the boat drew into an inlet and Zhaozhuang truly lay before us.

My eyes were drawn first to the stage, looming up out of an empty common just beyond the village proper – its outline only dimly visible from afar in the moonlit night, reminding me of fantastical sketches of fairytale landscapes I had seen. The boat picked up speed, and soon we could make out the gaudy movements of figures on the stage and, on the river near by, the dark awnings of boats of opera-watchers.

‘We’d best watch from here,’ Ah-fa proposed. ‘There’s no room closer in.’

The boat slowed into the bank. As there was indeed no way of getting a closer viewing position, everyone set down their oars. The shrine over the way – set up alongside the stage to allow the gods to enjoy the performance – was closer to the opera than we were. But it didn’t matter: we didn’t want to moor our white awning next to all those grand black boats – and anyway, there wasn’t room.

As we hurriedly moored, we saw a spear-wielding man with a long black beard, and four banners stuck to his back, fighting with a troupe of bare-chested men. This, Shuangxi told me, was the celebrated acrobat Iron-Head. He could turn eighty-four somersaults in a row – Shuangxi had counted them for himself earlier in the day.

We crowded the stern of the boat, watching the action, but the man with the black beard had no more somersaults in him; a handful of the bare-chested men turned a few, then trooped off, succeeded by a woman who began shrilling an aria. ‘The audiences are always smaller in the evenings,’ Shuangxi went on, ‘so Iron-Head isn’t putting much into it. What’s the point in showing off to an empty house?’ What he said made a lot of sense – the audience was already looking sparse. Because they’d be up at dawn the next day, the villagers couldn’t stay up all night. Most of them had gone to bed, leaving only a scattering of loafers from Zhaozhuang and other villages roundabout. Although the boats with black awnings filled with big local families remained, none of them cared much about the opera – they were just loitering near the stage, socializing over fruit, sweets and melon seeds. Shuangxi was right: it was almost an empty house.