The Real Story of Ah-Q (26 page)

I fled back to my uncle’s house, taking immediate advantage of her failure to produce another question. I was deeply unsettled. Had I made things worse for her, I wondered, by replying in the way I did? Seeing everyone else busy with their own New Year’s Sacrifice probably made her all the more conscious of her own loneliness. But had she meant something else altogether? Had she had a premonition of some kind? If she
had
meant something else, and something happened because of what I’d said to her, then I would be responsible – to a degree – for whatever it was… But then I laughed at myself: it was just a random encounter, nothing more than that. And here I was, obsessively going back over it – no wonder certain educationalists have diagnosed me a neurotic. Anyway, I was perfectly insured with that last ‘I don’t really know.’ Even if something did now happen, it could have nothing to do with me.

‘I don’t really know’ – what a useful little phrase it is. Brave young idiots rush in to resolve other people’s doubts and uncertainties, fixing on physicians, then risking criticism if the results are less than ideal. But top everything off with ‘I don’t really know’, and you sail clear of any possible blame or reproach. Now, more than ever, I felt the indispensability of this phrase – even when my interlocutor was a beggar-woman.

But still I felt unsettled, and kept returning to it in my thoughts all through the next day, as though it were some kind of ill omen. Tediously confined to my uncle’s study, beneath a sky gloomy with snow, my feelings of unease only grew. There was nothing for it but to leave for the city the next day. I wondered if the shark’s-fin soup served in one of my old haunts, the Fuxing – always outstanding value at a dollar a bowl – had gone up in price. Although none of my old crowd was around any more, I was determined to have myself a bowlful, even if I sat down to it alone… Whatever happened, I would leave the next day.

Because things were never working out for me the way I wanted them to, I feared my encounter with Xianglin’s wife would prove no exception. And as usual I was cheated of my happy ending. Late that afternoon, I caught a few snatches of conversation in one of the inner rooms of the house. Presently, the voices fell quiet – leaving only my uncle fulminating as he strode away: ‘It had to be New Year, didn’t it… A bad lot!’

I was first bewildered, then uneasy, as if this throwaway comment of his was in some way connected to me. Glancing out of the door, I could see no one about. When eventually the hired help came in to make tea before dinner, I took my chance to ask for information.

‘Who was my uncle angry with just now?’

‘Xianglin’s wife, of course!’ the servant bluntly replied.

‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’ I quickly pressed on.

‘She’s gone.’

‘Dead?’ I almost jumped out of my seat, feeling a sudden tightness in my chest. The colour must surely have drained from my face. But as he didn’t look up at me, not even once, he noticed nothing.

‘When did she die?’ I now asked, trying to steady myself.

‘Last night, or maybe this morning. I don’t know.’

‘What did she die of?’

‘Of poverty – what else?’ His verdict impassively delivered, he left, still without a glance at me.

But my panic was transient. Soon, I realized the thing I had dreaded was now past; that I no longer needed to dwell obsessively on the business, on my ‘I don’t really know’ or his ‘of being poor’. I became steadily easier in my mind, troubled only by the occasional twinge of discomfort. Uncle was a solemn presence through dinner. I wanted to ask about the deceased, but I knew that, though he was supposed to take the Neo-Confucian view that ghosts and spirits spring from the duality of nature, he was a man ruled by superstition. Death and disease were taboo subjects so close to the New Year’s Sacrifice. If something unavoidably came up, you could pick your way round it with allusions and euphemisms. But such skill lay beyond me, and I had to bite back my questions. The grim set to his face made me suspect he thought I had deliberately chosen this difficult moment to torment him; that I, too, was a bad lot. To mollify him, I immediately told him of my plan to leave for the city the following day. He made no great effort to keep me. Dinner was wound up in oppressive silence.

Another snowy winter’s night fell early over the town. Inside, all was hustle and bustle; outside, quiet reigned. The new flakes fell on to an already thick blanket of snow; if you listened out, you could even hear the rustle of their landing, sharpening the overwhelming sense of stillness. I sat alone beneath the yellow light of the vegetable-oil lamp, thinking about Xianglin’s wife, discarded by those she had lived alongside, like a useless plaything of which they had wearied. And yet she had left her mark: the people around her, leading their happy lives, had probably felt bewildered by her tenacious impulse to go on living. But now she had at last been swept tidily away. I didn’t know whether I believed in an afterlife or not; but if those with nothing to live for can stop living, removing their tiresome selves from the orbit of those who are sick of the sight of them, then death is an excellent expedient – both for the person concerned, and for those who have to put up with them. I listened quietly to the snowflakes whispering against my window and slowly began to relax, as the fragments of her life that I had seen or heard began to cohere.

She hadn’t been born in Luzhen. Early one winter, when my uncle was looking for a new maidservant, old Mrs Wei – a middle-woman in these sorts of transactions – brought her along to the house. Around twenty-five or twenty-six at the time, she wore a black skirt, a blue jacket and a lighter blue waistcoat, her hair tied up into a bun with a white cord. Though her face had a sallow, greenish tinge to it, her cheeks were pink. Mrs Wei introduced her as Xianglin’s wife, the neighbour of one of her mother’s relatives. Her husband had died, so she’d left home to look for work. Uncle frowned; my aunt knew what was worrying him – the fact she was a widow. But seeing as she had a good sturdy look, with big, strong hands and feet, and kept her eyes fixed docilely on the ground and let others do the talking for her, she seemed the kind of person who would know her place and do what she was told. And so, my uncle’s scowl notwithstanding, she was kept on. During the trial period, she seemed to work harder even than the men, toiling all day without a rest. On the third day she was formally hired, at five hundred coppers a month.

Everyone called her Xianglin’s wife. Though no one ever asked her what her surname was, it was probably Wei, as she had come from the village of Weijiashan – literally the ‘Mountain of the Wei Family’, where everyone shared the clan surname. She said very little, speaking out only when spoken to, and briefly even then. It took a good ten days to reveal she had a tyrannical mother-in-law; a brother-in-law around ten years old, who could gather firewood; and that she had lost her husband – a woodcutter, too, around ten years her junior – that spring. That was about the sum total of what was known of her.

As the days flew by, her prodigious capacity for work continued. On she went, not minding what she was given to eat, never sparing herself. Everyone said the Lus’ maid worked better than a man. Single-handedly she took charge of the New Year’s preparations: dusting, mopping, slaughtering the chickens and the geese, cooking through the night; no extra hired help was required. Yet she seemed content: her mouth tilting up into a smile, her face growing fairer and plumper.

A little after New Year, though, she returned from washing the rice by the river rather paler than usual. Just now, she said, she’d seen a man loitering a way off on the other bank. She was worried he was an older cousin of her husband, come looking for her. When my aunt – surprised by this string of revelations – tried to find out more, Xianglin’s wife went silent.

‘I don’t like it,’ Uncle frowned, when he heard. ‘Sounds like she’s run away from home.’

And indeed she had.

Around ten days later, just when everyone was forgetting what had happened, Mrs Wei reappeared, this time bringing with her a woman in her early thirties, whom she introduced as their maidservant’s mother-in-law – the late Xianglin’s mother. She conducted herself with unusual self-possession, for a peasant from the mountains. After exchanging a few pleasantries, she explained apologetically that she was here to take her daughter-in-law back home. It was the busy farming season, and they were short on labour – everyone at home was either too old or too young.

‘We can’t stop her mother-in-law taking her back,’ Uncle said.

Her wages were reckoned as coming to one thousand seven hundred and fifty coppers; the entire untouched sum – which she had kept deposited at the Lus’ – was handed over to her mother-in-law, who then picked up Xianglin’s wife’s clothes, thanked Uncle and Aunt, and left. It was now noon.

‘Where’s the rice?’ Aunt eventually exclaimed, her stomach reminding her it was lunchtime. ‘Didn’t Xianglin’s wife go out to wash it?’

Everyone went off in search of the rice basket: my aunt checked first in the kitchen, then in the hall, then in the bedrooms – no sign of it. After looking unsuccessfully about outside, Uncle walked all the way down to the river, where at last he found it, sitting upright on the bank, next to a bunch of vegetables.

That morning, he was told, while he was out, a boat – its white awning pulled fully across – had been spotted moored on the river. No one knew whose it was, though neither was the question given much thought. Just as Xianglin’s wife knelt down to wash the rice, two men – both peasants from the mountains, by the looks of them – rushed out of the boat. One had grabbed her, then, helped by the other, dragged her down into the boat. After screaming a while, she fell silent – probably because she had been gagged. Then a couple of women stepped on to the bank: Mrs Wei, with someone they didn’t recognize. No one got a proper look at what was going on in the boat, though Xianglin’s wife seemed to be lying on the deck, tied up.

‘What a dreadful business!’ said Uncle. ‘All the same…’

Aunt cooked the rice herself that noon, while their son, Aniu, saw to the fire.

Mrs Wei returned after lunch.

‘What a dreadful business!’ repeated Uncle.

‘What on earth do
you
want?’ Aunt spat at her, as she washed the bowls. ‘How dare you come back here? First you bring her to us, then you help kidnap her back! Causing all this trouble – making us look like idiots! Really – what will everyone think of us?’

‘I was tricked,’ the old woman wailed. ‘I came back to explain. When she asked me to find her a place, I had no idea her mother-in-law didn’t know about it. Please accept my apologies – I’m too old and stupid. But you’ve always given people a second chance, to make up for their mistakes – I’ll find you someone better, I promise.’

‘All the same…’ began Uncle.

And so the matter of Xianglin’s wife was closed and, not long afterwards, forgotten.

Except by Aunt, who was always going on about Xianglin’s wife, because most of the maidservants she subsequently hired turned out to be unsatisfactory: either lazy, or greedy, or both. ‘I wonder how she is now?’ she would mutter to herself, whenever she brought the subject up – meaning that she hoped she’d come back. In the first month of the next lunar year, this hope finally died.

As the month drew to a close, a rather tipsy Mrs Wei called to wish the family a happy New Year. She was later than usual, she said, because she’d been staying with her mother’s family a few days. Inevitably, the subject of Xianglin’s wife came up.

‘Well,’ Mrs Wei chattered merrily, ‘things are looking up for her. Her mother-in-law came to drag her back because she’d already been promised to Mr Ho’s sixth in Hojia. She got hitched a few days after they got her home.’

Aunt was astonished: ‘What a thing for a mother-in-law to do!’

‘You’ve money to spare, you would say that. Poor country people like us – we can’t afford to be too particular. She’s got another son who wants a wife. She needed the bride price from remarrying her daughter-in-law for the dowry. She’s sharp as a tack, and tough with it. She had it all planned – got her married off in the mountains. She wouldn’t have got much for her if she’d married her to someone from the same village. But it’s not often you get a woman who’ll marry into the back of beyond, so she got eighty thousand coppers for her. And now the younger son’s married: his wife set them back only fifty thousand, and she’s still got over ten thousand left, even after the wedding. She had it all planned, all right!’

‘Didn’t Xianglin’s wife mind?’

‘It wasn’t up to her. She made a row, of course. But they tied her up, threw her in the bridal chair and lugged her off to the husband’s house. Then it was just a case of getting the garland on her, forcing her to kneel and locking her in the bedroom. Job done. But Xianglin’s wife was quite something – the fuss she made, I mean. Everyone said it was because she’d been working for an educated family. I’ve seen a thing or two, let me tell you. When women get remarried, some of them scream and some of them cry, some try to kill themselves, some refuse to bow at the altar, some even smash the wedding candles. But Xianglin’s wife was something else. First, she screamed and shouted herself hoarse all the way to Hojia. Then after they’d pulled her out of the bridal chair, they couldn’t get her to kneel – not even with two men and her brother-in-law forcing her. The moment they let go of her, just a little bit, she smashed a great big hole in her head against the incense table. They couldn’t stop the bleeding – not even with two handfuls of incense ash and two pieces of red cloth to bind it. It took every pair of hands they could muster to get her locked in the bedroom – and you should have heard her curse, my goodness…’ Shaking her head, Mrs Wei looked down at the floor and fell silent.