The Real Story of Ah-Q (34 page)
Read The Real Story of Ah-Q Online
Authors: Lu Xun
Tags: #Lu; Xun, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Fiction, #General, #China, #Classics, #Short Stories, #China - Social life and customs
Could someone be – giggling?
A hot flush ran through Gao’s face. He hastily looked back at the textbook: but there was the first subheading, just as he had said – ‘The Partial Sovereignty of the Eastern Jin’. A classroom full of silent bobs lay beyond the book. His nerves must be playing tricks on him, he supposed; no one had laughed. Collecting himself once more, he gazed steadily back down at the book and slowly went on. To begin with, his hearing was synchronized with his voice production, but the two gradually became estranged from one another until he no longer had any idea what he was saying. By the time he’d reached ‘The Grand Designs of Shi Le’, all he could hear was a buzz of sniggering.
He felt an irresistible desire to glance down at his audience: the classroom was now an ocean of eyes, of dainty little equilateral triangles perched upon delicate nostrils, swirling into a single glittering mass, rushing towards him. He looked again: the eyes had transmogrified into a cloud of hair.
Terrified, he tugged his eyes back to the textbook, varying his style of delivery with only periodic glances up at the yellowing concrete ceiling, its centre occupied by a perfect stucco circle. And yet the circle suddenly came to life – expanding, then contracting dizzily. Terrified of re-encountering that dreadful ocean of eyes and nostrils, he looked back down at his book. He had now reached
AD
383, the Battle of Fei River, and the paranoid hallucinations of Fu Jian.
Despite suspecting the whole room was laughing secretly at him, on he went – for hours, and hours. Still the bell refused to ring. Sneaking a look at his own watch was out of the question, in case the students saw him. After another while, he reached the ‘Dramatic Rise of the Tuoba Wei’, and then the chart comparing the ‘Rise and Fall of the Six Kingdoms’ – neither of which he had thought he’d get as far as today; neither of which topics, therefore, he had prepared.
He decided to bring the lecture to a summary close.
‘We’ll end here today, as this is our first class,’ he stammered, after a moment’s hesitation. With a quick nod of his head, he stepped off the podium and out of the door.
He seemed to hear a great, collective squeal of laughter behind him, snorted out of that ocean of nostrils. He blundered through the botanical garden, heading in the direction of the staffroom.
His textbook slipped to the ground at an unexpected meeting between his skull and an unidentified object. Two steps back gave him enough critical distance to observe a young, slender branch in front of him, still trembling from the impact with his head. On bending down to recover the book, he encountered a wooden notice stood next to it:
Mulberry
Genus: Mulberry
Still the laughter behind him kept coming, bubbling out of that ocean of nostrils. Mortified, he ran into the staffroom as fast as he could, rubbing his bruised scalp.
The two cups of hot water were still there, although the inhabitant of the twilight zone and Wan Yaopu were nowhere to be seen. Only his new briefcase and hat seemed to shine through the gloom. The clock on the wall told him it was only 3.40.
Hours after Gao had returned home, he was still troubled by periodic hot flushes and inexplicable waves of anger. Eventually, he concluded that these new colleges were indeed a serious threat to the public order, and that they all wanted shutting down forthwith – the girls’ colleges first of all. Honestly, what was the point of them all? Vanity, nothing more than vanity.
He was still persecuted by the sound of ghostly laughter. His anger redoubled, strengthening in him his resolve to resign. He would write a letter to Principal Ho that very evening, citing some terrible affliction of the foot. But what if she refused to accept his resignation? No, no: he must be strong! Look what these female colleges were doing to the very fabric of society; he must put a safe distance between himself and them. It just wasn’t worth it, he now reflected.
He put Yuan Liaofan’s redoubtable work away, pushed the mirror to one side and folded up his card of appointment. As he was about to sit down, it struck him that it was still offensively red, and he stuffed it – along with
A Textbook of Chinese History
– into a drawer.
This punitive act of tidying – leaving only the mirror on top of the desk – drastically neatened his field of vision. And yet something was still niggling at him – something of great spiritual import. Suddenly remembering, he pulled on his red-tasselled autumn cap, and strode off towards Huang San’s.
‘So, our learned friend’s decided to come after all!’ yelled Bo.
‘Shut up!’ he scowled, giving him a smack round the head.
‘Class over? Any lookers?’ Huang San was eager to know.
‘I’m finished with the whole business. These girls’ colleges: they’re no place for decent people. Look what they’re doing to society!’
In came the Mao son, plump as a sticky rice dumpling.
‘A-ha-ha-ha! A delight, so long awaited!’ Every hand in the room was cupped in salutation, every knee joint bobbing reverently, as if threatening to give way to a squat.
‘Allow me to introduce you to Gao Ganting, I’m sure I’ve mentioned him to you,’ Bo addressed the new arrival, pointing out our learned friend.
‘A-ha-ha-ha! A delight, so long awaited!’ The eldest Mao son cupped his hands sociably in Gao’s direction, nodding his head.
Along the left-hand side of the room, a square table had been set at an angle to the wall. While greeting his guests, Huang San laid out places and tiles for them, with the help of a young servant girl. Soon each corner of the table had been marked out with a spindly imported candle and the four of them sat down.
The silence of early evening was disturbed only by the clacking of bone tiles against the red sandalwood table.
Though our learned friend had been dealt a perfectly decent hand, he couldn’t quite lose a sense of injustice. In the past, he’d always succeeded in shaking off unpleasant memories; why, then, was he allowing himself to go on fretting about the parlous state of public morality? Even the steadily mounting tiles before him failed to encourage him to see the bright side. Eventually, however, he regained his sense of happy optimism about society at large, and his mood began to improve – though not until the end of the second round, as he fast approached a winning hand.
1 May 1925
My friendship with Wei Lianshu, while it lasted, was a strange sort of affair, bracketed at its beginning and end by funerals.
I was living in S— when I first met him. His name often came up in conversations about the place, where general opinion had him down as something of an eccentric. He’d studied zoology at college but ended up teaching history at a high school. Though he kept himself to himself, he had a habit of sticking his nose into other people’s business, too. He was always declaring that the family should be abolished, and yet every month he’d send his salary back to his grandmother as soon as he got it. And so on and so forth, giving the people of S— no shortage of inconsistencies to snipe at. One autumn, I happened to find myself idling a stretch of time away with some relatives who lived near Hanshi Mountain, and who, sharing the surname Wei, happened also to claim a distant relation to Wei Lianshu. They had no more insight into him than anyone else. They talked about him as if he were a foreigner – ‘not like us’.
And no wonder. Twenty years after China had launched a national programme of educational reform, Hanshi Mountain still found itself without so much as a primary school. Lianshu was the only villager who had left to get an education. He was also the object of no little envy: everyone insisted he’d made a fortune in town.
By the close of that autumn, dysentery was rife through the village. Fearing for my own safety, I considered heading back to town. At that point, I heard that Lianshu’s grandmother had come down with it. Because of her age, she was unlikely to pull through, especially as there was no doctor in the village. Lianshu’s last-surviving relative, she lived modestly, with just a maidservant to look after her. He had lost both parents when he was a little boy, and it was this grandmother who had brought him up. I heard that, although things had been hard for her in the past, she now lived in relative peace and comfort. Probably his own failure to have a family and the solitude in which he lived contributed to his reputation for eccentricity.
Since Hanshi Mountain was more than thirty miles from town overland, and almost twenty-five by water, it would take four days to send for Lianshu and bring him back. The day after she fell ill, news of the grandmother’s sickness spread through this isolated community, and a messenger was dispatched. By the early hours of that same day, however, she had breathed her last. ‘Why won’t you let me see Lianshu?’ were her final words.
Every relative that could be rustled up – together with a number of idle spectators – now assembled. When Lianshu arrived, they calculated, it would be time to place the deceased in her coffin. Everything was ready – the objects to accompany her on her journey to the afterlife, her burial clothes; no further preparation was required. The principal obstacle to be anticipated was this chief mourner of hers: everyone was convinced he would insist on ‘modernizing’ the funeral in some way. By the end of the conference, everyone had fixed upon three conditions. One, that he should wear white, the conventional colour of mourning; two, that he should kneel; and three, that Daoist and Buddhist monks should be called in to perform the proper ceremonies. In sum: that all should be done in absolute accordance with tradition.
That settled, they agreed that on the day of Lianshu’s arrival in the village, they would reconvene at the family home, to battle it out with him together. The villagers eagerly awaited news; they knew that Lianshu was an unreasonably progressive type who’d converted to the foreign devils’ religion. A great Manichean struggle was about to begin; or at least a spectacle of some sort.
Lianshu, it was put about, arrived in the afternoon. His first action on entering the house was to bow to his grandmother’s shrine, after which the clan elders immediately proceeded according to plan, summoning him to the main hall. Having said a great deal of nothing much at all to him, they eventually got on to the main subject: their unrelenting chorus of unconditional demands for the funeral. When everything that was to be said had been said, a silence descended as everyone nervously fixed their eyes on Lianshu’s lips.
‘As you like,’ he replied, his face unchanging.
The sense of release that this easy victory brought was swiftly succeeded by new sources of anxiety, for the unexpectedness of his response seemed all of a piece with his general foreignness. Throughout the village, the news was greeted by disappointment: ‘Odd,’ they all muttered to each other. ‘Better go and see the lie of things for ourselves.’ Since the old ways were to be followed in every detail, there would be – so it transpired – no novelty to behold in the funeral. Still, though, look they must, and after dusk the courtyard before the main hall was filled with the happy buzz of spectators.
I, too, went after first sending incense and candles as a funeral gift. Lianshu was dressing the corpse when I arrived. I observed a short, slight man, with a long face. Almost half his face seemed to be obscured by an untidy head of hair, a thick black moustache and eyebrows, with his eyes gleaming in between. There was a methodical deftness to his dressing of the corpse – you might have thought he was a professional undertaker – and he was surrounded by admiring observers. However well a thing was managed, it was always the way – around Hanshi Mountain – that relatives on the mother’s side would find something to snipe at. And yet he accepted every criticism in silence, correcting the fault, no flicker of irritation registering in his face. A grey-haired old lady in front of me sighed admiringly.
The prostrations were followed by weeping, and then by women muttering Buddhist incantations. After that came the laying-in, followed by yet more prostrations and weeping, until the coffin lid was nailed down. A moment’s silence was succeeded by a general commotion of bewildered displeasure. I suddenly sensed its cause: Lianshu had failed to shed a single tear throughout the entire proceedings, remaining seated on his straw mat, his eyes flashing beneath their heavy brows.
And so the funeral drew to a surprised, sullen close; Lianshu still sat on his mat, deep in thought. But just as everyone prepared to disperse, tears suddenly began to course down his cheeks, followed by long howls – like the nocturnal howls of a wounded wolf in the wilderness, rasping with an agonized grief. Now this, at last, was a break with tradition; no one had ever heard or seen such a display at a funeral. Eventually the bewildered villagers edged forward, to try to get him to stop, until a great crowd of them stood uselessly about him. On he howled, as if paralysed by sorrow.
As the entertainment seemed at an end, everyone scattered. He went on weeping for another half-hour or so, when he abruptly stopped and set off for home, without a word to the other mourners. He had, a surveillance team subsequently reported, walked into his grandmother’s room, lain down on the bed and, apparently, fallen fast asleep.
Two days passed, taking us up to the day before I was due to set off back to the town. By now, the devil himself seemed to have got among the villagers. They were saying that Lianshu was planning to burn most of his grandmother’s things, so she could use them in the afterlife, and give the rest to the faithful maidservant woman who had seen her through her funeral – even let her stay on in the house for as long as she wanted. His relatives remonstrated with him till they were hoarse, but he wasn’t to be dissuaded.
