The Real Story of Ah-Q (44 page)

After making two circuits around the room, Yi noticed Wang Sheng at the door.

‘The mistress isn’t at the Yaos’, sir,’ Wang Sheng informed him. ‘They’re not playing mahjong today.’

Yi glanced wordlessly at him. Wang Sheng retreated.

‘Did you call, sir?’ Zhao Fu now appeared.

Shaking his head, Yi dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

After another few turns around the room, Yi walked into the hall where he sat down, gazing up at the wall opposite: at his crimson bow and arrow; his black bow and arrow; his cross-bow, his long sword and his short sword.

‘When did you realize she’d gone?’ he finally asked the maids, who were still standing blankly before him.

‘When I brought in the lamp,’ Number Two said. ‘But no one saw her go out.’

‘Did you see her taking an elixir? The one from the box?’

‘No. But she did ask me to pour her some water in the afternoon.’

His fears now fully aroused, Yi stood up, feeling utterly alone.

‘Did you see anything flying up to the sky?’ he asked next.

‘Oh!’ Number Eight paled, making a connection in her mind. ‘Just after I’d lit the lamp, I went out and I did see a black shadow fly over. Could that have been the mistress?’

‘Without a doubt!’ Yi slapped his knee, stood up and went out. He then turned back to Number Eight. ‘Where in the sky?’

Looking in the direction Number Eight indicated, he saw only the white globe of the moon, scattered with hazy outlines of trees and pavilions. He vaguely remembered his grandmother telling him, as a boy, about the wonders of the moon palace. Gazing upon it now, floating in a sea of deep blue, he felt the heaviness of his own mortality.

He suddenly experienced a murderous rage. ‘Bring me my Bow for Shooting the Sun!’ he roared, his eyes bulging. ‘And three arrows!’

Numbers Two and Seven brushed the dust off that greatest, most powerful of bows, and handed it – along with three long arrows – to him.

Taking the bow in one hand, the three arrows in the other, he placed the arrows against the string, drew it fully taut and aimed at the moon. Straight-backed, eyes flashing, hair and beard blowing about him like tongues of black fire, at that moment he might have been the same Yi who, all those years ago, shot the nine suns out of the sky.

As at one instant, the arrows whipped away from the bow, the action blurred with speed, their separate trajectories coalescing into a single hum. To be sure of hitting his target, Yi quivered his hand a fraction as he released the string, to disperse his simultaneous missiles – to make three separate wounds.

The maids squealed in alarm. Seeing the moon shudder, they thought it on the point of falling, but it kept its place, glowing more intensely, more beneficently than ever, as if uninjured.

Yi cursed out to the heavens, then paused an instant; the moon ignored him. He advanced three steps; the moon retreated as many. He took three steps back, and the moon regained its ground.

Everyone gazed silently at each other.

After wearily propping his great bow against the doorway, Yi went back inside. The maids followed behind.

Yi sat down, sighing. ‘Well, I hope your mistress enjoys eternity on her own. How could she have left me like that? Did she think I was getting past it? Just last month she told me how young I still was. That the moment you start thinking you’re old, you’re halfway to the grave.’

‘Of course not,’ soothed Number Two. ‘Some say you’re a great warrior still.’

‘Sometimes, you remind me of an artist,’ added Number Eight.

‘Balderdash! But I can understand why she was fed up with crow in fried-bean sauce…’

‘I’ll go and cut a bit off the leopard skin hanging down by the wall to patch the middle,’ Number Eight decided. ‘It looks awful as it is.’

‘No hurry,’ Yi said thoughtfully. ‘I’m starving – fry that chicken with some chillies, and steam me five pounds of wheat cakes. I’ll sleep better on a full stomach. Then I’ll get another elixir from that Daoist priest tomorrow and go after her. Number Seven: go and tell Wang Sheng to measure eight pints of white beans for my horse!’

December 1926

The great floods had divided the lands, encircling mountains and engulfing hills. Not all Emperor Shun’s subjects crowded on to summits that held clear of the water: some tied themselves to treetops, while others sat on rafts, occasionally embellished with tiny wooden shacks. A veritable idyll of adversity, when viewed from dry land.

News travelled on rafts, apprising the empire that Lord Gun, after a fruitless nine-year battle with the floodwaters, had lost the goodwill of the emperor and been banished to Feather Mountain. His son, Yu,
¹
had succeeded to the poisoned chalice.

The calamity had endured so long that all the universities had been shut down, and there was no dry ground even for nursery schools, so most people were rather raw and uneducated. Except on Mount Culture: for there, a mighty congregation of scholars had gathered, their food delivered by flying chariot from the Land of Clever Tricks.
²
Thus liberated from anxieties about subsistence, they were able to continue freely with their academic research. Most of them were against Yu, or even refused to believe in his very existence.

Once a month, the flying chariot would announce its approach with a rush of air overhead, whirring louder and louder until it glided into view, its large flag – a gleaming yellow circle at the centre – flapping in the wind. When the vehicle hovered five feet from the ground, a number of baskets, of unspecified contents, would be dropped down. A few vertical exchanges might take place – for example:

‘Goo-mou-lin!’ (For the learned residents of Mount Culture preferred to communicate in heavily accented English.)

‘Hao du yoe toooo?’

‘Goo-loo-jee-lee…’

‘Oh-kei!’

The chariot then sped off back to the Land of Clever Tricks, leaving only the hush of applied eating and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocky sides of the mountain. Their energies replenished a hundredfold on waking from their midday naps, the scholars would drown out the sound of the breakers with their seminars and research papers.

‘No son of Gun will succeed in controlling the floods,’ one learned individual with a walking stick declared. ‘I have not only collected, but also actually examined, a vast number of genealogies of kings, dukes, ministers and rich men. Only one conclusion thrusts itself out at me: the descendants of the rich are always rich, the descendants of the wicked are always wicked. This demonstrates the scientific principle of heredity, from which we may extrapolate: if Gun was unsuccessful, his son will be equally so, because the stupid never give birth to the clever!’

‘Oh-kei!’ someone without a walking stick agreed.

‘But what about the revered father of our emperor?’ another scholar – again without walking stick – objected.

‘Granted, he was never the sharpest tool in the box. But he made some progress over the years – he wasn’t a complete fool.’

‘Oh-kei!’

‘W-what nonsense,’ another scholar stammered, the tip of his nose flushing bright red. ‘It’s all a great hoax! There is no Yu – he doesn’t exist! He’s just a worm. Look at how he writes his name:
, a worm
in a box with a lid. What can a worm in a box with a lid do against the floods? And Gun doesn’t exist, either!’ He gave a little skip for added emphasis.

‘But Gun does exist. I saw him with my own eyes seven years ago, smelling the plum blossom at the foot of Kunlun Mountain.’

‘A classic case of mistaken identity! And Yu is most indisputably a worm. I have a huge pile of evidence to disprove his existence. Gather round and see for yourself.’

Springing valiantly to his feet, he pulled out his fruit knife, stripped the bark off five giant pine trees, made a paste of leftover breadcrumbs, water and charcoal dust, and over the next twenty-seven days wrote out in minuscule print a devastating critique definitively proving Yu’s non-existence. To read it cost ten young elm leaves or – in raft-dwellers’ currency – a shellful of fresh waterweed.

Since the floods had put an end to hunting and farming, the survivors had an excess of time on their hands, and so the critique drew flocks of visitors. For three days, tourists crowded under the pines, sighing in either admiration or exhaustion.

‘Yu does exist,’ one rustic finally objected on the noon of the fourth day, while the scholar was attacking his fried noodles.

‘He’s a worm!’ The author of the unforgettable treatise sprang, roaring, to his feet, choking on a mouthful of semi-masticated noodles, his nose purple with outrage.

‘Don’t waste your breath arguing with him, Mr Birdbrain,’ the scholar with a walking stick intervened, setting down his bread. ‘All peasants are idiots. Produce your genealogy,’ he ordered the rude nonconformist, ‘and I’ll show you your ancestors were all idiots.’

‘I’ve never had one.’

‘How I loathe you grubby plebeians, muddying the crystalline waters of scholarship!’

‘W-we don’t need to see his genealogy to prove I’m right,’ Mr Birdbrain went on, even more angrily. ‘I’ve plenty of letters of congratulation from other scholars commending me for my erudition – I have them with me here.’

‘I still think we should check his genealogy…’

‘I told you, I don’t have one,’ the idiot said. ‘Things being as they are now, it would take weeks, if not months, for your friends to send in letters of verification. More inconvenient than a Daoist rite in a snail shell. Look, let’s not be too literal about the business of names. Take yours, Birdbrain,
. Are you a man, or a birdbrain?’

‘The disrespect! The insult!’ Mr Birdbrain was now so enraged that his ear lobes glowed purple. ‘Let us both go before a judge, this very afternoon, and settle our differences in a court of law. If he finds against me, if I turn out to be a birdbrain indeed, I’ll lose my head for it. If he finds for me, you’ll pay in the same coin! Hold on, let me just finish my fried noodles.’

‘As you, sir,’ the countryman phlegmatically replied, ‘are a learned scholar, you will surely know that it is past midday – a time when hunger tends to creep up on people. And how bitterly inconvenient it is that the stomachs of the stupid grow empty exactly as do the stomachs of the wise. Please accept my profuse apologies, but the fishing of waterweed calls me. Once you’ve filed your suit, I’ll return forthwith to give myself up.’ He hopped on to his raft and, scooping up waterweed with the help of a net bag, floated off into the distance. The crowds slowly thinned, while Mr Birdbrain returned to his fried noodles, his ear lobes and the tip of his nose still purple, and the genealogist with a walking stick went on shaking his head.