The Real Story of Ah-Q (49 page)

Though public opinion was, on the whole, positive. As word got about, a few married and unmarried ladies made their own pilgrimages, although were little impressed. ‘What a yawn,’ they complained, on their return.

Eventually, even Shouyang’s one notable honoured them with a visit: Lord Xiaobing. The adopted son-in-law of the maternal uncle of the ill-fated concubine Da Ji, he had been Master of Libations under the Shang. Recognizing that the Mandate of Heaven was changing hands, he briskly surrendered to the victorious King Wu of Zhou, bringing with him fifty carts of personal goods and eight hundred slaves and retainers. As this occurred just a few days shy of the great assembly of forces at Mengjin, there was no time to reassign him to an appropriate post. Taking with him forty of his carts, and seven hundred and fifty of his slaves and retainers, he was allocated two hectares of fertile land at the foot of Mount Shouyang, and told to stay there researching trigrams. A great lover of literature, he was oppressed by the idiocy of rural life – the village was full of illiterates, completely ignorant of literary theory. And so, after ordering his servants to prepare a sedan chair, he set off in search of the two old men and some literary conversation – especially about poetry, his own genre of choice. He had already written a volume of verse himself.

But after some conversation, he got back into his chair and returned home in something of a temper. Neither of them, he thought, had anything to say about poetry. First of all, they were poor: no one who was scratching around for food all day could have time to write decent poetry. Second, they were too politically biased to cultivate the proper poetic moderation. Third, they were too opinionated to cultivate true poetic tolerance.
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Worst of all, they were a bundle of intellectual and moral contradictions.

‘Every inch of land under heaven belongs to our king,’ he now decreed self-righteously. ‘And that includes the ferns!’

Boyi and Shuqi, meanwhile, were growing thinner by the day. Not because they were exhausted by socializing – their visitors had been diminishing of late. The problem was a diminishing of the supply of ferns: enormous, lengthy efforts were necessary to yield even a handful per day.

And yet it never rains but it pours: once you’re already stuck at the bottom of a well, someone’s bound to drop a boulder on your head.

One afternoon, after a particularly arduous quest for food, they were at last sitting down to a late lunch of roast fern when a young woman they had never seen before – around twenty years old, a servant in a wealthy household, by the looks of her – suddenly appeared.

‘Is that your lunch?’ she asked.

Looking up, Shuqi immediately forced a smile and nodded.

‘What on earth is it?’ she asked.

‘Fern,’ Boyi answered.

‘Why are you eating it?’

‘Because we won’t eat the grain of Zhou.’

Shuqi darted a look at Boyi the moment the words had escaped his mouth. Too late: the woman smirked with a sharp cunning, her opening spotted.

‘Every inch of land under heaven belongs to our king,’ she recited. ‘And that includes the ferns!’

Her words seemed to stun the brothers – like a deafening thunderclap. By the time they had recovered their wits, the girl had disappeared. They did not finish the ferns, of course – they wouldn’t have got them down even if they had tried. They could hardly bear to look at them; and when they tried to push them away, their hands felt too stupidly heavy – as if they weighed hundreds of pounds.

Perhaps three weeks later, a woodcutter chanced upon the dead bodies of Boyi and Shuqi, curled up into a ball in a grotto on the far side of the mountain. The bodies had not decayed: partly because of their emaciation, and partly because they clearly hadn’t been long dead. Their old sheepskin robes had mysteriously disappeared. When this news reached the village, fresh parties of tourists clambered up to see, well into the evening. A few of the more interfering spectators buried them under a pile of yellow earth and even discussed erecting a stone tablet engraved with a few words, as a future draw for visitors.

But since no one in the village could write, they were obliged to turn to Lord Xiaobing for help.

And he wanted nothing to do with it.

‘They were idiots,’ he sniffed. ‘First they ran off to the Old People’s Home – but they wouldn’t live a quiet life. Then they ran off to Mount Shouyang – but they insisted on writing poetry about it. And then they insisted on using it for their own ends, completely disregarding the principle of art for art’s sake. Where is the lasting value of a poem like this?

‘Where’s the sincerity? Where’s the tolerance? All they did was rant and rave. You can’t give your readers thorns without any roses. And literary questions aside, what kind of sons were
they
to their father, abandoning their ancestral land? Then they started laying down the law to the King of Zhou, the treacherous upstarts… So no is your answer!’

Though the finer points of his disquisition were lost on the illiterate villagers, they sensed he was less than enthusiastic and let the idea lie. And so the burial of Boyi and Shuqi remained a simple affair.

But the brothers sometimes crept back into the villagers’ conversation as they sat about enjoying the cool of summer nights. Some said they died of old age, others that they died of illness, others again that they were murdered by robbers for their sheepskin robes. In time, someone said they’d starved themselves to death because of what Ah-jin, the maid in Lord Xiaobing’s household, had said to them. She’d told him they’d been found about a fortnight after she’d made her trip up the mountain. Idiots are always quick to pique – maybe they went on hunger strike to make a point. And succeeded only in starving themselves to death.

Ah-jin had her admirers, a good number of them, who praised her for her wit; others, however, felt she’d been too harsh.

The lady herself, meanwhile, refused to accept that the death of Boyi and Shuqi had anything to do with her. Granted, she’d gone up the mountain to poke a bit of fun at them, but it was just a bit of fun. Granted, the old fools had flown into a temper and refused to eat any more ferns. But this had brought them a great stroke of luck.

‘Heaven is kind,’ she said. ‘Seeing they were about to starve to death just to make a point, he told a doe to suckle them. Think of it! All they had to do was sit around all day, drinking milk delivered to their door – no need to lift a finger. But were they grateful? Not a bit. Especially not the younger one – what was he called? – the younger one, anyway; always wanting more, he was. So one day, as he was drinking the milk, he thought to himself how fat the deer was, and how delicious its meat would taste. Then he reached out for a stone – but he didn’t know the magic deer could read men’s minds. So she just disappeared in a puff of smoke. Heaven was so disgusted by their greed, he told the roe deer to stop coming. They deserved to starve! I had nothing to do with it – they brought it on themselves, the greedy wretches.’

Her audiences always sighed as she concluded her story – the worry lifting from their bodies. Now, if ever they thought of the brothers, they were hazy figures, squatted at the foot of a cliff, their white-bearded mouths gaping open to devour the deer.

December 1935

Mei Jianchi had just laid down to sleep next to his mother when the rats came out to gnaw on the lid to the cooking pot. The sound irritated him, and though hissing at them had some initial effect, after a while they began to ignore him and returned to their gnawing with renewed vigour. Raising his voice was impossible, for fear of waking his mother, who, after another day of constant toil, had fallen asleep the moment she had laid down.

Eventually, the noise subsided and sleep crept up on him, until a sudden splash had his eyes wide open again. At the same time, there came a rustling: the sound of claws scratching at pottery.

‘Ha!’ he gloated, sitting up quietly.

Stepping out of bed, he found his way to the door by moonlight, groped for the flint behind it, then lit a pine torch and held it over the water vat. As he suspected, an outsized rat had fallen inside, but the water level was so low it could have no hope of climbing out. Round and round the inside edge it went, clawing at the pottery wall.

‘Serves you right!’ he exulted, remembering how they tormented him every night, chewing on the furniture. After lodging the pine torch into a small hole in the mud wall, he delighted in the scene before him. Yet loathing also welled up in him – at those round, staring little eyes. Reaching out for a reed, he poked the animal down to the bottom of the vat. When eventually he stopped, the rat returned to the surface, resuming its original circuits. But the struggle had exhausted it: its eyes were now under water, with only its scarlet pointed nose bobbing up, rasping for breath.

He had rather taken against people with red noses of late. But the specimen currently before him suddenly aroused his pity, and he now slid the reed under the rat’s stomach. The creature clutched hold of it, rested briefly, then began clambering up. But when it emerged fully into view – with its slick black fur, oversized stomach, wormlike tail – he felt another rush of hatred. He shook the reed impatiently; the rat thumped back into the vat, where the boy now thrashed its head with his improvised weapon, to ensure it sank as fast as possible.

After the torch had been changed six times, the rat was floating in the centre of the water, motionless except for the occasional weak, upwards convulsion. Seized yet again by the pity of it, Mei Jianchi broke the reed in two and – with great difficulty – used the two pieces as pincers to lever the rat out and laid it on the floor. Initially immobile, the rat then began to breathe, and eventually to move its legs. Much later again, it rolled over, apparently preparing for the off. Astonished by its recovery, Mei Jianchi lifted his left foot then stamped down on it – without conscious thought. A squeak, then – when he squatted down to look – a trickle of blood at the corner of its mouth. It was probably dead.

Again, he was paralysed by pity, agonized by the enormity of his act. There he squatted, staring, unable to heave himself to his feet.

‘What are you doing, Jianchi?’ his mother asked from the bed.

‘A rat…’ he briefly replied, hastily standing up and turning to face her.

‘I know. But what are you doing with it? Killing it, or saving it?’

He made no answer. Now the torch had burnt itself out, he stood silently in the darkness, his eyes slowly adjusting to the pale moonlight.

His mother sighed. ‘After midnight, you’ll be fifteen, but you’re still as weak as a child. One minute hot, cold the next: there’s no consistency in you and I don’t see you changing. Your father will have no one to avenge him, it seems.’

He gazed at his mother, now sitting up, shuddering, in the shadows of the moonlight. The infinite sorrow contained in her quiet voice chilled him to the bone. An instant later, hot blood coursed through his veins.

‘Avenge Father? He needs avenging?’ he asked nervously, advancing a few steps towards the bed.

‘Yes. And you’re the only person who can. I wanted to tell you a long time ago, but always held back, because you were too young. And now you’re a man, you still act like a boy. What am I to do? Can you be trusted with such a task – to carry it through?’

‘I can. Tell me, Mother. I’ll change.’

‘Of course. I have to tell you. And you have to change… Come over here.’

He walked up to the bed. His mother was now sitting fully upright, her eyes flashing in the moonlight.

‘Listen!’ she began solemnly. ‘Your father was celebrated as a forger of swords – the best in the empire. A long time ago, I sold his tools to buy food – that’s why there’s no trace of his old trade about the place. But he was the best of his kind; there was no one to touch him. Twenty years ago, the king’s concubine gave birth to a piece of iron – the rumour went she had fallen pregnant after embracing an iron pillar – a piece of pure-blue, transparent iron. Recognizing this for the rare treasure it was, the king decided to forge it into a sword – a sword to defend the country and protect himself, that would fell all enemies. It was your father’s misfortune to be selected for the task. After he brought the iron back home, he tempered it day and night for three whole years until it was forged into two swords.

‘I remember when he finally opened up his furnace – the terror of it! A jet of white vapour roared up, shaking the ground beneath our feet. Then it enveloped the room in a cloud that slowly glowed crimson, a halo of peach-blossom light about it. There the two swords lay, bright red in our pitch-black furnace. When your father sprinkled well water over them, they hissed and roared, slowly turning blue. On this went for seven days and seven nights, until the swords lay, almost invisible, at the bottom of the furnace – two pure-blue, transparent icicles.

‘Your father’s eyes blazed with triumph as he took them up and wiped them off. Then a look of sorrow came over him. He placed the swords in two caskets.