by Lu Xun
‘He’s out!’ the corpulent form of the Liang grandmother bellowed irritably out of the window opposite, her triangular eyes set beneath a mass of grey hair.
‘Where’s he gone?’ I asked.
‘How would I know?… Where can he go? Hang on and he’ll be back soon.’
I opened the door and walked into his sitting room. I felt as if I hadn’t been there for years. A scene of desolation greeted me: most of the furniture and books were gone, leaving a mere handful of foreign-looking books that the average reader in S— would have no interest in. The round table in the middle of the room was still there, but while in the past it had always been surrounded by passionate young melancholics, frustrated eccentric geniuses and filthy, ill-behaved children, now it was peacefully overlaid with a thin layer of dust. I placed the bottle of spirits and bags of food on the table, pulled over a chair and settled down to wait, facing the door.
Soon enough, the door did indeed open, and a shadowy figure – Lianshu – slipped in. Maybe because of the dusk gloom, his face looked even darker than usual; but it was otherwise unchanged.
‘How long have you been here?’ He seemed pleased to see me.
‘Not long,’ I said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Nowhere much. Just wandering.’
He pulled another chair over and sat down by the table. We began to drink and to talk about his dismissal. But he didn’t seem that interested in talking about it; it was something he’d long expected, and that he’d seen happen plenty of times before; what more was there to say? As in the past, he applied himself to the business of drinking in a fairly dedicated fashion, while tossing out a variety of views about society and history. I happened to glance at the empty shelves. Reminded of the book on the stall, I was overcome with a vague sorrow.
‘It’s so bleak in here… Haven’t you had many visitors lately?’
‘No. They keep away – they’re afraid of the mood they’ll find me in. It’s not much fun keeping company with depression. Who likes visiting a park in winter?’ He took another couple of gulps and sat in silence, thinking. Suddenly, he looked back up at me.
‘Still no news about that job of yours?’
Even though I knew he was drunk, I still allowed myself to be irritated by the question. Just as I was about to make some response, I noticed him listening out for something. Scooping up a handful of peanuts, he went out – the Liang children were laughing and shouting outside.
But the moment he went out, the children’s voices faded to nothing – they’d obviously run away. He chased after them, trying to say something, but I didn’t hear their reply. Slipping back inside, he replaced the handful of peanuts in the bag.
‘They won’t even eat my food,’ he muttered, softly self-mocking.
I forced a smile through the melancholy of it all. ‘Sometimes, I think you make life more difficult for yourself than you need to. You’re too pessimistic about people.’
He responded with another of his bleak smiles.
‘I suppose you think people only visit you – people like me – because we’ve nothing better to do, for a bit of entertainment?’
‘No. Well, sometimes, maybe. Or maybe you’re after anecdote material.’
‘Well, you’re wrong,’ I sighed. ‘People aren’t like that. You’ve spun a cocoon of loneliness around yourself. Can’t you try to see the bright side of things?’
‘Maybe you’re right. But where did I get the silk for my cocoon in the first place? And there are plenty of people like me in the world; my grandmother for one. Even though we weren’t blood relatives, maybe she passed on her destiny to me. But I’ve shed all the tears I’m going to shed for her, and for myself.’
I thought back to his grandmother’s funeral.
‘I’ve never quite understood,’ I said, ‘why you cried like that, after she’d died.’
‘No reason why you should,’ he curtly responded, lighting the lamp. ‘You and I only became friends afterwards – or maybe even because of it. My grandmother, you see, was my father’s stepmother; his natural mother died when he was two.’ He drank some more wine, finishing up a smoked fish-head.
‘Back then, I knew nothing of any of this. But a few things always struck me as a bit curious. While my father was still alive and things were all right at home, we’d hang up pictures of our ancestors dressed in the most wonderful clothes at the start of the New Year and make offerings to them. I loved gazing at their images. I remember a maid holding me up, and pointing out one of the pictures. “That’s your real grandmother,” she’d say. “Bow to her, so she’ll bless you and you’ll grow up big and strong.” I was puzzled: I already had a grandmother, so who was this other, “real” grandmother? But I loved this young, beautiful grandmother of mine, in a gold-trimmed red dress and pearl crown, just like my mother in her picture, nothing like the old grandmother who looked after me. When I looked at her, she seemed to gaze back at me, her lips curling into a smile; I knew that she loved me very much.
‘I also loved my other grandmother, who sat by the window all day slowly doing her needlework. But however hard I tried to get her to laugh, I could never coax a smile out of her. I felt she was shutting me out – she seemed different from my friends’ grandmothers. But I still loved her. Afterwards, though, we somehow became more distant with each other. Not because I was older and knew she wasn’t my father’s natural mother. I got bored with her – sitting there, day in, day out, year in, year out, working mechanically away at her sewing. But on she went, doing her needlework, looking after me, loving me. Though I hardly ever saw her smile, she never told me off, either. After my father died, when her sewing became our only source of income, she withdrew even further into herself. Then I left for school…’
The lamp faded, its paraffin almost burned up. He groped for a small galvanized iron can on one of the bookshelves and topped the fuel up.
‘Paraffin’s gone up twice this month already,’ he commented, turning the wick. ‘Life seems to get harder every day… And so it went on, until I left school and started work myself. Life became a bit easier, a bit more secure, till she got ill and had to take to her bed.
‘I don’t think her life was too bad, towards the end. She’d lived a good long time. There was no need for me to cry as well; she’d had plenty of tears shed for her – a lot of them by people who’d tried their hardest to make her life miserable while she was alive. Hypocrites!’ He laughed. ‘But somehow, at that moment, her whole life seemed to play out before my eyes – a life of diligently self-inflicted isolation. And there are plenty of people like her. Maybe I was just emotional because of the funeral, but I suddenly wanted to weep for all these people.
‘You see me as I used to see her. But I was wrong. Because, now I think back over things, it was me who allowed myself to become estranged from her, as I saw more of the world…’
He bowed his head, a cigarette hanging between his fingers. There was a slight flicker to the lamplight.
‘It’s a hard thing to have no one to mourn you,’ he muttered, as if to himself. After another pause, he looked back up at me. ‘But you’ve problems of your own. I’ve got to find myself a job – and quickly.’
‘Haven’t you any other friends who can help you out?’ I felt utterly powerless to do anything either for him, or for myself.
‘A few, I suppose, but we’re all in pretty much the same boat.’
I said goodnight to Lianshu at the door and emerged into an unusually still night, a full moon shining directly overhead.
IV
My position at Shanyang turned out to be far from ideal. Two months after starting, I hadn’t seen a cent of my salary; I had to cut back even on cigarettes. My colleagues, by contrast, seemed constitutionally inured to hardship and perfectly contented with their menial positions and meagre fifteen- or sixteen-dollar salaries, their thin, pale, long-suffering faces bent constantly over their work. The sight of an individual of even middling rank would yank them respectfully
to their feet – proving that the maintenance of social niceties is not tied to material sufficiency. Whenever I witnessed this, I always recalled Lianshu’s parting words to me. By the time I left, his finances had become even more precarious. His old reserve had started to give way to a kind of urgent desperation, and he called on me, late one night, after he learnt that I was leaving.
‘Might there be anything for me, too, out there?’ he eventually stammered out. ‘Anything – even if it’s only copying work, twenty or thirty dollars a month…’
I said nothing, startled by how low he was willing to stoop.
‘I… I have to try to find a way to keep going.’
‘I’ll keep an eye out for you – I’ll do my best.’
Lianshu’s hopeless request, and my glib response to it, often returned to haunt me, pushing me to make all sorts of approaches on his behalf, but nothing came of it. There were too many people chasing too few jobs; all I ever got was the odd regretful apology, which I recycled into letters of apologetic regret back to him. My own situation deteriorated at the end of the first term. A weekly rag – Principles of Study – run by a few local worthies, began to publish attacks on me. No one named names, of course, but they were ingeniously worded to give the direct impression I was plotting revolution on campus. Even my friendship with Lianshu got dragged into it – as if we were part of some insidious cabal.
I kept as low a profile as I could. Outside class, I took refuge in my room, sometimes even afraid that the trickle of cigarette smoke from a crack in the window would be seen as further proof of subversion. All hope of helping Lianshu was, of course, now lost. And so it dragged on into midwinter.
Snow had fallen all day and deep into the night. Outside, the quiet was so absolute you could almost hear it. I was sitting under the shrunken flame of my lamp, imagining – through eyes closed with the boredom of it all – the busy descent of snowflakes before they banked over the ground. I thought of the place I’d grown up, of frantic New Year preparations there, of childhood, of sculpting a Buddhist saint out of snow in our back courtyard. Its black eyes – fashioned out of two fragments of coal – suddenly flashed, like Lianshu’s.
‘I… I have to try to find a way to keep going,’ went the same voice in my head.
‘Why?’ I wondered.
Shaken awake by the idiocy of my question, I sat up and lit a cigarette. Opening a window, I saw the snow was falling more heavily than ever. There was a knock at the door: a few seconds later, I heard the familiar footsteps of the boarding house’s odd-job man inside the room. He handed me a large envelope, perhaps six inches long. Though the handwriting was almost illegible, I recognized at a glance the word ‘Wei’ – it was from Lianshu.
This was the first letter I’d received from him since leaving S—. I hadn’t been particularly surprised by his lack of news – I knew how lethargic he sometimes was – but I’d felt the odd twinge of resentment at his silence. Yet I had a strange feeling about this letter, now it had finally come. I ripped it open.
‘— Shenfei,’ it began, again almost illegibly.
What title do you prefer? Fill in the blank as you please.
I’ve had three letters from you since you left, but have replied to none. For the simplest of reasons: I’ve had no money for stamps. Nonetheless, you may still be interested in having news of me – news that I have finally failed. I used to think I already was a failure; now, I know I merely dabbled in the art. There once was a time when there was someone who wanted me to keep going a little longer, and even when I wanted it myself. Despite all the obstacles. Now, there’s no reason to go on, and yet I find myself still alive.
So what should I do?
The person who wanted me to go on living has been lured to his death by enemies. And who were they? No one seems to know.
How fast things change! The past six months have practically, in fact properly, reduced me to begging. But there were still things I wanted to accomplish, things I was willing to beg for, to suffer cold, hunger and loneliness for. And I wasn’t ready to be destroyed. Just because someone else wanted me to live. Now he is gone, there is no one. I don’t deserve to go on living, but neither do a great many others. And now, I want to live for my enemies. Those who wished me well are gone – there’s no one left to hurt, no one to suffer for what I do. I wouldn’t want to cause people like that grief. I’ve now done everything I used to despise, and turned my back on everything I used to believe in. There’s a wonderful sense of release, of happiness in giving up, in going over to the other side. I’ve failed – but also won.
Have I gone mad, you must be wondering? Have I become a national hero, a celebrity? Nothing of the sort. It’s quite simple. I’ve become esteemed aide to our even more esteemed local warlord, Divisional Commander Du,1 who retains my services at the princely rate of eighty dollars a month.
Think what you like of me, Shenfei. I don’t mind.
Do you remember my old room: the room in which we first talked and later said goodbye? Now it is filled with new guests, new bribes, new flattery, new intrigues, new kowtows, new bows, new mahjong games, new drinking games, new plots and villainies; new sleepless nights and new spitting of blood…
You said in your previous letter that your new job was not as you’d hoped. Fancy becoming an aide? Say but the word! You’d probably make a decent living just as a doorman, all those guests, and bribes, all that dishonesty…
It’s snowing hard here. How about where you are? It’s the middle of the night: I’ve spat blood twice and can’t get back to sleep. I remember your three letters since the autumn; I’d never thought of you as a diligent correspondent. I felt I must send you news; I wonder if I’ve succeeded in shocking you.
I probably won’t write again. You know what I’m like. When are you coming back? If you hurry, we might yet meet; but I think it unlikely – we’ve taken different paths. Best forget all about me. Thank you for trying to help me – you can give up now. I’m ‘fine’.
Lianshu
14 December
I wasn’t shocked. After reading it once quickly, then a second time more carefully, I was left instead with a curious sense of uneasy relief. At least, I thought to myself, subsistence was no longer a problem for him. One less thing for me to worry about, even though I’d never done anything for him anyway. For a moment I considered writing back, then let the notion fade away – I felt I had nothing to say.
I did begin to forget him, just as he had instructed. But less than ten days after his letter arrived, Study Weekly – a local S— paper – suddenly went back into print. Though I’d never been a great reader of such publications, I glanced idly through it, since it had dropped on to my doorstep. It was full of reminders of Lianshu, of poems and essays mentioning him – ‘A Snowy Audience with Mr Lianshu’, ‘An Elegant Gathering in the Studio of our Esteemed Aide-de-camp Lianshu’, and so on. In the section entitled ‘Gossip’, stories in which Lianshu had previously been the target of ridicule were now relished as amusing anecdotes, designed to prove that exceptional men behave in exceptional ways.
The curious thing was that, despite all these reminders of him, and of my affection for him, his features blurred in my memory. But he haunted my thoughts, leaving me with a kind of mysterious, shuddering apprehension. Luckily, by autumn Study Weekly had stopped coming. At which point, Shanyang’s Principles of Study carried a long piece entitled ‘Gossip – Fact’. Rumours about certain gentlemen, it revealed, were enjoying a wide currency among law-abiding local notables. Several names were mentioned, of which mine was one. Now, extra precautions in my daily life became necessary – permitting my cigarette smoke to escape through the window once more became unacceptably risky. Worn out by it all, I soon let Lianshu slip to the back, and then out, of my mind.
But I was still unable to hold on to my job till the end of term. At the end of May, I left Shanyang.
V
From Shanyang to Licheng to Taigu, I spent the next six months almost constan
tly on the move. When finally all my other options seemed exhausted, I decided to return to S—. I arrived on an overcast afternoon in early spring, as the sky hesitated over whether or not to rain. As there were vacancies in my old lodgings, I took up a room there. I had set to thinking about Lianshu on my journey back, and resolved to go and call on him after dinner. I walked along a succession of damp streets and around a succession of dozing dogs, bearing two packages containing the steamed cakes for which Wenxi is renowned, until I finally reached Lianshu’s gate. It seemed very bright inside: maybe even an aide-de-camp’s lodgings got to share the brilliance of their occupant, I smiled to myself through the gloom. I then noticed a strip of white mourning paper pasted diagonally across the side of the gate. The Liang grandmother must have died, I thought to myself, heading inside.
A coffin was set beneath the courtyard light, a soldier, or perhaps a bodyguard in full uniform, standing to one side, talking to a woman who looked like the Liang grandmother. A few labourers in short jackets stood idly by. My heart began to pound.
‘Well, well, well, look who’s back!’ she shouted, turning to stare at me. ‘Bit late, aren’t we?’
‘Who – who’s passed away?’ Even though I knew what her answer would be, still I had to ask.
‘Our esteemed Mr Wei, the day before yesterday.’
I looked about me: Lianshu’s old room was sunk in quiet, dimly lit by probably a single lamp. White mourning curtains hung in the front room. A few children had gathered outside – the Liangs.
‘He’s in there.’ Their grandmother pointed towards the curtain as she approached me. ‘After Mr Wei was honoured with his new position, I rented our front room out to him as well. That’s where he is now.’
Two tables, one square, one rectangular, were set before the plain curtains, with perhaps a dozen bowls of food laid out on the first. The moment I entered the room, two men in long white gowns blocked my way, glaring suspiciously at me, their eyes bulging like those of landed fish. I quickly explained my relationship with Lianshu – a connection corroborated by the ever-present Mrs Liang. Eventually, Lianshu’s keepers stepped aside to permit me to pay my respects.