The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China

by Lu Xun

  As I bowed to the deceased, someone at ground level began sobbing. Turning, I discovered a child around nine years old lying face down on the straw mourning mat, also dressed in white, a hank of linen tied around his shaved head.

  After a brief conversation, I discovered that one of the men in white was Lianshu’s cousin, his closest surviving relative; the other was a distant nephew. When I asked to see the deceased, they did their best to turn me back, claiming that I did them ‘too much honour’. In the end, though, I persuaded them, and the curtain was opened.

  Lianshu lay before me, in death. And yet, the strangest thing! Despite his crumpled shirt and trousers, the bloodstains on the lapels, the hideous emaciation of his face – despite all this, his face essentially remained as it had always been, his mouth and eyes peacefully shut as if in sleep. I almost reached out to place my hand over his nose, to check whether he was still breathing.

  A sepulchral silence prevailed over the living and the dead. As I retreated, the cousin approached once more to continue our exchange: his ‘younger brother’, he said, had suddenly passed away in the prime of life, cutting off the infinite possibilities for advancement and success that lay before him – a misfortune for the family, a source of pain to his friends. He seemed actually to be apologizing for his cousin’s rudeness in having the temerity to die, demonstrating a grasp of funeral sophistry rare in countryfolk. Then the silence – the same, absolute silence as before – returned.

  I felt no sadness, only boredom. Re-emerging into the courtyard, I slipped into conversation with the Liang grandmother. He would be placed in his coffin, I learnt, as soon as the burial clothes were delivered. While it was being sealed up, anyone born in the year of the rat, horse, rabbit or rooster would have to make themselves scarce (for fear, presumably, of some cosmic clash). The words gushed out of her in a merry torrent, prattle about his illness, about his last few months and about her own views on both subjects.

  ‘He was a different man after his luck changed, you know. Strutting about, head held high. A whole load more fun than he used to be. Never used to be much of a talker – “Mrs Liang” was the most I’d get out of him. After he got his new job, though, he cracked me up – called me “old bat”. When people gave him herbs for tonics, he’d just toss them into the courtyard at me. “You have them, old bat,” that’s what he used to say. After his luck changed, I let the front room out to him and took the side-room for myself – made sense with all those visitors he got. But he wasn’t all up himself, like some people get when their luck turns. He’d often stop for a chat and a joke. If only you’d got here a month earlier, you’d have had yourself a time – drinking, chatting, laughing, singing, poetry, mahjong…

  ‘The old Mr Wei was scared to death of the children, meek as anything around them. The last few months, though, he was completely different, always up for a lark. He was a great favourite with our four, always running off to his rooms, they were, whenever they got a chance. Oh, he was a tease: if they wanted something off him, he’d get them to bark like dogs, or kowtow. The fun we had. A couple of months ago, when our second oldest wanted a pair of shoes, three times he had to kowtow – you could hear his head thumping on the ground. He’s still wearing them now – good as new.’

  She shut up when one of the men in long white gowns emerged. I asked about Lianshu’s illness, but she didn’t have much light to shed. He’d lost a load of weight some while ago, she said, but no one’d taken any notice, because he was always so full of the joys of spring. Maybe a month ago, they’d heard he’d been spitting blood, but he’d refused to see a doctor. ‘Then he took to his bed. He lost his voice completely three days before he died. When his cousin came down from Hanshi Mountain to ask where his savings were, he wouldn’t say a thing. The cousin thought he was just putting it on, but I don’t know… Some say that people with consumption really do lose their voices near the end.

  ‘He was a rum one, though, our Mr Wei,’ she lowered her voice. ‘The money just ran through his fingers, he didn’t save a penny. That cousin of his was convinced he’d given the loot to us, but we didn’t get a damn thing. He threw the whole lot away – on nothing. He’d buy something one day, sell it the next, break it in the meantime. No one could understand it. There was nothing left when he died – everything was spoilt. That’s why the place looks so depressing now.

  ‘His problem was he couldn’t take anything seriously. I tried to tell him it was time he had a family – a man in his position could have found someone like a shot. Or even if he couldn’t get someone from a good family, he could have bought in a few concubines. Kept up appearances, at least. But he’d just laugh: “Quite the matchmaker, aren’t we? Always sticking our nose in other people’s romances.” There wasn’t a word of sense to be had out of him. Now if he’d listened to me, all that while back, he wouldn’t be lying alone in the cold and dark like he is now. At least he’d have a few people to cry for him.’

  A shop assistant came in with a bundle of clothes on his back. After picking out some underwear, the three relatives went behind the mourning curtain. Soon after, the preliminaries were completed and the mourning curtain lifted, ready for the outer clothing to be added. I watched, perplexed, as a pair of khaki army trousers with a thick red stripe was followed by a jacket with gleaming epaulettes. I had no idea what rank they denoted, or in what army. His outlandish toilette completed, Lianshu lay in his coffin, a pair of brown leather shoes by his feet, a papier mâché sword at his waist. Next to his grey face – the bones protruding below the skin like sticks of wood – a gold-trimmed cap glinted.

  The three relatives wept a while at the side of the coffin, then stopped and wiped their tears. The boy with the linen round his head withdrew, as did the third Liang child, probably because they had been born in cosmically incompatible years.

  As a couple of the labourers heaved up the coffin lid, I moved in closer to take final leave of Lianshu.

  There he lay, under all this improbable clothing, eyes and mouth shut, lips curled up at the corners, mocking his posthumous absurdity.

  The instant the first hammer stroke fell, the wailing began. Desperate to escape it, I retreated first into the courtyard and then – my feet somehow taking on a will of their own – out of the gate and along damp streets, their outlines still perfectly visible through the dusk. I looked up at the sky: the heavy cloud-cover had now dissolved, to reveal a round moon, scattering a still, frigid light over the city.

  I walked faster, as if struggling – in vain – to flee some great source of oppression. Something seemed to be struggling to escape my eardrum, finally breaking free: a long howl – the nocturnal howl of a wounded wolf in the wilderness, rasping with an agonized grief.

  My heart easing beneath the moonlight, I strode freely through the damp cobbled streets.

  Finished on 17 October 1925

  IN MEMORIAM

  From Juansheng’s notes

  I want to try, if I possibly can, to set down here my feelings of sorrow and regret – for Zijun, and for myself.

  How quiet and empty this shabby old room is, in its forgotten corner of the hostel. And how quickly time passes: a whole year since I fell in love with Zijun, since she enabled me to escape this quiet emptiness. And how unfortunate that I should now happen to return to this same room, unchanged in every way: the same broken window, the same moribund locust tree and ancient wisteria, the same square table, the same mildewed wall, the same plank bed pushed against it. As I lie on it now, alone and awake in the middle of the night, the past year seems to fade away, as if I had never lived with Zijun, as if I had never moved out of this shabby room to set up my own hopeful little establishment in Goodluck Lane.

  Another thing I now notice. A year before, the stillness and emptiness about the place was different, full of expectation: the impatient expectation of Zijun’s arrival. I would spring to life the instant I heard the crisp clip of high-heeled shoes along the paved road. Her round, pale, dimpled face, thin wh
ite arms, striped blouse and black skirt would swing into view, bringing me fresh leaves from the locust tree, lilac flowers hanging in clusters off the gnarled wisteria trunk.

  But now, only quiet and emptiness are left. Zijun will never return – never.

  When Zijun was not here, I was blind to my decrepit surroundings, dazed by the unending tedium of her absence. Nothing I tried to read – science, literature, anything – stuck. I would run through a dozen pages then realize I had taken none of it in. Only my sense of hearing remained unimpaired, as if I could pick out Zijun’s tread from every other set of footsteps passing my gate. I would think I could hear them, drawing closer, and closer – then fading into the distance, disappearing in a confusion of other footsteps. How I hated the son of the local official’s factotum, his cloth soles a world away from Zijun’s high heels, and the dandy next door, whose leather shoes so often tricked me into hope.

  Had her rickshaw overturned? I would start to fret. Had she been run over by a tram?

  I would have snatched up my hat to go out to look for her, were it not for memory of her uncle’s wrath.

  Then suddenly her footsteps would draw near, and nearer. By the time I had come out to meet her, she would be under the wisteria canopy, her face dimpled with smiles, safe (that day, at least) from her uncle’s fury. My heartbeat would slow. We would spend a moment silently gazing at each other, then my shabby room would echo with the sound of my own voice: discoursing on the dictatorship of the Chinese family, on the need to sweep away tradition, on the equality of the sexes, Ibsen, Tagore, Shelley… And she would smile and nod, her eyes shining with childish excitement. I’d pinned to the wall a copperplate engraving of a bust of Shelley looking at his most handsome, torn from a magazine. When I showed it to her, she glanced at it, then looked down, as if embarrassed. I feared, at such moments, that Zijun had not yet freed herself of the shackles of tradition; perhaps, I later came to think, a commemorative portrait of Shelley drowning at sea, or of Ibsen, would have been more appropriate. But I never got round to replacing it – and can’t think what has happened to it now.

  ‘I belong to myself!’ she calmly declared, after a moment’s reflection. ‘No one else has any rights over me!’

  We’d known each other for six months, and our conversation had just turned to her uncle – her guardian in Beijing – and to her father, back home. By this point, I had declared all my opinions, experiences and faults, keeping almost nothing back; she understood me perfectly. For days, her words echoed in the cathedral of my mind, moving me to inexpressible euphoria – I now knew Chinese women weren’t the lost cause that pessimists would have us believe, and that a glorious future would soon dawn for us all.

  We maintained our usual ten paces’ distance as I saw her out of the gate, that filthy old gatekeeper with his catfish beard squashing his face against the dirty window-pane. Then there’d be the face of the young dandy in the next courtyard, plastered with cold cream as usual, against the gleaming window. She walked proudly off, without a sideways glance at our audience; I returned proudly to the hostel.

  ‘I belong to myself! No one else has any rights over me!’

  My resolution was nothing to hers. What could vanishing cream and a squashed face do to this thought?

  I can no longer remember how I declared myself to her. Soon afterwards, the details grew hazy in my mind – thinking back over them at night, I could recall only fragments. Within a month or two of our moving in together, even these fragments had faded into cryptic shadows and dreams. All I could remember was, a dozen or so days before the event itself, exhaustively scripting my speech: both introduction and conclusion, and an appropriate response in the case of a refusal. But when my moment arrived, none of this forethought was of the slightest use. Overwhelmed by stage fright, I fell instinctively back on the mode of delivery I’d learnt at the movies: falling to one knee and clasping her hand, tears in my eyes. I later cringed at the memory of it all, and yet, like a single lamp in a dark room, this is all that remains to me of the scene.

  Zijun’s response is equally a blur; all I knew was that she had accepted me. But I do seem to remember her face changing colour: to a ghostly white, then a bright crimson I’d never seen before – nor saw again. I saw joy and sorrow, doubt and surprise in her childlike eyes. She did her best to avoid my gaze, as if afraid, as if searching for an escape route through the window. But I knew I had been accepted even though I could not say how she had or had not expressed it.

  While she, by contrast, remembered everything: what I had said, as if she were reciting from a favourite text; what I had done, as if a film – invisible to me – were playing out before her, recounting the scene in three-dimensional detail, in all its sentimental idiocy. She would review the episode in the middle of the night, calling me to minute account, ordering me to go back over what I’d said, correcting or adding to my responses, as if I were a substandard pupil.

  As time went by, she went back over it less and less often. But whenever I saw her staring into space, lost in thought, her expression softening, her dimples deepening, I knew she was returning to it. I was terrified of her remembering my ridiculous, pathetic obeisance; and yet I knew there was no way to make her forget.

  And she found nothing ridiculous in it, I knew – because she loved me, totally, innocently.

  The closing weeks of last spring – those were our best, our happiest, busiest times. Once my mind had calmed back down, it began generating projects to keep my body fully occupied. Now, at last, we began to go out together: along the street, in the park, but mostly hunting for a place to live. I felt I had to be constantly ready for the looks we got as an unchaperoned couple – questioning, mocking, vulgar, contemptuous. The moment my guard dropped, I wanted to curl up into a ball; I had to bristle constantly with proud defiance. While Zijun strolled fearlessly, obliviously on, as if through a deserted city.

  Finding a place to live was no easy task: most places found some excuse or other to turn us away, while the rest weren’t suitable anyway. At the beginning of our search, we were very particular – or perhaps not particular enough, as we wouldn’t have felt welcome in most of the rooms we looked at. Later on, our sole concern became to find a landlord who would take us in. After seeing some twenty places, we eventually found somewhere that would do for the time being: two north-facing rooms in a small courtyard on Goodluck Lane. Our landlord was a low-ranking official of some description, but surprisingly liberal with it. He and his family – a wife, a baby girl not yet one, and a peasant-girl maid – took the main room and the apartments to the sides of the house. As long as the baby wasn’t crying, theirs was an agreeably peaceful establishment.

  Even though we kept our furnishings very simple, they swallowed up more than half the money I’d scraped together. Zijun sold her only jewellery – a gold ring and pair of earrings. I tried to stop her, but she was set on it, so I didn’t press the issue. I knew she would be uncomfortable if I didn’t let her make a contribution.

  Some while ago, she had quarrelled and broken with her uncle, who had subsequently disowned her. I, too, broke with friends whose cowardice and even envy they disguised as ‘friendly advice’. So we lived very quietly. Every evening, my rickshaw-puller would advance – with infuriating slowness – through the dusk, until eventually I was face to face with Zijun once more. First we would gaze silently at each other, then begin to talk – about anything, everything – before falling back into silence, perhaps thinking deep thoughts, or perhaps nothing at all. I gradually came to read her body and soul. Within three weeks, I felt I had an even deeper understanding of her: things I had thought I understood I now realized had been barriers, keeping us apart.

  Zijun became more cheerful and energetic by the day. Though I soon learnt she had no love of flowers. Two potted plants I bought her at a temple bazaar withered and died after four days of neglect; I had no time for such things. But she loved animals. Maybe the official’s wife gave her the idea, but before a m
onth was out our household had expanded to four little hens, mixing in the courtyard with our landlady’s dozen. The two women knew at a glance whose was whose. Then there was the grey pug, again from a temple bazaar. I seem to remember it already had a name when we got it, but Zijun gave it another – Tag. I didn’t care for the name, but I still took to using it.

  To survive, I would say to Zijun, true love needs renewing, nurturing, recreating. She would nod in understanding.

  Those peaceful, happy nights!

  *

  Given the chance, peace and happiness will thicken and set in the mould they are cast. Back in the hostel, we’d had the odd difference of opinion and misunderstanding, but there’d been nothing like this since we’d moved into Goodluck Lane. Now all we did was sit by the lamp opposite each other, going back over old times, luxuriating nostalgically in the pleasurable memory of reconciliation.

  Zijun began to put on weight; her face glowed with health. It was a pity she was so busy around the house, she had no time to chat, let alone read or go for a walk. We often said we needed a maid.

  Sometimes, on returning home of an evening, I’d catch a glimmer of unhappiness on her face, her painfully forced smile grieving me particularly. Investigation revealed its usual cause: some secret feud with the landlady, the hens the casus belli. But why did I have to drag it out of her? We needed a place on our own; we shouldn’t have to coexist with another family.

  My life slipped into a fixed routine. Six days of the week, I would travel from home to the office, and then back again. At work, I would sit at my desk, copying documents and letters. At home, I would sit opposite her, or help her light the fire, cook rice – a skill I learnt for the first time – and steam bread.