by Lao She
I was utterly confused and didn’t know what to think. What kinds of tricks were being played here? It wasn’t until after I arrived in Cat City and questioned the foreigners that I understood the full ramifications of what had happened. The Cat People were no match for foreigners; thus, their only hope was that foreigners would fight among themselves. It would have required a tremendous amount of effort for the Cat People to make themselves strong, and they were much too clever to be dumb enough to do that much work. It was much easier to pray to the Great Spirit to make the foreigners slaughter each other so that the Cat People might make a strength of Cat Country’s weakness, or perhaps one ought to say, make the foreigners as weak as themselves.
The foreigners well understood this and, although they often had conflicts of interest in Cat Country, they would never be willing to fight each other and let the Cat People take advantage of their quarrels. They saw very clearly that if they allowed disputes to arise amongst themselves, it would be a case of pitching one sharp sword against another so that even the victorious one would suffer great loss. If, on the other hand, the foreigners united in bullying the Cat People, they could gain great profit without suffering the slightest loss. They not only honoured this principle in the conduct of their international relations, but also as single individuals working in Cat Country.
Protecting the reverie forests was a good occupation for the foreigners. By agreement, they were responsible for protecting the Cat Country landlords from their own people. If it so happened that there were foreigners protecting the landlords, then neither side was permitted to infringe upon the rights of the other. If this condition were not honoured, then the foreign guardians from both sides were to meet in solemn conclave and decide on the punishment to be meted out to the landlords. Thus, not only was it possible to avoid disputes arising between foreigners because of the Cat People’s affairs, but it was also possible to preserve the superior status of the guardians. Thus they would never be used by the Cat People.
If you looked at it from the point of view of the foreign guardians, this was really a pretty good system. But from the Cat People’s point of view . . . Almost despite myself, I began to feel sympathy for all the Scorpions of Mars. But then it occurred to me that the Scorpions all seemed more than willing to accept this kind of treatment; they didn’t seem to want to make themselves strong. They seemed to prefer inviting the foreigners in to bully their own people. Then whose fault was it after all? Only people who have an equal share of guts can respect each other, and the people of Cat Country had simply lost theirs. No wonder other people toyed with them so much. For several days I couldn’t get these disturbing thoughts out of my mind.
Going back a bit, after Scorpion had been punished, he continued on to Cat City as though nothing had happened. Rather than having the slightest expression of shame on his face, he looked as though he had just returned from a great victory. The only thing he said to me was that if I didn’t want those two bales of reverie leaves – he knew that I really didn’t like reverie leaves all that much – he’d be willing to buy them back from me for thirty National Souls. I was certain that this quantity of reverie leaves was worth at least three hundred National Souls, but I didn’t say whether I would sell them or not. I didn’t want to lower myself by paying any attention at all to such a gutless coward. I didn’t so much as favour him with a growl of contempt. When the sun was on the western horizon, Cat City came into view.
THE CAPITAL OF CAT COUNTRY
AS SOON as I set eyes on Cat City, for some reason or other, a sentence took form in my mind: this civilisation will soon perish! It certainly wasn’t because I knew all there was to know about the civilisation of Cat Country that I thought this – the experience I had in the reverie forest had only been enough to stimulate my curiosity and make me want to understand everything. Nor was it because I viewed the civilisation of Cat Country as a mere tragic interlude prepared for my entertainment and diversion. It was rather that I had hoped to utilise my sojourn in Cat Country to fully comprehend the inner workings of at least this one civilisation and thus enrich my experience of life. I knew that it was possible that a whole civilisation or even a whole race might perish, for the history of mankind on my own planet, Earth, was not entirely wreathed in roses. And since perusing the history of mankind had been at times enough to make me shed tears, imagine my feelings at the prospect of seeing a civilisation breathe its last before my very eyes!
The life of a man, like a candle, seems to glow again with its former brilliance just before going out; similarly, an entire civilisation on the point of extinction is not without a final, ephemeral splendour. And yet there is a difference: a civilisation on the edge of oblivion is not so conscious of its own imminent demise as is a lone man. It is almost as though the creative process itself had marked the civilisation for extinction so that the good – and there are always a few good people left, even in a country that’s about to expire – suffer the same fate as the evil. And perhaps in such a civilisation, the few good people left will begin to experience a certain shortness of breath, will begin to draw up their wills, and will even moan over the impending fate of their civilisation. But their sad cries, matched against the funeral dirge of their own death-bound culture, will be but as the chirps of lingering cicadas against a cruel autumn wind.
And while Cat City was full of life, behind this lively façade one was conscious of a skeletal hand, a hand that seemed ever ready to tear the skin and flesh away from the Cat People to leave nothing but a wasteland of bleached bones. And yet, despite all of this, Cat City was one of the liveliest places I have ever seen.
The arrangement of the city itself was the simplest that I’d yet encountered. There was nothing you could really call a street, for other than an apparently endless line of dwellings, there was just a kind of highway or, perhaps one ought to say, empty square. If one kept in mind what the layout of a Cat Country army camp was like, one could well imagine the layout of the city: an immense open square with a row of houses down the middle, totally devoid of colour and utterly drowned in Cat People. This was what they called ‘Cat City’. There were crowds of people, but one couldn’t tell exactly what they were doing. No one walked in a straight line, and everyone got in each other’s way. Fortunately the streets were wide, and when it was no longer possible to go forward, people could switch to walking sideways as they crowded past one another.
It was as though the single row of houses formed a breakwater against which a tide of people pounded. I still don’t know whether they had house numbers or not. But if we assume they did, then a man who wanted to go from number five to number ten would have to zig-zag his way for at least three miles. Once outside his own door, he’d be crowded into a sideways progress and simply float along on the tide until he arrived at his destination. If by chance the direction of the tide should change before he got there, he’d be crowded home again. However, if he hit things just right, he would probably make it to number ten. But, of course, one can’t always be sure of hitting things just right, and occasionally he might be crowded back and forth so much that he would be taken even farther from his destination and might well fail to even make it home that day.
There was a reason that the city had just one row of buildings. I worked that reason out somewhat as follows. I assumed that in the beginning there must have been several rather narrow streets. Crowding about in the narrow lanes had doubtless resulted in wasting a good deal of time, and had probably cost a number of lives to boot. You see, in the eyes of the Cat People, yielding the right of way was considered to be most disgraceful, and keeping to one side of the street was seen as incompatible with their freedom-loving spirit. Thus, if they had built houses on both sides of the street, they would be forever bottled up between them, and it is likely that the bottleneck wouldn’t break up before one row of the houses had collapsed under the pressure of the crowd. And thus it was, I concluded, that they had built their houses in one long line, making the streets
on either side infinitely wide. While they hadn’t completely solved the problem of crowding quite yet, at least no more lives were lost. To be sure, crowding ten miles out and back in the course of a short trip took you out of your way a bit, but it didn’t place you in any mortal danger. Therefore we can cite this new and less dangerous arrangement as another piece of testimony to the humane spirit of the Cat People.
Furthermore, crowding along in this manner wasn’t all that unpleasant. Besides, when people crowded you off your feet and carried you along in the press, you were, in effect, getting free transportation. In all honesty, I must admit that this explanation is merely my own hypothesis and I dare not vouch for its correctness. To make a solid case for my theory, I’d have to go back and see whether or not I could, in fact, find traces of the old streets that I assume were there previously.
If it were simply a matter of crowding, it wouldn’t have been all that unusual. But I discovered that the tide didn’t merely roll to the left and right, but even had its risings and fallings! As I was watching the Cat City crowd, a pebble on the road caught someone’s eye and an entire group of Cat People suddenly squatted down to examine it, thus occasioning an eddy on the surface of the tide. It was as though, come hell or high water, they just had to see that pebble. Soon they changed from a squatting position to a sitting one, and all around them more and more people began to squat, making the eddy grow larger and larger. Those in back, of course, could not see the stone, and, as they pushed forward, those who had been seated were crowded to their feet again. The more people crowded, the higher up those who’d been sitting in front were pushed, until they were finally on top of their neighbours’ heads. Suddenly everyone forgot the pebble, stood up and threw their heads back to watch those who now rested on their neighbours’ heads, thus filling the eddy up again.
As though decreed by fate, two old friends happened to meet at the edge of the eddy that had just filled in. They immediately sat down for a chat and those around them also sat down to listen in on the conversation. This, of course, occasioned another eddy. Then the bystanders who were listening in began chipping in with their opinions and before long, a brawl ensued, causing the eddy to expand suddenly. As the fighting continued, the eddy kept getting larger and larger until it reached the edge of another eddy that had formed when two old men decided to play a game of chess on the street. Now the two eddies became one, and as more and more people began to watch the chess game, the brawl died out. But before the bystanders had a chance to start chipping in, the chess-game-eddy was possessed of a fleeting stability.
This cat-tide was interesting enough itself, but the best was yet to come. A large crack suddenly appeared in the tide that reminded one of the parting of the Red Sea when the Israelites crossed it. Had it not been for a similar miracle, I can’t possibly imagine how Scorpion’s reverie leaf formation could have got through the tide intact, since its destination – Scorpion’s home – was smack dab in the centre of Cat City.
Backtracking a bit, let me explain how it was that this miracle came about. One would have expected that as Scorpion’s formation neared the city, they would have devised some way of skirting the edges of that sea of cats while they jockeyed for a position from which they might work their way to his home. But no! With seven of them bearing Scorpion on their heads, they plunged headlong into the cat-surf! Then music was struck up. At first I thought it was a signal for the pedestrians to clear a right of way. But as soon as they heard the music, rather than shrinking back, the people all began crowding over in the direction of the reverie leaf formation until they were packed as tight as sardines in a can. I thought it would be a miracle if Scorpion’s men ever made it through.
But Scorpion was much more capable than I had imagined. Bump-ba dump-dump-dump, bump-ba dump-dump-dump – lively as a roll of drums in a Chinese military opera, the clubs of the soldiers came down on the heads of the Cat People and a crack began to appear in the cat-tide. Thus Scorpion made his own Red Sea miracle. Strange to say, the people’s eagerness to see what was going on was not abated one whit by the clubs, although they did fall back to open up a path as they kept smiling at the formation. The clubs, however, didn’t stop merely because of this friendly reception, but continued with a bump-ba dump-dump-dump. By dint of careful observation, I was able to make out a difference between the city cats and the country cats: the city cats had a bald spot where a part of the skull had been replaced by a steel plate at the centre of the head, which also doubled as a drum – clear evidence they had long experience of having their heads drummed by soldiers while watching exciting public spectacles, for experience is never the product of a single, fortuitous occurrence.
Originally, I’d thought the soldiers were beating heads as they walked along merely to open up a path; but it turned out that this drum playing also served another purpose. You see, the victims of all this drum playing were not exactly angels themselves. None of those who were hindmost were willing to stay at the back, and would push, kick, crowd and even bite in order to make their way in the world and become foremost. Those who were already foremost, on the other hand, kicked back with their heels, poked back with their elbows and leaned back hard in order to keep the hindmost in their proper place. Now the soldiers didn’t beat those who were in the front rows exclusively; they also reached out with their clubs and played a bump-ba dump-dump-dump on the cat-heads in back. Thus all the heads hurt and this made them forget somewhat the pain they were causing each other. And so the soldiers’ drumming served to reduce the hostility the spectators felt for each other. One may call this method ‘treating pain with pain.’
I was completely wrapped up in watching them. To tell the truth, they exerted a compelling, though melancholy, attraction over me. It seemed that I just had to watch them. I was so taken up with observing them that I didn’t pay attention to what the row of houses in the centre of the square was like. I already knew that whatever they were like, they certainly couldn’t be beautiful, for a foul stench continuously emanated from them. Now it may be possible for beauty to exist in the midst of filth, but I for one don’t think so. I can’t conceive, for instance, of a Taj Mahal resplendent beneath a coat of black mud and foul water. The people on the street didn’t do much to improve things either. Whenever I approached them, they immediately cried out and shrank back as far as the throng would allow; but then they would quickly rush back towards me again, a clear indication that the fear and respect that city dwellers felt for foreigners was not quite as intense as that of the country folk. Having dissipated their fear and surprise by crying out, the city dwellers then felt brave enough to come up to me and give me the once-over. If I’d stood still on the road, I would certainly never have been able to move again, for they’d have surrounded me so closely that you wouldn’t have been able to get a drop of water between us.
Ten thousand fingers kept pointing at me. The Cat People are very straightforward: if they see anything fresh and new, they simply point it right out with their fingers. Still unable to completely rid myself of the vanity of a human being from Earth, I was most uncomfortable. I longed to take wing and fly away to some quiet, peaceful spot where I might sit and rest for a while. My courage was gone and I simply didn’t dare to raise my head. Although I am not a poet, I still possess a certain degree of the poet’s sensitivity, and it seemed that these fingers and eyes were about to watch me away or point me away like a melting piece of ice. They made me feel like a thing, with no personality left. But there are two sides to everything, and my not daring to raise my head also had its advantages. The road was uneven, covered with potholes and strewn with stinking lumps of mud. If I were to walk with my head up, I would make the lower half of my body as dirty as a pig. In spite of their very long history, it seemed that the Cat People had never once repaired their roads.
Fortunately, I finally arrived at Scorpion’s house. It was only at this point that I had understood that the houses in Cat City were not much better than that little hole I�
�d lived in in the reverie forest.
WE FOREIGNERS HAD BETTER STICK TOGETHER
SCORPION’S RESIDENCE was right in the middle of town, with high walls on all four sides, and no windows or doors. The sun was already about to set and the crowd on the street was gradually thinning out, so I could see clearly now that the houses both to my right and left were all four-sided affairs without windows or doors.
Several cat-heads appeared above the walls, but after a few shouts from Scorpion, they all disappeared again. Then after a bit, they came up again and lowered down several thick ropes with which they hoisted the reverie leaves over the wall, one bundle at a time. It turned dark and not a single person was left on the streets. Once the majority of bales had been hauled in, the soldiers became impatient and were obviously nervous. I surmised that, despite their excellent vision in the dark, the Cat People didn’t like working at night.