The Real Story of Ah-Q (32 page)

‘The whole thing is a nightmare.’ The master of the house rapped the surface of the table. ‘He’s a disgrace to the family. We ought to just finish him off ourselves.’

‘I’m with you on that.’ Kuoting looked up again. ‘Last year, Liange Village did exactly that with someone just like him – a disgrace to the family. Beat him to death. Everyone agreed they’d do it together, at exactly the same time, so there’d be no finger-pointing afterwards. And it all worked out fine.’

‘This is different,’ Square-Head objected. ‘Our boys are keeping an eye on him for the time being. But we’ve got to come up with something, and fast. What I think is…’

The two great men of the village turned their eyes respectfully towards him.

‘I think we should lock him up for now.’

‘Good thinking.’ The master of the house nodded his head slightly.

‘Good thinking!’ Kuoting added.

‘Good – thinking,’ Guo confirmed. ‘We should – go out – now – and drag him – back here. Have – a room – got ready. With – a – lock.’

The uncle stared thoughtfully up at the ceiling. ‘I’m not sure I’ve a room going spare. And no one seems to have a clue when he’ll be better.’

‘Can’t you – use his – own – ?’ Guo asked.

‘My own son, Liushun,’ the long-suffering uncle’s mournful voice suddenly trembled with solemnity, ‘will be taking a wife this autumn. Just look at his cousin, though: a grown man, unmarried, no profession. All he does is go mad. My brother lived out the years that were allotted to him and though he wasn’t exactly a model citizen, he deserves to have a descendant to burn incense for him.’

‘Of course!’ the three of them chorused.

‘If Liushun is blessed by sons, I think my nephew should be allowed to adopt the second of them. But… is it right to give a person’s son to someone else, for nothing?’

‘Certainly not!’ the three of them chorused.

‘I don’t give a fig for that old house of his, and neither does Liushun. But would a mother give away her own son for nothing?’

‘Not a chance!’ his audience chorused.

He fell silent. The other three exchanged glances.

‘I keep on hoping he’s going to get better,’ the uncle wearily resumed, after a brief silence, ‘but he never does. And he doesn’t seem to want to, either. I’ve no choice but to have him locked up – as this esteemed gentleman has just suggested – for the sake of the village, and of his father’s memory. Yes, I think that would be best all round, best for his father.’

‘Of course,’ Kuoting wholeheartedly agreed. ‘But where should we put him?’

‘Isn’t there a spare room in the temple?’ the uncle now ponderously asked.

‘You’re right!’ Kuoting exclaimed. ‘No one’s using the western chamber. And as it only has a small square window, with thick wooden bars across it, there’s no way he could ever escape. Perfect!’

As Guo and Square-Head beamed their satisfaction, Kuoting puckered his lips and reapplied himself to his tea.

By dusk, the world was once more at peace, or the troubles of the last few hours forgotten, at least. All traces of the afternoon’s exhilarating panic had been wiped from the villagers’ faces. Though the trampled ground in front of the temple bore witness to an unusual amount of comings and goings earlier in the day, the traffic had already thinned back out. Because the gates had been locked for days, the children had been deprived for as long of their play area. Once dinner was eaten, a handful of them ran merrily inside the newly reopened courtyard, for games and riddles.

‘Guess again,’ the oldest was saying.

‘What can it be?’ wondered a girl. ‘Something with red oars.’

‘Look, I’ll tell you, it’s a – ’

‘Wait!’ a boy with ringworm interrupted. ‘I’ve got it: it’s a barge.’

‘A barge,’ another boy, with a bare chest, echoed.

‘A barge?’ the riddler snorted. ‘A barge has sculls. And does a barge sing? You’ll never get it, it’s a – ’

‘Wait a minute,’ the ringworm boy stalled.

‘You’ll never get it. I’m going to tell you: it’s a goose.’

‘A goose!’ the girl laughed. ‘With red oars?’

‘And a white sail?’ the bare-chested one asked.

‘I’ll burn it down!’

The children jumped then, just as quickly, remembered the village madman. Looking across at the room in the western wing of the temple, they glimpsed one hand tugging on a wooden grille, the other clawing at some bark, two eyes flashing between.

After a moment’s silence, the ringworm boy yelped and fled out of the gate, the others following behind, hooting with laughter. Turning his head as he ran, the bare-chested one pointed his reed again. ‘Pow!’ blew his cherry lips.

Stillness returned with the fall of dusk, the eternal green of the altar lamp glowing brighter than ever within the temple, illuminating the gods in their niches, insinuating its light out into the courtyard, into the darkness behind the wooden bars.

Once clear of the temple, the children paused, linked hands, and slowly made their way home, giggling a few extemporized snatches of song:

1 March 1925

All was quiet on a street in the western district of the Realm of Supreme Virtue.
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Although the sun was not yet at its zenith, already the grit on the road seemed to scintillate beneath its glare, the air burning with high summer. Dogs lolled their tongues – even crows in their treetops let their beaks hang open, panting from the heat. But not all was still. Someone, somewhere was striking together two copper cups, their clear chime somehow reminiscent of the brisk coolness of sour plum juice; and yet the lazily intermittent clang of metal upon metal only intensified the torpid silence that intervened.

Then a scatter of footsteps – a rickshaw-puller rushed quietly forward, fleeing the scorching sun.

‘Hot buns! Fresh from the steamer…’ hollered a plump tenor eleven-year-old by the door to a shop, eyes squinted, mouth distorted from the effort of it all, a hoarse, sleepy timbre to his voice – as if he were mesmerized by the sultry afternoon. On a battered old table next to him sat two or three dozen cold steamed rolls.

‘Steamed buns, fresh from the…’

Then off he flew to the other side of the road, like a rubber ball rebounding off a wall. By a telegraph pole directly opposite stood two men, facing out on to the road. One was a thin, sallow policeman in a khaki uniform, a sword by his side and one end of a rope in his hand. The other end was attached to the arm of a man in a long, blue cotton gown and a shapeless white waistcoat,
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the brim of a brand-new straw hat pulled down over his eyes. The fat boy was short enough to peep under the brim, and he met the man’s eyes – which seemed to be focused on his own head. The boy quickly looked down, to focus on the white waistcoat, but noted nothing of interest except for a few lines of text in a mixture of large and small print.

The scene instantly gathered a generous semicircle of spectators. The late addition of a bald old man filled perhaps the pen-penultimate gap; a fat specimen with a bare chest and a red nose completed the arc. (Since this last audience member was a little more expansive than he perhaps needed to be, he took up a space that would have normally done well for two, forcing latecomers to form a second row, poking their heads between the necks of the early arrivals.)

Taking up position almost directly opposite the white waistcoat, the old man craned forward to study the writing on it.

‘Ummm… all… errrrrr… eight… and…’

Noticing the white waistcoat engaged in studying the shiny bald head, the fat boy decided to join him in his researches, though discovered nothing of particular note – a burnished expanse of skin, with a tuft of greying hair behind each ear. An ageing amah just behind him, a child in her arms, tried to squeeze forward, bringing the bald man abruptly upright again, ready to fight for his place. The text of the waistcoat lying beyond his vision, he contented himself instead with perusing the face above it: the half-nose, mouth and pointed chin on display beneath the hat.

Like another rubber ball rebounding off a wall, a small schoolboy now plunged into the crowd, one hand securing a snow-white hat on his head. But three or four tiers in, a great immovable was encountered: a pair of blue trousers, topped by a mountainous bare back, down which waterfalls of sweat were cascading. Recognizing the path directly ahead was blocked, the boy detoured to the right of the trousers, happily glimpsing some light – a space – at the end of this tunnel. But by the time he had bowed his head to burrow through, he heard a territorial splutter, and the bottom inside the blue trousers sashayed right. The space was filled; the light went out.

Soon enough, though, the little scholar re-emerged next to the policeman’s sword. Amazed by what he had achieved, he looked about him. He was surrounded by people, the man in the white waistcoat at their head, a fat, bare-chested boy opposite; behind him, a burly, red-nosed man, also bare-chested and running to fat. Now, only now, did he get a sense of the true magnitude of his earlier obstacle, and he stared wonderingly at him. Conducting his own study of the schoolboy, the plump little steamed-bun seller rotated, following the direction of the former’s gaze, and was confronted by an impressively ample bosom, both nipples crowned by tendrils of long, soft hair.

‘What’s he done?’

Everyone looked round in astonishment to discover a rough-looking fellow – some kind of worker, probably – quietly asking the bald old man for enlightenment.

The old man merely stared at him. The questioner broke eye contact, unnerved by his scrutiny; but when he looked back up, he found he was still being stared at – and by several others in the group as well. Beginning to feel like a criminal himself, he backed self-consciously out of the crowd and slipped away. A tall man with an umbrella tucked under his arm filled the gap, while the bald man turned back round to consider, once more, the white waistcoat.

The tall man bent forward to admire the face of the white waistcoat from under the brim of his hat, then with inexplicable suddenness straightened up again, forcing those behind him to crane their necks to get a view. The mouth of one under-nourished specimen among them hung open with the effort – like that of a dead perch.

Without warning, the policeman raised his foot. Astounded by this development, everyone rushed to observe it. On its return to the ground, however, all eyes shifted back to the white waistcoat. The tall man made another sally forwards, hoping to peek under the brim a second time, then a few seconds later straightened up again and scratched desperately at his scalp.

The bald man irritably noted a disturbance somewhere behind him – a grinding sound next to his ear. Scowling, he looked round to discover, just to his right, a large, tanned hand stuffing half a vast steamed bun into the mouth of a feline-looking face. Resisting the impulse to comment, he instead focused on the felon’s new straw hat.

The group suddenly toppled forward like dominoes – even the redoubtable man mountain staggered a few steps – as if struck by some heavenly body. A fleshy arm, a certain match for that of the man with the red nose, extended beyond his shoulder, hand outstretched, and gave the plump boy a resounding slap.

‘Enjoying yourself are you, you little bastard – ’ a face fatter even than the Buddha hissed from behind the first fat man.

After reeling a few steps back, the plump boy recovered and, one hand pressed against his cheek, tried to dart through a gap next to the first fat man’s legs. ‘What’re you playing at?’ the man mountain asked, with a certain want of sympathy, shifting his buttocks slightly and closing off the escape route.

Caught like a rat in a trap, the plump boy – after a moment’s transfixed panic – charged off in the direction of the schoolboy, shoved him to one side and fled. The latter also turned and followed him out of the crowd.

‘Pesky kids!’ muttered five or six members of the audience.

When peace had once more returned and the man mountain looked back at the white waistcoat’s face, he discovered him staring at his own chest. Looking quickly down, he found a torrent of sweat rushing down the valley between his breasts. He brushed it away with the palm of his hand.

Yet all was not quite peaceful. Struggling for a view, the amah – the child still in her arms – bumped the nose of the rickshaw-puller standing next to her with her stiffly pointed topknot. The rickshaw-puller then accidentally landed his retaliatory push on the child, who started wriggling to escape the tight-knit audience and screaming that he wanted to go home. After momentarily losing her balance, the amah got her footing back, then turned the child back towards the white waistcoat.

‘Look at that, hey!’ she pointed. ‘Isn’t that fun!’

Popping up into a gap, a straw-hatted head that looked like it might belong to a student placed what may or may not have been a watermelon seed in its mouth, brought its lower jaw up to crack it, and withdrew. The space was filled next by an oval face streaked with sweat and dirt.

Something had succeeded in annoying the tall man with an umbrella: twisting round to one side, he turned to glare at the dead perch behind his shoulder – presumably his hot breath was aggravating the torment of midsummer. Tipping his head back, the bald man was now finding the four white characters on a red notice pinned to the telegraph pole a rich topic for research. The fat man and the policeman were gazing askance at the sickle-point toes of the amah’s shoes.

A chorus of approval rang out. Every head turned, realizing that something, somewhere else, must have happened. Even the policeman and his prisoner stirred.

‘Hot buns! Fresh from the steamer…’ the plump boy called sleepily out from the other side of the road, head lolled to one side. Rickshaw-pullers rushed quietly forward, fleeing the scorching sun. A sense of disappointment rippled through the crowd. But then, ten houses further along, a fallen rickshaw was joyfully discovered, its puller clambering out.

The circular ranks immediately dispersed in the direction of the incident. Before the halfway point in his journey was reached, the fat man rested beneath the shade of a locust tree, while the tall man charged up to the scene, accelerating past the bald man and the oval-faced man. The passenger was still sitting in the rickshaw, while his puller stood up, rubbing his knees. Five or six spectators looked on with delight.

‘You all right?’ the passenger asked, as the puller prepared to pick his vehicle up again.

With a nod of the head, he set off once more, his disconsolate audience watching them disappear. Eventually, they lost sight of him among a sea of other rickshaws.

Peace returned to the street. Dogs lolled their tongues, panting with the heat. Beneath the shade of his tree, the fat man watched the rapid rise and fall of their stomachs.

Still holding the child in her arms, the old amah scurried along in the shade beneath the eaves of houses. His head still slumped to one side, the plump boy squinted and returned to his sleepy refrain.

‘Hot buns!… Fresh from the steamer…’

18 March 1925