The Real Story of Ah-Q (41 page)
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Authors: Lu Xun
Tags: #Lu; Xun, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Fiction, #General, #China, #Classics, #Short Stories, #China - Social life and customs
‘Who called you a bastard?’ Aigu shouted back at him, before turning to face Mr Qi again. ‘I’m not done yet. When did I ever get a good word out of him? It was “bitch” this, or “slut” that. After he got mixed up with that whore, he’d start laying in to my ancestors, too. You be the judge, Mr Qi – ’
With a sudden shudder of fear, she shut her mouth: his eyes rolled heavenward, Mr Qi had tilted his moon-face up to the ceiling.
‘En… ter!’ A colossal imperative erupted from his scantily bearded mouth.
Her heart seemed to stop, then to pound madly again. All was lost, she now knew – as if she had fallen into an abyss through her own clumsy footing.
A man in a blue gown under a black waistcoat immediately appeared, and stood before Mr Qi, hands hanging down by his sides, back as straight as a wooden pole.
You could have heard a pin drop in the hall. Though Mr Qi’s lips were moving once more, no one could make out what he was saying – no one except the new arrival, whom it seemed to electrify.
‘Yes, sir.’ He took a few steps backward, turned and exited.
Something unexpected, Aigu now knew, was about to happen – something unexpected and unavoidable. Now she began to realize how formidable Mr Qi was – and to regret her own tactical error. She had been too blunt, too forthright.
‘Of course,’ she found herself murmuring in a tiny, thread-like voice. ‘I only came to ask for Mr Qi’s advice…’
You would have heard a second pin drop. Then Mr Wei leapt to his feet – as if startled awake by a peal of thunder.
‘Glad to hear it! So Aigu understands Mr Qi is on the side of justice and right.’ He then turned to her father. ‘Seeing as your daughter’s done all the talking for you, shall we proceed? I presume you’ve brought the wedding certificates I asked you about. Let’s have both sides’.’
Aigu watched as her father delved into his waist pocket, while the man with a pole for a spine reappeared and passed a small, flat black object, shaped like a turtle, to Mr Qi. Afraid that events were taking a turn for the worse, she quickly turned back to her father, who was now taking silver dollars out of a blue bundle on a small table.
Mr Qi removed the turtle’s head and poured a little something out of its body into his palm, after which the stiff-backed man took it back. Dipping a finger into his palm, Mr Qi then inserted it into each of his nostrils, which – together with his upper lip – immediately went an angry yellow. His nose twitched, as if preparing to sneeze.
Zhuang Musan, meanwhile, was counting out silver dollars. Mr Wei removed a few from an unchecked pile, and handed them to the swinish father-in-law. He then swapped the two wedding notices round, and pushed them towards the relevant parties. ‘Put them away now,’ he instructed. ‘Make sure you count right, Mu. This is a serious business – it’s a lot of money.’
A great roar notified Aigu that Mr Qi had sneezed; and yet still she couldn’t stop herself looking in his direction. His mouth was hanging open, nostrils still convulsing, as he rubbed his beloved anus-stopper against the side of his nose.
Eventually, Zhuang Musan completed his laborious task of accountancy and both sides filed away their certificates. Everyone straightened up, and the tension on the assembled company’s faces relaxed into expressions of relieved cordiality.
‘Marvellous! An end at last,’ Mr Wei sighed, seeing that the adversaries seemed ready to take leave of each other. ‘Well, I think that takes care of everything – congratulations all round, an awkward problem resolved. Leaving so soon? Why not stop to toast the New Year? This is quite an occasion.’
‘We’d better be going,’ Aigu declined. ‘Next year, maybe.’
‘Thank you, Mr Wei,’ Zhuang Musan and his ex-in-laws echoed, backing politely out. ‘Best be off.’
‘No time for a drink, even?’ Mr Wei pinned his gaze on Aigu, the last out of the room.
‘No, really. But thank you, Mr Wei.’
6 November 1925
This slim collection has taken me thirteen long years to complete.
The first story, ‘Mending Heaven’ – which started life as ‘The Broken Mountain’ – I finished in the winter of 1922. My thinking back then was to rework various stories, both ancient and modern, into short fiction. In my first attempt, I chose the legend of Nüwa, the Goddess of Creation, smelting stones to patch the sky. I started earnestly enough, even though I had nothing new to say, just rehashing Freud into a theory of creation – the creation of both life and literature. But for some reason, I stopped halfway through to read the newspaper, where I came across an article by someone – I forget his name – attacking
Orchid Breeze
,
1
a collection of new romantic verse by Wang Jingzhi, and begging other young writers, with tears in his eyes, to avoid sinking into a similar mire of degeneration. I was so amused by the spineless treachery of it all that when I started up again I couldn’t help a little simulacrum – in classical robes – appearing between Nüwa’s legs. And so I began the slippery descent into facetiousness – the arch-enemy of literary creation. I still hate myself for it.
Resolving to nip such self-indulgence in the bud, I hid it at the back of my first short-story collection,
Outcry
– the beginning and end of my experiment.
Our esteemed critic Cheng Fangwu
2
chose this moment to try a few swings of his axe at the gate of the palace of pure literature.
Outcry
he dispatched with a few brutal strokes as ‘vulgarly naturalistic’; only ‘The Broken Mountain’ met with his discerning, though still reserved, approval. In truth, his denunciation not only failed to convince me; it also undermined any confidence I might have had in his opinion. For one, I delight in vulgarity. And on the subject of historical fiction: those very detailed works, stuffed with research, every fact checked, that some deride as scholarly fiction – they’re no picnic to pull off. If instead you take one tiny scrap of fact, add a bit of colour, then extrapolate it into a story of sorts: this doesn’t take much out of a person. Anyway, ‘a fish knows whether the water is hot or cold’, as the vulgar saying goes – a writer is his own best critic: the second half of ‘The Broken Mountain’ is an extraordinarily sloppy piece of work; only a fool would find anything to recommend in it. Determined not to lead readers further down the road of Cheng’s misjudgement, I respectfully parried his axe-blows by removing the piece from the second edition of
A Call to Arms
, in 1930, reshaping the volume into a monument to my beloved vulgarity.
In the autumn of 1926, I found myself living in Xiamen, in a stone building facing the ocean, flicking blankly through ancient texts, bereft of company. Yet Weiming Press in Beijing would not let me alone, pressing for articles for their magazine. In an effort to escape thinking about the present, I recycled a handful of reminiscences into an essay collection –
Dawn Flowers Picked at Dusk
– then, returning to an old idea, selected a number of classical legends for reworking into eight
Old Stories Retold
. But by the time I had completed ‘Flight to the Moon’ and ‘Forging the Swords’ – first published as ‘Mei Jianchi’ – I hurried off to Guangzhou, where this project was thoroughly sidelined. Although I would scrawl the occasional idea down, I never had time to polish anything.
But at last it is finished. Most of the pieces are only sketches, and certainly not literary fiction. At times I base myself in historical fact; at others, my imagination roams free. And because I can’t convince myself that the ancients are as worthy of respect as my contemporaries, I’ve found myself periodically slipping into the quicksands of facetiousness. After thirteen years, I’ve not progressed beyond ‘The Broken Mountain’. But as long as I haven’t made the ancients seem even deader than they already are, I suppose this book has a flimsy justification for its existence.
Lu Xun
26 December 1935
Nüwa started awake.
As if from a dream – but a dream she instantly forgot on regaining consciousness. All she could remember was a sense of vexation, of an insufficiency of something, and an excess of something else. A mild breeze, warm with the morning sun, fanned her life-force through the universe.
She rubbed her eyes.
A mass of green serpentine clouds wove their way through a powder-pink sky, a backdrop of stars blinking away at them. The sun blazed light over the blood-red clouds on the horizon, like a golden ball petrified in ancient lava. A frigid white moon, the colour of pig iron, hung opposite. As to which was rising, and which was setting – she paid no attention.
The ground was carpeted in pastel green; even the evergreens – the pines and cypresses – had a youthful fragility to them. Bend down far enough, and a mass of pink and bluish-white flowers, the size of ladles, drew into focus; pull back, and they swam out into a variegated mist.
‘I’ve never been so bored in my life!’ she thought to herself, springing to her feet and stretching her perfectly rounded arms, vibrant with energy, to the sky. As she yawned, the heavens responded by paling to a mystical flesh-pink, momentarily merging the goddess into her background.
She walked through the pink universe to the seashore, her curvaceous form now melting into the roseate ocean, her waist lightening to a pure white. The waves, taken by surprise, rose and fell in orderly rhythm, drenching her in spray. She shimmered palely through the water, as if about to dissolve into the brine. Oblivious to her surroundings, she knelt down, scooped up some mud and – after a little pressing and kneading – held in the palm of her hand a tiny creature, almost exactly in her image.
She exclaimed, not quite able to believe she was its author – as if it had been lying in the mud all along, waiting for her to pick it up.
All the same, the unexpectedness of it all made her happy, and on she went with her work, with a new sense of courage and joy, blowing, sweating life into her figurines.
The tiny creatures began to yelp.
She exclaimed in surprise again, and something streamed out from every pore of her body; the ground was now covered in a milky-white vapour. By the time she had recovered from her abstraction, her creatures had also fallen silent.
‘Sky! Lord!’ some began to babble.
‘My precious things.’ She stared at them, prodding at one of their fat white faces with a muddy finger.
They gurgled with laughter – the first laughter she had heard in the universe. And for the first time, her lips curled unstoppably into a smile.
She stroked her creatures as she made them. To begin with, they circled around her, but gradually they wandered further and further away, and had more and more to say for themselves, until she was no longer able to understand them. Her ears filled with clamorous noise, till she was dizzy with it.
She wearied, through all this delight: in time, she began to feel she had no more breath with which to infuse them, no more sweat to drip on to them. Her head thickened, her vision clouded, her cheeks flushed. Her joyful excitement left her: all she felt was impatience. But on she went, tirelessly manufacturing, as if she had lost all sense of what she was doing.
Eventually, a cramp in her legs forced her to stand up. Leaning against a bare mountain, she looked up: the sky was dappled with clouds, like white fish-scales against the brooding dark green below. Registering an unaccountable twinge of dissatisfaction, she reached out to pluck a wisteria vine – heavy with clusters of wondrously plump purple flowers – that stretched to the horizon from the mountainside. When she shook it, the vine collapsed over the ground, scattering lilac petals.
She dragged the wisteria this way and that, spraying droplets of mud about her. As they fell to the earth, they turned into yet more tiny creatures, similar to the kind she had already fashioned, but this time rather duller, uglier, less appealing than the early batch – with weaselly heads and rats’ eyes. But she went obliviously on, seized by a restless fascination with her task, her hands frantic with the mischief they were making. As she swung it ever faster, the vine writhed muddily over the ground, like a scalded snake. Drops of clay flew like rain, transforming into bawling little creatures in mid-air, swarming the instant they hit the ground.
Barely conscious of her actions, she flicked the branch more and more wildly, but her back, legs and arms began to fail her. She squatted down on the ground, resting her head against the mountain, her black hair spreading over its summit. She sighed, after catching her breath back; her eyes closed. The wisteria dropped from her hands to the ground, sprawling limply over the earth, as if exhausted.
She was awoken by a crash – the rupture of heaven and earth. Finding herself slipping south-eastwards, Nüwa tried to steady herself, but stepped into a void. She grabbed at a mountaintop to prevent herself from toppling forward.
She felt water, sand and rocks pouring down on her from behind. When she glanced over her shoulder, her mouth and ears filled with water. Quickly looking down, she discovered the ground shaking beneath her feet. Thankfully, it settled again, giving her a chance to edge backwards and find a place to sit. Wiping the water from her forehead and eyes, she began to study the situation.