The Real Story of Ah-Q (36 page)

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.

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.

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.

From Shanyang to Licheng to Taigu, I spent the next six months almost constantly 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.