The Real Story of Ah-Q (9 page)

My loneliness grew with every day that passed, coiling itself like a great poisonous snake around my soul.

And though I was unreasonable enough to feel the sorrow of it, I couldn’t stir myself to anger. Because the Tokyo fiasco forced me to reflect realistically on myself: that I was no hero, no demagogue capable of rousing the masses with a single battle-cry.

But I had to do something about the loneliness, because it was causing me too much pain. So I tried all manner of opiates: attempting to merge into the massed ranks of my fellow countrymen, immersing myself in study of the classics. Later still, I experienced or witnessed things that intensified my feelings of loneliness and sorrow – things that I preferred not to remember, that I preferred to bury (alongside my head) deep in the sand. But my quest for intellectual narcotics had had some effect; I had succeeded in ridding myself of my youthful ideals.

There was a three-room apartment in the Shaoxing Hostel in Beijing. The story went that a woman had once hanged herself on the locust tree in the courtyard outside. Even though the tree later grew so tall no one could reach its branches, still the apartment remained unoccupied. For years, then, this was where I lodged, copying out ancient stone inscriptions. I suffered very few visitors, and applied myself to realizing my sole ambition: to permit my life to ebb quietly away, without undue stimulation – either technical or intellectual – from my inscriptions. On summer nights, when mosquitoes hung heavy in the air, I would sit beneath the locust tree, cooling myself with a cattail-leaf fan, glimpsing scraps of blue sky through cracks
in the dense foliage overhead, as nocturnal caterpillars dropped icily on to my neck.

An occasional visitor was an old friend by the name of Jin Xinyi.
³
Setting his large leather briefcase on a battered old table, he would take off his gown and sit himself down opposite me, looking as if his heart was still pounding from fear of a dog he had encountered along the way.

‘What’s the use in this?’ he asked one evening, flicking through my book of inscriptions.

‘None at all.’

‘Why are you doing it, then?’

‘No reason.’

‘I thought, maybe you could write something for…’

I knew what he was driving at. Although he and a few associates were now working on a magazine of their own –
New Youth
⁴
– so far they had been rewarded only by indifference, by neither criticism nor support. Maybe, I thought, they were feeling lonely. This is what I replied:

‘Imagine an iron house: without windows or doors, utterly indestructible, and full of sound sleepers – all about to suffocate to death. Let them die in their sleep, and they will feel nothing. Is it right to cry out, to rouse the light sleepers among them, causing them inconsolable agony before they die?’

‘But even if we succeed in waking only the few, there is still hope – hope that the iron house may one day be destroyed.’

He was right: however hard I tried, I couldn’t quite obliterate my own sense of hope. Because hope is a thing of the future: my denial of it failed to convince him. In the end I agreed to write something for him: my first short story, ‘Diary of a Madman’. And once I had started, I found it impossible to stop, rattling off poor imitations of fiction to keep my earnest friends quiet, until in time I found myself the author of some dozen pieces.

I thought I had changed: that I was no longer the kind of person who felt the imperative to speak out. Yet neither could I forget the lonely sorrows of my youth. And so I found myself issuing a few battle-cries of my own, if only to offer comfort or sympathy to those still fighting through their loneliness, and to
alleviate their fear of the struggles ahead. I have no interest in passing judgement on these things of mine: on whether they are brave, despondent, contemptible or ridiculous. But since they are battle-cries, I naturally had to follow my generals’ orders. So I often stooped to distortions and untruths: adding a fictitious wreath of flowers to Yu’er’s grave in ‘Medicine’; forbearing to write that Mrs Shan never dreams of her son in ‘Tomorrow’, because my generalissimos did not approve of pessimism. And I didn’t want to infect younger generations – dreaming the glorious dreams that I too had dreamed when I was young – with the loneliness that came to torment me.

These attempts of mine are no works of art; that I understand perfectly well. And yet I now enjoy the great good fortune of seeing them collected together and passed off as a volume of fiction. Though I feel some unease at this undeserved stroke of luck, it also brings me some happiness – that they might, at least fleetingly, find a readership.

And so I have dispatched my pieces to the printer and, for the reasons given above, named them
Outcry
.

Lu Xun

3 December 1922, Beijing

The moon is bright tonight.

I had not seen it for thirty years; the sight of it today was extraordinarily refreshing. Tonight, I realized I have spent the past thirty years or more in a state of dream; but I must still be careful. Why did the Zhaos’ dog look twice at me?

I have reason to be afraid.

No moon tonight; a bad sign. I went out this morning – cautiously. Mr Zhao had a strange look in his eyes: as if he feared me, or as if he wished me harm. I saw a group of them, seven or eight, huddled around, whispering about me, afraid I would catch them at it. Everywhere I went – the same thing. One of them – the most vicious of the bunch – pulled his lips back into a grin. I prickled with cold fear; their traps, I realized, were already in place.

Refusing to be intimidated, I carried on my way. A gang of children blocked my path ahead – they, too, were discussing me, their eyes as strange as Mr Zhao’s, their faces a ghastly white. What quarrel could these children have with me, I wondered. ‘Tell me!’ I shouted, unable to stop myself. But they just ran away.

Mr Zhao, all the others I saw that morning – what was the source of their hatred? All I could think of was that twenty years ago, I stamped on the Records of the Past, and it has been my enemy since. Though he has no personal acquaintance with this Past, Mr Zhao must have somehow got wind of the business, and resolved to take up the grudge himself. He must have rallied everyone else I saw against me. But what about the children? They weren’t even born twenty years ago – so why do they stare so strangely at me, as if they fear me, or wish me harm? I am hurt, bewildered, afraid.

Then the answer came to me. Their parents must have taught them.

My nights are sleepless. Only thorough investigation will bring clarity.

Those people. They have been pilloried by their magistrate, beaten by their squires, had their wives requisitioned by bailiffs, seen their parents driven to early graves by creditors. And yet, through all this, none looked as fearful, as savage as they did yesterday.

The most curious thing of all – that woman, hitting her son. ‘I’m so angry, I could eat you!’ That’s what she said. But looking at me all the while. I flinched in terror, I couldn’t help myself. The crowd – their faces bleached greenish-white – roared with laughter, exposing their fangs. Mr Chen rushed up to drag me home.

To drag me home. Back home, though, everyone was pretending they didn’t know me, that same look in their eyes. The moment I stepped into the study, the door was latched on the outside, as if I were a chicken in a coop. I had no idea what lay at the bottom of it all.

A few days ago, one of our tenants – a farmer from Wolf Cub Village – came to report a famine. The most hated man in the village had been beaten to death, he told my brother, and some of the villagers had dug out his heart and liver, then fried and eaten them, for courage. When I interrupted, the farmer and my brother glanced at me – repeatedly. Now – now I recognize the look in their eyes: exactly that of the people I passed yesterday.

I shiver at the very memory of it.

If they are eating people, I might well be next.

That woman scolding her son – ‘I could eat you!’ – those bleached faces and bared fangs, their roars of laughter; the farmer’s story; the signs are all there. I now see that their speech is poisoned, their laughter knife-edged, their teeth fearfully white – teeth that eat people.

I don’t think I’m a bad man, but I now see my fate has been in the balance since I trod on those Records of the Past. They keep their own, secret accounts – a mystery to me. And they can turn on you in an instant. When my brother taught me to write essays, he would always mark me up if I found grounds to criticize the virtuous or rehabilitate the villainous: ‘It is a rare man who can go against received wisdom.’ How can I guess what they are really thinking, when their fangs are poised over my flesh?

Only thorough investigation will bring clarity. I seem to remember, though only vaguely, that people have been eating each other since ancient times. When I flick through the history books, I find no dates, only those fine Confucian principles ‘benevolence, righteousness, morality’ snaking their way across each page. As I studied them again, through one of my more implacably sleepless nights, I finally glimpsed what lay between every line, of every book: ‘Eat people!’

All these words – written in books, spoken by the farmer – stare strangely, smirkingly at me.

Are they planning to eat me, too?

I sat quietly a while, through the morning. Mr Chen brought me some food: a bowl of vegetables and a bowl of steamed fish – its eyes glassily white, its mouth gaping like the village cannibals. After a few slippery mouthfuls, I could no longer tell whether I was eating fish or human; up it all came again.

‘Tell my brother,’ I said to Chen, ‘that I feel stifled inside – that I want to take a walk in the garden.’ Chen left me without a word but shortly afterwards unlocked the door.

I did not move; I wanted to see what they planned to do with me next; I knew they would not relax their grip so easily. And so it proved. My brother brought an old man in to see me. My visitor approached slowly, head bowed, afraid I would catch the savagery in his eyes, sneaking glances at me through his spectacles. ‘You seem well today,’ my brother said. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Dr Ho here has come to examine you,’ my brother went on, ‘at my request.’ ‘Be my guest!’ I replied. My executioner, of course! Come to check how fat I was, while he pretended to take my pulse. Presumably his fee would be a slice of my flesh. Yet I felt no fear: my nerve remained steadier than those of the cannibals about me. I held out my wrists to see how he would go about it. Taking a seat, the old man closed his eyes, held my wrists for a considerable length of time, stared blankly a while longer, then opened those terrible eyes of his. ‘Avoid overexcitement,’ he pronounced. ‘A few days’ rest and you’ll be fine.’

Avoid overexcitement! Rest! Of course: they want to fatten me up, so there will be more to go round. ‘You’ll be fine’? They were all after my flesh, but they couldn’t be open about it – they had to pursue their prey with secret plans and clever tricks; I could have died laughing. Indeed, I burst into uncontrollable roars of mirth – a laughter that rang with righteous courage. The old man and my brother blanched at the robustness of my morale.

But my boldness succeeded only in sharpening their appetites – the braver the prey, the more glory for the hunter. ‘To be eaten immediately!’ the old man muttered as he left. My brother nodded.
Et tu!
And yet I should have foreseen it all: my own brother in league with people who wanted to eat me!

My own brother was a cannibal!

I was the brother of a cannibal!

And destined to be eaten myself – this brother of a cannibal.

These last few days, I have reconsidered a couple of my earlier suspicions: perhaps the old man was not my executioner, perhaps he really was a doctor. But he will still have eaten people. In his
Book of
… what is it?
Herbs
?… Li Shizhen openly observes that boiled human flesh is perfectly edible.
¹
He must have tried it himself.