The Real Story of Ah-Q Read Online Free PDF Page A

matted with blood it took her a moment to realize it was Zhao’s head…’
    ‘Didn’t she die of fright?’ Li screeched again, as the rest of Wang’s wide-eyed audience let their jaws hang a few degrees wider.
    ‘When the Long Hairs knocked at the door, Zhao wouldn’t open up. “The master’s away!” he shouted back at them. “You just want to loot the place!” Then the Long – ’
    ‘Any more news yet?’ My teacher was back. After a moment of panic, I saw his expression had lost its usual note of severity, and dared to hold my ground. If the Long Hairs really did come, I now thought, they might throw his head at Li, freeing me from
The Analects
to dedicate myself to ant-drowning.
    ‘Nothing… After the Long Hairs destroyed the gate, Zhao came out and got a proper look at them – terrified he was, then they – ’
    ‘Mr Yangsheng! My servants are back!’ Yaozong shouted as he re-entered the compound.
    ‘And?’ my teacher asked as he walked up to him, his shortsighted eyes bulging unnervingly. Everyone turned towards Yaozong.
    ‘Mr San says it’s all lies about the Long Hairs, it’s just a few dozen refugees passing by Hexu. A refugee… a refugee’s like a beggar – like the sort of beggar my family gets all the time.’ Anxious his audience might not understand the term ‘refugee’, Yaozong exhausted his linguistic resources in attempting a definition – and barely filled a sentence in the process.
    ‘Refugees! Ha!’ My teacher burst into laughter, as if mocking the stupidity of his former panic, and sneering at the refugees’ deficient ability to inspire fear. Everyone else joined in – compelled by my teacher’s mirth.
    Having received Mr San’s intelligence, the gathered company scattered with a buzz of chatter. With Yaozong also gone, quiet returned to the parasol tree, leaving only Wang and a handful of others. ‘I must go and tell my family the good news,’ my teacher said, after pacing out a few circuits. ‘I’ll be back first thing tomorrow.’ And off he went, this time taking with him his essay-writing primer. ‘So your homework’s going to do itself, is it?’ were his parting words to me. ‘Back to your books! Stop wasting time, wicked boy.’ Feeling persecuted, I silently fixed my gaze on the light in Wang’s pipe. Its flickering glow – as Wang puffed away – reminded me of an autumn firefly sunk into grass. Busy remembering how last year I had stumbled into a pond of reeds while trying to catch one, I stopped worrying about my teacher.
    ‘All that fuss about the Long Hairs,’ Wang nodded, leaving off his pipe. ‘They were terrible to begin with, but they came to nothing in the end.’
    ‘Did you ever see them?’ Li quickly asked. ‘What were they like?’
    ‘Were you one?’ I wanted to know. When the Long Hairs were about to descend on us, my teacher had left; the Long Hairs, I therefore reasoned, were a force for good. And since Wang was always kind to me, I further deduced, he must have been a Long Hair himself.
    ‘Ha-ha! No, never… Mrs Li, how old would you have been back then? I must have been in my twenties.’
    ‘Only ten. And my mother took me off to hide in Pingtian, so I never saw them.’
    ‘I fled to Mount Huang… When the Long Hairs got to my village, I happened to be away. My neighbour Niusi and two of my cousins weren’t so lucky. They got dragged out on to the Taiping Bridge, had their throats slit, then were pushed into the water and left to drown. Niusi was strong as an ox: he could carry nearly three hundred pounds of rice a quarter of a mile – they don’t make them like that any more. It was near twilight by the time I got to Mount Huang. Up at the summit, the sun was still caught on the treetops, but night was falling on the rice paddies at the foot of the mountain; it was getting dark. When I got to the foot of the mountain, I looked behind me and calmed down a bit as soon as I saw no one was coming after me. But there