The Real Story of Ah-Q by Lu Xun Page B

them to grow back concentrated on ducking out of sight. Without stopping to investigate anyone else’s coiffure, Mr Zhao cut through the lot of them and vanished back below the tallow canopy. ‘No one!’ he repeated, before striding out, head high, along the log bridge.
    The villagers stood there, in stunned realization that none of them – and least of all the miserable Seven-Pounds – would stand a chance against Zhang Fei. But there was also a certain pleasure in contemplating that the village bigwig was now a fugitive from the law, as they thought back to all those times he’d smugly lectured them, pipe in mouth, on doings in the city. A village council, they felt, was in order; and yet they could think of nothing to say. After a swarm of mosquitoes whined past bare arms and chests to reconvene beneath the tallow trees, the assembled company dispersed back to their respective dwellings, shut their doors and went to sleep. Still muttering to herself, Mrs Seven-Pounds tidied away the dinner things, the table and stools, then did the same.
    Taking the broken bowl with him, Seven-Pounds sat down melancholically on the threshold with his pipe, forgetting to smoke, until the light in his six-foot speckled bamboo pipe (with its ivory mouth and pewter bowl) slowly petered out. Though he could sense the situation was critical, every attempt to find a solution fizzled out: ‘Where’s your queue? Eighteen-foot lance – the youth of today! The emperor’s back. Get it mended in town. No one! All the books. Damn it all to hell…’
    The next morning, Seven-Pounds got up and poled the boat, as always, from Luzhen into the city and back again, returning to the village that evening, carrying his long, speckled bamboo pipe and the rice bowl. He’d had it riveted back together in town, he told Mrs Nine-Pounds at dinner. Sixteen copper nails, it had taken, at three coppers apiece – forty-eight coppers in total.
    ‘The youth of today,’ his grandmother groused. ‘Seventy-eight years I’ve lived – that’s enough for anyone. Three coppers a nail; it was never that much in my day… Seventy-eight years…’
    Though Seven-Pounds kept up his daily routine, passing back and forth between village and town, gloom remained the keynote at home. His fellow villagers gave him and his bulletins about current affairs a wide berth, while his wife was often sourly on at him to keep digging his own grave.
    One evening, however, some ten days later, Seven-Pounds returned home to find his wife in much-improved spirits. ‘Any news from town?’ she asked.
    ‘Oh, nothing much.’
    ‘Anything about the emperor?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Nothing at the Universal Prosperity?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘I’m sure the emperor’s not back. When I walked past Mr Zhao’s today, he was just sitting there reading, his queue tucked back on his head. He wasn’t wearing that gown of his either.’
    No reply from her husband.
    ‘D’you think he’s back?’
    ‘Probably not.’
    And so Seven-Pounds again enjoys the deferential regard of his wife and fellow villagers. Every summer, they dine out on the mudflat outside their door, graciously acknowledging their neighbours’ smiles and greetings. Now well past her eightieth birthday, old Mrs Nine-Pounds enjoys the same healthy ill-temper as always, while Six-Pounds’s two wiry little braids have merged into a larger, single plait. And even though her feet have now been bound, she still helps Mrs Seven-Pounds with the chores, hobbling back and forth across the mudbank, carrying her rice bowl with its sixteen copper nails.
    October 1920

MY OLD HOME
     
    After a twenty-year absence, and a journey of seven hundred bitterly cold miles, I returned home.
    As I neared my destination the weather grew overcast, the midwinter wind whistling through my cabin. Through a crack in the awning, I could see a bleak scattering of villages beneath a dull yellow sky. A powerful sense of desolation welled up in me.
    Was this the