Forbidden City by William Bell Read Free Book Online Page B

beer.
    Most of the men at the other tables kept their hats on, so I did, too. I hoped that in the dim lighting no one would see my blue eyes.
    “This is a kind of teahouse, Shan Da,” Lao Xu said in a voice so low I could hardly hear him. I knew he was talking low so we couldn’t be heard. Once the men heard foreign talk there’d be no end to the staring.
    “In old Beijing,” Lao Xu continued, “it was the custom for a lot of people to come to the neighbourhood teahouse and sit with their friends and talk. Not so much anymore, since most people have radio and TV. In this place they have storytellers, old men from the neighbourhood who tell tales from Chinese classical literature.”
    We sat for a while and gradually the tables filled up. None of the patrons looked to be less than forty years old.
    Three old guys came in and walked slowly up to the dais and stepped up. Each one carried a low stool and what I took to be some kind of musical instrument. One had a sort of guitar that Lao Xu told me was called a
pipa
. Every finger and the thumb of his left hand bore a white guitar pick. The second oldman set up a little percussion set — gongs, small cymbals, and some wooden blocks.
    “And that’s an
erhu
,” Lao Xu said, pointing to the third man.
    “Means, two strings.”
    The third man had lowered himself carefully onto his stool. He held the
erhu
straight up and down, with the round part, about the size of a large pork-and-bean tin, on his thigh and the long neck, like a guitar’s, only much thinner, came up to his shoulder. In his right hand he held a bow, but this bow’s strings went between the
erhu
strings and the frame.
    I heard some rumbling of voices near the door and I turned to see a
really
old man hobble in. He was dressed in what looked like black pajamas, with strips of cloth wrapped around his ankles to hold the cuffs tight and a wider strip of cloth around his waist for a belt. He was totally bald, bent over, and he walked as if he was afraid his bones would break from the strain.
    He made it up to the little stage and sat down even more slowly and carefully than the
erhu
player. Someone put a tiny wooden table down beside the old man. Another person appeared with a white teacup with a lid on it and set it down on the table.
    The storyteller sat quietly, a thin gnarled hand on each knee, and closed his eyes. After a moment he nodded once. Then the music — if you could call it that — started up. The
pipa
was sort of normal but the
erhu
sounded like a violin with stomach flu, andthe percussion went
boing, boing, boing, tick, tock, clunk
. It was the strangest collection of noises I’d ever heard.
    The weird sounds coming from the instruments were nothing compared to what came out of the old man’s thin mouth. You’d have sworn he had put a clothespin on his nose and then tried to imitate an angry little girl with tonsilitis. His high, reedy voice soared and dipped and quavered as he slowly moved one hand through the air while the other rested on his knee. He’d change hands when his voice changed pitch.
    “
Tian xia da shi, fen jiu bi he, he jiu bi fen,”
whined the old man, and from behind him came
boing, boing, crash, tick, tick, tick, tock, tock
.
    I didn’t pay too much attention to the noises after the first few seconds because I was trying to follow Lao Xu’s quiet interpretation.
    “The empire, long divided, must unite,” his soft voice floated from across the table, “long united, must divide. History teaches us this lesson.”
    The story had begun.
    “Day after day, week after week, the armies were encamped at the Red Cliffs of the mighty Yang-ze River. On the north bank, the endless ranks of the ambitious Cao Cao, whose greed sought to swallow down the house of Han. On the south, Sun Quan, ally of the noble Liu Bei, kinsman to the Han, who opposed Cao Cao as his oath in the peach tree garden demanded. Between them the wide swift Yang-ze River.
    “Zhu Ge-liang was adviser to