The Real Story of Ah-Q by Lu Xun Read Free Book Online Page B

Primitive men probably did eat human flesh. But their thinking changed, developed over time, and some of them stopped – they were determined to become human, genuinely human. Those who wouldn’t give it up remained reptiles, some of them changing into fish, birds or monkeys, then finally men. But they remain reptiles at heart – even today. The shame of the cannibal, brother, before the non-cannibal! Greater than the reptile before the monkey.
    ‘Thousands of years ago, the royal cook Yi Ya steamed his own son for his king to eat. We all know it’s been going on – since the creation of the earth itself. That revolutionary, Xu Xilin, a few years back – didn’t they eat his heart and liver? 3 Then there’s the Wolf Cub villagers; and last year, I heard that a consumptive ate a steamed roll dipped in the blood of an executed criminal.
    ‘And now it’s my turn to be eaten. I don’t expect you to fight on my behalf, alone against the rest of them. But do you have to join the conspiracy? They’ll do anything, eat anyone: me, you, each other. Pull back from them, change – and we will all live in peace. However long it’s been going on for, we can decide to stop today, we can! I know you can do it. Why, when that tenant of ours wanted his rent reduced the other day, to start with you said it was impossible.’
    As I began my speech, his lips curled back into a scornful smile. Then his eyes shone with a terrible, savage gleam. When I set to exposing their awful secrets the colour drained dreadfully from his face. A crowd gathered outside the gate, Mr Zhao and his dog among them, craning forward to listen in. Some faces remained only a blur, as if masked in gauze; on others, I saw the same bleached pallor, the same bared fangs as before – their lips distorted into smiles. I recognized all of them: the eaters of human flesh. But I knew they were divided in their thinking. Some believed that the eating of men must go on because it was how things had always been. Others recognized it for the sin it was, and yet still they ate, terrified of exposure. The more I said, the angrier they became, through their frozen smiles.
    My brother chose this moment to show his true, unrepentant colours.
    ‘Clear off!’ he roared ferociously at them. ‘Where’s the fun in gawping at a madman!’
    Another of their ingenious devices: to discredit me as insane. The plot was too well laid; they would never change. And when the moment arrived for me to be eaten, there would be not a murmur of opposition, only sympathy for my butchers. Death by character assassination – a method tried and tested by the farmers of Wolf Cub Village.
    Chen stormed in through the gate. Though they wanted to shut me up, I was not yet finished with my audience.
    ‘You can change! In your hearts! Soon there will be no place for cannibals in this world of ours. And if you don’t change, you will all be eaten. However many children you have, you will all be destroyed, like reptiles – by real humans, just as a hunter kills a wolf!’
    Chen chased the crowd away. My brother disappeared. Then Chen coaxed me back inside. A stifling darkness hung over the room; the beams and rafters shuddered, then began to swell – piling distendedly down on me.
    They pinned me to the ground; they meant me to die beneath them. But I struggled through my illusion, drenching myself in sweat.
    ‘Change, in your hearts!’ I gasped. ‘Soon there will be no place for cannibals in this world…’

XI
     
    The sun will not come out, the door does not open; two meals, every day.
    As I held my chopsticks, I thought again of my brother. Now I know what happened to my sister. I can see her now, in all her heartbreaking vulnerability; only four years old when she left us. I remember my mother’s uncontrollable sobs, my brother’s efforts to stop her. He’d probably eaten her himself, and all the crying was making him uncomfortable. If he had any conscience left…
    I wonder if Mother