Cat Country

by Lao She

  Still gazing toward the front lines, he said, ‘Friend, I place Revery in your hands!’ Still not turning around, he extended one hand behind his back to feel whether Revery was still there or not. Revery took his hand and said with a tremble, ‘We’ll die together!’

  I was totally at a loss as to what to do. Should I take Revery away with me, or stay there and die with them. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I would have to consider what kind of death would be more worthwhile. I knew that if several hundred soldiers attacked me, then with only a single revolver to rely on I should be overwhelmed. However, I couldn’t afford to waste too much time weighing the pros and cons, and so I grabbed Revery and Young Scorpion each by the hand and ran with them towards a dilapidated old house behind the village. I really can’t say what I had in mind. My plan – I really shouldn’t call it a plan because I had no time to weigh things carefully – was nothing more than a flash of intuition. According to my intuition, there was only one course of action open: the three of us would hide until the main body of the army was past. Then I would foray out, capture one of the stragglers and determine the situation at the front. Then we’d be able to decide what to do on the basis of sound intelligence. If we were discovered by the main body of troops – and there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t bivouac in our area – then I would simply put up as much resistance as I could with my revolver. The rest I would leave to fate.

  Before we had gone very far, Young Scorpion stopped and refused to go on. He seemed to have his reasons, but I didn’t have the time to examine them. If he didn’t come, then obviously I had no hopes of Revery going with me. I was once more at a loss. The dust that we had seen to the west was moving ominously closer. I had great respect for the speed and sight of the Cat People, and I knew that if the soldiers got much closer, there would be no more opportunity to hide.

  ‘You’re not going to die at their hands! I won’t permit it!’ There was urgency in my voice as I tried to pull them towards the dilapidated old house, but Young Scorpion still wouldn’t budge.

  ‘It’s all over! There’s no point in your dying too. Let Revery do whatever she chooses. I release you from all responsibility.’ Young Scorpion sounded quite determined. In strength, however, I knew that he was no match for me. I grabbed him around the waist and, half-hugging half-pushing, forced him towards safety. Since he wasn’t the rugged type to begin with, he didn’t put up a struggle. Revery, of course, had no choice but to follow. Thus I won out and before long we were all hidden safely away in a dilapidated little house at the back of the village.

  I piled broken bricks into a wall that shielded us from view, and then peeked out through the cracks to see what was going on. Revery sat beside me and held Young Scorpion’s hand.

  Before long, the main body of troops came our way. It moved forward, looking like a tornado whose vortex was a chaotic mass of debris. And from within the cone of this furry tornado there issued forth one confused roar after another. Then the sound of the roar suddenly died away, as of a wave that has just broken on the beach. I held my breath waiting for the roar to suddenly build up again, but it didn’t. When the cone of the cat-tornado was past and the mass had thinned out a bit, I was able to make out individual soldiers. They didn’t even have the wooden clubs that I had grown used to seeing them carry back in the reverie forest. Their eyes were glued to their toes, as they ran desperately forward as though they were scared out of their wits. Their weird appearance made my blood run cold. An army without the whinnying of horses, without banners, without swords or guns, without rank or file – just a huge chaos of naked cats scurrying madly across the hot sands, each of them apparently pushed to the verge of madness by fright, hurtling forward for his very life. A group of, a field of, an entire horizon of, a whole planet of madmen! I had never before seen such a thing! Had they maintained some semblance of order I shouldn’t have been nearly so frightened, but this was pure random chaos!

  I began wondering what point there was in Young Scorpion’s coming out all this way just to see a defeated army in rout. Were these crazed soldiers running back to settle accounts with his father? That would be logical enough, but why shouldn’t Young Scorpion hide from them rather than going out to meet them? I couldn’t figure it out, and my confusion and curiosity made me bold: I decided to venture out of our hideout and capture one of the enemy soldiers. However, on second thought I realised that if I did venture out, I would be spotted immediately, for apart from a few dilapidated houses, there wasn’t a single tree or obstacle behind which I might take cover.

  I waited some more, and finally the flow of soldiers dribbled away to almost nothing. However, those soldiers who were hindmost were also running the fastest. They were, no doubt, especially terrified because they had fallen behind the main body of troops and were doing their very best to catch up. It would be pointless for me to try to overtake one of them. I decided that I’d have to come up with some other plan.

  All right, then. Why not try my skill with my revolver? I knew that if I wounded one of them, those behind would run right past him without giving him a second glance and those in front of him wouldn’t so much as turn their heads when they heard the crack of my revolver. But how could I guarantee that I should be sufficiently skilful to hit just one of them, and sufficiently accurate to wound him just enough so I could capture him alive? Moreover, even if I were able to hit him in a non-vital spot, would I have the heart to interrogate a man with a slug in him? Never having been a military officer, I seemed to lack the requisite touch of cruelty for such a task. I concluded that my plan was something less than honourable.

  There were hardly any soldiers going by now and I realised that if I procrastinated any longer, there wouldn’t be a single one left. I decided to go out and seize one bodily. At any rate there were so few of them left now that at the worst, only a few would be able to gang up on me and my chances would still be pretty good. It was now or never. I drew my revolver and rushed out.

  Things are never as easy as we think they should be in the abstract, nor are they as difficult. If the stragglers had bolted upon seeing me, then it was a foregone conclusion that I could chase them the livelong day without catching a single one. But one of them, upon spotting me, actually froze like a frog surprised by a water snake. The rest of it was easy. I threw him across my shoulders like a shawl and carried him back to our hideout the way one brings a pig home from market. He neither cried out nor struggled. He was probably so tired and terrified that he was as good as half dead anyway. I put him down in our dilapidated hideout, but it was a long time before he opened his eyes. He took one look at Young Scorpion, and one would have thought that someone had jabbed him with a pin. He glared so furiously at my young friend that it was obvious he wanted to get up and spring upon him like a tiger. With me beside him, however, it seemed he had nerve enough to get angry but not enough to act.

  Young Scorpion didn’t seem to be the least bit interested in him, and merely sat holding Revery by the hand with a blank expression on his face. I knew that if I used a soft approach in interrogating this prisoner, I might well get nothing out of him. I’d have to intimidate him, and when I had him scared enough, I’d ask how the army was defeated.

  My captive quickly seemed to have forgotten everything and went blank. And then after a long while, he seemed to have thought of something. ‘It’s all his fault!’ He pointed at Young Scorpion and the latter smiled.

  ‘Speak!’ I ordered the prisoner.

  ‘It’s all his fault!’ The soldier repeated. I knew how verbose and roundabout Cat People can be, so I waited patiently until he’d worked off some of his anger.

  ‘None of us wanted to go to war, but he tricked us into going to fight. The enemy was even prepared to give us National Souls, but he wouldn’t let us take them! The only thing he was good for was controlling us and keeping us from what we wanted to do. The Red Cord Corps and a number of other units all took the foreigners’ National Souls and retreated in perfect sa
fety. We were the only ones left for the enemy to give a good beating to, and believe me they did! We are his father’s personal troops, but rather than looking after our welfare, Young Scorpion there led us straight to the execution ground. It seemed that as long as there was one of us left alive, he’d still want that lone individual to die like a well-behaved little soldier! His father was already planning to pull us out. But this one! He wouldn’t go along with it. The other troops retreated in perfect safety; they weren’t wounded and would be in good shape for looting when they got back to the rear. But us! We don’t even have a single club left. How are we to go on living?’ He seemed caught up in his own eloquence, and neither Young Scorpion nor myself said anything. We just listened. At least I listened, for Young Scorpion was perhaps so caught up in his own grief that he wasn’t paying attention. I, on the other hand, was definitely fascinated by everything the soldier had to say. I just hoped he would go on and on, the more the better.

  ‘Our land, homes and families,’ he continued, ‘have all been taken away by you. Old Scorpion does this to us today and you do that to us tomorrow. The number of officials increases every day and the poverty of the people increases apace. You thieve and cheat us until there’s nothing left for us but to join the army. And then once you have us in the army, you force us to help you thieve from others just like ourselves. And the ruling class always takes the lion’s share of the loot. You let us have a tiny bit of it only for fear that we won’t go on helping you if you don’t. We can’t work, for you make soldiers of our parents so that we have to grow up in the army, knowing nothing but soldiering. If we didn’t become soldiers, we wouldn’t be able to make a living in any other line!’ He stopped to catch his breath and I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him a question.

  ‘Since you know that they’re no good, why don’t you simply kill them and take over everything yourselves?’

  The soldier rolled his eyes away. At first I thought that it was because he didn’t understand my words, but then I realised that he was thinking. After a while, he asked, ‘You mean we ought to revolt?’

  I nodded my head. I hadn’t thought that a simple soldier would be familiar with the term ‘revolution’. I’d momentarily forgotten about the great number of revolutions the Cat People had already gone through.

  ‘There’s no point in talking about that. We don’t believe in it any more. There’d be some pleasure in killing them for revenge, but revolution’s a waste of time. Every time there’s a revolution, we common folk just lose something else. The revolutionaries are all bad. Take that time when they were going to split up all the land and property, for instance. Everyone thought it was a great idea. But in the end each man only got a tiny bit of land, not even enough to plant a dozen reverie trees. We went hungry whether we worked the land or not.

  ‘The ruling group couldn’t come up with any way of solving our economic problems, especially the younger ones – all they were good for was coming up with plans, but they never paid any attention to whether our stomachs were empty or not. Any plan that isn’t directed at filling the bellies of the common people is a joke. We don’t believe anything they say any more. But since we don’t have any way out ourselves, we simply serve as soldiers to anyone who gives us reverie leaves. And now they won’t even let us be soldiers any more! There’s no point in revolting, but killing them would be sweet. We’ll kill every last one of them! In having us go to war against the foreigners, they tried to kill us. But if we were all dead, who would there be to eat their reverie leaves and serve them as soldiers? They collect reverie leaves by the pile and wives by the dozen, but they won’t even give us a scrap of their leaves. Instead, they send us out to make war against the foreigners and kill or be killed!’

  ‘And now you’ve come back especially to kill him?’ I pointed at Young Scorpion.

  ‘That’s exactly the reason! He orders us out to die at the front and won’t even allow us to accept the foreigners’ National Souls!’

  ‘What are you going to do after you’ve killed him?’ I asked.

  He was silent.

  Young Scorpion was the first clear-headed person I’d met during my Martian experience and yet this soldier and his comrades hated him to the very marrow of his bones. Of course, it wasn’t my place to, nor did I have the time to, explain to this soldier that Young Scorpion was not the man he should hate. He had mistakenly taken Young Scorpion as representative of the official class, and since he couldn’t put his hands on the whole of officialdom, he had decided to take his revenge on Young Scorpion. This revealed to me one of the real reasons for the debilitation of Cat Country: those with a little intelligence were forever leading their compatriots to revolt before they had secured a firm knowledge of the real workings and power structures of their own society. Then, while seeking to solve the political and economic problems of Cat Country, these well-intentioned and self-appointed leaders would themselves be swept up in the whirlwind of the very problems they had set out to solve.

  The common people, having gone through a series of revolutions, had, to be sure, cultivated a class consciousness. But they were still in such a state of abysmal ignorance that their class consciousness was limited to realising they were being swindled as a group, but not being able to do anything about it. The upper classes were confused; and the common people were confused. Above and below, they were equally confused! This was the fatal weakness in the body politic of the Cat People! Suffering from such weakness, even though they were shocked by the prospect of the imminent extinction of their whole race, even that kind of shock still wasn’t enough to make them grit their teeth, stand up and fight back.

  What was I to do with this soldier? That was a problem. If I let him go, he might well run off to get help and then come back to finish off Young Scorpion. And if we kept him with us, he certainly wouldn’t be the most congenial of companions. Besides, where would we go?

  It was already late in the day and we’d have to make up our minds what we were going to do. Young Scorpion’s expression indicated that he was only hoping for a quick death. Where were we to go? Going back east to Cat City would be dangerous. And the west? That would be to jump into the maw of death, for it was quite likely that the enemy was advancing in our direction at this very moment. After long deliberation, it seemed to me that seeking refuge in the foreign enclave was the only course of action open to us.

  Young Scorpion shook his head at the suggestion. I should have known. He would rather die than lose face by seeking refuge with the foreigners. He told me to release the soldier. ‘Let him go wherever he wants to!’ I had to admit that was the only thing we could really do with the soldier, so I released him.

  The sky gradually darkened. It grew unusually and fearfully dark. And all was silent. There was no one in the immediate vicinity. And yet we knew that in the distance, there were defeated troops behind us, and enemy soldiers before us. It was a silence like that on a desert island just before the sudden fury of a storm. And the quieter that it got the more nervous we became.

  Of course, if Cat Country were wiped out, I could always go somewhere else. But I was heartbroken with thoughts of my friend, Young Scorpion. To spend the eve of the extinction of a whole nation in a small lonely room – what a melancholy prospect! By now I had grown to like Revery to the point that I couldn’t bring myself to leave her either.

  Only when a state is on the verge of extinction does one comprehend what a weighty relationship exists between an individual and his nationality. Of course, this had nothing to do with me personally, but I had to consider things from Scorpion and Revery’s point of view so that I might be able to enter into their hearts and shoulder part of the load of their grief. There was nothing that I could say by way of comfort, for the destruction of the country was due to the stupidity of an entire people. What was the point in trying to comfort one or two individuals? The death of a state is not the catharsis of a tragedy, nor is it a poet’s metaphor for righteousness. It is a cold and ug
ly fact; it is the steel logic of history. How can one explain away a fact, no matter how many emotional phrases one uses? I was actually listening to the last gasp of a dying state. My two friends, of course, heard it even more clearly than I did. In their hearts they were no doubt cursing the bitter times and reminiscing over the sweet. Now reliving the past was all they had, for there was no future, and their present had nothing to offer except the gradual fulfilment of the greatest disgrace to which creatures can be subjected: annihilation.

  The sky was as black as usual, and the stars were as bright as ever. The environment was peaceful, and yet on this eve of the demise of an entire nation, one simply couldn’t close one’s eyes. I knew that they were awake, and they knew that I wasn’t sleeping either. Yet none of us said anything. Our tongues seemed to be tied by the cords of doom. From this time on, neither people nor country would be permitted to speak again. The culture of another country had become dumb. Her last dream had been a song of freedom that had come too late. Now she would never wake again. Her soul could only go to hell, for her record in life was nothing but a dark and dirty spot on the pages of history.

  FAREWELL TO MARS

  IT MUST have been about dawn when I finally dozed off. I was awoken by two loud reports. The bodies of my friends were lying in pools of blood not two feet from me. My revolver lay next to Young Scorpion.

  It would be impossible to describe what I felt at the time. My mind was a total blank and I was only conscious of a generalised pain. I felt the unflinching stare of my lively friends’ eyes fixed upon me. Lively? For a moment my brain was unable to make the transition and I couldn’t imagine two such lively friends as actually being dead. They both seemed to be staring at me, but there was no expression in their eyes.

  They seemed to have grasped hold of some enigmatic and secret affirmation that they challenged me to guess. I stared at them until my eyes began to ache; their deathly gaze was still fixed upon me. It was as though they had given me a very difficult riddle to solve, but my mind was a total blank. Standing before them and unable to think of any way of bringing them back from the dead, I was painfully aware of the fragility and helplessness of life. I shed not a single tear. Except for the fact that I was standing and they were lying on the floor, we were equally wooden.