by Justin Hill
‘I won’t tell the boss. Let her rest.’
The old men followed her advice and went home. They didn’t come again.
Incense burned in the marquee for six full days as the red candles dripped the lonely hours away. During the morning people brought more wreaths, banners of yellow, and paper-cuts of white mourning. The paper-cuts were hung from the roof, while the wreaths were laid along the sides of the tent, and the banners were draped around the coffin. Others brought tinsel and fairy lights till the marquee was a display of wreaths and sparkle that brightened a grey world, leeched of colour by the endless rain.
Friends and relatives took over from the karaoke band. Silhouettes without youth or age, they sat up playing cards to keep Autumn Cloud and Party Secretary Li’s body company as a tape recorder played military tunes through to morning. Sometimes Autumn Cloud would come and sit with the men playing mah-jong or cards, listening as they joked and laughed to raise her spirits.
On the fifth and last night the rain stopped. Autumn Cloud came out and stood over the body. She pulled back the red cloth and looked into her husband’s face: his eyeballs had sunk into his skull, his lips were grey, and his body was so still. She looked at him for the last time, thought secret words of parting and recrimination, then pulled the red cloth back over his face.
On the morning of the funeral a truck bringing relatives from the countryside broke down and they arrived in tractors half an hour late; a party of invited officials overslept; the brass band lost their trumpet player; and a group of important old cousins refused to go by taxi and insisted on walking instead.
There was pandemonium and confusion. Autumn Cloud shivered in the graveyard wind as noisy telephone calls were made and frantic messages were dashed around town.
When at last all was ready, the procession rolled out of the factory gates. There was a large crowd of expectant spectators who went silent as the procession began, led by a man carrying a banner which listed Party Secretary Li’s achievements. He was followed by a crowd of fifty male relatives carrying the gaudy wreaths and the brass band who walked and played out of step with each other. There was a gasp of excitement as the spectators saw Autumn Cloud dressed in white with soot smudged down her cheeks. Approving comments were made on the cost of the coffin that was loaded on a bier carried by sixteen men. Next came a crowd of friends and relatives, many old and frail; a traditional band of pipes, gongs and drums; three part-time Buddhist priests who knew the Diamond Sutra by heart; and at the last a crowd of children who were running and playing and squealing with excitement.
The procession filled the streets and caused three-hour traffic jams throughout the town. Passers-by wanted to know who it was; how old he was; how did he die. Angry car and truck drivers blared their horns and leant out of their windows to shout get a move on; get out of the way! while traffic policemen took time off to smoke a cigarette.
The brass band answered the angry shouts by putting their instruments to their lips and giving a long blast. The traditional band were not to be outdone and struck their gongs and blew on their pipes and flutes, and the part-time monks at the end of the file added to the bedlam of noise by chanting their sutras and striking out an occasional clok! on their wooden blocks. Last man was the trombone player who stopped to get a stone out of his shoe. He hopped on one foot, ran to catch the procession up, and gave a wheezing blast to support his colleagues before the discordant noise faded away.
The funeral snaked its way through Shaoyang to the town’s Number 4 Incinerator and ran into a number of other funeral processions going the same way. The bands competed with each other; grievers mingled in a blurred confusion of people; banners and achievements got confused and mislaid. Peach clung to Autumn Cloud, while Madam Fan cursed and blindly attacked the bodies around her. Old Zhu pushed through the confusion and the men carrying the bier pushed after him. He fought his way through the crowd at the doorway, and managed to deliver the body to the correct official. He paid the hundred-yuan bill and received a stamped receipt for the ashes.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ the official shouted. ‘Next!’
‘What time?’
‘Are you deaf? Tomorrow!’
‘What about the wreaths?’ Old Zhu asked. ‘Can they go in with the body?’ The official turned around and pointed to a large skip where mourners were dumping wreaths. ‘Wreaths go over there!’
In the confusion around the town Number 4 Incinerator the grievers were split up and lost, and they straggled away alone or in small groups like troops retreating from a crushing defeat. Some dumped their wreaths on the road where they were trampled underfoot, others went off for something to eat, but most just wanted to go home and shut the door. Old Zhu hurried through the streets with the receipt for the ashes and spotted his wife on the pavement a long way in front of him. He dodged cars and bicycles and caught up with her, desperately clinging to the ticket. She looked up at her breathless old husband, and squeezed out a smile, and they walked together in silence, stumping along together on their old joints.
‘I’m hungry,’ Old Zhu told his wife.
‘You’re always hungry,’ she said, and heard the reprimand in her voice and relented. She looked again and said more softly, ‘Yes, so am I.’
They walked together, Old Zhu feeling better because he was with his wife and they both felt hungry. Hunger was a reliable feeling; it had a simplicity love or grief did not.
Back at Shaoyang Number Two Space Rocket Factory a truck was parked under the trees and four peasants were dismantling the funeral marquee. They had made a fire out of the remaining wreaths and paper money, white ashes rising on the flames.
‘Make sure they don’t steal anything,’ his wife whispered to him, so Old Zhu went to check inside the marquee. He organised the removal of the chest of drawers and table. The green bronze incense burner was returned to Madam Fan, the food was dumped in a nearby dustbin. He picked up a wad of paper money, and the paper-cut of a television and dropped them into the fire. The paper-cut rose on the column of hot air and ashes, and then floated away on the breeze. He watched it sail away on the east wind, and turned to go home.
After they’d eaten dinner Old Zhu and his wife went to visit Autumn Cloud. The lights in her flat were off, so Old Zhu knocked gently. There was no reply, so he knocked again, and listened to the stubborn silence.
Nothing.
‘She must be asleep,’ Old Zhu told his wife. She nodded. They walked back down the stairs and went to bed, and that night Old Zhu slept as deeply as a stone dropped into the ocean.
Over the evening skyline of Shaoyang burned the dot of a Buddhist lantern in the Monastery of Universal Purity. From a distance it looked no more than a bright grain of white sand, but under its light a monk was chanting the Lotus Sutra for the soul of Party Secretary Li, dispelling the aura of death. The monk diligently read the words, and struck a gong each time he turned the page. In the early hours he reached the final stanza and stumbled over the last line, repeated it then struck his gong three times, the echoes fading to memory.
The monk looked at his watch and swore, ‘Shit!’ It was too late to go home. He curled up under a blanket, and slept dreamlessly.
While he slept the lantern flame burned low, and the statue of Guanyin watched the hungry mice gradually emerge from their holes, her serenely painted eyes full of compassion. As the mice nibbled her holy offerings the moon rose high in the branches and turned the dew to a snow-white frost.
Snow fell during the night, smudging the factory’s straight lines and imposing quiet upon the world. Madam Fan disturbed the white silence when she stepped onto her balcony a few minutes after sunrise. An icy sharpness cut the air as she stood and cleared her throat, but the fine snow floated aimlessly on the breeze, undisturbed. She stamped her feet for reassurance, coughed, and then blew steamy breaths over her fingertips. Snowflakes drifted down like blossoms, burying the world. She wiped her eyes and shivered, not from the cold but from the oppressive authorit
y of the snow.
Madam Fan decided she would no longer sing the nun’s soliloquy from The White Fur Coat, but the wife’s song from The Upright Official. She stamped her feet again; the muffled echoes were soaked up by the blurred world as she wiped a few melted snowflakes from her face with her sleeve, let her breath condense in front of her, and began:
Common folk suffer when kingdoms rise
Common folk suffer when kingdoms fall.
Old Zhu’s wife got up to find the room an unnatural colour and the windows fish-scaled with frost. She shivered as she dressed, then rubbed a hole through the ice and saw the outside world was just a white blur of buildings that had melted during the night. She stamped her feet and flapped her arms against her sides and, cursing the cold, completed three circuits of the flat before she felt ready to start cooking breakfast. As she heated the soup she heard distant singing then heard the words and stopped stirring. She turned to her husband as he blundered out of the bedroom, a worried look on her face. Old Zhu sat very still and listened.
‘She can’t be,’ his wife said.
‘I think she is,’ Old Zhu replied.
The singing continued as the soup went round and round in the pot.
Laws that govern are slack
Laws that punish harsh.
The soup boiled and his wife poured it out with an old aluminium ladle. She put a bowl of egg and spinach soup in front of Old Zhu. He nodded, then lifted his spoon and began to slurp. His wife sat down opposite him and dredged up thick green spinach leaves, stirred them back in. She was listening toohardtoeat.
Why are we ruled by these barbarians?
These arrogant and corrupt barbarians,
Old Zhu splattered his soup over his wife. He choked till his face went red and then sucked in an enormous breath and coughed ferociously while the aria continued:
These fucking corrupt officials
who killed our children
and destroyed the hope of Ming?
There was the sudden sound of shouting and the singing broke off. Madam Fan’s voice snapped short; a man’s angry voice rising above Madam Fan’s.
Old Zhu peered around the curtain to see what was happening. He rubbed a hole in the frost-patterned window and peered through. It was Madam Fan’s husband trying to drag her in off the balcony.
‘Stop that noise!’ Madam Fan’s husband bellowed, and Madam Fan struggled to get free.
‘Curse the day I married you,’ he spat as she scratched his arm.
‘Have you no face?’ he demanded, ‘shaming the family?’
Old Zhu watched the Fans arguing on the balcony, and tutted softly. ‘Poor Peach,’ he said. ‘It’s not right for a child to have parents behave like that.’
‘Yes,’ Old Zhu’s wife said as she wiped spinach and egg soup off her sweater. ‘It’ll upset Autumn Cloud if she hears it.’
Old Zhu watched as Madam Fan was dragged off the balcony. Distant doors slammed, the building shook with echoes that faded away to nothing. Old Zhu was left staring out into the snowy landscape that looked blankly back. He listened hard but he could hear nothing more of the Fans’ argument, nothing except the hungry silence.
Old Zhu leant his forehead against the cold window. ‘What has happened?’ he said at last. ‘What has happened to us all?’ His words condensed on to the cold pane of glass and froze. His wife sat in silence, then crossed the room and stood behind him. She moved the curtain back an inch so that she could see as well. The balcony where Madam Fan stood every morning was empty, except for footprints in the snow. The lights at the house of Party Secretary Li were still out, even at this time. Autumn Cloud must still be asleep. These little changes were so disconcerting.
Old Zhu’s wife put her left hand on his shoulder and leant her weight on him, and the old man felt supported. They stared out through the chink between curtain and window frame at a world they no longer recognised or understood. People went about their daily business: to market for the vegetables, to a friend’s house for cards, to see the snow, to go down to the allotments to think about planting next year’s vegetables; but all of it seemed unreal.
We must try harder to understand, Old Zhu thought. This is the world we live in.
‘When are you going to collect the ashes?’ Old Zhu’s wife asked as she began clearing away the dishes.
She’d disturbed his line of thought, and he frowned for a moment and then said simply, ‘Today.’
‘Have you got the ticket?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’ve lost it?’
‘No.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You have lost it.’
‘It’s not lost,’ Old Zhu said, ‘it’s somewhere.’
His wife was unconvinced and she went to the kitchen to vigorously batter pots and plates together, then stormed back through the door.
‘Have you decided how you’re going to bring the ashes back?’ she demanded.
‘I’ll put them on my bicycle,’ he told her, hitting the table with his palm as if that was the final word.
She stared at Old Zhu’s rounded shoulders as he sat at the table, then went over to the pot of tea on the shelf and lifted it up. There was a thin wad of ten-yuan notes, folded over in half. She took one of them and put it in his breast pocket. ‘Get a taxi.’
‘I’ll cycle,’ he said, and took the money out and put it on the table. The note lay flat for a moment, then curled back in half.
‘When was the last time you cycled?’
He didn’t answer.
‘It’s too dangerous. It’s snowing.’ She stood above him for added authority. ‘All those cars and motorbikes. It’s not safe!’
Old Zhu didn’t answer. He put on his coat and went into the bedroom. His wife watched as he searched through the drawers for the ticket. He found it under an empty packet of cigarettes, clenched it between thumb and forefinger and then put his whole hand with ticket into his pocket. Her eyes followed him as he walked out of the door into the snow.
‘Wah!’ she said after he’d walked out. ‘Trust my luck–being married to a stupid old goat.’
Old Zhu spent the morning walking around with the ticket for Party Secretary Li’s ashes in his pocket. He went down to the allotment behind Building Number 7, but the leaves were buried under snow so he decided to go for a slow walk around the factory compound instead. He set off along the tight rows of drab grey tenements, then turned down past the dance hall and the old communal restaurant where they’d smelted all their pots and pans into iron in the summer of 1959.Anold womanwitha knittedmaskacross her mouth was sweeping a black path through the snow. The slag that had come from their home-made furnaces was bubbled and shiny like meteorite. Old Zhu thought of the stars and the moon, the day when Vice-President Zhou Enlai visited the factory. We will take Communism to the Moon and Ten Thousand Stars! he’d proclaimed and they’d renamed the factory Shaoyang Number Two Space Rocket Factory in his honour. Party Secretary Li had been in charge then. Had run the factory till he was retired in 1990, after the troubles.
The path led him further back into his memories, to the time just after liberation when he was fierce with youth and the determination for change. They were going to build a new China, sweep away the old. He’d been assigned as a leader of teams of volunteers, and together they’d imagined the factory was the country. They’d all let that dream dominate their lives. For many of them it had proved fatal. Now the new leaders had decided it was time to sell up and move on.
Old Zhu looked up as he approached the snow-draped factory. There was an unnatural quiet about the place: the windows were dark, solitary ghosts lingered where crowds had once marched, and there were even birds nesting in the chimney stacks that had once proudly poured black industrial smoke into the heavens.
At the far end of the factory hall a team of peasants were dismantling the New Block. T
hey had stripped down the roof tiles and beams, and were now removing the bricks one by one. The peasants passed them down a chain of hands, down to the floor where the bricks were piled up in squat square blocks.
Old Zhu remembered building the New Block in 1978. He’d stood on the roof and caught each brick as it was tossed up, and then he’d tossed it to the next man, and so on until someone laid it in a bed of mortar. They’d built up the walls brick by brick. Watching the peasants dismantling the New Block was like seeing his memories unravel. He no longer felt sure of the past or the present, knew nothing about the future.
The demolition workers lived in a tent of plastic sheeting, sleeping in bunks of twenty men, crammed in tight for warmth. They worked split shifts, one group worked days, the other nights. They took it in turns to cook. They did not make food in the local way, but made thick wheat noodles with eggs and tomatoes; or toasted flat breads on the inside of oil barrels filled with charcoal. Old Zhu’s friends blamed the rise in crime on these migrant workers, repeated insults they read in the newspapers under headlines about the ‘Rushing Tide’ or ‘Blind Fish’.
‘It’s cold,’ Old Zhu said to one of them as he passed, a young boy maybe eighteen or nineteen.
‘Yes, it’s too cold.’ The boy shivered. ‘But it’s colder at home.’
Old Zhu looked at the boy and nodded with a half smile. His white hair stood up and his eyes were bleary in the biting wind. ‘How old are you?’ Old Zhu asked.
The boy struggled to understand the old man’s accent. ‘I was born in the Year of the Dog,’ he said uncertainly.
Old Zhu nodded. ‘And where are you from?’
‘Shanxi.’
‘My ancestors were from Shanxi,’ Old Zhu said. ‘Their hometown was at Ruicheng.’
The boy didn’t answer.
‘Have you ever been there?’
The boy shook his head because he didn’t know what the old man was saying and didn’t know how to answer. Old Zhu looked at him.