The Noodle Maker

by Ma Jian

  ‘Your profession is despicable. It’s degenerate. It proves that human nature is essentially evil.’

  ‘Roast goose doesn’t grow on trees, you know.’ The blood donor points to the pieces of spat-out bone stuck to the manuscript paper. ‘If it weren’t for me, the national blood banks would be empty. I’ve bled myself dry for this country.’

  ‘They still haven’t put any ginger in their fish-head soup,’ the writer grumbles.

  ‘If it weren’t for me, this country would be finished!’

  ‘Foreigners give blood for free,’ the writer retorts. ‘You’re a fraud, a fake philanthropist.’

  ‘I’m more real than you are,’ the blood donor snaps, touching a nerve. Over the years, he has slowly learned to speak the writer’s language, and knows where to insert his knife.

  ‘The king is in trouble now!’ the writer chuckles to himself, leaning back in his chair. ‘The sailors are clambering to shore …’

  ‘The factory leaders depend on us to fulfil their blood donation quotas. If their own employees gave blood, they’d have to fork out thousands of yuan a year on sick pay and convalescent breaks. We only take cash, and we’ve never asked for a convalescent break. Many factories have been granted the status of “advanced enterprises” because of the blood we’ve given on their behalf. Well, I’m an “advanced blood donor”, a selfless Lei Feng devoted to the cause of the people. You say foreigners give blood for free. Well, if the government could be bothered to give me a proper job, I would give blood for free too.’

  The writer’s jaw drops. ‘You – a living Lei Feng! All right then, I’ll write about you. The blood-donating saviour of the people. The new Lei Feng. But the trouble is – you make money out of it …’

  ‘So what?’ the blood donor says, unwilling to let slip this chance to achieve fame. ‘I’m more Lei Feng than Lei Feng! If you write about me, you won’t have to bother to “Go Down among the Masses” or to “Learn about Life through Personal Experience”. I gave blood twice in one day to help out a man who had been ordered to give blood by the Party. Not even Lei Feng would have done that. And as for all the other good deeds I’ve done in my past, well you know about them already.’ He snatches the bottle of medicinal wine from the centre of the table, pours out a few drops for the writer, and empties the rest into his own glass. Then he gets up from the table and goes to fetch a box of matches. ‘You always promised you would write about me,’ he says, lighting a cigarette. ‘I would have given up this job ages ago otherwise.’

  ‘Do you know anything about the brain?’ the writer asks blankly. ‘My thoughts seem to arrive in unconnected paragraphs. They never connect. They set up home in my mind and pour their hearts out. They couldn’t care less about me, but I depend on them for my livelihood. You, though, have always been rooted to the real world, and over the years, you’ve influenced me and brought me down to earth. Who knows? Tomorrow I might just start giving blood myself. But I …’ The writer takes a drag from his cigarette, and glances at the blood donor sitting opposite him. ‘ … I’ve influenced you too. You’ve taken every word of criticism I’ve used against you in the past, and now you’re using them against me. Maybe you’re the one who’s going to end up in the history books. You and your lot.’

  ‘I don’t eat much these days,’ the blood donor says. ‘It takes me twice as long to climb the stairs now. My movements are clumsy.’

  ‘You’re in better shape than I am. In the re-education camp, you were the pasty one. Always playing sick, lying in bed while the rest of us were out working.’ A sour tone has crept into the writer’s voice, as it always does when the first bottle of wine is finished. My mind is filled with stories, he thinks to himself. But I have no idea how to piece them together. I need to be with people. I need to go out and speak to people before I can reach any deeper understanding.

  ‘You swallow jugfuls of water before giving blood,’ the writer adds, after a long pause. ‘You could harm someone that way.’

  ‘I’ve only done that once. What others get up to is their own business. Most of the recruits tie metal rods to their legs these days.’

  ‘You’ve never really grown up.’

  The blood donor stares at the writer’s face, trying to assess the seriousness of the remark. But the writer’s eyes are hidden behind his glasses, and there is no emotion in his voice.

  ‘You are utterly self-centred,’ the writer continues. ‘You never pay attention to the world around you.’ Reaching for a second bottle of wine, he thinks to himself: As far as he and I are concerned, Lei Feng is a dead man, like any other. Everyone is equal in death. What’s the difference between General Cao Cao, Marshal Liu Bei, and Comrade Lei Feng? They’re just a bunch of dead men, that’s all …

  The blood donor looks at the writer’s mouth, then at his ears. He knows that it’s his mouth that draws him to this room. In the re-education camp, he and the other urban youths would sit around the writer and stare at his mouth, waiting to hear what would come out of it.

  ‘Could you ever be entirely selfless and devote yourself to the people?’ the writer asks with a sneer. His question seems to be directed at both himself and the blood donor.

  ‘I refuse to be anyone’s slave. The constitution states that all men are equal, so why should I put myself down and sacrifice myself to others?’ The blood donor has dropped his obsequious tone. He has clearly given up trying to persuade his friend to write about him.

  The writer remains silent. He knows that his life is almost entirely devoted to the Party. But he has no idea who the Party is. He knows that the Party was around before he was born, and has controlled him his entire life. Every part of him belongs to the Party. The Party told him to write novels. It could tell him to die too if it wanted – he’d have no choice in the matter. Vlazerim exchanges his blood for food, he exchanges his mind instead. He remembers how the blood donor looked as he gobbled the roast goose: his entire body consumed in the act of eating, his mind focused on the need to eat, the need to survive. When he bit into the chunk of goose breast, a blob of grease dripped down his shirt and fell onto the table.

  ‘You’re a beast,’ the writer replies, peeling the shell from a steaming-hot egg.

  The blood donor shoots him a disparaging look. ‘When we were sent to the countryside, you talked about the “Sublime”. You even went on about that man Jesus. But now look at you! You’ve spent the whole day just waiting for me to turn up and put meat on your table. You can’t buy much food with the money they pay you for your deep thoughts, can you?’ The blood donor grabs an egg then pushes the plate back towards the bottles in the middle of the table. He takes a pinch of salt from the jar beside him, removes the hot shell and rubs the salt onto the gleaming white surface of the egg. ‘I get three times your monthly salary for just one blood donation. When you look at what you put into your work and what you get out of it, you’re not doing too well, are you? Or to put it another way, just because I’m a professional blood donor and you’re a professional writer doesn’t mean you’re any better than me.’

  The writer stares in disgust at the blood donor’s mouth, at the egg yolk moving inside it. He often adopts this disapproving look when his stomach is full. ‘If everyone were like you,’ he says, ‘this country would be ruined.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure. You’re a blood donor yourself. The reason I’m better off than you is because my blood saves lives, and earns me money and respect. But what have you got for your sweat and blood, for all that expended grey matter? Nothing. Your salary is only just enough to keep you breathing. You depend on the smell of your neighbours’ cooking to get you through the day. What kind of life is that? You talk about God, and your need to find the truth, but what help has your God ever been to you?’

  ‘You’re only interested in food. What do you know about truth?’ The writer’s expression is now calm and composed. ‘I will spend the rest of my life in quiet meditation. The sages live on one meal a day, the average man on two. I will survive
on …’

  ‘Everyone needs three square meals a day.’

  ‘Only animals eat three meals a day,’ the writer says with conviction. ‘I’m not fussy about what I eat. We didn’t have fish-head soup tonight, but I didn’t kick up a fuss, did I?’

  ‘In fact three meals a day aren’t nearly enough for me. What does that make me then?’

  ‘A beast,’ the writer replies. He inhales a gust of fragrant air, and says to himself: That smells like smoked mushrooms. Maybe if you add them to fish-head soup you can leave out the ginger. ‘You live off your body fluids,’ he continues, ‘so you must be a beast.’

  ‘If you don’t start eating properly, you’ll turn into a lump of dried tofu.’ The blood donor observes the writer’s hunched shoulders and his sallow, palsied face. ‘Very soon, you will weigh less than a sheet of manuscript paper, and then you will disappear altogether.’

  The blood donor’s eyes sparkle with life, in stark contrast to the writer, whose energies are slowly failing him and who has lost the will to write. The blood donor’s face is free of wrinkles and flushed with blood. His thick lips are moist and red. No one would guess he gives blood on a weekly basis, unless they heard him faltering up the stairs. His small, narrow body seethes with fresh young blood and gastric juices. At mealtimes he can finish every scrap of food on the table. Before he gives blood, he can swallow two thermos flasks of water and keep it all in for half an hour without having to relieve himself. His body is a blood making machine, every part in fine working order.

  The writer, however, has a weak heart, and a troublesome pair of lungs which spew out globs of phlegm at inopportune moments. None of the organs below his stomach are quite right either. He has to rush to the toilet as soon as any food reaches his intestines. Years of sitting at a desk have contorted his guts, causing him to suffer from perennial haemorrhoids. His feeble kidneys absolved him from having to take part in the Writers’ Association’s annual blood donation, and although his liver is now behaving reasonably well, it was nearly the death of him during his years in the camp.

  But despite his relentless blood donations, Vlazerim is looking more suave and relaxed by the day. He doesn’t have to tax his brains, so never experiences the dizziness, insomnia and disturbing dreams the writer suffers from – the afflictions of intellectuals. His imagination is only engaged when he’s daydreaming about recipes. During his time in the re-education camp, he stole a chicken once and took it up into the hills. He rubbed it with spices, roasted it over a wooden fire and gobbled it down all by himself. When he was finished, he buried the feathers in the ground. Had the guard dogs not sniffed out those feathers and dug them up, he would have got away with his crime without a beating.

  Now, every organ in his body is focused on the pleasure of his masticating jaws.

  ‘I’m no victim,’ the blood donor says. ‘Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy has rescued me, and allowed me to create a new life for myself. All my misery vanished the day they first gave me money for my blood. Now I have everything I want. But you’re still stuck here, wallowing in self-pity, yearning for the day you’ll make it into The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers. You hate yourself for writing what the Party tells you to write. You mystify life, so that you can rationalise your loss of grip on reality. You’ve forgotten that man survives through his quest for profit, not truth. Without the profit motive, we would all be finished. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve.’

  ‘You could be an intellectual yourself, if you wanted,’ the writer laughs. His mind starts to drift again. What am I doing here? he asks himself. I have to find a new Lei Feng, make it into The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers … But all I can see is the entrepreneur’s face, the young man who runs the crematorium, who looks nothing like the boy he once was. I have been observing the world through his eyes for a while now. It’s time he came and set fire to me too …

  The Swooner

  After he shut the steel door, everything went quiet.

  He switched off the cassette player, stood up and examined the furnace’s thermograph. ‘1,700 degrees,’ he said, moving his nose closer to the furnace. ‘Not burned to the bone yet.’ At this stage, if the wind were blowing in the wrong direction, smells of roast flesh would fill the air and he would feel a pang of hunger. Ten minutes later, the delicious smells would be replaced by a sickening stench.

  He had bought the large furnace off the ceramic department of the local art school. The students there no longer used it for their projects, and had dumped it in the yard of a local pottery factory. After his purchase was finalised, he transported the furnace from the yard to a small plot of land he rented from a peasant in the outskirts of town. Once the furnace was in place, he gave the exterior a lick of heat-resistant paint, replaced a few of the fire-proof bricks that lined the inside, and installed a new electric heating element. After he secured an entrepreneur’s licence, he was able to use the beautiful kiln to reduce a total of one-hundred-and-nine cadavers to ashes.

  His death register was filled with a list of names, each accompanied by a photograph, ready for the police to inspect. Of the dead, forty-nine were victims of car accidents; twenty had committed suicide by a range of methods including hanging, swallowing pesticides, inhaling carbon monoxide, and severing arteries. One man had even swallowed a kilogram of iron nails. There were Beijing opera stars and suburban farmers. The woman who had gassed herself with carbon monoxide was the daughter of a senior cadre – ordinary people in this town can’t afford gas ovens. Glancing down the column headed ‘educational background’, you could see there were three university students (including the boy from the top university who was burning away right now), and thirty poets (this is not surprising – there are more poets in this town than prostitutes or rubbish collectors). The youngest fatality was a one-year-old baby who had fallen from the top of a building. She was a sweet little corpse, and only needed a third of the usual electricity requirement.

  When the fifty-third corpse was cremated, the furnace’s fire-proof window shattered. The entrepreneur couldn’t afford to replace the window, so he blocked it up with bricks. After that, he could no longer enjoy the sight of bodies being consumed by the flames, and had to rely on his experience to judge the correct timing. He always gave an extra seven minutes to anyone over the standard one-hundred-and-thirty kilogram weight, at no additional cost.

  His crematorium had several advantages over the state-run incinerators. First, the corpses could enter the flames while swooning to the sound of their favourite piece of music. The entrepreneur could provide them with any music they requested, including all the unwholesome tunes that were banned by the Party. If the deceased had grown up in the 1930s, he would play the decadent songs ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ or ‘Pretty Girls in Peach Blossom River’.

  Admittedly, his prices were higher than the public crematoriums. He had to pay electricity bills and taxes, after all. But the dead were guaranteed a same-day burning. With state-run operations, the body waited at least a week for a cremation, over two weeks if it hit a busy period. Relatives had to pay for the body storage, and were often reduced to slipping back handers to officials in an attempt to speed the process up. When these additional costs were taken into account, the crematorium worked out as quite good value. But the greatest advantage of choosing the Swooners’ Crematorium, as the entrepreneur called it, was that the company sent a car to collect the body from the house, saving the family the trouble of finding their own transport. The relatives of the deceased could set up a modest wake at home, dispatch someone to the crematorium’s liaison office in the centre of town to sort out the formalities, and that was it. When the body was collected later in the day the relatives could shed a few tears, then return to their lives as normal. With state-run operations, the proceedings dragged on so long that the relatives were almost reduced to corpses themselves.

  The liaison office of the Swooners’ Crematorium was a long narrow shed built in the entrance passage
of an old building in the centre of town. The relatives visited the office to register the death, plan the cremation and buy the clothes and daily necessities the deceased would require in the Land of the Dead. The entrepreneur lived in this office with his mother. They were a great team. Their business flourished. Although his mother had very little knowledge of electricity (the entrepreneur was an electrician by trade), she knew all there was to know about the dead. They only saw each other at night. During the day, the mother looked after business in the office while the son travelled to the crematorium in the suburbs to deal with the dead bodies. He left the office at nine in the morning, and was rarely back before midnight.

  At night, the two colleagues would meet in the long shed that occupied half the entrance passage of the building. When the son returned, the mother would sit on the bed sorting out the burial clothes he had retrieved from the bodies, and listen to what he had to say.

  ‘Women burn more easily,’ he told her one night. ‘For someone as skinny as you, eight hundred degrees would be enough to get your flesh to fall from the bone.’

  ‘What do you mean, fall from the bone?’ she asked, glancing at the walls whose lower halves were painted pink – a colour that had only been available in the shops since the launch of the Open Door Policy.

  ‘It’s just like when you cook spare-ribs. When the temperature is high enough, the flesh just falls from the bone.’

  ‘I think my leg is rotting. I should have cut out this boil long ago.’ The mother’s shadow on the pink wall behind her looked like a creature from another planet. ‘You got your bones from me and your flesh from your father,’ she said, lowering her gaze. She always avoided looking her son in the eye.

  ‘That’s why I’m so short,’ he replied.

  ‘It’s your father’s fault you can’t find a woman. He had an unlucky face.’