by Ma Jian
‘I know a lot about women,’ the entrepreneur said indignantly. ‘Most of them like to listen to piano music before they go into the oven.’
‘What do men like to listen to?’ The mother snatched a piece of old cloth she spotted lying on the corner of the bed, then folded it neatly and returned it to its place.
‘Symphonies.’ The son swung his bony legs. ‘Men are tough brutes. Only strong, powerful music can send them into a swoon.’
‘Men are animals. Don’t waste your time playing music to them,’ the mother snarled, reaching for a pair of dark woollen trousers.
‘Everyone needs to swoon before they go.’ All the neighbours knew that the entrepreneur was a great lover of music. After the Open Door Policy was launched, he was the first man in town brave enough to walk down the streets swinging a cassette player in his hand. The entrepreneur jumped up from his seat and threw his hand in the air. His hand’s shadow was moving too. ‘I always make sure they swoon. I’ve heard that unless the dead swoon before they go, their souls won’t rise to heaven and their bodies won’t burn properly. Swooning allows them to vanish from this world for ever.’
The mother’s shadow looked very dark against the clean pink wall. ‘Look, here’s another hole you’ve made,’ she growled. Every object in the room was second-hand: the table, the sheets, every stitch of cloth on her body. She sat on the bed watching her son pace back and forth. The room was two metres by ten, and had an arched ceiling. In the light of the fire, she could see the traces of white ash, or ash-like substance, clinging like ghosts to the red bricks at the top of the walls. The entrance passage smelt as bad as a public bathhouse. Most of the stench came from the stall-holder who sold fermented bean curd outside the front gate. If their front door was left open during the day, the smells would flow straight in.
The office looked cheerful and festive when one glimpsed it from the street. There was always loud music playing, and large displays of paper flowers, paper shoes, imperial hats and Western suits and ties (the manufacture of which had only been permitted since the introduction of the Open Door Policy). The paper money, paper horses and paper flowers were brand new, but all the burial clothes were second-hand. The entrepreneur would never have been so wasteful as to send a body into the oven with its burial clothes still on. He would leave the clothes on the corpse until the last minute, in case the relatives turned up to bid a last goodbye, then he would carefully remove them, fold them up and bring them back to the office. His mother would howl in despair if she discovered he had inadvertently ripped the cloth or torn off a button. When she sold the burial clothes on to the next family, she was always generous enough to knock the price down a little.
From a distance (or from the town’s highest clock tower), the long narrow shed looked as bright as an open eye. When he first set up business there, the entrepreneur invited the most talented artist in town, a member of the ‘Wild Beast’ school apparently, to paint a large mural along the shed’s outside wall. He paid him fifty yuan for it. At first, the artist was reluctant to fix his art onto a wall: he believed that art and beauty were fluid concepts, and encompassed activities such as pissing, burping, spitting and fondling women and bottles of beer. But the entrepreneur was persistent, and at last persuaded him to paint a scene of a girl with golden hair burning to death to the sound of beautiful music. Instead of the metal tray, he painted her lying on an imported Western Dream mattress, and squiggled a few lines below to indicate an electric grill. One look at the girl’s smile and softly protruding breasts (which exceeded the maximum cup-size allowed by the Open Door Policy’s poster regulations) and you could die a happy man.
Unfortunately, the minute the artist put down his brush, a woman from the neighbourhood committee turned up with two policemen in tow. They ordered the artist to paint over the line of cleavage (a stroke of brown paint slightly darker than the surrounding flesh tone). Once the offending cleavage had become flat and uninviting, the artist was ordered to mask the girl’s bare legs. The muslin skirt he painted over them seemed to satisfy the policemen, as it fell just below her knees. At the top left hand corner of the mural he had painted a skinny little god, China’s Lord of the Sky, and without waiting to be asked, the ‘Wild Beast’ quickly daubed a white cloud over the god’s penis, and painted two more under his feet for the sake of symmetry. Then, in the background, he added a crowd of representative workers, peasants, businessmen, students and soldiers rising to the heavens with big smiles on their faces. Among their ranks were a couple of ‘Four Eyes’ (otherwise known as intellectuals) who had been allowed back on the scene since the Open Door Policy. The artist filled the remaining blank spaces with pretty angels and beguiling devils – you could tell them apart by the horns. At the bottom of the picture stood the Lord of the Underworld, who held opposite duties to the Lord of the Sky. It was clear from the images that he was responsible for punishing the most serious category of criminal: counter-revolutionaries. He employed torture techniques borrowed from Christianity, Islam and Buddhism: drowning in boiling fat, being run over by a car, pecked to death by eagles and eaten alive by snakes. The entrepreneur’s mother later stuck a pair of paper horses over this section to hide the gruesome scenes.
The old apartment building with the half-blocked entrance passage looked very similar to the August 1st Uprising Memorial Museum in Beijing (without the ornate portico and huge arched windows, of course). The decoration of the facade reflected the different stages of prosperity brought about by the recent reforms. A few well-off families had replaced their old wooden cased windows with aluminium frames and tinted glass. A bureau head had even installed air-conditioning, a foreign machine that sucks out hot air and blows in cold. You could guess the wealth of each household by the style and condition of the clothes that hung from the windows on bamboo poles. Most of the rooms on the ground floor had been converted into shops. A poster of a foreign movie star was pasted to the window of the Comrade Lei Feng Hair Salon.
The mother crossed her legs and picked up a burial nightshirt. The smoke from the burning incense coil spiralled through the morbid stench. One shirt had been worn by three different corpses already, and you could still smell aftershave (probably French) on the collar. She searched the garment for imperfections as carefully as though she were inspecting her own body. Her nimble fingers laboured through the night, darning every hole and tear. By the morning the shirt was looking brand new again, folded up on the top shelf of the office.
There was one embroidered jacket still lying on the bed though. If the entrepreneur had been more astute, he might have guessed what use she had in mind for it.
(At this point in his thoughts, the professional writer exhales a deep breath and moves his gaze to the night sky. Colours always look more seductive in the dark, he says to himself, as he listens to the noises coming from inside and outside the lit-up windows. Since it is quieter than the daytime, you can hear pebbles bounce off the shoes of a passer-by, and children under a street lamp humming ‘Learn from the Good Example of Comrade Lei Feng’. A bicycle bell rings out occasionally, then melts into the darkness. At this time of night, people become sad and mysterious creatures. It’s only when they are cooking, resting or chatting that the flavour of life pours from the streets and drifts into every home. As long as there are no women quarrelling, people can stare at the stars, share a meal with some friends, or go out on a date …)
At dusk, the entrepreneur would start burning the bodies that had been collected during the day. He would work until midnight, then return home laden with clothes and belongings. Sometimes he came back with gold teeth or pieces of jewellery. In the mornings he drove his army motorbike out of town through a string of houses that until recently had been a stretch of open field, to his crematorium in the suburbs, a simple shack he had built from the bricks of an abandoned chicken shed. An iron barrel welded to the rectangular metal roof served as the chimney. His two drivers would dump the corpses on the shack’s cement floor or on one of the th
ree stretchers. When the bodies entered the crematorium, they seemed as comfortable in their new surroundings as music lovers in a concert hall.
The entrepreneur always made sure that the bodies were collected on the day of registration. He understood how things work. If a dead person hangs around the house for more than three days, the relatives not only stop weeping, they begin to resent its presence. He also ensured that the ashes were returned to the family within the week. Any later and he knew he would get a very frosty reception at the swooners’ homes.
Sometimes the relatives would visit the office in the centre of town (finding their way from the address at the top of the entrepreneur’s invoice) to collect the ashes themselves. But the boxes seldom contained the swooner whose photograph was stuck to the lid. The entrepreneur often divided one corpse’s ashes between several boxes. He was forced to cheat in this way if he was to guarantee a prompt delivery of the remains. Anyway, as far as he was concerned, one person’s ashes were the same as the next’s. His drivers drove a small second-hand Fiat whose sides were emblazoned with the bright text:
WE CARE FOR OTHERS, WE CARE FOR THE PARTY, WE CARE FOR OUR MOTHERLAND. WE CARE FOR THE CAUSE OF DOUBLING THE NATION’S PRODUCTION BY THE 21ST CENTURY. GO DOWN AMONG THE PEASANTS! GO TO THE BORDER AREAS! GO TO THE SWOONERS’ CREMATORIUM!
On the boot of the car was a picture of a huge crowd of people standing on a globe the size of a football. The eye-catching slogan below read: UP WITH PRODUCTION! DOWN WITH POPULATION!
‘I really love them – the dead are much nicer than the living,’ the entrepreneur once said to some weeping relatives when he arrived to deliver the ashes.
‘China has a population of 1.2 billion. If more people don’t hurry up and die, our country will be finished,’ he told another family. ‘Anyway, it’s not as if he was a hero of the revolution, is it?’ he added, noticing the word ‘proletarian’ in the political class column of the dead man’s form.
The entrepreneur’s greatest talent was in recommending music for the deceased. He only had to glance at the profession, political class, age, sex and photograph on the form and he could select the appropriate music from his list. The price of each song had to rise, of course, in line with the inflation brought about by the Open Door Policy.
BEETHOVEN’S ‘FIFTH SYMPHONY’: 5 YUAN
CHOPIN’S ‘NOCTURNE’: 7 YUAN
(Suitable for young girls and poets)
TCHAIKOVSKY’S ‘PATHETIQUE’: 8 YUAN
(Karajan’s latest recording)
POTTIER’S ‘THE INTERNATIONALE’: 1.5 YUAN
ORFF’S ‘FORTUNE, EMPRESS OF THE WORLD’: 2 YUAN
(On special offer. A popular choice for intellectuals)
There were also some more familiar tunes at only half a yuan a go. These included the old favourites ‘Riverwater’, ‘The Moon Reflected in Two Ponds’, ‘No Communist Party, No New China,’ as well as ‘Young Cabbages’, ‘I Give My Life to the Party’ and ‘Learn from the Good Example of Comrade Lei Feng’. If the deceased was a member of the Young Pioneers, he would play ‘There are Many Good Deeds to be Done on Sunday’ free of charge.
If the relatives had trouble deciding what to choose from the list, the entrepreneur would stick his chin out, sidle up to them and whisper, ‘I have some more tapes in reserve. But you will have to pay for them in Foreign Exchange Certificates.’ This secret stash of music included tapes of English rock, American country music, erotic French disco music and the original Hong Kong recordings of the Taiwanese pop star, Deng Lijun. ‘The central authorities have started to confiscate Deng Lijun tapes,’ he told them authoritatively. ‘Anyone found in possession of one will be given a five-year prison sentence and have their urban residency permit revoked.’
His customers often followed his recommendations. Some of them found it hard to reach a decision because they had very little idea about the dead person’s musical tastes.
‘Trust me,’ he told one family. ‘I can tell at a glance that your daughter would like “Star-Crossed Lovers” and “Mistress Meng Weeps on the Great Wall”.’
‘But she was still a virgin,’ the relatives whispered.
The entrepreneur looked again at the photograph on the form. The woman was well into her forties.
‘Well, you decide. I have “Ave Maria”, or “Disco Music for Making Love”. The musical styles are different, but they will both do the same job. You can send her off to the Old Man in the Sky in whatever manner you please.’ Since the relatives had a low level of education, he used the term ‘Old Man in the Sky’ instead of ‘God’.
‘You can choose to give her a virgin’s cremation, or not. It’s up to you,’ he added, smiling at them as smugly as a matchmaker at a wedding.
‘She always wanted to join the Party,’ the mother confessed with a sly smile.
‘Wanting to join the Party and joining the Party are two quite different things.’ As far as politics were concerned, the entrepreneur was mature beyond his years. ‘But if you like, I can play “The Party has Given Me a New Lease of Life” and “Socialism is Good” and she will die with no regrets.’
Soon, news of the entrepreneur’s excellent service spread throughout the town. People discovered that being dead was not much different from being alive.
A constant din boomed from the entrepreneur’s shack. He had bought the cassette player from the first batch of goods imported from Japan following the launch of the Open Door Policy. It had four speakers. He would always try to play the music the relatives had requested, if time allowed. But the only real audience were the stray dogs in the yard outside who were drawn to the shack by the smell of burning swooners. The hounds would lie on the ground and sunbathe, or riffle through the discarded burial clothes. Sometimes the delicious smells wafting from the shack drove them into a frenzy, and they would run about the yard, chasing each other’s tails.
Occasionally the entrepreneur spent the night in the shack. We should examine his professional conduct and analyse his immoral behaviour. A thirty-year-old bachelor must have something to hide. The grief he feels at the sight of female corpses is most unnatural. If we practise our Qigong, and use our ‘eye of wisdom’ to observe him through the walls of his shack, we will see this self-appointed leader pace the room, then stop at the feet of a certain leading cadre and glare at him like a man about to avenge the death of his father. With his death register in his hand, he subjects each swooner to ruthless interrogation, pausing now and then to give them a sharp kick in the shins.
One day, he had lying at his feet: a policeman, the municipal Party secretary, the deputy head of the local housing department, a retired second-grade Party cadre and the chairwoman of the neighbourhood committee. Not one of them posed a threat to him though. They lay on the ground, next to the intellectual, the doctor and the pianist, and in one breath, the entrepreneur cursed the lot of them.
Everyone is equal in death. Had these important people known they were going to be abused in this way, they would have sorted the rascal out while they were still alive. But now the swooners could only lie back silently as he passed his final judgements on them. He swore at the cop for not observing the traffic regulations and for unjustly confiscating his motorbike licence. He cursed the deputy head of the housing department for failing to help him with his accommodation problems. ‘You even wanted to have me thrown out of my shed in the entrance passage,’ he hissed. He berated them for their corruption saying, ‘I could have bought myself a villa in the country with all the money I wasted on your bribes.’ Then he walked back to the deputy head of the housing department and kicked him in the stomach. ‘You had the cheek to accuse my shed of spoiling the look of the city. But when the Albanian prime minister came here on his state visit, it was you who decided to cover the town with those huge ugly hoardings.’
The entrepreneur was settling old scores. The year the Albanian prime minister, Mr Shehu, was due to visit, the local government decided that the tatty buildings on the most important s
treets should be covered with hardboard and painted with a mural of a long row of neat houses. Shehu would be driving past in a flash, so an impression was all that was required. One of these hardboard fronts was attached to the apartment block in which the entrepreneur was living with his mother at the time. It blocked all the light and air from their flat. The windows of the hardboard fronts were spaced at five metre intervals, and as luck would have it, they missed their apartment and ended up on his neighbours’ flat. The local government issued the neighbours with a length of curtain, and as long as they hung it up for the five minutes when Shehu’s car was expected to pass, it was theirs to keep afterwards. The entrepreneur thought this was very unfair, as the neighbours’ class origins were similar to his own – they both belonged to one of the ‘Five Black Categories’ who were denied state-allotted jobs. In the end, missing out on the piece of curtain was the least of his troubles. While the ‘hardboard mansions’ were being dismantled, the entrepreneur took advantage of the general chaos and stole a section of hardboard and two planks of wood to make furniture with later on. Someone saw him and reported him to the police. He was taken to the public security bureau and interrogated for hours. He was just fourteen at the time.
As night fell, the municipal Party secretary took on a magical air. The entrepreneur felt a sense of pride as he gazed at the line of dead bodies. At last he could enjoy the kind of authority that everyone deserves in life. The dead lay below him, eyes agape, mere witnesses to their own humiliation.
After the entrepreneur saw the play The Ninth-Grade Sesame Seed Officer about the altruistic Communist cadre, he was moved to act with a keener sense of social justice. He sent proletarians into the incinerator without exploiting them once. He didn’t even check their teeth. (A gold tooth is worth an average family’s yearly income in this town.) It was a case of ‘Levelling out the rich and poor’ or ‘The sun shines after the rain’. That was how he saw it, anyway. As his own father’s death was still fresh in his mind, he was always especially kind to rightists, or to anyone who had been run over by a car.