by Ma Jian
When he walked through the streets and saw people queuing up for the bus or stopping for a chat, scenes from the crematorium would flash through his mind: the oily vapours rising from charred skin, the slowly contracting skeletons. He would think about the difference between the yellow and orange skin of the roast chicken on the street stalls, and the tender white skin of a little girl’s face before it enters the furnace. He would think about the difference between the living, who could move and talk, and the dead, who could neither move nor make excuses for themselves any longer.
His love for the dead grew deeper every day. He thought about how happy he would be if his mother were to become a dead person (that mouth shut once and for all). The dead had made him a millionaire, the leader of the crematorium’s unofficial Party committee. The dead never talked nonsense. They never vetted his publications or checked his account books. They didn’t care what he wore, where he lived or where he travelled to. As the number of corpses rose, their ages and personalities became increasingly varied, and his love for them grew stronger. Although the frequent power cuts led to corpse pile-ups (a chemical plant leaked once, flooding local fields with polluted water, seven people died in one day, and they were all brought to his shack at the same time, of course), he still felt that there were far too many living people and not enough dead.
As time went by, he became confused as to why people insisted on living so long. When his mother swore at him for tearing off a button from what had been a perfect pair of woollen trousers (in fact it already had three buttons missing, and you could only find replacements for those foreign-style brass-effect buttons in decadent boom towns like Shenzhen), he suddenly imagined how calm she would look when she was dead. He imagined it again when he gazed at her through the sheet of red cotton they hung between each other before going to sleep. ‘The Buddha’s realm is full of mercy,’ he wanted to tell her. He opened his mouth, but the words would not come out.
‘Women burn better than men,’ he told her again, but this time in a more insistent tone. ‘Dead people smell like roast meat, when they first go in the oven.’ A few minutes later, the innards let off foul gases that make you want to retch, but he kept that last part to himself.
‘You should come to the shack one day and take a look,’ he continued. ‘There’s an upholstered armchair that belonged to a rich and powerful man before the campaign against the “Four Olds”. You can sit in it and watch the corpses entering the furnace and see them being transported by the music of their choice to a realm of peace and joy.’
‘They say that one day, balls of cotton will fall from the sky,’ the mother murmured, her shadow stretching along the pink wall behind her. ‘When I see them fall, I will go with you to the shack.’
The son panicked. When he was young, his mother could always see through his lies. He was now in his thirties, but he still felt unsure of himself. ‘Just come with me and have a look,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’
Just before daybreak, the mother glanced outside through the gaps in their wooden door. Then she turned her head, her green eyes glistening like the eyes of an old cat. The son dared not meet her gaze, but he could sense the importance of the moment. He knew there was something he had to do. He rolled over and got out of bed.
The mother and son seemed troubled by the way the day had begun. The routine of their mornings had been upset. Usually, when the son pulled back the red curtain, the mother would press down the handle to open the front door. While the mother fed charcoal briquettes into the stove, the son would cross the smoke-filled room with a toothbrush in his mouth and step outside into the entrance passage to clean his teeth. After the mother had placed her chamber pot on the other side of the stove, the son would walk in, put down his toothbrush, pick up the chamber pot and carry it to the public latrines. Today, however, everything was out of sequence. It was so bad that, when he was squeezing out the toothpaste, his mother was squatting on the chamber pot for a piss. He was only supposed to hear her do that first thing in the morning, while he was still half asleep in bed.
It seemed like the start of something new. He realised it was time for him to act, but he didn’t know where to begin.
Over the previous two years, he had made a life for himself. His business had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. He had bought the electric kiln because he liked it, it intrigued him. He only discovered it could be used for burning bodies in a conversation he overheard in the public latrines. He set up his crematorium, and soon the bodies were churning out from the furnace like water from a pump, and he was continually rushing back and forth like the water pump’s revolving chain, because in this town, rain or shine, whether it was a Sunday afternoon or a Wednesday night, people died every day. Sunday was never a day of rest, in fact people died more than ever. Especially women – women always chose to kill themselves on Sundays. Students between the ages of sixteen and twenty preferred to die on Mondays. Middle-aged housewives died on Tuesdays. This was the worst day for the entrepreneur, as he had to lug those huge fat women about the room all by himself. Babies and women who died in childbirth turned up on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Senior Party cadres died on Fridays. This was always a solemn and nerve-racking day. He would have to analyse the newspaper obituaries in minute detail to determine whether the deceased was a reformist or a reactionary, and then make the appropriate preparations for their swoon. People in their twenties liked to die on Saturday nights. Some would die on their way to a date, others in the drunken stupor after a break-up. Saturday was always the most romantic night of the week. Love would surge into the crematorium like fresh blood, and the cassette player on the rickety table would belt out Orff’s ‘Fortune, Empress of the World’ all through the night.
The son watched his mother’s shadow slip down the wall, creep across the grey cement floor and slowly disappear into the coal stove.
The morning passed quietly.
In the afternoon, the mother carefully combed her hair into place and followed her son outside. She locked the front door behind her, sat down on the back of her son’s motorbike and, for the first time in seventeen years, left home. (A street writer from another province who wrote letters for the illiterate moved into the shed a few weeks later.) Then she left the town. She had never travelled further than five blocks from her home in her entire life.
She already looked like a swooner. She was dressed head to toe in burial clothes that had been worn by many swooners before her. On her way to the crematorium, everyone stopped and stared at the living woman dressed in dead men’s clothes. She was even wearing ceremonial paper ingot shoes on her feet. Some recognised her as the old woman who lived in the Swooners’ liaison office. As they reached the outskirts of the town the sun came out. The sky was blue, and there was not one cotton ball in the air.
The son led his mother inside the shack and stared at her. He saw now that she was a swooner like any other, and no longer had control over him. In fact, their roles seemed to have reversed. Were he to have called this woman his ‘mother’, his scalp would have split apart. She had nothing to do with him now. In the cool of the shack, he suddenly felt sure of himself and comfortable in the role he was about to take on. He was capable of change after all. Before today, he had always been playing a part that had been assigned to him, he’d had no choice in the matter. He was only ever his mother’s son, the Party’s son, the Motherland’s son. He was a son right down to his bones, always taking the supporting role. But now, as he stared at the swooner standing before him, he finally sensed that he was separate from her, an individual, although he was not sure who that individual was yet. All he knew was that he wasn’t a wily businessman, a smug clandestine leader, or the son of the dead rightist, the boy his schoolmates liked to kick about.
(It’s very hard to draw the line between man and beast, the professional writer thinks to himself. What should the criteria be? A wolf will die to save her cubs, but a man will sell his mother for eight hundred yuan. A tiger wil
l maim a weaker animal in its fight for food, but a man will go hungry until he’s sure that his family’s stomachs are full. You can’t draw any conclusions from this …)
His entire life had been bound up with his mother and the experiences he had shared with her. He had worked like a dog to keep them both alive, because if they were going to survive in this world, they would have to pay rent, water bills, gas bills, buy vast quantities of compulsory premium bonds and cope with the inflation brought about by the Open Door Policy. When he bought the art school’s electric furnace, he had no idea what the future had in store for him, or what talents he would prove to have. Now that he thought about it, he guessed that he had inherited his artistic sensibility from his mother. When he was a child, the old cabbage face would jump around the room like a monkey, humming ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ She knew all the popular songs from the 1930s, and passed on her love of music to her son. (That rightist had married her for her voice, and when he was run over on the street, his mind was filled with happy memories.) Although the son could no longer detect any traces of her past charms, he knew that the ordinary looking woman in front of him was the only living woman he’d had any contact with. It was she who had brought him up. This thought was particularly repugnant to him when he heard the piss fall from between her legs in the morning, and caught the smell of her warm urine. He had thought he could never escape the lifetime sentence of being a ‘son’, but just when he was about to give up hope, fate showed him a light.
Now at last this heavy old swooner’s body, which had consumed two deep-fried buns and a bowl of bean curd for breakfast, was finally going to join the ranks of the dead. He knew what remained to be done, but the suddenness of the events had knocked him sideways. He was no longer the cocksure underground Party secretary. He could tell this was real, he could even smell his own body odours on his mother’s skin. But there was a strange sense of theatre about the old woman dressed in burial clothes. His mother seemed at ease with the situation though; she thought she was in control, just as she had been in the office. She appeared to be watching her son’s movements with a remote control in her hand.
He observed her scuttling between the corpses like a cockroach, checking their hands and teeth, criticising their dress sense.
‘This woman’s still got her bracelet on,’ she said, kneeling down.
The son walked over, lifted the dead woman’s hand, inspected the bracelet and tugged it off her wrist.
‘I know this man. He worked in the pharmacy on Peace Road.’ The mother’s paper ingot shoes brushed against another cadaver’s head. She seemed excited. The son switched on the furnace briefly to check that the electricity was running.
‘Burn him first,’ she said, checking the pharmacist’s hands and teeth. ‘He knew I like dry turnips, the ones I soak and use to stuff dumplings with.’
The pharmacist was pushed into the furnace to the strains of ‘The Internationale’. (After his death, he had been granted posthumous membership of the Chinese Communist Party.) When the son had locked the steel door, the mother switched on the furnace again, and her eyes sparkled like a young girl full of dreams and curiosity. Before she had married the art teacher who was later condemned as a rightist, she had laughed when her grandmother announced that her father had just hurled himself from the top of a building. At the time, she ignored her grandmother’s tears, and instead remembered how the leader of the Central Committee had described the Shanghai capitalists who jumped off the top of tall buildings for fear of Communist persecution as ‘parachuters’. She thought it was a very funny and accurate description.
‘You monster,’ the grandmother shouted, and slapped her innocent little face. ‘Your father falls down and cracks his skull open and you just laugh about it.’
Her grandmother’s eyes flashed with anger, but all she could do was giggle. She had no idea yet what death was. But soon after she married the rightist, she realised that these calamities can happen, and that she would have to spend the rest of her days using all her skill and cunning just to try to stay alive. She never liked to dwell on her past, though. As long as she was kept fed, she thought she could muddle her way through this cruel world, unless one day she decided to bring her life to an end, of course. She accepted that hardship and suffering were inevitable. Besides, if life became too easy, the skills she had developed over the years would be of no use to her any longer, and there would be nothing left for her to do but die. If, however, it turned out that death was not a tragedy, but a new way of life, an escape, then it might begin to look quite attractive to her.
She sat in the armchair, combing her shiny black hair, waiting for the posthumous Party member to emerge from the oven. She wondered whether she would take her gold earrings in with her or not, when her time came.
The son pulled out the metal tray.
The pharmacist was immaculately white. He looked like he had just come out of a shower. A soft fragrance rose from his tidy white bones. The flesh had disappeared from his body. The mother was relieved to see that his horrible fat lips had disappeared too.
‘He is utterly transformed,’ she said, pressing the hot white bones with delight.
‘They’re nice and soft, aren’t they?’ Now his flesh had gone, the pharmacist had become ageless. Had one not seen him go into the oven, one might have taken him for a child, or a creature from some heavenly realm.
‘My god!’ the mother cried, beating her chest. ‘If only I had known before.’
The son could guess what his mother meant by these words. He presumed that she was contemplating ‘immortality’ – that word he heard so often at funeral receptions. She knew now that the posthumous Party member had achieved immortality.
‘He is immortal now,’ the son said. ‘Whether he goes to heaven or hell, he won’t be coming back here again. Especially considering he managed to get through life without committing any grave mistakes.’ He walked to the cassette player and turned off ‘The Internationale’, then put on an aria from Salammbô free of charge.
The joy of seeing the pharmacist shed his mortal coil put the mother and son in convivial mood. They moved their hands inside the pharmacist’s hot carcass and soaked up the mysterious wonder of death. The son noticed with embarrassment a scrap of steaming flesh stuck to the furnace door – a clumsy slip-up on his part – and quickly unhooked it with a metal rod.
‘What music did you play just then?’ the mother asked in a melodious tone.
‘Mussorgsky’s Salammbô,’ the son replied.
‘Musso – who?’ The mother obviously knew nothing about modern music.
‘It’s probably a little contemporary for your taste.’ The son was unwilling to give detailed responses to uninformed questions.
‘I wouldn’t mind using that piece for myself.’
The son paused for a moment, and whispered, ‘I still have the old recording of you singing the … dirty songs.’
‘All right. But start me off with the Salammbô.’
‘It doesn’t matter what music I play, you will still come out of the oven as white as snow.’
‘Immaculate? Do you promise?’ The mother sounded as though she were talking to a wily tradesman.
‘Immaculate, as long as there’s no power cut.’ Then he added, out of a sense of professional duty: ‘Sometimes middle-aged women come out slightly yellow, a pale yellow like golden corn. But I’ll do my best to make you come out even whiter than the pharmacist.’
With this new feeling of trust established between them, their eyes could at last meet. They had reached a silent understanding. They felt even closer now than when they had witnessed the pharmacist’s transformation. Before, the son had always thought of his mother as a grandmother wolf. As a child, he was terrified that when she tied a scarf around her head, her white ears would suddenly pop out. When he heard her hum he wanted to run away; he was frightened that as soon as she was happy, her grey tail would stick out from under her skirt and wag from side to side. But
now that they were looking into each other’s eyes for probably the first time in their lives, they felt more united than the day he was interrogated in the public security bureau and their entire future was at stake.
‘As long as there’s no power cut,’ the son pledged, ‘I will give you a beautiful burn.’ He was getting excited now. He turned round, and with a piece of bent wire, plucked out from a crack in the table an original Hong Kong tape of Deng Lijun’s songs. It was the tape that Premier Deng Xiaoping had specifically banned, the one with the dirty song ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ The song had the decadent chorus his mother used to sing: ‘Come drive away the loneliness from my love-sick heart …’
The son was raring to go. He put his past resentments towards his mother behind him, and devoted himself to her needs. They no longer behaved as they had done in the shed in the entrance passage, grunting cursory replies to each other’s questions, glancing at one another with contempt. They were now united in one action, bound together as intimately as a pair of identical twins. They breathed a sigh of relief. This quiet understanding was as comforting as the soft and warm white bones. The mother’s face glowed with maternal love. She was a woman who had sung dirty songs in her youth, and whose eyes had sent a painter crazy. In the old woman’s face, these eyes now looked gentle and kind. That expression has disappeared from today’s world. You can walk the streets for ten years and never find an expression like it. (At least you won’t find it on Chinese faces. Perhaps Western faces can look gentle, calm, kind. But in China, not only have those expressions disappeared, but so have all similar expressions of pity, compassion and respect.)