by Jack Livings
“I’m withholding your paycheck until you call the chief and sort this out,” he said.
“So what?” Yang said.
“Just call the man,” Rabbit said.
“I don’t want to.”
“Fine. I’ll tell the men you’re withholding our donation.”
“So? They can read the sign,” Yang said.
“They’re under the impression the zone chief is putting the squeeze on you for a kickback. You want me to tell them that you’re keeping the money for yourself?”
“You’d kick your own mother in the balls,” Yang said.
“My mother keeps her balls in a jar on the shelf, my friend, right next to yours.”
Chief Zhou’s office kept him on hold for five minutes while Yang listened to a tinny recording touting the zone’s commitment to aiding the victims of the Wenchuan earthquake. The voice also reminded him that the zone was accepting applications for factory space, which could be modified to meet tenants’ needs.
“Hello?” the chief said when he finally came on the line, as if he’d just run into the office and hadn’t been sitting there fuming, fantasizing about various methods by which to disembowel Yang, the entire time.
“Chief Zhou, it’s Bing Yang, Beijing Number Seven Peony Metal Fabrication.”
“Bing Yang. Good to hear your voice. How have you been?” the chief said. His tone was calm and collegial, and if Yang hadn’t known the man was exercising every muscle in his body to keep from reaching through the handset to crush his throat, he’d have thought they were on good terms.
“It’s been busy, Chief. I’m sorry we haven’t been able to speak sooner.”
“Busy man, Yang.”
“Busy.”
“Yang, let’s cut the bullshit.”
“Bullshit cut, Chief,” Yang said.
“I’m urging you to make a donation through the industrial zone. You’ve seen the board. It’s a disgrace. You’re one of only two companies who haven’t helped the victims, and Beijing Heavy Transmission Eight is liquidating its holdings as we speak, so I might as well take them off the board entirely. Don’t tell me you’re broke, too.”
“Oh, no sir, Chief. We’ve had better quarters, but we’re okay.”
“Good. So, how much will it be? They found a little girl alive in Beichuan, did you see that? Buried four and a half days.”
“Amazing. It’s a testament to the human spirit, Chief.”
“I agree, Yang. So, how much?”
“Well, Chief, I’ve prepared a donation of three hundred thousand,” Yang said. “We may end up bankrupt yet.”
Chief Zhou didn’t laugh. “That’s fine, Yang. That might be enough to help me forget your behavior so far. When should I expect it?”
“Whenever you’re ready to massage my scrotum,” Yang said. Across the office, Rabbit gasped and made waving motions with his arms.
Yang waved back.
“What?” yelled Chief Zhou.
“Just cutting the bullshit, as requested.”
“You son of a bitch!” Chief Zhou’s voice shook. “All this time you keep me waiting? I’ve got cadres from the municipal government up my ass, and you’re wasting my time with this? What have I ever done to you?”
Rabbit was pale, his breathing shallow.
“Let’s avoid conflict, Chief,” Yang said, holding the receiver away from his ear. “Why don’t I just write a check to your personal account and we’ll be done with it?”
Rabbit made a choking sound.
“You fucking hick,” Chief Zhou sputtered. The line clicked and he was gone. Yang set his handset back in its cradle.
“Oh, oh, oh,” was all Rabbit could say. He kept wiping his brow with a handkerchief.
“What’s he going to do?” Yang said. “Add another zero to our tally on the big board? My conscience is clean. We’ll give three hundred thousand directly to the Red Cross and we’ll match the men’s donations. I’ve given my own blood. Why is everyone so intent on draining my accounts?”
Rabbit stared at him. “You’ve lost your mind. Your wife calls me in tears. I’m maintaining your customers for you. Okay, my friend. That’s one thing. But now you’re messing with the Party. Chief Zhou is going to drop a bomb on us.”
“He just wants his cut,” Yang said.
“No shit. And he wants to keep his house and his Mercedes. If he doesn’t get a donation from every company, in two weeks he’ll be driving a dump truck in Xinjiang, spending Friday nights at the mosque.”
“You’re a Party member,” Yang said. “Can’t you have him reprimanded for trying to collect bribes? Doesn’t that go against ‘Love and respect honest labor and thrift’?”
“When did he ever solicit a bribe?”
“Come on!” Yang said.
“This is ridiculous. I can’t go to the Party about Chief Zhou. I don’t have the right connections,” Rabbit said. “You’re putting me in a terrible position. Let’s make the donation together. We’ll pull it from operating expenses, no cost to you or me. Deal? It’s a business expense. It’s an operational expense,” Rabbit said.
“Not a fen. Not one single fen,” Yang said.
Rabbit’s face fell. “You’re going to ruin us both,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” Yang said. “I know you’ll figure this out. I’m going home.”
Yang opened the office door, the whine of the factory flooding in around him, and clanked down the stairs.
He passed his bus stop, intending to use the walk to the subway to clear his head, but when he got there he passed the entrance without giving it a second thought. His mood had begun to lift. It had been days since he’d exerted himself physically, and as he walked, effortlessly cutting through crowds, weaving around food vendors and CD pirates, he began to formulate plans for daily exercise routines that would get him back to peak condition. In his teenage years he’d been a distance runner, and from his distinction on the track he’d made connections that took him to Beijing. It had been the start of everything.
He worked himself into a state of exhilaration, awash in beneficence at the thought of tightening his laces at the edge of a track, joining the other early morning runners. He could turn everything around by donating more than any other company. He and Chief Zhou would have a good laugh about it afterward, and Rabbit would shake his head in admiration, as if to say, You sly old fox, I should have known you were up to something. He’d buy presents for Gong and Little Li in apology for his bad behavior.
By the time he turned in to his hutong, he’d laid out a plan for reconciliation that involved a banquet at the Kunlun Hotel and presents at everyone’s setting. He would draw the people he loved into his orbit.
When he rounded the final corner, he saw Old Gao outside his gate, writing a ticket. Her back was to him, and Yang shuffled his feet and coughed to alert her to his presence. Her arm paused its scribbling motion, so he knew she’d heard him, but when he came up beside her, she flinched and said, “You startled me!”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Gao,” Yang said.
“Here,” she said, holding out the ticket.
“I see.” He studied her long, swooping strokes on the paper. She had quite beautiful script and he wondered if she’d been an intellectual in her former life. “‘Improper disposal of garbage,’” he read aloud. “Thank you, Mrs. Gao.”
“Don’t be smart,” she said. “Bing Yang, it’s lucky I’ve found you. The neighborhood committee is receiving donations for the earthquake victims. Some of these foreign ghosts have given more than we Chinese,” she said, waving her arm in the direction of his German neighbor’s compound. “It’s a point of national pride, and I know we can count on you.”
Yang’s jaw began to ache. He felt his mood disintegrate like a stone wall crumbling to powder.
Then Old Gao said, “Mr. Bing. You’re crying,” as if to scold him for his breach of etiquette. When he didn’t reply, she moved away from him, cane tapping rapidly, and called out over her shoulde
r, “You’ll bring a donation when you can.”
Yang pushed open his gate and went into the courtyard. Little Li had finally swept up the petals, but he felt no sense of pride in her obedience. He dabbed at his eyes with his sleeve and lowered himself onto a bench across from the denuded peach tree. It was late afternoon, pigeons and starlings circling above, their cries filling the courtyard as they looped over his house. Every once in a while a pigeon would flap down to attach itself to a limb, make some cooing noises, then fly back up to rejoin its kit. The light faded, and Yang stared at the tree for a long time, until its uppermost branches were only black outlines against the purple sky. He thought that if he had an ax, he would chop it down, but he didn’t, so he sat, folding and unfolding the garbage ticket and trying to recall what it had been like to be poor.
THE CRYSTAL SARCOPHAGUS
On the morning of September 9, 1976, Comrade Zhou Yuqing was awakened before dawn by the loudspeakers mounted on tarred poles outside his building. Chairman Mao was dead. Zhou rose in the dark and made for the bathroom, located at the other end of the building, across an open-air passageway. When he returned, his wife was up and getting dressed, and said she was leaving for the flower shop, which she knew would be open early and mobbed. Zhou tried to stop her. Lan Baiyu hadn’t been well, and he didn’t think she should exert herself. They lived on the fifth floor in an east-facing apartment that allowed them an unobstructed view of the rising sun over the rooftops of Beijing. The apartment, and its view, was a reward from the Party, but the building’s only elevator was a rickety freight cage off-limits to residents. Zhou was afraid the climb back to the apartment would cause her to miss yet another day of research at the Academy of Sciences, where she was a mathematician. He demanded that she stay put. He would go for the flowers. She told him to mind his own business.
She was back with a bunch before he’d had a chance to get the tea water boiling, and she inserted one into the buttonhole of his chest pocket, pinning it there in an under-over-under piercing of the cloth that resembled a metal stitch and held the chrysanthemum neatly in place. She was breathing heavily from the climb, exhaling warmly on his neck as she worked at his pocket. He sat down at the table and looked into the dark reflection of the window. “The Great Helmsman has passed,” he said.
Lan Baiyu said, “Very well, now, Director. You’ve marked the occasion. Put out the cups and get the leaves ready.”
He arrived at the Glass Institute just as the dawn sky was waking the birds. The air was weeping with humidity, and his short-sleeve shirt was plastered to his back by the time he climbed to his third-floor office. He touched the flower to confirm that it was still secure, took his vacuum bottle from his desk, and went back downstairs to the communal kitchen on the first floor to fill it. Some researchers were gathered around a table, listening to a transistor radio, their faces buried in their hands. He recognized them from Institute political meetings, where they always occupied the front row. Their grief was real, he knew. They were Communist Youth League members, the raw red heart of the People’s Republic. It had been a bad year for the people of China. Premier Zhou Enlai had died the previous January; then protests; then the disciplining hand of the government. Then, just over a month ago, the earthquake in Tangshan had killed hundreds of thousands of their comrades. And now this. If Zhou didn’t feel exactly separate from their sorrow, he was insulated from it by his age and rank, and he felt an obligation to be a strong father for them. He opened the tap on the boiler to fill his bottle and tried to assemble some words, but he could only think to repeat the old adage that life is a dream, death a trip home. They wouldn’t ken to that old philosophy. Bottle topped, he nodded gravely at the researchers and went back to his office.
All morning the speaker in the hall squawked the Chairman’s poetry and passages from his essays. Zhou closed his door and worked until lunch, at noon walking downstairs to the cafeteria, where he sat rigidly during the vice director’s speech, then delivered one himself entitled “Facing the Bright Red Sun in the East,” which had been written by the Institute’s political section. As with everything from the political section, he found it overwrought, hysterical in places, and he skipped entire sections. The four hundred assembled scientists, researchers, cadres, technicians, and students listened intently, many with eyes moist from crying. Stripped bare as a winter branch, the speech was neither beautiful nor moving, but it was politically correct, and as he drew to a close, the sobbing and wailing began in earnest. The Youth League members were sitting right in front of him, their faces upturned like hatchlings. One had grasped the sides of her head and was rocking back and forth as if possessed. Her cheeks glistened and her chest heaved as she struggled against her benchmate, who had to embrace her to keep her from tumbling onto the floor. As Zhou sat down, the woman’s mouth opened in an anguished rictus, the cords of her neck taut, her incisors bared. She howled like an injured animal. Zhou looked down at the table and studied the backs of his hands. She was right to display her sorrow, he just wished she wasn’t so close to him. It was horrible to see anyone in such pain. Poor sad rabbit, he thought.
When the food lines wound down, Zhou took a tin bowl of rice and pickled vegetables and returned to his office. Everyone else stayed for a film of Chairman Mao’s speeches, but Zhou wanted to get back to the reports he’d been reviewing that morning, catalogues of glass injuries during the quake in Tangshan. The earthquake had come in the middle of the night and left the city looking like the target of an aerial bombing campaign intended to bring a war to a swift and decisive end. He’d been instructed to make recommendations for the installation of safety glass when rebuilding efforts commenced, and though, as with most directives, this was nothing more than a cadre somewhere up the line covering his backside, Zhou would give the task his full attention. Of the hundreds of thousands dead, ten people might have died as a result of glass lacerations. But ten lives were ten lives.
Beijing was only 130 kilometers west of the epicenter, and tremors still rolled through the city daily. When, that afternoon, the ceiling lights began to sway and the bookcases to creak, without looking up Zhou lifted his teacup from his desk so it would not spill, and went on with his work.
* * *
The welder Gu Yasheng was leaving the Beijing Railway Station, summoned back from his home village in Shandong Province by an urgent telegram. The messenger had come after midnight, and Gu had packed and left immediately. He’d walked the dirt road toward Red Flag Commune for a couple of hours before catching a ride on a farmer’s horse cart, and he’d made it to Weifang just after dawn. Somehow news of Mao’s death had already spread to the countryside. Every train going north was packed with keening peasants hell-bent on getting to the capital to mourn the Chairman. Only by showing the telegram to the political section head at the station had Gu been able to squeeze onto an express to Tianjin. He’d stood in the aisle for five hours, packed in with the farmers, those good folk, backbone of the People’s Republic, many clutching small photos of Chairman Mao in their callused hands, wailing, sobbing. Eventually, he’d managed to work his way into a corner where he could hide his face in the crook of his arm and sleep.
At Tianjin he’d headed directly to the station political section secretary, who, upon seeing the telegram, personally escorted him to the next Beijing train. It rolled out a little after noon, and in the sun the carriage heated up like a steel furnace, reeking of garlic and loamy flatulence. The open windows did nothing but introduce gusts of hot air and bugs. The peasants’ wailing and breast-beating intensified as they neared Beijing, and when the train pulled in and disgorged its passengers, they exited and stood dazed on the platform, as if awakened from a dream, unsure of what to do now that they’d reached their destination. Gu Yasheng pushed through them.
He hurried through the cavernous station, pausing just outside the exit, dazed by the harsh white light scouring the square, to put on his sunglasses, squinting even behind the green lenses. In the years immediately
after liberation, proper welding goggles hadn’t always been available, and in service to the revolution he’d contracted arc eye more times than he could remember. He was blind at night, and wasn’t much better in the light of day. His sight was best in a welding shed.
The square was packed with travelers sprawled over their bags, casualties of the heat. Anywhere a structure threw a shadow, people had wedged themselves in like puzzle pieces. They sheltered under newspapers and in the skinny shade of light posts. A lucky few crowded under umbrellas. Waves of people pushed past Gu on their way to outbound trains. A fleet of long-distance buses idled to the west of the square, engines rumbling. Vendors hawking crabapple sticks and candies wrapped in bows had set up near the entrances. In Beijing, it was just another August day, the white sky sagging, the heat flavored with the charcoal smoke from a meat stand. Although a few passersby wore black armbands or chrysanthemums, there were no mourning masses at the station, and as the peasants from Gu Yasheng’s train flowed out into the city, they were consumed, and vanished like a muddy river emptying into the ocean.
He walked across the roasting square, his bag on his shoulder, weaving around the supine bodies in a doddering fashion, like an egg rolling across a table. His legs were tight from standing, his calves hard, but despite the heat, his fingers felt bloodless and cold. He was nervous, moving as fast as his booted feet allowed, and he didn’t feel the tremor that set the office lights swaying in Zhou Yuqing’s office, but the synchronous up-leaping of everyone in the square made him stop. The tremor reached its inflection point, abated, the crowd tumbled back onto their bags, and Gu climbed onto a bus.
Many glassworkers had received the telegram. It told them when and where to report, offering no further information—but the signature, the name that had secured Gu’s place on two trains where no tickets existed, the reason he felt a jumpiness in his chest, the propulsion urging him forward, forward, was the most powerful name in the country on that day, that of first vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and premier of the State Council, Hua Guofeng.