by Yan Lianke
The birdsong mixed with the flower fragrance.
The flower fragrance mixed with the birdsong.
Countless shades of red and purple mixed together. Not even Yan Lianke’s novels contained a scene like this.
The sky was heavy with clouds, but their footsteps were as light as cotton blossoms. I gazed up at the sky, then at the two-story furnace room and funeral parlor. There were several stone steps, and when I climbed them I found the farewell hall. Actually, there were two farewell halls, and I stood in front of the second one for a while. The cries of the crickets were soft and bright. Behind the farewell hall, there was an area that no one—other than the crematorium workers and the relatives of the deceased—was permitted to enter, because it was from there that the deceased entered the furnace room. In that room, the crematorium workers had to perform many tasks that outsiders shouldn’t be permitted to observe. Before placing each corpse in the furnace, the crematorium workers would always drink several cups of baijiu and smoke several cigarettes. Sometimes they would have strange ideas, and would go to the incense burner next to the wall and light a stick of incense. If they were going to cremate one of their relatives or someone they knew, they would light three sticks of incense. They would also kowtow once, or three times. If they were cremating one of their enemies, or a rich owner or manager, however, they might kick the corpse several times. They would close all of the doors to the furnace room from the inside and would drink some beer or baijiu, as everyone outside waited impatiently, banging on the door and shouting:
“Are you done or not? Just get it done!”
The workers would reply, “These people did so many things while they were alive, we should send them on their way in a respectable fashion. We certainly can’t send them off as though they were merely ordinary people.”
In reality, the crematorium workers weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary, but rather they were simply sitting in the crematorium room and drinking.
While drinking, they would sometimes even spit on a corpse’s face.
Or they would shatter a beer bottle over a corpse’s head.
By afternoon or evening, whenever there were no more corpses to cremate, those two crematorium rooms would be filled with ashes, and the floor would be covered in bottles. Against the wall next to the furnace, there would be a barrel full of corpse oil. Hanging from the wall and at the base of the wall, there would be the funeral objects that had not been sent into the furnace with the corpse. Everywhere, there were bone fragments from one corpse or another, together with shards of stone or plastic that had fallen off a funeral urn. But as long as it wasn’t the busy season for deaths, it was fine. People were always cremated either at dawn or later in the morning, and in the afternoon the crematorium workers would straighten up the rooms. But during the busy season for deaths, they wouldn’t have time to clean, and instead they would drink and stagger around, and sometimes they would collapse onto a pile of funeral objects and clothing, and fall asleep.
Alcohol can give people courage, which is why the crematorium workers always needed to drink.
Alcohol can eliminate foul odors, which is why they always needed to drink.
Whenever the two crematorium workers got drunk, they would ask someone to come help them clean up. Eventually, they simply hired an assistant specifically tasked with cleaning the furnace room and the cremation hall. This was a young girl—the Little Juanzi I mentioned earlier. She was a year or two younger than I, and her family was from one of the villages to the east of the embankment. Her parents had both died, as had her grandparents. Consequently, she had come to know the crematorium like the palm of her hand, and was hired to clean it every evening. At that moment, she was straightening up the furnace room. She swept the ashes, and the lamplight. She emerged from the room and then went back inside, like a butterfly fluttering around. She left behind a sweet fragrance wherever she went, as though a stream of water were flowing toward me on a humid summer night.
I waded through the light encircling the cremation hall, toward the furnace room.
Meanwhile, Little Juanzi reemerged to grab something, and then went back inside. There was a shimmering shadow, like the rustling of a sheet of black silk. I heard her say something. She wasn’t speaking to me, but there wasn’t anyone else who could hear her, other than a pile of flowers and plants next to the entranceway—and each time she went out and back in, she would bring in some of those flowers and plants.
When I arrived at the entrance to the furnace room, Little Juanzi was in the process of placing some plants and wildflowers next to the iron door of the furnace. She had already decorated the entire room with flowers and plants. The ones on the wall resembled a vertical garden, and on the furnace itself flowers had been placed everywhere they could potentially be mounted. There were red, yellow, and green ones. There were wild camellias and wild chrysanthemums, producing strings of purple and clumps of red. There were also coxcomb flowers and small orchids. These flowers could be found everywhere outside the crematorium. There were carriage-wheel blossoms and another kind of little yellow flower of which I didn’t know the name. There were also Chinese roses and peonies planted in the crematorium courtyard, as well as roses in full bloom. The building resembled a greenhouse. The semi-inclined furnace resembled an enormous flower pistil.
In this way, the furnace building became a greenhouse.
When I showed up, Little Juanzi was in the process of inserting tiny yellow and red flowers into the cracks in the barrels of corpse oil, making it appear as though the flowers were growing right out of the barrels. I had assumed that when she realized I was observing all of this, she would stop. However, when I appeared, she turned and looked in my direction, appearing completely unsurprised, as though she hadn’t even seen me. It was as if she were looking at a tree. She blinked without saying a word, then continued inserting the flowers into the barrels. I was baffled by this reaction. I knew why she was decorating this furnace room as though it were a heavenly greenhouse.
“You are dreamwalking.”
She was in the process of fastening a wildflower onto the metal pipe leading into the oil barrel. Her expression was as calm and impassive as a flower secretly blooming in the moonlight.
She again turned to look at me. Her mouth moved, as though she were speaking to someone. She mumbled to herself, but it was impossible to tell what she was saying. I watched her face move as she spoke, then watched as she took a step back to see whether or not the flowers were attractive. It was as if I were looking at a painting or a scene that she had designed. I went over and tugged on her shoulder. “You should go into the courtyard and wash your face.” She stubbornly pulled her shoulder away. “When people die, we have to bring their corpses into this room. After their friends and family have bidden the deceased goodbye in the farewell hall, the body is brought into this room between the farewell hall and the furnace room. The body is brought in adorned in flowers, and remains adorned in flowers when it is taken to the furnace room. It would be ideal if we could have dragonflies and butterflies flying around this room. That would be a true heavenly world.”
As she said this, she stood there regretfully.
“Can you help me catch some butterflies to put in this room?” She looked at me, then smiled. “Oh, it’s you. I thought you were my cousin.
“My cousin has become a drunkard. Every time he cremates a corpse, he drinks half a bottle of baijiu, so you can imagine how much he ends up drinking on a day like today.” She shifted her gaze back to the flower she had just inserted. “Tomorrow, I’ll catch some butterflies and dragonflies, and will release them in this room. That way, the room will look like a garden. When people die and are brought here, it will be as though they were returning home. That way, no one who enters this room will ever want to leave, the same way that no one ever wants spring to be displaced by summer, or summer to be displaced by fall.” At first she mumbled to herself, as though reading an article, but gradually her speech
became clearer. As she was speaking, she turned toward me, though her gaze remained fixed on a bucket of water in the entranceway.
Then, she went to bring over the bucket, and sprinkled water on the flowers and plants. I clearly saw her gaunt and sallow face. Her eyes were half-open, and her expression looked like a flower blooming in a foggy night. She was wearing a black skirt and a floral shirt. Her hair was arranged into two messy braids, and her face was filthy. Her front teeth protruded slightly over her bottom lip. She did not smile easily, but she nevertheless made a point of always smiling. Her father was dead, as was her mother. Her grandmother and grandfather were also dead. She lived in the crematorium, and every day after the cremations concluded, she would clean the crematorium’s two main halls. She would straighten up the farewell hall, and would also clean up the furnace room. She truly lived in a dead, corpse world. She had lost her father, and had lost her mother. She had also lost her grandfather and grandmother. But she would always smile whenever she saw anyone. She would smile while sweeping the ground, and would smile while cleaning the farewell hall. Sometimes she would even smile while rushing to apply makeup to a corpse. She resembled a flower that would never accept defeat.
As I was preparing to haul away a barrel of corpse oil, I knocked down the coxcomb flower and the green sprig that she had placed on the barrel. She then picked them up and placed them back on the barrel, with an expression that still resembled a reddish-yellow blossom.
“If you don’t take this barrel, there won’t be anywhere to store tomorrow’s corpse oil. After you take it away, I’ll put a flowerpot here. I notice that there are wildflowers as large as my fist growing on the embankment outside the crematorium. They are red with traces of yellow, and they produce a sweet fragrance even stronger than that of osmanthus blossoms.
“I want to plant some of those osmanthus-scented flowers here in the furnace room.
“I want to fill this room with the scent of osmanthus. That way, when people walk over from that other world, they will enter a world filled with osmanthus fragrance. They will feel no pain as their bodies are being cremated. They will feel no pain as their corpses are being burned and their bones are reduced to ash. They will feel no pain as oil flows from their remains. This osmanthus fragrance comes from plants called intoxicants, and after one whiff, people will pass out and forget everything. They will forget their pain and the world, as though they had been anesthetized. That way, they will move from that world into this one without feeling the slightest trace of pain.
“Tomorrow, I will dig up some intoxicants, and plant them here in the furnace room.
“Now, I am going to go dig one up and plant it in a flowerpot. I will place the pot next to the furnace. When you replace the oil barrel, be careful not to knock over my pot.”
She walked out of the room, like a butterfly fluttering away. Even though she was speaking to me, she wasn’t looking at me. Instead, her gaze remained focused on her own affairs. Her gaze remained focused on her somnambulistic world. Even when I brought over a cart to haul away that barrel of corpse oil and asked her to help me push it, she didn’t seem to hear me. She went outside, as though flying away. I saw her in the entranceway, walking under the lamplight with a shovel. The door in the courtyard wall behind the crematorium was open. Perhaps it had always been open. After all, not even thieves were willing to come here. She walked out through that back door, appearing to float away into the empty, empty mountain ridge. She walked along the ridge, casting her shadow on the mountains.
She resembled a flower blooming on the mountain ridge in a nighttime dream.
2. (22:01–22:22)
One barrel of corpse oil weighed about six hundred jin, but I don’t know how many corpses had to be cremated in order to generate so much oil. In the off-season for deaths, one month might yield less than a barrel, but in the peak season you could generate a full barrel in just ten days or two weeks. The oil was initially light yellow, but when it congealed it darkened—turning so dark that it appeared as though there was a light-black layer beneath the yellow.
Because the oil came from humans, I won’t say any more about it. Whenever I speak about it, my body begins to throb with pain, my heart tenses up, and I become extremely anxious—as though I accidentally got my fingers caught in a door hinge. The crematorium was built on a road leading to the mountain ridge, with the reservoir on one side and the road on the other. At that point, the night was still very shallow, and all sorts of sounds were walking over from the villages below the ridge. The weather was warm and muggy, but the breeze on the mountain ridge was as cool as a mountain spring. In the reservoir, a clear white light leaped from the surface of the water, as the water vapor drifted out over the mountain ridge. The wheat in the fields on both sides of the road had already been harvested, and the sweet smell of wheat stubble mixed with the water vapor, like milk flying everywhere. It was as if a woman had given birth to a baby, then secreted her excess milk all over the mountain, splattering it all over the fields.
I hauled a large barrel of corpse oil up from the mountain-ridge road to a cold cave on the side of the reservoir. Tendrils of scent hung from the tip of my nose. Because the barrel was full, some of the oil had spilled out and splattered over the metal exterior, just as there is always a layer of salt and water on the outside of a salt canister. As a result, the barrel’s white metallic exterior turned oily red, then oily black. The oily red and oily black tint produced an icy stench—smelling mostly of ice, with a slight stench. If you didn’t know this was human oil, you might not have noticed this icy stench. Most of this coldness was produced from people’s hearts, and without it the barrel would simply have been an ordinary barrel of oil—either mechanical or vegetable oil. Although the odor emanating from the barrel was not that of sesame or peanut oil, it was nevertheless a greasy, oily smell. It was human oil, and upon remembering this I felt a chill. It had the stench of bone, flesh, and fat. Fortunately, I didn’t fear this smell of human oil, since I was a bit stupid. Stupid people are always fearless. I never feared death or corpses. Our family lived in the funerary shop, and ever since I was little I had grown up surrounded by wreaths, paper ornaments, and piles of funerary objects. Before I was even three, my parents would take me to the crematorium to see my uncle, and by the time I was five, I had entered the furnace room. When I was five and a half, I sat on the front handle of the cart used to transport human oil, going with my father once or twice a month to store the barrel in the cold cave.
I made several trips a month.
Now it was my turn to go alone to carry the corpse oil to the cave. At the age of fourteen, I felt like a tree that had grown up at the entrance to the underworld. I had to stand in that entrance, braving wind and rain. Alone, in the night of the great somnambulism, I would move a barrel of corpse oil from the furnace onto a cart, and then proceed one li down the mountain-ridge road. I passed the courtyard of the house Yan Lianke had rented, proceeded another half a li down the gently sloping road, then another half a li down the hill. I took this barrel of corpse oil, which was the product of the cremation of seventy to eighty corpses, and stored it in an overflow cave that stayed cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Then I left. I walked alone along the mountain ridge, and up the gently sloping path. In order not to think about all of those corpses and the corpse oil, I told myself that I wanted to reflect on some things relating to men and women. But what? I ended up thinking about Xiaojuan, or “Little Juan,” who cleans the furnace every day and applies makeup to the corpses. Her full name was Xu Xiaojuan, but everyone calls her Juan . . . Juanzi . . . and Xu Juanzi.
I should have gone with her to dig up some intoxicants. I should have leaned close to her ear and shouted, to wake her up from her somnambulism. I should have taken her a basin of water, to wash her face. I should have rubbed her face with a wet cloth. If only she were a bit prettier—just a bit—I would definitely have woken her up from her somnambulism. I would definitely have accompanied her as she
dreamwalked to dig up some intoxicants, and then let her accompany me as I went to store the corpse oil. We would have walked together along this one-li mountain-ridge road, and up this half-li hill, and nearly another li down another hill. But I already covered that ground myself. The squeaking of the cart’s wheels sounded as if the moon and the stars were all following their respective paths through the sky. As I proceeded forward, the cart’s wheels bumped against each other, and as the wheels turned they produced a grinding sound that consumed the night road inch by inch. In this way, the cart had led me to the cave next to the reservoir. In front of the cave there were two trees, and a field of grass. There was also a pair of rusty iron gates that were large enough to drive a cart through. Inside the gates, my father himself had erected a wooden door. I opened both the outer gates and the inner door, then felt around on the right-hand side of the inner door. I quickly found the lamp string that was hanging there, and pulled it.
The lamp came on.
The lamplight shone forlornly on this area in the entranceway to the cave. In order to save electricity, Father had not arranged for lamps to illuminate the entire five-hundred-meter-long cave. However, this lamp still energetically shone down on those barrels of oil in the cave’s dark depths. The lamp made a panting sound, as though it were about to expire. There was the sound of water dripping down the cave walls, and the sound of a bitter cold breeze blowing from the depths of the cave. There was wave after wave of a cold, oily stench emanating from the barrels of corpse oil. This stench was sometimes heavy and sometimes light, but it was always very pungent. I had opened the door, gone inside, and stood under the lamp. The light from the forty-watt bulb gradually dimmed, as though it were so tired that it wanted to die. I looked into the cave, and immediately my entire body felt chilled and began to tremble. The cave was as wide as a street and as tall as a house. It extended from one end of the embankment to the other. The walls were made of stone and cement, and the cement-filled fissures between the stones were two fingers wide. Whether deep or shallow, these fissures lined the cave’s walls and ceiling. The ceiling was in the shape of an irregular dome, and over the years it had developed damp areas that were stained by water, like a stream that would never dry up but also would never flow abundantly. When the reservoir was first built several decades ago, it was designed so that when the water rose above its target level, the excess would flow into this cave abutting the embankment. But later, the amount of rain in the region decreased, as did the amount of water flowing into the cave, and even after the reservoir had accumulated water for years, it still didn’t reach the lower lip of this cave. The cave was therefore abandoned, until my family began using it to store their corpse oil. In exchange for a meal and several cigarettes, the person in charge of overseeing the cave handed my father the keys. It was as if this cave had been constructed specifically for my father’s use—so that after the crematorium was built nearby, my father could then use the cave to store corpse oil.