by Yan Lianke
The nighttime had finally ended.
The sun really did rise in the west.
But after the nighttime concluded and the daytime arrived, there wasn’t a trace of the happiness that daylight had returned. The town government sent someone to put desks in the most crowded areas around town, where cadres proceeded to calculate the number of deceased and the amount of property damage each household had suffered, but most families were reluctant to make a report.
“Will every family that has had a relative pass away receive compensation from the government?”
“Not necessarily.”
“If not, then what’s the point of registering?”
“Isn’t it just so that they can have some data?”
After that, there were no more questions, and no more responses, and after reporting their families’ deaths, injuries, and damages, the residents slowly trudged home in the sunlight. One of the cadres recording the data remembered something, and shouted, “Given that the weather is so hot, you should take this opportunity to bury your dead. The government no longer cares whether the dead are buried or cremated, so you should take this opportunity to go ahead and bury them.”
Some of the people walking away didn’t look back, while others turned around and said, “If we weren’t going to bury them, why would we be letting the corpses lie in our homes?”
Actually, it wasn’t that the government no longer cared whether the dead were buried or cremated, but rather that the crematorium had been destroyed and reduced to a pile of debris. I don’t know whether the crematorium was dismantled by dreamwalkers or by people who were awake but were taking advantage of the general somnambulism to destroy it. The crematorium’s furnace had been pushed over and rolled into the reservoir, and the furnace room had been detonated with explosives, such that there was now a small hill of shattered bricks and tiles in the courtyard. Everything else had been carted away—including not only things of value, but also worthless items. All that was left were two empty houses and courtyards on either side, with some trees and plants, plants and flowers, flowers and wild birds, as well as an assortment of wild sparrows, wild hares, wild badgers, and weasels. It was a field of ruins—a field of ruins and wilderness. I didn’t know where Juanzi had gone. Perhaps she had returned home to her own village? I didn’t know where the crematorium workers had gone either. Perhaps they, too, had returned home to their own villages?
The crematorium was very still.
The embankment, ridge, and mountain range were very still.
The entire world was very still. Our Gaotian Town was very, very still.
Half a month later—just half a month—the town gradually began to recover its former vibrancy. Everything that had to be bought was bought, and everything that had to be sold was sold. It was as if nothing had happened. The sun rose when it was supposed to, and set when it was supposed to. It rose from where it was supposed to, and set where it was supposed to. In the fields outside town, after the wheat was harvested there was an extended period of rainy weather—and after the skies had cleared, the fields of green grass were so thick that they appeared black. The thousands of freshly dug graves were covered by a layer of new grass, but apart from the fact that this grass was lighter, thinner, and more tender than the surrounding grass, these new graves were scarcely different from the older ones. In the threshing grounds, the area of the field that had been flattened didn’t have a single grain left, but the new wheat sprouts were growing so vibrantly that it was as though someone had deliberately planted them there.
This is how things were.
This is how the world was.
In the clothing store, the owner cleaned up the shattered doors and windows, and reopened for business.
The electronics store suffered enormous losses, but the owner took out a loan and reopened, and business turned out to be even better than before. In fact, it was much better, as there was a steady stream of people from town and from the countryside who wanted to buy electronics.
There were shops selling beef and mutton, stores selling packaged food and groceries, and street-side stalls selling fruits and vegetables. There were also the people who came in from the countryside to go to the market. Everything was as lively as before, and as noisy and bustling as before. The only exception was the farm tools store next to our house. The owner had died that night, and I don’t know where his wife had gone. Perhaps she had returned to her parents’ home. At any rate, she was originally not from this town, and after she left, the store’s front door remained closed and the sign in front—which read PROSPEROUS TOOL STORE—quickly became covered in cobwebs.
On that night, Mother had followed Father’s instructions and barricaded the front door from within, to keep out the battle being waged outside. Although countless people from the town and surrounding villages died that night, blanketing the ground like fallen fruit following an infestation or toppled crops following a windstorm, business at our New World funerary shop actually did not improve. In fact, it didn’t improve in the slightest. This is because my mother stopped making burial shrouds and papercuts for wreaths and funerary objects. I’m not sure why she stopped making papercuts, but over the next several days—as local families were conducting funerals for their deceased—my own family went up to the embankment’s east hill and collected a handful of charred soil from what had been the oil pit. Then, using this soil to stand for Li Tianbao, we symbolically buried him. As we were collecting the soil from the pit, we saw something very odd. At that moment, the pit—from which the flaming corpse oil had risen up as a new sun—resembled an overturned brick kiln, and the soil was charred and burnt. The entire pit—in fact, the entire world—was filled with the smell of burnt soil and sulfur from making bricks. However, in the fissures that had formed in the dry, burnt soil, someone had planted countless wildflowers, including red ones, yellow ones, and green ones. There were wild camellias and chrysanthemums, with long strings of purple and red blossoms, and also coxcomb blossoms and small orchids. In order to permit the plants’ roots to reach the soft earth beneath the top charred layer, whoever had planted these flowers had lifted up chunks of charred soil, as though removing the lid from a pot, and had then dug small holes in the soil, such that only the tops of the plants peeked out through the charred soil. It looked as though the flowers had been planted only three days earlier, and they hadn’t yet begun to thrive and instead were simply draped over the charred soil. We proceeded to this flower garden in the middle of the pit and collected several handfuls of soil to serve as Father’s ashes. We then placed Father’s soil and ashes in a room in our shop, assuming that in the future, whenever townspeople saw us and saw Father’s ashes, they would feel grateful and indebted, and would greet us with a smile. This, however, turned out not to be the case. Although during the first few days after the calamity, whenever the townspeople saw Mother and me, most of them would express their gratitude, later they stopped responding in this way, and instead would pull Mother aside and say, “You claim that that night your family wasn’t sleepy? . . . That night, your husband also dreamwalked. If he wasn’t dreamwalking, then how could he have thought of using that method to make the sun come up? If he wasn’t dreamwalking, how could he have brought himself to jump into that pit of burning oil?”
Within another half a month, they stopped saying even this sort of thing.
Afterward, there was another minor incident that I should probably recount. One day, Mother was straightening up the dust-covered debris that was still scattered on the table, when someone walked in. He had gray hair and was of average height, and he was pulling a suitcase and carrying several bundles. Upon entering the house, he left his suitcase in the doorway and handed Mother some eggs, milk, and pastries. When people from around here pay someone a visit, they always offer these sorts of goods as a gift. After giving my mother the gifts, he gazed at my father’s funeral portrait without saying a word. He was silent for a long time—for what seemed like an entire day, an
entire month, an entire year, and even an entire lifetime. Eventually, he began to remove several books from his suitcase, until he formed a pile—an enormous pile of books. The books had titles like Kissing Lenin’s Years and like Water, Ballad, Hymn, and Sun; Ding of Dream Village; and The Dead Books. There was also The Days, Months, Years and My Gaotian and Father’s Generation. The visitor placed the books in front of Father’s funeral portrait, then lit them on fire. As he was doing so, he didn’t kneel down, nor did he light any incense sticks. Rather, he merely stood there watching the fire, and looking at my father’s black-and-white portrait. After the fire began to die down, the man gave Mother a final look, then caressed my face and patted my head.
“If I don’t succeed in writing the book your father asked me to write—a book that would function as a warm stove in winter and a cool electric fan in summer—then I won’t ever return to this town.”
He said this in a quiet voice—a cold and listless voice. Then he left. Pulling his wheeled suitcase, he left our house. My mother and I escorted him out to the entranceway. We assumed he was heading to the train station in order to return to his home in Beijing, but it turned out that his family in Beijing thought that he was still writing his novel in his old home in Gaotian. So, no one knew where he was, and it was as if he had vanished from the face of the earth. He disappeared without a trace, like the books he burned in front of my father’s funeral portrait. We never heard from him again, but before he disappeared, the last thing he said to me was, “Go to that charred-soil pit, and look for Juanzi. She goes there every day to wait for you.”
I didn’t go.
I simply couldn’t believe that Juanzi would go there every day to wait for me. Why would she be waiting for me? How could I be worth waiting for? In the end, however, I couldn’t resist going to take a look. I wanted to see whether or not she was, in fact, waiting in that charred-earth pit. And, if so, what was she doing there? I went on a market day. On market days, the sun is like a winter fire. The sun was as bright as the sun, and there wasn’t a trace of dust or pollutants. The streets were thronged with people, and the sunlight was abundant. The autumn sun shone down on the houses, walls, and streets, making them look as though they were glowing. The trees looked as though they were glowing. The shops, doors, windows, and goods all looked as though they were glowing. The street sellers hawking vegetables, clothing, brooms, and plows—everything looked as though it was glowing. The heads and shoulders of the people walking on their way to the market were as bright and transparent as jade, to the point that you could see right through their clothing and flesh, and see their hearts and veins. Feeling completely listless, I wandered up and down the street. Listlessly, I remembered the final thing Yan Lianke had said before he left. Listlessly, I remembered that Juanzi’s family lived in one of the villages near the former oil pit. The memory of Little Juanzi suddenly stabbed my body like a hot needle. It stabbed my heart. I decided to go to that charred-soil pit to look for her. I walked and then ran out of town, as if I were fleeing, and headed straight to that charred-soil pit. When I got there, however, I stared in shock. Along the path where Father and the dreamwalkers had rolled the oil barrels that night, the grass was now knee-high, and there were layers upon layers of small yellow flowers reaching for the sky. Autumn bees were busily buzzing around the flowers, and hundreds upon hundreds of floral fragrances shimmered yellow and red in front of me, like a sheet of silk. I waded through the floral fragrance until I was standing in front of the pit, and although I didn’t find Little Juanzi, it did seem as though the black pit full of charred earth suddenly penetrated my heart. It turned out that those flowers growing out of the fissures in the charred soil were alive! Where previously the flowers had been growing sparsely, now they were tightly packed together. The charred, black earth in the pit was covered by the flowers, such that not a speck of soil remained visible. Red and yellow chrysanthemums were blooming in the area around the pit, and the floral fragrance was so strong that it seemed as if the wind would not be able to blow it away. The autumn bees and butterflies were flying around those flowers as though it were spring. The shadows of the bees and butterflies—together with the fainter shadows of the sparrows and other birds flying overhead—passed over the flowers, like a boat drifting through a lake. The sunlight was extremely bright, such that you could even see the puffs of breath that the flowers and the birds exhaled, the sound of which was as soft as sunrays and specks of dust doing battle in midair. At the same time, it was as clear as the stars sparkling in the sky above. This, I think, was taken from the end of Yan Lianke’s novella The Days, Months, Years . . . or perhaps it wasn’t! As I was hesitating over whether the text was or wasn’t taken from this work, Juanzi suddenly appeared on the other side of the pit, using a carrying pole to bring buckets of water to irrigate the flowers. “Ay, ay, ay!” Her braids and the carrying pole shimmered in the sunlight, like the wings of butterflies and dragonflies.
ALSO BY YAN LIANKE
The Years, Months, Days
The Explosion Chronicles
The Four Books
Lenin’s Kisses
Dream of Ding Village
Serve the People!
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Text has published six of his earlier novels. Yan has been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker International Prize, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Prix Femina Étranger. He won the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, as well as two of China’s most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Prize and the Lao She Award. In 2014, he won the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Bejing.
Carlos Rojas is Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University. He has translated Yan Lianke’s four most recent novels: Lenin’s Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Years, Months, Days.
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Copyright © Yan Lianke, 2015
English translation copyright © Carlos Rojas, 2018
The moral right of Yan Lianke to be identified as the author and Carlos Rojas as the translator of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Originally published in 2015 China as Rixi/日熄 by Rye Field Publishing (Tapei).
Published in 2018 by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic.
This edition published in 2018 by Text Publishing.
Cover design by Penguin Random House UK
Flower image on cover by Paolo Negri / Getty
Typeset by Alpha Design and Composition of Pittsfield, NH
ISBN: 9781925603859 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925626827 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.