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 three 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.