The Noodle Maker(12)
As night fell, the municipal Party secretary took on a magical air. The entrepreneur felt a sense of pride as he gazed at the line of dead bodies. At last he could enjoy the kind of authority that everyone deserves in life. The dead lay below him, eyes agape, mere witnesses to their own humiliation.
After the entrepreneur saw the play The Ninth-Grade Sesame Seed Officer about the altruistic Communist cadre, he was moved to act with a keener sense of social justice. He sent proletarians into the incinerator without exploiting them once. He didn’t even check their teeth. (A gold tooth is worth an average family’s yearly income in this town.) It was a case of ‘Levelling out the rich and poor’ or ‘The sun shines after the rain’. That was how he saw it, anyway. As his own father’s death was still fresh in his mind, he was always especially kind to rightists, or to anyone who had been run over by a car.
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.