It seemed like the start of something new. He realised it was time for him to act, but he didn’t know where to begin.
Over the previous two years, he had made a life for himself. His business had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. He had bought the electric kiln because he liked it, it intrigued him. He only discovered it could be used for burning bodies in a conversation he overheard in the public latrines. He set up his crematorium, and soon the bodies were churning out from the furnace like water from a pump, and he was continually rushing back and forth like the water pump’s revolving chain, because in this town, rain or shine, whether it was a Sunday afternoon or a Wednesday night, people died every day. Sunday was never a day of rest, in fact people died more than ever. Especially women – women always chose to kill themselves on Sundays. Students between the ages of sixteen and twenty preferred to die on Mondays. Middle-aged housewives died on Tuesdays. This was the worst day for the entrepreneur, as he had to lug those huge fat women about the room all by himself. Babies and women who died in childbirth turned up on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Senior Party cadres died on Fridays. This was always a solemn and nerve-racking day. He would have to analyse the newspaper obituaries in minute detail to determine whether the deceased was a reformist or a reactionary, and then make the appropriate preparations for their swoon. People in their twenties liked to die on Saturday nights. Some would die on their way to a date, others in the drunken stupor after a break-up. Saturday was always the most romantic night of the week. Love would surge into the crematorium like fresh blood, and the cassette player on the rickety table would belt out Orff’s ‘Fortune, Empress of the World’ all through the night.
The son watched his mother’s shadow slip down the wall, creep across the grey cement floor and slowly disappear into the coal stove.
The morning passed quietly.
In the afternoon, the mother carefully combed her hair into place and followed her son outside. She locked the front door behind her, sat down on the back of her son’s motorbike and, for the first time in seventeen years, left home. (A street writer from another province who wrote letters for the illiterate moved into the shed a few weeks later.) Then she left the town. She had never travelled further than five blocks from her home in her entire life.
She already looked like a swooner. She was dressed head to toe in burial clothes that had been worn by many swooners before her. On her way to the crematorium, everyone stopped and stared at the living woman dressed in dead men’s clothes. She was even wearing ceremonial paper ingot shoes on her feet. Some recognised her as the old woman who lived in the Swooners’ liaison office. As they reached the outskirts of the town the sun came out. The sky was blue, and there was not one cotton ball in the air.
The son led his mother inside the shack and stared at her. He saw now that she was a swooner like any other, and no longer had control over him. In fact, their roles seemed to have reversed. Were he to have called this woman his ‘mother’, his scalp would have split apart. She had nothing to do with him now. In the cool of the shack, he suddenly felt sure of himself and comfortable in the role he was about to take on. He was capable of change after all. Before today, he had always been playing a part that had been assigned to him, he’d had no choice in the matter. He was only ever his mother’s son, the Party’s son, the Motherland’s son. He was a son right down to his bones, always taking the supporting role. But now, as he stared at the swooner standing before him, he finally sensed that he was separate from her, an individual, although he was not sure who that individual was yet. All he knew was that he wasn’t a wily businessman, a smug clandestine leader, or the son of the dead rightist, the boy his schoolmates liked to kick about.
(It’s very hard to draw the line between man and beast, the professional writer thinks to himself. What should the criteria be? A wolf will die to save her cubs, but a man will sell his mother for eight hundred yuan. A tiger will maim a weaker animal in its fight for food, but a man will go hungry until he’s sure that his family’s stomachs are full. You can’t draw any conclusions from this …)
His entire life had been bound up with his mother and the experiences he had shared with her. He had worked like a dog to keep them both alive, because if they were going to survive in this world, they would have to pay rent, water bills, gas bills, buy vast quantities of compulsory premium bonds and cope with the inflation brought about by the Open Door Policy. When he bought the art school’s electric furnace, he had no idea what the future had in store for him, or what talents he would prove to have. Now that he thought about it, he guessed that he had inherited his artistic sensibility from his mother. When he was a child, the old cabbage face would jump around the room like a monkey, humming ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ She knew all the popular songs from the 1930s, and passed on her love of music to her son. (That rightist had married her for her voice, and when he was run over on the street, his mind was filled with happy memories.) Although the son could no longer detect any traces of her past charms, he knew that the ordinary looking woman in front of him was the only living woman he’d had any contact with. It was she who had brought him up. This thought was particularly repugnant to him when he heard the piss fall from between her legs in the morning, and caught the smell of her warm urine. He had thought he could never escape the lifetime sentence of being a ‘son’, but just when he was about to give up hope, fate showed him a light.