Now at last this heavy old swooner’s body, which had consumed two deep-fried buns and a bowl of bean curd for breakfast, was finally going to join the ranks of the dead. He knew what remained to be done, but the suddenness of the events had knocked him sideways. He was no longer the cocksure underground Party secretary. He could tell this was real, he could even smell his own body odours on his mother’s skin. But there was a strange sense of theatre about the old woman dressed in burial clothes. His mother seemed at ease with the situation though; she thought she was in control, just as she had been in the office. She appeared to be watching her son’s movements with a remote control in her hand.
He observed her scuttling between the corpses like a cockroach, checking their hands and teeth, criticising their dress sense.
‘This woman’s still got her bracelet on,’ she said, kneeling down.
The son walked over, lifted the dead woman’s hand, inspected the bracelet and tugged it off her wrist.
‘I know this man. He worked in the pharmacy on Peace Road.’ The mother’s paper ingot shoes brushed against another cadaver’s head. She seemed excited. The son switched on the furnace briefly to check that the electricity was running.
‘Burn him first,’ she said, checking the pharmacist’s hands and teeth. ‘He knew I like dry turnips, the ones I soak and use to stuff dumplings with.’
The pharmacist was pushed into the furnace to the strains of ‘The Internationale’. (After his death, he had been granted posthumous membership of the Chinese Communist Party.) When the son had locked the steel door, the mother switched on the furnace again, and her eyes sparkled like a young girl full of dreams and curiosity. Before she had married the art teacher who was later condemned as a rightist, she had laughed when her grandmother announced that her father had just hurled himself from the top of a building. At the time, she ignored her grandmother’s tears, and instead remembered how the leader of the Central Committee had described the Shanghai capitalists who jumped off the top of tall buildings for fear of Communist persecution as ‘parachuters’. She thought it was a very funny and accurate description.
‘You monster,’ the grandmother shouted, and slapped her innocent little face. ‘Your father falls down and cracks his skull open and you just laugh about it.’
Her grandmother’s eyes flashed with anger, but all she could do was giggle. She had no idea yet what death was. But soon after she married the rightist, she realised that these calamities can happen, and that she would have to spend the rest of her days using all her skill and cunning just to try to stay alive. She never liked to dwell on her past, though. As long as she was kept fed, she thought she could muddle her way through this cruel world, unless one day she decided to bring her life to an end, of course. She accepted that hardship and suffering were inevitable. Besides, if life became too easy, the skills she had developed over the years would be of no use to her any longer, and there would be nothing left for her to do but die. If, however, it turned out that death was not a tragedy, but a new way of life, an escape, then it might begin to look quite attractive to her.
She sat in the armchair, combing her shiny black hair, waiting for the posthumous Party member to emerge from the oven. She wondered whether she would take her gold earrings in with her or not, when her time came.
The son pulled out the metal tray.
The pharmacist was immaculately white. He looked like he had just come out of a shower. A soft fragrance rose from his tidy white bones. The flesh had disappeared from his body. The mother was relieved to see that his horrible fat lips had disappeared too.
‘He is utterly transformed,’ she said, pressing the hot white bones with delight.
‘They’re nice and soft, aren’t they?’ Now his flesh had gone, the pharmacist had become ageless. Had one not seen him go into the oven, one might have taken him for a child, or a creature from some heavenly realm.
‘My god!’ the mother cried, beating her chest. ‘If only I had known before.’
The son could guess what his mother meant by these words. He presumed that she was contemplating ‘immortality’ – that word he heard so often at funeral receptions. She knew now that the posthumous Party member had achieved immortality.
‘He is immortal now,’ the son said. ‘Whether he goes to heaven or hell, he won’t be coming back here again. Especially considering he managed to get through life without committing any grave mistakes.’ He walked to the cassette player and turned off ‘The Internationale’, then put on an aria from Salammbô free of charge.