The Noodle Maker(15)

The joy of seeing the pharmacist shed his mortal coil put the mother and son in convivial mood. They moved their hands inside the pharmacist’s hot carcass and soaked up the mysterious wonder of death. The son noticed with embarrassment a scrap of steaming flesh stuck to the furnace door – a clumsy slip-up on his part – and quickly unhooked it with a metal rod.

‘What music did you play just then?’ the mother asked in a melodious tone.

‘Mussorgsky’s Salammbô,’ the son replied.

‘Musso – who?’ The mother obviously knew nothing about modern music.

‘It’s probably a little contemporary for your taste.’ The son was unwilling to give detailed responses to uninformed questions.

‘I wouldn’t mind using that piece for myself.’

The son paused for a moment, and whispered, ‘I still have the old recording of you singing the … dirty songs.’

‘All right. But start me off with the Salammbô.’

‘It doesn’t matter what music I play, you will still come out of the oven as white as snow.’

‘Immaculate? Do you promise?’ The mother sounded as though she were talking to a wily tradesman.

‘Immaculate, as long as there’s no power cut.’ Then he added, out of a sense of professional duty: ‘Sometimes middle-aged women come out slightly yellow, a pale yellow like golden corn. But I’ll do my best to make you come out even whiter than the pharmacist.’

With this new feeling of trust established between them, their eyes could at last meet. They had reached a silent understanding. They felt even closer now than when they had witnessed the pharmacist’s transformation. Before, the son had always thought of his mother as a grandmother wolf. As a child, he was terrified that when she tied a scarf around her head, her white ears would suddenly pop out. When he heard her hum he wanted to run away; he was frightened that as soon as she was happy, her grey tail would stick out from under her skirt and wag from side to side. But now that they were looking into each other’s eyes for probably the first time in their lives, they felt more united than the day he was interrogated in the public security bureau and their entire future was at stake.

‘As long as there’s no power cut,’ the son pledged, ‘I will give you a beautiful burn.’ He was getting excited now. He turned round, and with a piece of bent wire, plucked out from a crack in the table an original Hong Kong tape of Deng Lijun’s songs. It was the tape that Premier Deng Xiaoping had specifically banned, the one with the dirty song ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ The song had the decadent chorus his mother used to sing: ‘Come drive away the loneliness from my love-sick heart …’

The son was raring to go. He put his past resentments towards his mother behind him, and devoted himself to her needs. They no longer behaved as they had done in the shed in the entrance passage, grunting cursory replies to each other’s questions, glancing at one another with contempt. They were now united in one action, bound together as intimately as a pair of identical twins. They breathed a sigh of relief. This quiet understanding was as comforting as the soft and warm white bones. The mother’s face glowed with maternal love. She was a woman who had sung dirty songs in her youth, and whose eyes had sent a painter crazy. In the old woman’s face, these eyes now looked gentle and kind. That expression has disappeared from today’s world. You can walk the streets for ten years and never find an expression like it. (At least you won’t find it on Chinese faces. Perhaps Western faces can look gentle, calm, kind. But in China, not only have those expressions disappeared, but so have all similar expressions of pity, compassion and respect.)

Anyone observing the couple through the window could have only guessed at the intense feelings welling up inside them. The shameful idea that had come to the entrepreneur the night before had now transformed into a glorious mission. He fetched the box with the pharmacist’s photograph on the lid, tipped some of the ashes into it, opened the window, tossed out the remaining ashes, and closed the window again. (One day he forgot to shut the window, and the stray dogs loitering outside sneaked in and gobbled up half of the twelve swooners that were lying on the floor.) He washed down the hot metal tray with a wet flannel, and dropped the tape into the cassette player. Everything was in order, everything had gone according to plan. All that was left to be done was for the mother to lie down on the tray. ‘It’s ready now,’ he said to her softly.

She lay down flat on the tray, just as she had seen the posthumous Party member do. She let her hands drop naturally to the sides and fixed her eyes on the ceiling. As the son was about to switch the furnace on, the mother raised her hand in the air and said, ‘Play the music!’