Now, every organ in his body is focused on the pleasure of his masticating jaws.
‘I’m no victim,’ the blood donor says. ‘Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy has rescued me, and allowed me to create a new life for myself. All my misery vanished the day they first gave me money for my blood. Now I have everything I want. But you’re still stuck here, wallowing in self-pity, yearning for the day you’ll make it into The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers. You hate yourself for writing what the Party tells you to write. You mystify life, so that you can rationalise your loss of grip on reality. You’ve forgotten that man survives through his quest for profit, not truth. Without the profit motive, we would all be finished. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve.’
‘You could be an intellectual yourself, if you wanted,’ the writer laughs. His mind starts to drift again. What am I doing here? he asks himself. I have to find a new Lei Feng, make it into The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers … But all I can see is the entrepreneur’s face, the young man who runs the crematorium, who looks nothing like the boy he once was. I have been observing the world through his eyes for a while now. It’s time he came and set fire to me too …
The Swooner
After he shut the steel door, everything went quiet.
He switched off the cassette player, stood up and examined the furnace’s thermograph. ‘1,700 degrees,’ he said, moving his nose closer to the furnace. ‘Not burned to the bone yet.’ At this stage, if the wind were blowing in the wrong direction, smells of roast flesh would fill the air and he would feel a pang of hunger. Ten minutes later, the delicious smells would be replaced by a sickening stench.
He had bought the large furnace off the ceramic department of the local art school. The students there no longer used it for their projects, and had dumped it in the yard of a local pottery factory. After his purchase was finalised, he transported the furnace from the yard to a small plot of land he rented from a peasant in the outskirts of town. Once the furnace was in place, he gave the exterior a lick of heat-resistant paint, replaced a few of the fire-proof bricks that lined the inside, and installed a new electric heating element. After he secured an entrepreneur’s licence, he was able to use the beautiful kiln to reduce a total of one-hundred-and-nine cadavers to ashes.
His death register was filled with a list of names, each accompanied by a photograph, ready for the police to inspect. Of the dead, forty-nine were victims of car accidents; twenty had committed suicide by a range of methods including hanging, swallowing pesticides, inhaling carbon monoxide, and severing arteries. One man had even swallowed a kilogram of iron nails. There were Beijing opera stars and suburban farmers. The woman who had gassed herself with carbon monoxide was the daughter of a senior cadre – ordinary people in this town can’t afford gas ovens. Glancing down the column headed ‘educational background’, you could see there were three university students (including the boy from the top university who was burning away right now), and thirty poets (this is not surprising – there are more poets in this town than prostitutes or rubbish collectors). The youngest fatality was a one-year-old baby who had fallen from the top of a building. She was a sweet little corpse, and only needed a third of the usual electricity requirement.
When the fifty-third corpse was cremated, the furnace’s fire-proof window shattered. The entrepreneur couldn’t afford to replace the window, so he blocked it up with bricks. After that, he could no longer enjoy the sight of bodies being consumed by the flames, and had to rely on his experience to judge the correct timing. He always gave an extra seven minutes to anyone over the standard one-hundred-and-thirty kilogram weight, at no additional cost.
His crematorium had several advantages over the state-run incinerators. First, the corpses could enter the flames while swooning to the sound of their favourite piece of music. The entrepreneur could provide them with any music they requested, including all the unwholesome tunes that were banned by the Party. If the deceased had grown up in the 1930s, he would play the decadent songs ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ or ‘Pretty Girls in Peach Blossom River’.
Admittedly, his prices were higher than the public crematoriums. He had to pay electricity bills and taxes, after all. But the dead were guaranteed a same-day burning. With state-run operations, the body waited at least a week for a cremation, over two weeks if it hit a busy period. Relatives had to pay for the body storage, and were often reduced to slipping back handers to officials in an attempt to speed the process up. When these additional costs were taken into account, the crematorium worked out as quite good value. But the greatest advantage of choosing the Swooners’ Crematorium, as the entrepreneur called it, was that the company sent a car to collect the body from the house, saving the family the trouble of finding their own transport. The relatives of the deceased could set up a modest wake at home, dispatch someone to the crematorium’s liaison office in the centre of town to sort out the formalities, and that was it. When the body was collected later in the day the relatives could shed a few tears, then return to their lives as normal. With state-run operations, the proceedings dragged on so long that the relatives were almost reduced to corpses themselves.