The liaison office of the Swooners’ Crematorium was a long narrow shed built in the entrance passage of an old building in the centre of town. The relatives visited the office to register the death, plan the cremation and buy the clothes and daily necessities the deceased would require in the Land of the Dead. The entrepreneur lived in this office with his mother. They were a great team. Their business flourished. Although his mother had very little knowledge of electricity (the entrepreneur was an electrician by trade), she knew all there was to know about the dead. They only saw each other at night. During the day, the mother looked after business in the office while the son travelled to the crematorium in the suburbs to deal with the dead bodies. He left the office at nine in the morning, and was rarely back before midnight.
At night, the two colleagues would meet in the long shed that occupied half the entrance passage of the building. When the son returned, the mother would sit on the bed sorting out the burial clothes he had retrieved from the bodies, and listen to what he had to say.
‘Women burn more easily,’ he told her one night. ‘For someone as skinny as you, eight hundred degrees would be enough to get your flesh to fall from the bone.’
‘What do you mean, fall from the bone?’ she asked, glancing at the walls whose lower halves were painted pink – a colour that had only been available in the shops since the launch of the Open Door Policy.
‘It’s just like when you cook spare-ribs. When the temperature is high enough, the flesh just falls from the bone.’
‘I think my leg is rotting. I should have cut out this boil long ago.’ The mother’s shadow on the pink wall behind her looked like a creature from another planet. ‘You got your bones from me and your flesh from your father,’ she said, lowering her gaze. She always avoided looking her son in the eye.
‘That’s why I’m so short,’ he replied.
‘It’s your father’s fault you can’t find a woman. He had an unlucky face.’
‘I know a lot about women,’ the entrepreneur said indignantly. ‘Most of them like to listen to piano music before they go into the oven.’
‘What do men like to listen to?’ The mother snatched a piece of old cloth she spotted lying on the corner of the bed, then folded it neatly and returned it to its place.
‘Symphonies.’ The son swung his bony legs. ‘Men are tough brutes. Only strong, powerful music can send them into a swoon.’
‘Men are animals. Don’t waste your time playing music to them,’ the mother snarled, reaching for a pair of dark woollen trousers.
‘Everyone needs to swoon before they go.’ All the neighbours knew that the entrepreneur was a great lover of music. After the Open Door Policy was launched, he was the first man in town brave enough to walk down the streets swinging a cassette player in his hand. The entrepreneur jumped up from his seat and threw his hand in the air. His hand’s shadow was moving too. ‘I always make sure they swoon. I’ve heard that unless the dead swoon before they go, their souls won’t rise to heaven and their bodies won’t burn properly. Swooning allows them to vanish from this world for ever.’
The mother’s shadow looked very dark against the clean pink wall. ‘Look, here’s another hole you’ve made,’ she growled. Every object in the room was second-hand: the table, the sheets, every stitch of cloth on her body. She sat on the bed watching her son pace back and forth. The room was two metres by ten, and had an arched ceiling. In the light of the fire, she could see the traces of white ash, or ash-like substance, clinging like ghosts to the red bricks at the top of the walls. The entrance passage smelt as bad as a public bathhouse. Most of the stench came from the stall-holder who sold fermented bean curd outside the front gate. If their front door was left open during the day, the smells would flow straight in.
The office looked cheerful and festive when one glimpsed it from the street. There was always loud music playing, and large displays of paper flowers, paper shoes, imperial hats and Western suits and ties (the manufacture of which had only been permitted since the introduction of the Open Door Policy). The paper money, paper horses and paper flowers were brand new, but all the burial clothes were second-hand. The entrepreneur would never have been so wasteful as to send a body into the oven with its burial clothes still on. He would leave the clothes on the corpse until the last minute, in case the relatives turned up to bid a last goodbye, then he would carefully remove them, fold them up and bring them back to the office. His mother would howl in despair if she discovered he had inadvertently ripped the cloth or torn off a button. When she sold the burial clothes on to the next family, she was always generous enough to knock the price down a little.