Authors: Yan Lianke
The wholer gave a sigh of relief. “That’s good to hear.”
She said, “There’s another thing. For each performance, we won’t receive five seats, but rather ten, though I, Grandma Mao Zhi, don’t want a single cent. The remaining money from these final performances can all go to you, but first you must provide a car and help me take these dogs back to Liven tonight.”
The wholers stared at her in confusion, then laughingly agreed. They each started working on their respective assignments. One of them went to call the other performance troupe, instructing them to report to the county that all of the Liven residents affiliated with their troupe also wished to withdraw from society; another went to arrange for a car to send this pack of more than a dozen dogs back to Balou; another went to arrange for crates and vehicles to transport the troupe to Wenzhou; and someone else hurriedly went out to buy Grandma Mao Zhi a costume and props for her performance.
Given that Grandma Mao Zhi was going to appear as someone who was two hundred and forty-one years old, her residence permit and identity card both had to be replaced, and the person responsible for making new ones needed some time to work. The person responsible for making her new costume also needed at least a full night to finish the task.
Two hundred and forty-one years ago, it had been the Hongli reign of the Qing dynasty, more specifically the twenty-first year of the Qianlong emperor’s reign. Between then and now, China had undergone the rise and fall of the Qing dynasty, the United Army of the Eight Nations, Yuan Shikai’s presidency, the Xinhai Revolution, and the Republican period, together with the new government following the War of resistance against Japan and the ensuing Liberation.
For someone to have survived from the Qianlong reign up to the present day, she naturally would have needed some special techniques. For Grandma Mao Zhi to have lived to be two hundred and forty-one years old, her secret must have been not merely keeping to a vegetarian diet, but going to work in the fields every day. Most important, when she became ill in the seventeenth year of the Daoguang reign, at the age of eighty-one, she preemptively put on her burial garb, but somehow managed to survive. It was as though Grandma Mao Zhi had already died once, and that therefore from that point on never again feared death. She wore her burial clothes three hundred and sixty-five days a year—wearing them to eat and work in the fields, and at night even wearing them to bed. In this way, she was always prepared for the possibility that she might not wake up the next morning, but each morning she did wake up after all.
In the third year of the Guangxu reign, when she was a hundred and twenty-one years old, she suffered another illness. But after being on the brink of death for three days, she again managed to survive. Afterward, she was doubly prepared to die at any time, and therefore continued to wear her burial clothing day and night. She wore it while eating, while working in the fields, and particularly at night while sleeping.
Year after year, month after month, she wore her burial clothing day in and day out, ready to pass away at any moment. In this way, she lived to be two hundred and forty-one years old, surviving from the Qianlong reign up to the present day. In the process, she witnessed countless historical events, from the Jiaqing to the Daoguang, Xianfeng, Tongzhi, Guangxu, and Xuantong imperial reigns, together with the Republican period. Over two hundred and forty-one years, she witnessed nine imperial reigns. It was during the Daoguang reign that she began wearing burial clothing, and during the third year of the Guangxu reign that she switched to wearing it both day and night. During the following century or so, she must have worn out countless sets of burial clothing, and therefore in order to have her two-hundred-and-forty-one-year-old self perform on stage, it would be necessary to prepare at least eight or ten sets of clothing. That clothing, moreover, had to appear old and tattered, so as to convince the audience that it really was on account of wearing these clothes that she had been able to survive an additional hundred and sixty years up to the present day.
The wholers hustled about getting everything together, and by early morning, they had succeeded in relocating the troupe to the new city, where they would soon begin their magnificent performance.
C
HAPTER 7:
L
ENIN’S
M
AUSOLEUM IS COMPLETED,
AND THE INAUGURATION PERFORMANCE BEGINS
Chief Liu had to go to the district and provincial seat to attend an important meeting for a few days.
Grandma Mao Zhi and the disabled performers in her special-skills troupe had returned from the south by train and by car. Before they even had a chance to spend the night with their children, houses, trees, and streets and alleys, together with their chickens, pigs, dogs, ducks, sheep, and oxen, Chief Liu urgently sent them up to Spirit Mountain to do one final performance to help celebrate the opening of the mausoleum.
The Lenin Mausoleum was complete, and even the latrines lining the road up to the mausoleum were finished. The red
Men
and
Women
signs over the door to the latrines had been dry for several days. Everything was ready, and all that was missing was the final touch.
The delegation responsible for purchasing Lenin’s remains had been away from Shuanghuai for seven or eight days, and it was said they had completed all of the requisite paperwork to travel to Russia. They had been delayed another day or so in Beijing, after which they would fly to Russia and initiate negotiations for purchasing the corpse. These so-called negotiations were really simply a process of haggling over the price, in which the people on one side would say they would pay only ten million yuan for the remains, while the other side would insist on getting a hundred million. The first side would then offer fifteen million, whereupon the other side would repeat that they wouldn’t even consider an offer of less than a hundred million. The first side would offer twenty million, and the other side would reply that if the first side really wanted to buy the remains, they should offer a realistic price.
At this point, the leader of the first delegation would furrow his skybrows,
1
one set of wrinkles after another appearing on his shiny sun panel,
3
as though he had encountered an incredibly difficult dilemma. And to tell the truth, this
was
in fact an incredibly difficult dilemma. If he offered too low a price, his counterpart might refuse to sell the corpse at all, but if he offered too high a price, he might end up unnecessarily giving away millions—or even tens or hundreds of millions—of yuan. During the six months the two troupes had been performing, they’d earned the county a vast profit, while the district had also donated an enormous sum to the fund. In the end, however, this money was not like tap water, and after it was spent it would be gone forever. The higher-ups would not disburse any more money to Shuanghuai for at least the next three years.
The contract between Shuanghuai and the performance troupes had expired, and this seven-day celebration of the opening of the Lenin Mausoleum was intended to serve as Chief Liu’s threat and promise to Grandma Mao Zhi, and it was only with this that she offered her support. After seven days, not only would the troupes not be able to continue performing on behalf of Shuanghuai county, but even the performers themselves would no longer belong to Shuanghuai. On the map of Shuanghuai, the village of Liven would no longer exist.
It was essential that they purchase Lenin’s remains.
It was also essential that they somehow find a way to bargain down the price. In order to do so, Chief Liu would need to personally take a team to Russia to negotiate. The district and the province called an extraordinarily urgent meeting, and said that every county chief and county secretary was required to attend. Because the meeting had implications for the election of both the district commissioner and the provincial governor, the announcement specified that even if the county chiefs and county secretaries were in the hospital, as long as they didn’t have cancer they were obligated to leave the hospital and come to the district and provincial seat to attend the meeting. And if they were in fact suffering from cancer, if the cancer was still in its early stages they were still expected to attend the meeting.
Chief Liu therefore had no choice but to appoint his most trusted, and most capable, deputy county chief to lead a delegation to negotiate in his place. In this deputy chief’s family hall there was an enlarged portrait of Chief Liu himself. The deputy chief’s primary responsibility, furthermore, was the tourism industry. Once he found himself chatting at dinner with a Taiwan businessman who happened to be passing through Shuanghuai on his way to the provincial capital to invest some funds. Despite the fact that they had different surnames, they nevertheless promptly declared themselves to be blood brothers and thereby became instant relatives, even agreeing to share an ancestral grave site.
In this way, they became extremely close. They discussed the details of their respective families, to the point that the visitor from Taiwan began bawling his eyes out, and suddenly decided to leave Shuanghuai the several tens of million yuan that he was originally planning to invest in the city. He donated money for the county to build an electrical generator, as a result of which every household in Shuanghuai came to have electricity. Chief Liu promoted the deputy county chief to the position of managing deputy county chief, and upon being named to the county standing committee, he was allowed to attend all important meetings, large or small, and to hold a crucial vote.
This deputy chief was an excellent choice to lead the expedition to Russia, given that he was a superb negotiator. He was accompanied by an expensive interpreter, who had studied in Russia for many years and knew the country as intimately as Chief Liu knew his own Shuanghuai county.
Chief Liu was not concerned about their trip to purchase Lenin’s corpse, since he had prepared for every eventuality. If the other side asked them to propose a realistic price, the deputy chief, needless to say, would not immediately offer a specific figure, even if the price had already been discussed countless times at home and they had agreed what the upper limit would be. Even if they couldn’t agree to that price, however, they understood that they absolutely had to complete this purchase, allowing them to bring Lenin’s corpse back to Shuanghuai and install it in Balou’s Spirit Mountain. At this point, the situation would become difficult for the negotiating team, and they would have to rely on the patience of the deputy chief, who had it in abundance.
Perhaps the negotiations would take place in the room next to Lenin’s remains, the reception room to the west of Lenin’s crystal coffin. That room was far smaller than the underground reception room Shuanghuai had constructed. The walls were made of brick, the inside was whitewashed with a special powder, and the outside was styled as a traditional Chinese tomb. On one side of Moscow’s Red Square there was a stone stage on an elevated piece of land, and twenty feet below the stage there was a square pit, in which there was a stone wall as big as two or three houses. In the center, shielded from the cold of winter or the heat of summer, was Lenin’s crystal coffin. This was truly disrespectful to Lenin, since his mausoleum was not even as large as the ones that some of the wealthy inhabitants of Wenzhou built for themselves, the only difference being that the pit in Lenin’s tomb was deeper than most of our houses are tall. Because Russians are generally taller than we are, it was only natural that their ceilings would be higher and the tomb taller. The walls inside the mausoleum were painted with a special water-resistant and anticorrosive whitewash, and in this white expanse lay the crystal coffin. Even though seventy-five years had elapsed since Lenin’s death, the coffin had hardly changed at all, nor had the walls of the mausoleum been repainted.
Despite the fact that carefully selected administrators spent the entire day meticulously polishing the coffin with a feather duster and a flannel cloth, its surface was not as resplendent as it had been three-quarters of a century earlier. Viewed from outside, Lenin’s corpse was also not as translucent as it had been several decades earlier. In the large underground reception hall, the salaried managers wiped it down every day, and every month they stood on the back of a chair or a couch and swept away the dust and cobwebs from the walls and ceiling. But in the end, that whitewashed wall had been there for seventy-five years, and the white paint could no longer cover the yellow grime underneath. In some places the wall had become a sheet of deep yellow, like the yellow paper the people of Balou, Shuanghuai, and western Hunan burn every year during the Qingming festival.
As for the small waiting room next to the room holding Lenin’s corpse, after one went through the ornately carved door frame, the first thing one might see would be an oil painting in a white birch frame above an old wooden couch, though it might not be clear what kind of wood it was. Over time, that wood would become only more and more resplendent, though the cover on the couch would not age well and might have started to fade and peel. There would be holes in the armrest, through which several metal springs might be visible. It would be on this couch—and, naturally, it had to be on this couch—that the deputy county chief would politely discuss his business. After a long conversation, the two negotiators would finally agree on a time to ship Lenin’s corpse, whereupon the deputy county chief would announce that if the price of the corpse were to exceed a certain amount, his group wouldn’t buy it even if their lives depended on it. His Russian counterpart would respond that if the Chinese delegation didn’t offer more than such-and-such a price, the Russians wouldn’t sell the corpse even if
their
lives depended on it.