Authors: Yan Lianke
It occurred to everyone that Grandma Mao Zhi had not yet emerged from the memorial hall, so they all hurried back to the side room and saw that she had put on the burial outfit that she normally wore only while performing. The black silk shimmered and sparkled in the dark room. Grandma Mao Zhi was just sitting there, expressionless, as though she already knew what had happened outside the memorial hall.
The villagers said, “Auntie, the door is open.”
Grandma Mao Zhi replied, “I just want to die. Tell everyone to go back down the mountain and return home.”
The villagers said, “Last night the wholers ran away. Auntie, lead us back to Liven. You must lead us back.”
She said, “You should all quickly return home.”
The villagers said, “Huaihua and her nin sisters have all been violated.”
Grandma Mao Zhi stared in shock, then pondered for a moment and said, “That’s fine. This way, in the future, everyone in the village will know that wholers are to be feared. This way, it won’t occur to anyone to want to go out and perform again, and they’ll appreciate the advantages of remaining in Liven.”
When the sun came up, the mountain ridge became as hot as summer. Grandma Mao Zhi was wearing her burial clothes as she led the villagers, who were pulling, pushing, carrying, and dragging the luggage and bedrolls they had taken with them when they originally left the village of Liven. Together, they descended Spirit Mountain and headed back to Liven. In the end, it was in fact still winter, and the land outside the Balou mountains was covered in snow and ice. It was only in the mountains that the seasons had skipped over springtime and proceeded directly to summer. The trees were beginning to bud and put out new leaves, and even the grass on the pockmarked slope had turned green, transforming the entire slope into a verdant expanse.
The group of villagers headed down the mountain together. They saw many things along the way, including sighted wholers standing in the fields with black blindfolds over their eyes and tapping various objects, practicing the Acute-Listening technique, and people with their ears stuffed full of cotton or cornstalks, a board or piece of cardboard hanging next to their face, practicing the Firecracker-on-the-Ear technique. There were also women and girls sitting in a sunny area in front of a village, embroidering images on tree leaves or pieces of paper, together with some people in their forties or fifties wearing black burial clothes as they hoed the fields, carried manure, and spread fertilizer. As the villagers slowly walked through the mountain ridge, they saw many wholers wearing burial clothes. In one village, tens or even hundreds of villagers were gathered on a hillside hoeing wheat sprouts, all of them wearing black silk and satin burial clothes with large golden
longevity,
sacrifice,
and
libation
characters embroidered on the back. They were laughing as they raised and lowered their hoes, and the entire mountainside was filled with the rustling of their silk clothes and the shimmering of their burial outfits in the sunlight.
After the residents of Liven passed this village, it was no longer merely people in their forties and fifties who wore burial clothes, but boys and girls, wearing them to school. Even nursing babies had golden
longevity,
sacrifice,
and
libation
characters on their backs.
Throughout the land, these
longevity,
sacrifice,
and
libation
characters could be found everywhere.
The entire land had become a world of longevity, sacrifice, and libation.
Book 13: Fruit
C
HAPTER 1:
J
UST BEFORE DUSK,
C
HIEF
L
IU RETURNS
TO
S
HUANGHUAI
Just before dusk, Chief Liu returned to Shuanghuai.
Chief Liu and the delegation that had been assigned to travel to Russia to purchase Lenin’s corpse initially arrived at the county seat around noon, and from there Chief Liu instructed the delegation to get out of the car and return home for the moment. As for himself, he drove to Spirit Mountain to examine the Lenin Memorial Hall.
By the time Chief Liu arrived back at the county seat’s eastern gate, it was already almost dusk. He did not immediately proceed into the city, however, but rather told his driver to go home while he himself waited just outside the city. He stood by the side of the road, as if afraid of running into anyone. He wandered back and forth, hovering like a specter at the city gate.
He wanted to wait until the sky was completely dark before returning home.
This was a day at the beginning of the
jimao
Year of the Hare, 1999. Although it was the middle of winter, it was not very cold. There were a few blocks of ice on the sides of the river, but the water in the center was still flowing freely, producing a white belt that stretched in both directions. In the depths of the Balou mountains, meanwhile, it was as sweltering as in the middle of summer. The trees were all green, the plants were budding, and the Lenin Mausoleum was surrounded on all sides by lush, green vegetation.
But in the end, this was merely a peculiarity of the Balou mountain region, and in the outside world, circumstances and the climate both remained unchanged. Winter was still winter. The trees were all bare, and the mountainside was dark and ashen. In the fields, the dull and pale green wheat sprouts were still dormant, but seemed to have an oppressive air. The villages were all so quiet that they resembled ghost towns. There was a slight breeze from the north, and it blew like a knife under the eaves of the houses and through the streets and back alleys.
There was no sun.
The sky was gray, and some fog began to develop in the evening, though it would probably be more accurate to say that a thick layer of winter air spread out over the ground, over the face of the mountain, and throughout the deep gorge. In the depths of the region, people seemed lazy, as if they had not slept enough but still needed to get up and go about their day. When they looked up, they saw that the sun was hidden behind the clouds, like a corn pancake hidden inside a skillet.
Ordinarily, it would have been snowing at this time of year, but it had been a dry winter and therefore had merely been bitterly cold. Everyone throughout the land had a fever, and the sound of sneezing and coughing could be heard all night long. Cold medicine sold like grain during a famine.
The livestock, however, were in no danger of getting sick. The pigs hid in the pigsties, sleeping all day and waking up only to eat, and after eating they would sneeze brightly and go back to sleep. The sheep, meanwhile, grazed on the mountain slope during the day and at dusk returned to their pen to pass the frigid winter night. As for the chickens, when the sun was out they would scratch for food where it was sunny and swallow some sand to aid their digestion. When there was no sun, they would hide at the base of the mountain wall or in a corner of the village alleys.
It was in the middle of this sort of winter that Chief Liu abruptly returned to Shuanghuai, together with the delegation he had sent to Russia. He came in a car with six people, all of whom had frosty expressions. The situation surprised everyone, as if they had set out for Beijing but arrived at Nanjing instead.
Half a month earlier, Chief Liu had visited Spirit Mountain with red silk for the memorial hall’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. A flower had already been placed in the middle of the silk strip, and the red-handled scissors had already been prepared. Chief Liu had taken the scissors and tried them out on a book, finding them to be so sharp that they immediately sliced off a corner of the cover. He also watched the residents of Liven perform their special-skills routines at different scenic spots throughout the area, but these routines were already somewhat stale after six months of continual performances, and he decided that for the ribbon-cutting ceremony they would need to develop a completely new routine, which would cause the tens of thousands of spectators to cheer in astonishment.
Chief Liu had decided that he definitely couldn’t cut the ribbon before the memorial hall’s inaugural performance, but rather would do so immediately following the conclusion of the performance, whereupon he would announce the official opening of the memorial hall. He would announce that the delegation he had sent to purchase Lenin’s corpse had arrived in the capital, where they were filling out the paperwork needed to go to Russia. In two or three days, once the paperwork was complete, they would depart for Russia. Then, in ten days or two weeks—or, at most, twenty days—they would ship Lenin’s corpse back from Russia and install it in the memorial hall’s crystal coffin.
Chief Liu would use his sonorous voice to announce to the tens of thousands of people in the audience that the following year Shuanghuai’s revenue would increase from nothing to fifty million yuan, then double to a hundred million the following year and double again to two hundred million the year after that. Within four years, the county would be able to issue each of its residents a Western-style house with a gable and a pointed roof. Beginning on the day that Lenin’s corpse was installed in the memorial hall, none of the Shuanghuai peasants would ever need to pay any more grain tax, and instead the local treasuries would send all of the requisite funds to the national coffers in a series of monthly installments. Beginning in the first month after the installation of Lenin’s corpse in the memorial hall, every family of peasants in the county would drink calcium-fortified milk for breakfast every morning. Those who didn’t drink the milk would not receive the refrigerator and color televisions distributed by the county, and if they had already received them they would have to return them. Whichever family didn’t eat ribs and eggs for lunch wouldn’t receive nutritional supplements like ginseng and black-boned chicken at the end of the month.
In short, during the six months after the installation of Lenin’s corpse, the lives of the people of Shuanghuai would improve immeasurably. Peasants working in the fields would be issued salaries, which would be determined not by how much grain they harvested but rather by the number and size of the flowers they planted in the fields along the road. Those who planted more than half a
mu
of flowers would receive several thousand yuan a month in salary, and at the end of the year they would receive a bonus of more than ten thousand yuan. Because Lenin would be resting on Spirit Mountain in the depths of the Balou mountains, the Shuanghuai county seat would become a bustling metropolis. Water would flow nonstop through the streets, and there wouldn’t be a single speck of dust to be found anywhere. The sidewalks on either side of the road would be paved not with brick, but rather with granite or marble, and at key locations like major intersections and in front of the county committee and county government buildings, the sidewalk would be paved, not with granite or even marble, but rather with Nanyang jade from Funiu Mountain.
As Chief Liu was speaking, someone objected that having a lot of money was not necessarily a good thing, since money can change people. Chief Liu, however, had already anticipated this objection, and took this opportunity to warn Shuanghuai’s seven hundred and thirty thousand peasants and its eighty thousand city-dwellers that, by that point, all the people—from the county seat to the depths of the Balou mountains—would have so much money they would either have more than enough to pay for their house and food and a car, or become suicidal, treating money as though it weren’t worth anything at all. He warned them that, after the county’s hundred thousand or so households all became rich, they shouldn’t permit their children
not
to study and read newspapers, and they shouldn’t just ride around all day, enjoying fancy meals, going through money like dirt, and reveling in the fruits of other people’s labor. They shouldn’t hire people from other counties to come to their homes to work as nannies and order them about as though they weren’t even human. Even distant rural areas could develop problems with gambling and drugs, and when they reached that stage, Shuanghuai would need to pass some new laws, among them:
1) Any peasants who fail to plant at least two
mu
of flowers in front and back of their house, along the road, and in front of their field will have their year-end bonus cut in half (but not to less than fifty thousand yuan).
2) All households whose children do not graduate from college will have three years of their salaries and bonuses cut, and all households with a child who has gone to college will receive double salary and bonus (and not less than two hundred yuan).
3) All families who donate their extra money to charitable causes—such as changing the card tables in their village’s geriatric residence and paving the paths to the village’s gardens with bricks and covering them with limestone—will be reimbursed for twice as much as they have donated; however, if they spend their extra money on gambling and drugs, the county will send them to the poorest area in a neighboring county to work the land, thereby returning them to their former poor life; their family’s entire salary of several tens of thousands of yuan will be transferred to a poor school or village in a neighboring county; and they themselves won’t be allowed to return to Shuanghuai until they have been successfully reeducated.