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.
In order to prevent the residents of the county from going crazy as soon as they became rich, Chief Liu had jotted down a dozen or so new laws and regulations in his notebook. He recognized that the real climax of the memorial hall’s opening ceremony would lie not in the villagers’ special-skills performance, but rather in his own emotional and moving speech. He knew that as soon as he finished speaking, everyone on stage would immediately begin jumping around like crazy, and he was afraid that they might start cheering him the way people had cried out, “Long Live Chairman Mao” at the height of the Cultural Revolution, and that each household might hang his portrait in the center of the wall of the main room of their house, and that they might kowtow to his portrait the way they would to Lenin in the memorial hall. Actually, from the day that the delegation charged with purchasing Lenin’s remains left Shuanghuai and headed to Beijing, Chief Liu had hardly been able to sleep. His blood was coursing through his veins, and by the time the residents of Liven began arriving at Spirit Mountain for the performance, he couldn’t sleep at all. He hadn’t closed his eyes in more than seventy-two hours, but he nevertheless remained as wide awake as if he had just had a long bath and a good night’s rest.