While staying at a guest house in the provincial capital, Chief Liu got sick. He caught a cold and started running a fever. If he had been in Shuanghuai, his secretary and the county hospital would have sent him the very best medicine, but here in the provincial capital he had no choice but to spend the next two or three days in a delirium, popping one fistful of pills after another, as though they were fried peas. He was afraid that his fever wouldn’t break, and that he would keep coughing until his cold developed into pneumonia. By the time the delegation had been summoned back from Beijing by cadres from the provincial Party committee, and the governor had spent a drop of time seeing them, Chief Liu found that his cold was somewhat improved and that his fever had begun to subside. It was as if he had come down with the cold and the fever solely in order to have an excuse to sleep while waiting for the delegation to return from Beijing — waiting for them to return so that he could speak to them.
“What did the governor say?”
“The governor didn’t say anything. He just wanted to see us, to see what was wrong with us. He said that if we needed, he could have the provincial psychiatric hospital set up a clinic in Shuanghuai.”
“Set up what kind of clinic?”
“He said it would be a political psychology clinic. He said he was concerned that we were all suffering from a form of political insanity.”
“Fuck his grandmother. What else did he say?”
“He told us to return to Shuanghuai, where we will report to our post for the final time, because in a few days he was going to send someone to relieve us of our responsibilities.”
“Fuck his grandmother. Fuck his great-grandmother. Fuck his grandmother’s grandmother.”
After cursing for a while, Chief Liu had no choice but to lead the delegation from the provincial capital back to the county seat. They felt like people who, after studying diligently for an exam for more than a decade, discovered just as they were about to enter the examination room that they had been denied entry by the site’s managers, and as a result their ten years of diligent study had disappeared in the blink of an eye and the dreams they had nurtured their entire life had collapsed behind them.
The delegation set out when the sky was still dark, and first took a train to the district, then proceeded back to Shuanghuai in a car sent by the county. For the duration of the trip, there was commotion everywhere, but neither the country chief nor his companions uttered a word. Chief Liu resembled someone on his deathbed, and it was truly heartrending. During this entire journey of several hundred li, he sat in the front row without saying a single word, and therefore no one dared to say anything to him either.
The delegation had left for Beijing after having filled out a mountain of paperwork to go to Russia. They had even bought the tickets to fly from Beijing to Russia. But it was at this point that — because they were traveling to Russia for the express purpose of purchasing Lenin’s corpse, which was interred beneath Moscow’s Red Square — they discovered that they needed to get one of China’s departments to stamp the forms they had brought with them from the county seat. This was a round, red stamp, containing only a dozen or so characters. But when they went to that department to get the stamp, someone asked them to sit down and wait for a moment, inviting them to have a drink of water and not to worry. The person brought them each a glass of water, and then left.
Soon someone else arrived to lead them away. He asked them many questions, such as whether they had prepared enough money to buy Lenin’s corpse, where the memorial hall housing Lenin’s corpse was located, how big it was, and whether they had worked out the technology needed to maintain the corpse. He also asked about the Spirit Mountain Forest Park where the corpse would be installed, including how much admission tickets would cost, and how they planned to use the money after the county became rich. Eventually, after he had asked everything that could conceivably be asked, and they’d answered everything that could be answered, he told them not to worry, saying that the person in charge of issuing the stamps had just left that morning with some other cadres to visit the Great Wall at Badaling. He said they had already notified him and told him to return immediately, and therefore asked the Shuanghuai delegation to wait patiently. He said, “When it is time to eat, we’ll have someone bring you some food, and that way you can wait for the provincial cadres to return. If necessary, we’ll send someone to lead them back.”
In the blink of an eye, everything had ended, and it suddenly felt like a theater after a performance has concluded and everything has been put away. No one knew what Chief Liu was thinking during the ride home. No one knew what he had seen as he was climbing Spirit Mountain to visit the memorial hall. In any case, it was nightfall by the time he arrived at the eastern gate of the county seat. Chief Liu’s face looked like a dead man’s, and his hair had gone completely gray. It wasn’t clear whether his hair had turned gray following his meeting with the governor or upon his return to the memorial hall. At any rate, it was now as gray as a nestful of white sparrows.
He had aged overnight.
He had become completely and utterly old.
Like an elderly man, Chief Liu trudged back to the county seat. His legs were weak, and it seemed as though he would topple over if he wasn’t careful.
From the time Chief Liu left the debut performance at Spirit Mountain led by Grandma Mao Zhi, pace by pace,1 only a few days had passed. Yet, he felt as if he had been away from Shuanghuai for several years, several decades, even half a lifetime. Now it seemed the people of Shuanghuai didn’t even recognize him. In the past he would always ride in a car, with the scenery passing by outside the car window like wind blowing by his eyes. What was past was past, however, and now nothing was left.
Occasionally back then, he would get out of the car for some reason, and all of the people in the streets would recognize him and erupt into a tumult. In the commotion, they would call out affectionately, “Chief Liu, Chief Liu,” and would immediately surround him. If they weren’t trying to drag him home for dinner, they were bringing a stool over for him to sit on, inviting him to rest in their doorway. Some people would stuff a newborn baby into his arms, asking him to hold it and begging him to grant the infant some good fortune and to give it a name. Others would ask him to use his rather mediocre handwriting to write out a couplet that they would then paste beside their front door. Students would bring him a textbook or homework, and ask him to sign it. When he walked through the city, he felt like an emperor strolling down the street, and his mere presence would make people deliriously happy, such that he wouldn’t even pay attention to the scenery.
But today, it was dusk and fairly chilly, and there were very few people out in the street. The doors to the shops and stores were all closed, and even the little alleys had barely anyone in them. The main street was as quiet as an empty room, and the only people still outside were the streetwalkers.