‘I wouldn’t mind using that piece for myself.’
The son paused for a moment, and whispered, ‘I still have the old recording of you singing the … dirty songs.’
‘All right. But start me off with the Salammbô.’
‘It doesn’t matter what music I play, you will still come out of the oven as white as snow.’
‘Immaculate? Do you promise?’ The mother sounded as though she were talking to a wily tradesman.
‘Immaculate, as long as there’s no power cut.’ Then he added, out of a sense of professional duty: ‘Sometimes middle-aged women come out slightly yellow, a pale yellow like golden corn. But I’ll do my best to make you come out even whiter than the pharmacist.’
With this new feeling of trust established between them, their eyes could at last meet. They had reached a silent understanding. They felt even closer now than when they had witnessed the pharmacist’s transformation. Before, the son had always thought of his mother as a grandmother wolf. As a child, he was terrified that when she tied a scarf around her head, her white ears would suddenly pop out. When he heard her hum he wanted to run away; he was frightened that as soon as she was happy, her grey tail would stick out from under her skirt and wag from side to side. But now that they were looking into each other’s eyes for probably the first time in their lives, they felt more united than the day he was interrogated in the public security bureau and their entire future was at stake.
‘As long as there’s no power cut,’ the son pledged, ‘I will give you a beautiful burn.’ He was getting excited now. He turned round, and with a piece of bent wire, plucked out from a crack in the table an original Hong Kong tape of Deng Lijun’s songs. It was the tape that Premier Deng Xiaoping had specifically banned, the one with the dirty song ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ The song had the decadent chorus his mother used to sing: ‘Come drive away the loneliness from my love-sick heart …’
The son was raring to go. He put his past resentments towards his mother behind him, and devoted himself to her needs. They no longer behaved as they had done in the shed in the entrance passage, grunting cursory replies to each other’s questions, glancing at one another with contempt. They were now united in one action, bound together as intimately as a pair of identical twins. They breathed a sigh of relief. This quiet understanding was as comforting as the soft and warm white bones. The mother’s face glowed with maternal love. She was a woman who had sung dirty songs in her youth, and whose eyes had sent a painter crazy. In the old woman’s face, these eyes now looked gentle and kind. That expression has disappeared from today’s world. You can walk the streets for ten years and never find an expression like it. (At least you won’t find it on Chinese faces. Perhaps Western faces can look gentle, calm, kind. But in China, not only have those expressions disappeared, but so have all similar expressions of pity, compassion and respect.)
Anyone observing the couple through the window could have only guessed at the intense feelings welling up inside them. The shameful idea that had come to the entrepreneur the night before had now transformed into a glorious mission. He fetched the box with the pharmacist’s photograph on the lid, tipped some of the ashes into it, opened the window, tossed out the remaining ashes, and closed the window again. (One day he forgot to shut the window, and the stray dogs loitering outside sneaked in and gobbled up half of the twelve swooners that were lying on the floor.) He washed down the hot metal tray with a wet flannel, and dropped the tape into the cassette player. Everything was in order, everything had gone according to plan. All that was left to be done was for the mother to lie down on the tray. ‘It’s ready now,’ he said to her softly.
She lay down flat on the tray, just as she had seen the posthumous Party member do. She let her hands drop naturally to the sides and fixed her eyes on the ceiling. As the son was about to switch the furnace on, the mother raised her hand in the air and said, ‘Play the music!’
‘All right,’ he said. He leaned back and pressed the play button, waited for the prelude to finish, then slowly pushed the tray into the furnace to the rhythm of the Salammbô aria. The paper ingot shoes were the last to go in. Stuck to the soles he saw a patch of grey ash and a brightly shining drawing pin.
‘The electricity bill’s under the premium bonds!’ he heard his mother cry from inside the furnace, as the lyrics of the dirty song began to blare out. Without a word, he brushed his hair back and slammed the steel door shut.
The Suicide or The Actress
Su Yun was sixteen when she first stepped onto the stage. It was the height of the Cultural Revolution, and she was determined to pour all her youth and vitality into the revolutionary heroines she played. She took the roles of Jiang Jie, the brave activist who is shot in a Guomindang jail, and Liu Hulan, the Communist martyr who is decapitated by Japanese invaders. She sang the part of the shepherdess who loses her feet to frostbite in her attempt to rescue her state-owned flock, and danced the role of the fearless peasant leader, Wu Jinghua, who bayonets the evil capitalist landowner.
But the winds brought in by the Open Door Policy blew away those revolutionary heroines, and Su Yun lost her way. She tried to keep up with the changing times and relax her moral views, but was kicked back time and again by a series of failed love affairs. She slowly lost her grip on reality and retreated inside herself. She wanted to travel to the core of her being, to see what lay at her life’s end.
Su Yun’s initial plan was to die alone, but she was afraid that without an audience, her performance would go unnoticed. When she thought that she would soon become a heap of white powder inside a blazing incinerator, her heart clenched.
What if she shed no tears at the moment of death? She was incapable of predicting how she would react. When she tried to imagine taking her last breath, crazed thoughts fluttered through her mind like dry petals falling from a withered bunch of flowers. A laugh rose from the pit of her stomach.
Her life seemed like the string of maxims she copied from magazines, then tore up and tossed on the floor. These maxims gave her strength and insight. They taught her, for example, that ‘a sage must assume the guise of a fool’. As well as jotting down these maxims, she also liked to copy out from Milan Kundera’s books passages that mock female frailty. ‘He really must hate women,’ she said to herself. ‘He implies that without us, the world would be a better place. What a cheek! Although, I must admit, my foolish behaviour today does seem to support his argument.’
She felt as though she had lived a hundred years. Everything that happened in the world seemed to her like a tedious repetition of some past event. One day she made up her mind to write a play about a woman who wants to commit suicide. She tried to remain objective, but couldn’t help writing herself into the script. While she worked on her suicide play, she continued her career as an actress, having to die day after day on stage. The strain was almost too much for her to bear. In the midst of her distress, a new idea came to her. She decided that in her play she would return from death to perform her suicide once again.
As her thoughts took shape, she sat down at her desk and set to work on her second draft. First she sketched an outline of the male lead, who was a composite of her current boyfriend — a painter who worked in the municipal museum — and several other men she had known.
She made the lead a little taller and bulkier than her boyfriend, and gave him a graveyard voice that suggested a sentimental character and a long history of heartbreak. Through his untidy, tobacco-stained teeth, she made him spew a few of the vulgar terms and phrases that filled the latest magazines — words like: IQ, spiritual enlightenment, ‘my bleeding heart’, ‘too vile for words’, and ‘chasing skirt’. This was her idea of the perfect man.