‘You’re a beast,’ the writer replies, peeling the shell from a steaming-hot egg.
The blood donor shoots him a disparaging look. ‘When we were sent to the countryside, you talked about the “Sublime”. You even went on about that man Jesus. But now look at you! You’ve spent the whole day just waiting for me to turn up and put meat on your table. You can’t buy much food with the money they pay you for your deep thoughts, can you?’ The blood donor grabs an egg then pushes the plate back towards the bottles in the middle of the table. He takes a pinch of salt from the jar beside him, removes the hot shell and rubs the salt onto the gleaming white surface of the egg. ‘I get three times your monthly salary for just one blood donation. When you look at what you put into your work and what you get out of it, you’re not doing too well, are you? Or to put it another way, just because I’m a professional blood donor and you’re a professional writer doesn’t mean you’re any better than me.’
The writer stares in disgust at the blood donor’s mouth, at the egg yolk moving inside it. He often adopts this disapproving look when his stomach is full. ‘If everyone were like you,’ he says, ‘this country would be ruined.’
‘Don’t be so sure. You’re a blood donor yourself. The reason I’m better off than you is because my blood saves lives, and earns me money and respect. But what have you got for your sweat and blood, for all that expended grey matter? Nothing. Your salary is only just enough to keep you breathing. You depend on the smell of your neighbours’ cooking to get you through the day. What kind of life is that? You talk about God, and your need to find the truth, but what help has your God ever been to you?’
‘You’re only interested in food. What do you know about truth?’ The writer’s expression is now calm and composed. ‘I will spend the rest of my life in quiet meditation. The sages live on one meal a day, the average man on two. I will survive on …’
‘Everyone needs three square meals a day.’
‘Only animals eat three meals a day,’ the writer says with conviction. ‘I’m not fussy about what I eat. We didn’t have fish-head soup tonight, but I didn’t kick up a fuss, did I?’
‘In fact three meals a day aren’t nearly enough for me. What does that make me then?’
‘A beast,’ the writer replies. He inhales a gust of fragrant air, and says to himself: That smells like smoked mushrooms. Maybe if you add them to fish-head soup you can leave out the ginger. ‘You live off your body fluids,’ he continues, ‘so you must be a beast.’
‘If you don’t start eating properly, you’ll turn into a lump of dried tofu.’ The blood donor observes the writer’s hunched shoulders and his sallow, palsied face. ‘Very soon, you will weigh less than a sheet of manuscript paper, and then you will disappear altogether.’
The blood donor’s eyes sparkle with life, in stark contrast to the writer, whose energies are slowly failing him and who has lost the will to write. The blood donor’s face is free of wrinkles and flushed with blood. His thick lips are moist and red. No one would guess he gives blood on a weekly basis, unless they heard him faltering up the stairs. His small, narrow body seethes with fresh young blood and gastric juices. At mealtimes he can finish every scrap of food on the table. Before he gives blood, he can swallow two thermos flasks of water and keep it all in for half an hour without having to relieve himself. His body is a blood making machine, every part in fine working order.
The writer, however, has a weak heart, and a troublesome pair of lungs which spew out globs of phlegm at inopportune moments. None of the organs below his stomach are quite right either. He has to rush to the toilet as soon as any food reaches his intestines. Years of sitting at a desk have contorted his guts, causing him to suffer from perennial haemorrhoids. His feeble kidneys absolved him from having to take part in the Writers’ Association’s annual blood donation, and although his liver is now behaving reasonably well, it was nearly the death of him during his years in the camp.
But despite his relentless blood donations, Vlazerim is looking more suave and relaxed by the day. He doesn’t have to tax his brains, so never experiences the dizziness, insomnia and disturbing dreams the writer suffers from — the afflictions of intellectuals. His imagination is only engaged when he’s daydreaming about recipes. During his time in the re-education camp, he stole a chicken once and took it up into the hills. He rubbed it with spices, roasted it over a wooden fire and gobbled it down all by himself. When he was finished, he buried the feathers in the ground. Had the guard dogs not sniffed out those feathers and dug them up, he would have got away with his crime without a beating.
Now, every organ in his body is focused on the pleasure of his masticating jaws.
‘I’m no victim,’ the blood donor says. ‘Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy has rescued me, and allowed me to create a new life for myself. All my misery vanished the day they first gave me money for my blood. Now I have everything I want. But you’re still stuck here, wallowing in self-pity, yearning for the day you’ll make it into The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers. You hate yourself for writing what the Party tells you to write. You mystify life, so that you can rationalise your loss of grip on reality. You’ve forgotten that man survives through his quest for profit, not truth. Without the profit motive, we would all be finished. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve.’
‘You could be an intellectual yourself, if you wanted,’ the writer laughs. His mind starts to drift again. What am I doing here? he asks himself. I have to find a new Lei Feng, make it into The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers … But all I can see is the entrepreneur’s face, the young man who runs the crematorium, who looks nothing like the boy he once was. I have been observing the world through his eyes for a while now. It’s time he came and set fire to me too …
The Swooner
After he shut the steel door, everything went quiet.
He switched off the cassette player, stood up and examined the furnace’s thermograph. ‘1,700 degrees,’ he said, moving his nose closer to the furnace. ‘Not burned to the bone yet.’ At this stage, if the wind were blowing in the wrong direction, smells of roast flesh would fill the air and he would feel a pang of hunger. Ten minutes later, the delicious smells would be replaced by a sickening stench.
He had bought the large furnace off the ceramic department of the local art school. The students there no longer used it for their projects, and had dumped it in the yard of a local pottery factory. After his purchase was finalised, he transported the furnace from the yard to a small plot of land he rented from a peasant in the outskirts of town. Once the furnace was in place, he gave the exterior a lick of heat-resistant paint, replaced a few of the fire-proof bricks that lined the inside, and installed a new electric heating element. After he secured an entrepreneur’s licence, he was able to use the beautiful kiln to reduce a total of one-hundred-and-nine cadavers to ashes.