When he walked through the streets and saw people queuing up for the bus or stopping for a chat, scenes from the crematorium would flash through his mind: the oily vapours rising from charred skin, the slowly contracting skeletons. He would think about the difference between the yellow and orange skin of the roast chicken on the street stalls, and the tender white skin of a little girl’s face before it enters the furnace. He would think about the difference between the living, who could move and talk, and the dead, who could neither move nor make excuses for themselves any longer.
His love for the dead grew deeper every day. He thought about how happy he would be if his mother were to become a dead person (that mouth shut once and for all). The dead had made him a millionaire, the leader of the crematorium’s unofficial Party committee. The dead never talked nonsense. They never vetted his publications or checked his account books. They didn’t care what he wore, where he lived or where he travelled to. As the number of corpses rose, their ages and personalities became increasingly varied, and his love for them grew stronger. Although the frequent power cuts led to corpse pile-ups (a chemical plant leaked once, flooding local fields with polluted water, seven people died in one day, and they were all brought to his shack at the same time, of course), he still felt that there were far too many living people and not enough dead.
As time went by, he became confused as to why people insisted on living so long. When his mother swore at him for tearing off a button from what had been a perfect pair of woollen trousers (in fact it already had three buttons missing, and you could only find replacements for those foreign-style brass-effect buttons in decadent boom towns like Shenzhen), he suddenly imagined how calm she would look when she was dead. He imagined it again when he gazed at her through the sheet of red cotton they hung between each other before going to sleep. ‘The Buddha’s realm is full of mercy,’ he wanted to tell her. He opened his mouth, but the words would not come out.
‘Women burn better than men,’ he told her again, but this time in a more insistent tone. ‘Dead people smell like roast meat, when they first go in the oven.’ A few minutes later, the innards let off foul gases that make you want to retch, but he kept that last part to himself.
‘You should come to the shack one day and take a look,’ he continued. ‘There’s an upholstered armchair that belonged to a rich and powerful man before the campaign against the “Four Olds”. You can sit in it and watch the corpses entering the furnace and see them being transported by the music of their choice to a realm of peace and joy.’
‘They say that one day, balls of cotton will fall from the sky,’ the mother murmured, her shadow stretching along the pink wall behind her. ‘When I see them fall, I will go with you to the shack.’
The son panicked. When he was young, his mother could always see through his lies. He was now in his thirties, but he still felt unsure of himself. ‘Just come with me and have a look,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’
Just before daybreak, the mother glanced outside through the gaps in their wooden door. Then she turned her head, her green eyes glistening like the eyes of an old cat. The son dared not meet her gaze, but he could sense the importance of the moment. He knew there was something he had to do. He rolled over and got out of bed.
The mother and son seemed troubled by the way the day had begun. The routine of their mornings had been upset. Usually, when the son pulled back the red curtain, the mother would press down the handle to open the front door. While the mother fed charcoal briquettes into the stove, the son would cross the smoke-filled room with a toothbrush in his mouth and step outside into the entrance passage to clean his teeth. After the mother had placed her chamber pot on the other side of the stove, the son would walk in, put down his toothbrush, pick up the chamber pot and carry it to the public latrines. Today, however, everything was out of sequence. It was so bad that, when he was squeezing out the toothpaste, his mother was squatting on the chamber pot for a piss. He was only supposed to hear her do that first thing in the morning, while he was still half asleep in bed.
It seemed like the start of something new. He realised it was time for him to act, but he didn’t know where to begin.
Over the previous two years, he had made a life for himself. His business had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. He had bought the electric kiln because he liked it, it intrigued him. He only discovered it could be used for burning bodies in a conversation he overheard in the public latrines. He set up his crematorium, and soon the bodies were churning out from the furnace like water from a pump, and he was continually rushing back and forth like the water pump’s revolving chain, because in this town, rain or shine, whether it was a Sunday afternoon or a Wednesday night, people died every day. Sunday was never a day of rest, in fact people died more than ever. Especially women — women always chose to kill themselves on Sundays. Students between the ages of sixteen and twenty preferred to die on Mondays. Middle-aged housewives died on Tuesdays. This was the worst day for the entrepreneur, as he had to lug those huge fat women about the room all by himself. Babies and women who died in childbirth turned up on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Senior Party cadres died on Fridays. This was always a solemn and nerve-racking day. He would have to analyse the newspaper obituaries in minute detail to determine whether the deceased was a reformist or a reactionary, and then make the appropriate preparations for their swoon. People in their twenties liked to die on Saturday nights. Some would die on their way to a date, others in the drunken stupor after a break-up. Saturday was always the most romantic night of the week. Love would surge into the crematorium like fresh blood, and the cassette player on the rickety table would belt out Orff’s ‘Fortune, Empress of the World’ all through the night.
The son watched his mother’s shadow slip down the wall, creep across the grey cement floor and slowly disappear into the coal stove.
The morning passed quietly.
In the afternoon, the mother carefully combed her hair into place and followed her son outside. She locked the front door behind her, sat down on the back of her son’s motorbike and, for the first time in seventeen years, left home. (A street writer from another province who wrote letters for the illiterate moved into the shed a few weeks later.) Then she left the town. She had never travelled further than five blocks from her home in her entire life.
She already looked like a swooner. She was dressed head to toe in burial clothes that had been worn by many swooners before her. On her way to the crematorium, everyone stopped and stared at the living woman dressed in dead men’s clothes. She was even wearing ceremonial paper ingot shoes on her feet. Some recognised her as the old woman who lived in the Swooners’ liaison office. As they reached the outskirts of the town the sun came out. The sky was blue, and there was not one cotton ball in the air.
The son led his mother inside the shack and stared at her. He saw now that she was a swooner like any other, and no longer had control over him. In fact, their roles seemed to have reversed. Were he to have called this woman his ‘mother’, his scalp would have split apart. She had nothing to do with him now. In the cool of the shack, he suddenly felt sure of himself and comfortable in the role he was about to take on. He was capable of change after all. Before today, he had always been playing a part that had been assigned to him, he’d had no choice in the matter. He was only ever his mother’s son, the Party’s son, the Motherland’s son. He was a son right down to his bones, always taking the supporting role. But now, as he stared at the swooner standing before him, he finally sensed that he was separate from her, an individual, although he was not sure who that individual was yet. All he knew was that he wasn’t a wily businessman, a smug clandestine leader, or the son of the dead rightist, the boy his schoolmates liked to kick about.