(It’s very hard to draw the line between man and beast, the professional writer thinks to himself. What should the criteria be? A wolf will die to save her cubs, but a man will sell his mother for eight hundred yuan. A tiger will maim a weaker animal in its fight for food, but a man will go hungry until he’s sure that his family’s stomachs are full. You can’t draw any conclusions from this …)
His entire life had been bound up with his mother and the experiences he had shared with her. He had worked like a dog to keep them both alive, because if they were going to survive in this world, they would have to pay rent, water bills, gas bills, buy vast quantities of compulsory premium bonds and cope with the inflation brought about by the Open Door Policy. When he bought the art school’s electric furnace, he had no idea what the future had in store for him, or what talents he would prove to have. Now that he thought about it, he guessed that he had inherited his artistic sensibility from his mother. When he was a child, the old cabbage face would jump around the room like a monkey, humming ‘When Will My Prince Come Back?’ She knew all the popular songs from the 1930s, and passed on her love of music to her son. (That rightist had married her for her voice, and when he was run over on the street, his mind was filled with happy memories.) Although the son could no longer detect any traces of her past charms, he knew that the ordinary looking woman in front of him was the only living woman he’d had any contact with. It was she who had brought him up. This thought was particularly repugnant to him when he heard the piss fall from between her legs in the morning, and caught the smell of her warm urine. He had thought he could never escape the lifetime sentence of being a ‘son’, but just when he was about to give up hope, fate showed him a light.
Now at last this heavy old swooner’s body, which had consumed two deep-fried buns and a bowl of bean curd for breakfast, was finally going to join the ranks of the dead. He knew what remained to be done, but the suddenness of the events had knocked him sideways. He was no longer the cocksure underground Party secretary. He could tell this was real, he could even smell his own body odours on his mother’s skin. But there was a strange sense of theatre about the old woman dressed in burial clothes. His mother seemed at ease with the situation though; she thought she was in control, just as she had been in the office. She appeared to be watching her son’s movements with a remote control in her hand.
He observed her scuttling between the corpses like a cockroach, checking their hands and teeth, criticising their dress sense.
‘This woman’s still got her bracelet on,’ she said, kneeling down.
The son walked over, lifted the dead woman’s hand, inspected the bracelet and tugged it off her wrist.
‘I know this man. He worked in the pharmacy on Peace Road.’ The mother’s paper ingot shoes brushed against another cadaver’s head. She seemed excited. The son switched on the furnace briefly to check that the electricity was running.
‘Burn him first,’ she said, checking the pharmacist’s hands and teeth. ‘He knew I like dry turnips, the ones I soak and use to stuff dumplings with.’
The pharmacist was pushed into the furnace to the strains of ‘The Internationale’. (After his death, he had been granted posthumous membership of the Chinese Communist Party.) When the son had locked the steel door, the mother switched on the furnace again, and her eyes sparkled like a young girl full of dreams and curiosity. Before she had married the art teacher who was later condemned as a rightist, she had laughed when her grandmother announced that her father had just hurled himself from the top of a building. At the time, she ignored her grandmother’s tears, and instead remembered how the leader of the Central Committee had described the Shanghai capitalists who jumped off the top of tall buildings for fear of Communist persecution as ‘parachuters’. She thought it was a very funny and accurate description.
‘You monster,’ the grandmother shouted, and slapped her innocent little face. ‘Your father falls down and cracks his skull open and you just laugh about it.’
Her grandmother’s eyes flashed with anger, but all she could do was giggle. She had no idea yet what death was. But soon after she married the rightist, she realised that these calamities can happen, and that she would have to spend the rest of her days using all her skill and cunning just to try to stay alive. She never liked to dwell on her past, though. As long as she was kept fed, she thought she could muddle her way through this cruel world, unless one day she decided to bring her life to an end, of course. She accepted that hardship and suffering were inevitable. Besides, if life became too easy, the skills she had developed over the years would be of no use to her any longer, and there would be nothing left for her to do but die. If, however, it turned out that death was not a tragedy, but a new way of life, an escape, then it might begin to look quite attractive to her.
She sat in the armchair, combing her shiny black hair, waiting for the posthumous Party member to emerge from the oven. She wondered whether she would take her gold earrings in with her or not, when her time came.
The son pulled out the metal tray.
The pharmacist was immaculately white. He looked like he had just come out of a shower. A soft fragrance rose from his tidy white bones. The flesh had disappeared from his body. The mother was relieved to see that his horrible fat lips had disappeared too.
‘He is utterly transformed,’ she said, pressing the hot white bones with delight.
‘They’re nice and soft, aren’t they?’ Now his flesh had gone, the pharmacist had become ageless. Had one not seen him go into the oven, one might have taken him for a child, or a creature from some heavenly realm.
‘My god!’ the mother cried, beating her chest. ‘If only I had known before.’
The son could guess what his mother meant by these words. He presumed that she was contemplating ‘immortality’ — that word he heard so often at funeral receptions. She knew now that the posthumous Party member had achieved immortality.
‘He is immortal now,’ the son said. ‘Whether he goes to heaven or hell, he won’t be coming back here again. Especially considering he managed to get through life without committing any grave mistakes.’ He walked to the cassette player and turned off ‘The Internationale’, then put on an aria from Salammbô free of charge.
The joy of seeing the pharmacist shed his mortal coil put the mother and son in convivial mood. They moved their hands inside the pharmacist’s hot carcass and soaked up the mysterious wonder of death. The son noticed with embarrassment a scrap of steaming flesh stuck to the furnace door — a clumsy slip-up on his part — and quickly unhooked it with a metal rod.
‘What music did you play just then?’ the mother asked in a melodious tone.
‘Mussorgsky’s Salammbô,’ the son replied.
‘Musso — who?’ The mother obviously knew nothing about modern music.
‘It’s probably a little contemporary for your taste.’ The son was unwilling to give detailed responses to uninformed questions.