by Justin Hill
The top of the coffin had been staved in and the putrid smell was very strong. The half-excavated casket was dry and crumbly, like driftwood. Through a hole Da Shan’s mother could see something white and stringy.
Go and have a look, one of the men signalled with his hand, and Old Zhu’s wife didn’t know if she really wanted to look.
‘Go on,’ Da Shan laughed. ‘She’s still there.’
Old Zhu’s wife edged a little closer and saw that the white stuff was grass packing. Da Shan was with her–go and have a look one of the workers signalled and she leant forward. A few of them chuckled to themselves, sucked deeply on their cigarettes and Old Zhu’s wife laughed nervously for a moment and took another step forward.
‘Oh dear,’ she whispered as she peered straight down into the face of a dead woman. ‘Oh dear.’
The news that the workers had dug up a grave set the Space Rocket Factory into a flurry of activity. The older members of the community shut their doors and windows in case the spirits brought bad luck: the younger residents were more concerned about the smell. Smell or not, everyone put their shoes on and hurried down to have a look. Items of news were traded in exchange for cigarettes: she was a whore who’d died from a drugs overdose in 1950; it was the body of the video shop boy; the clothes dated from before Liberation; she had bound feet; the workers had stripped her of rings and gold.
Wah! The people muttered as they saw the small frail body. It looked like the body of a small woman. Her hair was bound around her head, she wore a long flowing gown of silk; her skin was dry; her long fingernails were black. The corpse’s hair had grown in the grave, there were whiskers on its chin, its jaws were open, its teeth were black. Both feet were bound, shorter than the man’s palm, they were perfect ‘Three Inch Lilies’.
The old woman under the tree spat in disgust. They didn’t approve of digging up dead bodies at all. Death and burial were supposed to be the end of the story. If you couldn’t find peace in the grave then where could you? It was a subject close to many of them, getting closer day by day.
Old Zhu’s wife went to tell Autumn Cloud the news while Da Shan stayed around for a bit longer then decided he ought to go and tell his father.
Old Zhu had caught a cold and was sitting in a scarf and a Russian hat, watching TV. The programme was about a man in the North East border with Russia who had spent all his life cutting down trees, and who now spent his retirement replanting the areas he’d cleared. He was sorry he’d done so much damage; but it had seemed right at the time, now he dreamt of the forests there were in his childhood. He wanted to replant as many trees as he’d cut down; he reckoned he had another 8,345 seedlings to go. He was getting old. He didn’t know if he would achieve his aim.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Da Shan cut in.
‘Heard what?’
‘They’ve found a dead body.’
Old Zhu was suspicious of things other people knew before he did, as if being told them made them less true. He shuffled, pulled an uncomfortable face and winced. ‘Really?’
Da Shan wanted to laugh at his father, but instead he opened the window and let the smell into the house. Old Zhu shivered when he smelt the putrid stench of the grave, but at least he stopped asking questions. Only a dead body could smell that bad.
Old Zhu stayed out at the graveside all morning. He watched the man from the Public Utilities Bureau arrive to collect the body. The man parked his car next to the building site, pushed through the onlookers and began to shout orders. He got a couple of the workers to help him lift the body out of the coffin and up through the crowd, to his car. People were pushing in for a closer look or pushing out trying to escape the smell, and when a black fingernail caught one girl on the hand she screamed and there was a sudden panic because she claimed the old woman’s hand had moved. Everyone stepped back, maybe she’d been cursed!
At first the man from the Public Utilities Bureau tried to get the body into the boot, but her feet were a little bit too long.
‘You could tie the boot down with string,’ someone suggested, but the man from the Public Utilities Bureau said that that wouldn’t do at all. They tried to put her across the back seat–but they had the same problem: the door wouldn’t close. At last they ended up putting the corpse into the front seat, with the seat reclined as far back as it would go. The man from the Public Utilities Bureau climbed into the driver’s seat and leant across the corpse to get the seat belt. He pulled it across the body and clicked it into place, ‘There we go!’ he said and started his car. The crowd all jostled around the car; he waved at them all to get out of the way, then pulled round onto the road and out of the factory.
Old Zhu watched the car go and shook his head. The face of the dead woman had looked familiar. It was impossible he knew, but still he had a feeling of recognition in him that he couldn’t dislocate. He shut his eyes and saw the corpse’s face: dried skin wrinkled and cracked, sunken eye sockets and leering teeth, and had a feeling that the dead woman had recognised him as well, even though its eyes had stayed shut.
The next day was colder than the first and the old ladies who sat under the trees said it was a curse for disturbing the dead. It wasn’t right to dig graves up like that; once a family put you in the earth there you should stay. A few of them, who’d been with the factory from the start, remembered when they’d started building the place it was full of old graves.
‘This was a south-facing hillside,’ one of them explained, ‘a very lucky place indeed!’
The others nodded. In spite of its faults the Space Rocket Factory had been good to them.
Old Zhu’s wife found out from a neighbour that Old Zhu had spent the whole morning in the cold. She was furious he’d gone to look at dead bodies in his condition, kept silent about the fact she’d gone to look as well. It was an unlucky thing to do, she snapped at her husband as he winced from his sore throat. What if the ghost of the dead woman came back to haunt him? He wasn’t strong enough to fight her off, was he! First having dead bodies in the wardrobe, and now this!
When Old Zhu’s cough didn’t go away she claimed it was the least he deserved and called a doctor as a punishment. The first one insisted they take Old Zhu down to the clinic and put him on a drip. Old Zhu’s wife refused: the clinic was too cold and draughty. The next was a short man with an open frank look who felt Old Zhu’s head and heart, looked at the colour of his tongue and then proscribed a course of traditional Chinese medicine, combined with a chest massage twice a day with Tiger Balm. Da Shan went to the medicine shop just outside the factory gate and gave them the prescription. He sat and had a fag while they opened all manner of wooden drawers and took out what they needed: powders, twigs, roots, lumps, dried shredded leaves. Each was weighed out in a daily amount, and then poured into a row of white paper bags that the pharmacist stapled shut.
‘How much?’
The man used an abacus and a piece of paper. ‘Thirteen yuan,’ he said.
Old Zhu’s wife insisted on boiling up the first course as soon as it arrived, even though the doctor’s instructions said ‘morning’ and ‘nights.’
‘It is morning,’ she snapped when Old Zhu said he shouldn’t be taking anything yet. ‘And how come you have the energy to argue if you’re so ill?’
She boiled the stuff for two hours and the smell it gave off got worse and worse, till Old Zhu curled his lip and refused to take it. It was the same stuff his mother used to give him when he was a child. It was a black-purple liquid that tasted worse than he remembered. He put the bowl down and winced.
‘Drink!’ his wife ordered, and refused to go away.
Old Zhu was worse than a child, she decided as she sat down and flicked through the Shaoyang Daily.
Old Zhu was sipping the last few drops, making sure he didn’t drink the lumps at the bottom when his wife sat up. ‘Wah!’ she exclaimed, and leant forward to read again.
‘What is it?’ Old Zhu asked, but she didn’t respond until she’d r
ead the whole article. ‘It’s about the body they found,’ she said. ‘She was buried a hundred years ago.’
Old Zhu raised his eyebrows. ‘What happened to it?’
‘They burnt it.’
‘Didn’t they find anything on her?’
‘Yes, it says she was from the landlord class,’ Old Zhu’s wife read, scanning the article and picking out snippets that might interest Old Zhu. ‘She had no family still living in the area, the body was well preserved, dry conditions of the soil. That’s it.’
Old Zhu nodded then let out a long sigh that turned into a cough. The feeling of recognition stayed with him. The Zhu family had once had a graveyard on a hill outside Shaoyang, he remembered. Maybe it was a Zhu family woman.
As the days went by Old Zhu tried to pin down every body he could remember being accidentally dug up when they’d built the factory. When he slept the faces haunted him, and when he was awake he became more and more convinced that Shaoyang Number Two Space Rocket Factory had been built on a Zhu Family graveyard. All the bad things that had happened were because his ancestors had cursed him. All those years in the ‘cow shed’ were part of his punishment. The man who’d shared the cow shed with them in the winter of 1967 hanged himself because the ghosts were angry. Even the fact Old Zhu only had a single son was a curse: he’d been given just enough to ensure the Zhu bloodline would not die out and no more.
Old Zhu fretted. He thought about the man in the cow shed and bit his fingernails. He and Party Secretary Li had woken and found him swinging from his belt. He was a cadre from another work unit. They didn’t even know his name. But what was strange was that Party Secretary Li had mentioned the man a few weeks before his death. Maybe it was a warning. Maybe this was a sign. Even when he was asleep his face was tight and nervous. Old Zhu’s wife sat over him and thought he looked in pain.
Illnesses came in all varieties, but all after each man’s nature the doctor had said. This illness didn’t seem to be in Old Zhu’s nature at all: it was vicious and malevolent. Imagine all the disease and germs bottled up in that coffin for all those years. It was a wonder that half the factory hadn’t been wiped out.
‘Have you finished your medicine?’ Old Zhu’s wife demanded that evening as Old Zhu coughed and he held up the empty bowl for her to see. ‘Hmm,’ she said and then left him to his illness.
Old Zhu dozed and dreamt of Party Secretary Li hanging still in the room, the ink drying on the wall. Party Secretary Li opened his eyes and smiled. ‘It’s easy,’ he said. ‘We could have done it a long time ago. It could have happened to us any time.’ Old Zhu didn’t understand and Party Secretary Li explained, but the explanation made no sense. Old Zhu turned and saw the old woman in her grave. She got up and pulled the death mask off and he saw it was his wife in elaborate make-up. ‘It’s easy to let go,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been here waiting. For you.’ ‘I’ve just got to check on my tomatoes,’ Old Zhu had told them and then he’d woken up.
The next morning there was a grey hammered sky and Old Zhu lay in bed strangely quiet. He didn’t even complain when his wife came to give him his medicine. He lay and thought about Autumn Cloud, about his wife, what they’d all been through in the last forty years. ‘You know,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘all these years–you’ve been a good wife.’
Old Zhu’s wife looked at him in alarm. She saw the old man’s tired face and thought of the young Communist Party visionary she’d fallen in love with all those years before. He didn’t complain when she made him drink the medicine and she felt a rush of panic: where’s Da Shan?
‘He’s stopped complaining,’ she said. ‘I’m worried.’
Da Shan went in to see his father. Old Zhu’s skin sagged, his eyes had lost their sparkle. He saw Da Shan let out a long, deep breath. He looked at his fingers and shook his head, lay silent for a long time, thinking about what he had to say.
‘Nineteen twenty-four,’ he said at last. ‘Nineteen twenty-four was the year I was born.’
Da Shan gave half a smile.
‘In a village near Dongkou. The youngest of my mother’s three children. She died when I was five. I never saw my father.’ Old Zhu coughed. ‘He smoked opium. Even when he was there he was somewhere else. Each year there was less than before. Those were bad years. Bad years.’
Da Shan adjusted the pillow behind his father’s back and Old Zhu forced a smile. ‘Too many cigarettes,’ he said. Da Shan watched his father as he recovered, drew in a clear breath. ‘That’s what it was like before liberation. We changed all that. Whatever we got wrong, China is a better place.’ Old Zhu nodded to himself. His mind kept on wandering. ‘Those girls we took in, they were in a terrible state. Terrible. Some of them were only girls.’ Da Shan held his father’s hand and absent-mindedly stroked a vein on the back of his father’s palm. ‘We fed them and cured them. Gave them skills, found them husbands. And one of them bit me!’
Old Zhu dozed for a while and Da Shan sat by his bed listening to his rattling breath. Old Zhu was sleeping and Da Shan could hear his mother in the kitchen, chopping. He walked to the window and looked out. The factory hadn’t even outlasted its founders. They’d lived to see it grow and decay and finally close. He let out a deep breath and Old Zhu stirred. There was a rustle of bed sheets and then the old man croaked, ‘Water!’
When Da Shan brought him his cup of tea Old Zhu slurped and coughed, put the cup down on the bedside table. He shut his eyes and breathed heavily, Da Shan sitting by the bed, just in case.
At six o’clock Old Zhu’s wife stood in the dining room and shouted, ‘Dinner!’
Da Shan didn’t move.
Old Zhu’s wife stood in the doorway. ‘Come on!’ she snapped. ‘If you’re not careful the food’ll get bored and walk away!’
Old Zhu patted his son’s hand as if to say, go on, I’ll still be here when you come back.
The winds got more and more ferocious the deeper they went into autumn. Old Zhu sipped his medicine every morning and night and refused to get better. Some days he started telling Da Shan about the Zhu Family Clan, but then he’d get confused and sit scowling out of the window. Other days he refused to understand why he had to stay in bed. One night he got up and was stumbling towards the door when his wife saw him, woke up and had to drag him back to bed.
The next morning he was unapologetic. ‘If I wasn’t drinking that stuff I’d be fine,’ he told his wife, and she silenced him by tilting the bowl up again and forcing him to drink, making him pull a sour face.
Over the next week Old Zhu’s wife kept a close eye on her patient. He wanted to go and check on his chrysanthemum but she wouldn’t let him out of bed for more than a few minutes, and he certainly was not allowed to go out onto the balcony. One night he wouldn’t let her sleep till she had promised to go and sweep up all the leaves for him. She ignored him for as long as she could then turned and told him to go to sleep.
‘But all the leaves,’ he said and broke into another coughing fit. His chest sounded raw and painful, full of phlegm and bile. She sat up, put her hand on his arm to reassure him, rubbed his back with the other.
‘OK, I’ll burn the leaves,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Promise?’ he managed to wheeze.
‘Promise.’
The next morning Old Zhu’s wife put on a padded great coat and went down to the allotment while his medicine boiled. The square of earth was buried under a carpet of brown rustling leaves: it seemed all the leaves in Shaoyang came here to shelter from the wind. Old Zhu’s wife went back and got his rake, then began to rake them all into a pile. So many leaves, she half thought, half reprimanded them, if only you’d clung on I wouldn’t be here sweeping you up. If you’d held on then you’d still be in the trees!
The leaves rustled in reply, but Old Zhu’s wife wasn’t listening. She was thinking about the medicine that was still on the cooker, on a low blue flame.
When the smell of burning leaves drifted up to Old Zhu in his bed he slept more peace
fully, and dreamt again of Party Secretary Li and the dead old woman they’d dug up. He dreamt that the ghosts, so many ghosts, of the Space Rocket Factory all came to welcome him to the Yellow Halls of the Dead, but Old Zhu kept on telling them he had some leaves to burn, and they all smiled:
We know you won’t burn leaves again, they said, and Old Zhu insisted that he would. They were his leaves.
Old Zhu took his food in bed, his wife sitting with him and feeding him like he was a child. ‘Come on!’ she told him, ‘open your mouth properly!’
Da Shan poked his head around the door. ‘I’m just going out,’ he said. ‘Is there anything I can get you?’
‘Some decent food!’ Old Zhu snapped and his wife thrust a sliver of dofu in to shut him up.
‘No?’
‘No,’ she said.
Da Shan picked up his bag and walked down through the factory to the file of taxis. The first driver was asleep so Da Shan knocked on the window.
‘Yeah?’
‘To the Post Office.’
They pulled out into the road and turned left, cruised alongside the river.
‘Haven’t I met you before?’ the taxi driver asked, yawning.
‘Probably.’
‘You’re a businessman, right?’
Da Shan smiled. ‘Yeah.’
‘You used to work in Shenzhen, didn’t you. I remember your mother. I knew it was you!’ the driver slapped his steering wheel as he swung the car across a T-junction. ‘So are you here for good?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You know what,’ the driver grinned, ‘I’ve just come back from Shanghai. So beautiful and modern, not like here.’
The lights at the cross-roads were red. The taxi lurched to a stop. ‘Cigarette?’
‘Thanks.’
They smoked and exhaled out of the window while they waited for the lights to change. Da Shan looked out of the window at the row of deaf shoe-shine men sitting in the cold. They spoke to each other with their hands, tapped each other on the back when they wanted to say something. Da Shan took a drag, and exhaled; watched a middle-aged woman come and sit down to have her red high heels polished. The man at her feet signed something to the man next to him and they both laughed: a strange sound, like croaking frogs.
