by Yan Lianke
“Let me go out and take a look, and we’ll talk more later.” Mother said this as she rolled over in the bed. Father, who had been sitting next to the fire, stood up, and came over to the bed to caress my face. “Son, for generations, our family has had only one son per generation, and you should similarly also give me a son. That way there will be no karmic retribution, and I, Li Tianbao, will not have let anyone down.”
Then he left. He went outside. In the blizzard, the world was so still that not even a single person’s shadow could be seen, but on the wall in front of the entrance to our house, someone had posted a sheet of paper on which was written, in black characters, “Joyous news! Li Tianbao’s mother has died. Let’s see whether or not she will be cremated. Joyous news! Li Tianbao’s mother has died. Let’s see whether or not she will be cremated.” This announcement was written in black characters on a sheet of white paper. The paper had straight edges, but the characters were twisted and slanted. The announcement was posted in the entrance to my family’s home. It was posted on electrical poles. It was posted on the poplar and pagoda trees by the side of the road. After my father saw five or six of these announcements, he stood in front of an empty eatery, facing the silent snow. Then he turned and walked back.
On his way home, Father angrily kicked at the snow with every step. He was short and thin, and when the snow came up only to other people’s knees, it came up to his thighs. And when the snow came up to other people’s thighs, it came up to his waist. But he kicked the snow like a horse kicking up dust. In this way, he returned home, and on his way back, he began screaming,
“My wife has given birth to a son!”
“My wife has given birth to a son!”
He started out announcing the joyous news of the birth of his son, but by the time he reached my mother’s bedside, he was talking about something else.
“Let’s cremate her. Otherwise, everyone will either hate me, or hate your brother.
“Let’s cremate her. That way, we can stuff people’s mouths and eyes with her ashes.”
They decided to have my grandmother cremated. On the third day, it stopped snowing in the morning, and when the sun came up and everyone in Gaotian was out sweeping the snow, my father didn’t ask anyone to help him lift my grandmother’s corpse, nor did he ask anyone to lend him a cart to transport it. He also didn’t arrange for the crematorium’s hearse to drive to our family’s house. Instead, wearing a white filial cap and white shoes, he walked out of the house while carrying his mother—my grandmother—in her burial shroud. It was as if he were placing a wager with this world. It was as if he were fighting with the gaze of everyone in Gaotian. Father’s white filial cap was made from calico, and was as white and delicate as snow. The burial shroud that my mother prepared for my grandmother was made from black silk that produced a black glow, and the golden lining around the collar and the sleeves glistened in the sunlight. The stitching was expertly done—indescribably so. No one had anticipated that my father would be so strong, or so bold. At that time, some people were sweeping snow from their entranceways, while others were out chatting in the streets that had just been swept clean. Breakfast and lunch were being served in the canteen. My father carried my grandmother’s corpse past a crowded area, where many villagers and townspeople were watching.
Step-by-step, as if protesting.
Step-by-step, as though taking a vow.
Everyone stared in surprise. Everyone stared in shock.
The audience gasped in astonishment, then erupted into shouts as everyone’s gaze was suddenly riveted on Grandma Mao Zhi, standing up onstage. After all, even at 109 years old, she was still a living person who had just been cracking walnuts, but now they found her wearing burial clothing like a dead person!
The burial garb was made of high-quality black satin with subtle sparkles that shimmered under the stage lights.
In this way, the blackness appeared to emit a white light, the redness emitted a purplish light, and the yellowness had a golden bronze luster. This resplendent burial outfit shocked the thousands of people in the audience into silence, and drew all of their eyes up to what was occurring onstage.
I was reminded of a passage from Kissing Lenin. I don’t know whether it is because of Kissing Lenin that the events in our town subsequently came to pass, or whether it was instead on account of the events that happened in our town that Kissing Lenin came to be written. I don’t know whether it was Yan Lianke’s novel that foretold this night’s events in our town, or whether it was this night’s events that helped conceive a future Yan Lianke.
My father carried Grandmother, dressed in her burial shroud, from that area that was most crowded. The villagers stared in surprise. They all stared in shock. The brooms they were using to sweep the snow paused, as did their shovels. Their mouths, which were in the middle of exchanging gossip, paused. Their faces also paused in the bitter cold. Everyone watched quietly as my father walked over. They watched in deathly silence as this short man with a round face walked over carrying his mother’s corpse on his back. He cut across the snow-covered ground. The snow had stopped falling and the sky had cleared, but between the sky and the earth there wasn’t a single particle of dust. The snow-covered areas were white, and the areas that had been swept clean were the color of red earth. Meanwhile, my grandmother’s body, which my father was carrying, was dressed from head to toe in shiny black fabric. The weather should have warmed once the sky cleared and the sun came out. However, because of my father and my grandmother, the town remained as bitterly cold as the middle of a winter night. It was as cold as a patch of uninhabited wilderness. The ground had frozen and cracked. People’s hearts had frozen and cracked. Everyone’s heart had cracked into deep fissures. Those announcements written on paper were posted on people’s bodies and on tree trunks: “Joyous news! Li Tianbao’s mother has died. Let’s see whether or not she will be cremated.” This was meant to be a very ordinary, playful remark. Father proceeded with Grandmother’s corpse on his back and waded through that mortal realm. He cut across it, and jostled through it. Slowly. Bitter cold. Iron nails. It was as if he were shooting through a frozen forest. In the process, he knocked off all of the trees’ frozen branches. He broke them off. He chopped down all of the frozen tree trunks. The entire world was filled with the sound of my father breaking off frozen branches. The world was filled with the sound of my father breaking off other people’s gazes.
No one had any inkling that he possessed such strength.
No one had any inkling that he was strong enough to suppress the rotation of Gaotian’s heaven and earth. Someone watching him from behind opened his mouth.
“Li Tianbao, what are you doing?
“Li Tianbao, what are you doing? Are you trying to put on a display of strength for the other villagers and townspeople? It’s as if your mother’s death was the villagers’ and the townspeople’s doing.”
My father came to a halt.
His voice was as loud as thunder.
“I’ve never revealed anyone’s secrets, because I’ve never revealed anyone’s secrets!
“Whether or not the villagers and the townspeople are cremated or burned in the open isn’t any of my business. It’s simply not any of my business.”
Then he proceeded forward again.
He showed everyone the shadow of my grandmother’s corpse, as though he were holding a black cloth in front of people’s eyes. As a result, no one was able to see what was really going on. The onlookers had no choice but to pursue him, shouting loudly. “What are you suffering from? What are you suffering from? Your mother died, but we are all from the same street in the same village. Therefore, if you had asked any of us to come help, we obviously would have been happy to do so.”
Father once again came to a halt. He turned around, and in the process he reoriented the corpse he was carrying on his shoulders, such that my grandmother’s face and eyes were now oriented toward the villagers.
“I haven’t revealed anyo
ne’s secrets. In this village and this town, it is really of no concern to me who is cremated and who is torched by my brother-in-law.
“My mother has died, so I am taking her to be cremated. You must believe this.
“I’m taking my mother to be cremated. You must believe this.”
Father spoke abjectly and magnanimously, as though retrieving from his pocket something that others had lost, and returning it to them. Or as if there were something he himself had lost and was now retrieving from someone else’s pocket. He finished speaking and then, still carrying my grandmother’s corpse, he walked away. He was a small, thin simian figure, carrying the corpse of a figure who had lived for sixty years, and had maintained close relations with the villagers and the townspeople for more than forty. This new development disquieted the villagers and the townspeople, making them feel that they had let him down. They also felt that they had let down my grandmother, and the entire Li family. Therefore, Zhang Mutou followed my father. Wang Dayou brought out a cart from his house, and followed him as well. The cart had bedding, sheets, and a thick pile of straw. Eventually, more than a dozen people, both noisily and quietly, lowered my grandmother from my father’s shoulders. Then, following custom, they covered her face with a white cloth. They purchased some fireworks, wreaths, and spirit money from street-side shops, then lit the fireworks and scattered the spirit money along the street as though it were snow. In this bitterly cold frenzy, they transferred my grandmother’s body to the crematorium.
A celebratory event unfolded against the backdrop of my grandmother’s cremation.
The crematorium was located two li from town, and to reach it you had to follow the road directly south, and then climb a hundred-meter-tall hill. From the western side of the reservoir embankment, you could see a red courtyard wall. Inside the courtyard there were two rows of houses and a two-story building. There was also a tall exhaust pipe extending through the building’s roof. This was why all of the villagers and townspeople—not to mention half of the residents of the county—hated the crematorium. At the time, the crematorium’s farewell hall was simply a three-room house below the two-story building, with the words FAREWELL HALL written on the wall in black paint. That day, there were no trees or flowers, and instead there was only the crematorium’s hearse parked in the snow. Several workers were gossiping while they swept the snow. My uncle was in his office sitting by a stove on which he was roasting peanuts, walnuts, and cloves of garlic. The smell of roasted garlic filled the crematorium as though several bottles of liquor had been spilled in the courtyard.
They brought my grandmother’s body to the entrance of the crematorium. Then they lit some firecrackers, and the sound of the explosions alerted the people inside that someone had died and that they should begin preparing for the cremation. When my uncle emerged, he saw my father wearing a filial cap and standing next to the hearse. Then he looked around for the noisy crowd of villagers who normally form a funeral procession and accompany a corpse to the crematorium, but instead all he saw was my father with my grandmother’s corpse. There were also a handful of villagers and a large wreath. Apart from this, all he saw was white snow, a northerly wind, and a solitary mountain ridge, together with the desolate and idle crematorium.
“What’s going on?”
“Xiaomin gave birth, and my mother died.”
My uncle fell silent. He summoned my father over to his office, then snorted and proceeded to say a multitude of things.
“Li Tianbao, you should have told me that my sister was going to give birth.
“Li Tianbao, look at how shabby and miserable you are. You should come work here. I’ll offer you our highest salary in return for doing nothing, as long as you take good care of my sister.
“Li Tianbao, your mother died, but you didn’t notify the crematorium. I would have sent a hearse to fetch your mother’s body, its horn blaring to announce the death. I would have let everyone know that I, Shao Dacheng, was following the new customs and using cremation in order to help conserve land, without giving any preferential treatment to friends and relatives.
“Li Tianbao, remembering that we are relatives, you have voluntarily brought over your mother’s corpse in the snow. After the cremation, I’ll arrange for the hearse to return her remains. As for the cost of the funeral arrangements, I’ll take care of them. But you must follow the relevant regulations. Even if you don’t care about saving face, I—as your brother-in-law—certainly do, and I can’t permit people to say that I, Shao Dacheng, knew about a death in my sister’s family, and didn’t handle the funeral arrangements.”
After all these things were said, my father simply stared at his brother-in-law—my uncle—without saying a word. After my father left the room, my uncle called out to him and said something truly scathing.
“Li Tianbao, damn you, you can’t even produce a fart on your own.”
After this, my father should have said something in response, but instead he merely listened and silently came to a stop. When he saw that my uncle wasn’t going to say anything else, my father continued walking out of the office, and closed the door behind him. He then proceeded outside and looked at the people standing in the entranceway. He looked at Zhang Mutou, Wang Dayou, Uncle Shu, and Uncle Wang, who were all waiting in the entranceway, and he laughed coldly, and said, “My brother-in-law has asked me to come serve as a foreman at this crematorium, and he promised to give me a very high monthly salary. But how can I possibly engage in cremating people? Even if I were so poor that I was starving to death, I still wouldn’t do this.”
No one said a word, and instead the villagers gazed at Father’s face.
They all kept their eyes fixed on Father’s face.
What followed was something that every villager had experienced, and something that had already occurred in many families. Without saying a word, Father transferred the corpse to the cart. Then, still without saying a word, he pushed the cart from the farewell hall into the furnace room. Without saying a word, he had everyone wait in the hall for the cremation—as though waiting for something that would come sooner or later. Because everyone was there to help my father, my uncle handed out cigarettes to all the visitors, and because they were cremating my grandmother, my uncle let the cremation go on for longer than usual, so that the body would be burned more thoroughly than usual. People stood in the hall smoking cigarettes while waiting for my grandmother’s ashes, as though waiting for some late-ripening autumn crops. They brought over a wreath someone had left behind and lit it on fire, then huddled around for warmth while chatting with one another. Not having anything else to do, my father staggered over to the furnace.
When he reached the furnace, he stared in surprise.
The room with the furnace was located in a two-story-high building that was not divided into separate floors. The rust-covered furnace was sitting at an angle in the middle of the room, like an enormous metal pail suspended in midair, and appeared very rustic and awkward. It was said that this furnace had been used during the Great Leap Forward, in the forty-seventh year of the Republic, after which it had been sent to a factory. After that, it was sent to a recycling station in the city, and from there ended up in my uncle’s possession. After having been repaired and adjusted, it became the furnace for the Gaotian crematorium. This furnace, moreover, had a special capability, which is that it could first excrete oil before cremating the corpse. Its high-temperature iron crucible was covered in an assortment of screws and bolts, like stones scattered across a loess plateau, but only the doors to the retort and to the slag hole could be opened. There was also a black exhaust pipe extending from the middle of the furnace and through the roof. There was a bare redbrick wall, and the ceiling was black with soot. Next to the brick wall, there was a three-legged table, on which were scattered some porcelain cups and several bottles of baijiu. On the floor, there was a trash can and piles of dust. Normally, this room was off-limits to visitors, but after my father married my mother he was allowed t
o enter. Normally, when people did enter they would merely stand there, but because my father was Shao Dacheng’s brother-in-law, he was permitted to go in and look around.
He wandered until he was standing behind the furnace, where he stared intently at a thin metal pipe that extended out from the middle of the furnace. The pipe was connected to a meter-long leather tube, which led to a large metal barrel beside the wall. A stream of brown oil, as thin as a chopstick, was pouring out of the tube and into the barrel. The room was very warm, while outside the ground was covered in white snow and it was so bitterly cold that the trees and the earth had cracked. In this room, however, it was so hot that even if you were wearing just a shirt and unlined pants, the heat was still almost unbearable. There were two crematorium workers, both of whom were in their thirties. They had short hair and red faces, and their eyes were bloodshot from having stared into the fire for so many years. They also drank like fish. Each time they cremated a corpse, they would drink several shots of baijiu. As they were drinking and eating peanuts, my father stood next to that tube with warm liquid pouring out, and stared.
“What’s this?”
“It’s corpse oil.”
“What is corpse oil?”
“When you cremate a corpse, you inevitably end up with corpse oil. When you cook meat at home, don’t you find that the meat generates oil?”
They didn’t say anything else.
My father realized that this was human oil.
First the furnace was heated to an optimal temperature for extracting oil, then it was raised to a high heat in order to cremate the corpse.
Realizing that the liquid dripping out of the tube in front of him was actually oil from my grandmother’s corpse, he suddenly felt nauseated. He felt as though countless snakes were climbing up his legs and writhing around his chest and back, seeking an opening to enter his body. Then, he felt as though they were crawling up to his head and into his brain, where they proceeded to rest happily. He retched several times, to the point that he wanted to reach his hand down his throat and pull out several handfuls of his own intestines. Next to him, the furnace was so hot that soon he was covered in sweat, as the snakes continued to crawl happily over his head and body. Sometimes there would be only one snake, but at other times there were ten or more, and as they slithered around it also felt as though there were countless bugs crawling all over his body and biting him. The elder of the two crematorium workers brought over half a cup of baijiu. “I told you not to enter, but you simply had to come in and take a look . . . Quick, have a sip. Have a sip, and you’ll feel better.”
