by Yan Lianke
My father accepted the cup and took a sip.
Then he took another.
Finally, he turned to the large uncovered barrel and peered inside. He saw that the reddish-yellow corpse oil from his mother—my grandmother—was dripping out of the leather tube. The flame was very loud, and it completely muffled the sound of the oil dripping out. Or maybe the oil wasn’t making any sound in the first place. Father looked again, took another sip of baijiu, then handed the cup back to the crematorium worker.
“Is corpse oil produced every time a body is cremated?”
“For that, you should go ask your brother-in-law.”
“And where does the oil go?”
“For that, you should also go ask your brother-in-law.”
Father didn’t have anything else to say.
He didn’t say anything else.
In the furnace room, apart from the sound of fire and—shortly after a body was inserted—the sound of bubbles bursting, there was also the sound of the crematorium workers sipping baijiu. My father stood in that furnace room, waiting for the spasms of nausea in his throat to subside, and then he walked out of the room. Outside, the entire world was covered in snow. From here, you could see the blue surface of the water in the reservoir. The parts of the reservoir that were not covered in snow appeared icy blue, while the snow on the water’s edge was tinged in green. On the shore, there was a border of ice. He simply stood there and watched. My father squatted down and retched, then proceeded toward the office of his brother-in-law—which is to say, my uncle. He opened the door, walked in, and stopped in front of the director’s yellow desk. He gazed at my one-point-eight-meter-tall uncle, the way an ant might gaze up at an elephant. He was like a blade of grass growing beneath a tall pagoda. After a moment of silence, my father told my uncle something so extraordinary that it was as if a moth had flown right into a mountain—as if it had flown right into the fire.
“Brother, I want to tell you something, but you mustn’t get angry.
“You really mustn’t get angry.
“Do you agree that it is because of karmic retribution that the heavens had me observe my brother-in-law cremating my own mother’s body and producing corpse oil from it?
“Is it true that corpse oil cannot but be excreted, and that you cannot but profit from it?
“Tell me, what do you do with all of the corpse oil you produce?
“I am your brother-in-law, so you must tell me the truth—where does all the corpse oil go?
“In that barrel, there is my mother’s flesh and blood, and her corpse oil. But where does the corpse oil go?”
Uncle’s eyes grew large with amazement. The scent of the peanuts and walnuts being roasted over the stove’s fire filled the room. The room was also filled with the scent of roasted garlic. The room was full of the warm scents of roasted nuts and garlic.
“Damn it, you went in there.
“You shouldn’t have gone in, yet you did.
“Damn it, you are my brother-in-law, so I’ll level with you. This oil is a financial resource, you know?
“Don’t stare at me like that. If you do, I may get angry.
“If you want to eat, then go ahead. The roasted garlic and nuts are delicious.
“You can sell the oil anywhere you want. You can sell it to Luoyang. You can sell it to Zhengzhou. Factories in the cities all need this kind of oil. They need it to make fertilizer. They need it to make rubber. They need it to make lubricant. This is high-quality industrial oil. In fact, it would probably even be excellent for human consumption. During the Three Years of Natural Disaster, it was not unusual for people to consume one another.”
My father stood there, and looked down at the garlic and nuts my uncle was roasting.
As my uncle ate, he looked back at my father. “Have some.”
Father’s entire throat began to spasm. “I don’t want to eat. For how much can you sell this barrel of corpse oil?”
“For two hundred eighty or three hundred yuan. Normally a barrel would sell for three hundred yuan.”
My father didn’t say anything else. My uncle also didn’t say anything else. My father reflected for a while. He seemed to be pondering for a long time, but, in fact, it was only the amount of time that it took my uncle to eat a peanut and a clove of garlic. Then, my father reached a decision. When he spoke, his voice was not particularly loud, but every syllable was clearly enunciated.
“Brother, given that corpse oil is produced every time there is a cremation, you should sell this oil to me. OK? I’ll pay three hundred yuan per barrel. This way you won’t need to pay to transport it to Luoyang or Zhengzhou. I’ll come regularly to haul the oil away. As long as you sell the oil to me, I’ll treat your sister well . . . As long as you don’t sell it to anyone else, I’ll be able to enjoy a good life with Xiaomin. We’ll get along so well that you’ll have no cause to worry at all. I’ll treat Shao Xiaomin as though she were my own sister . . . You needn’t concern yourself with what I’ll be using this oil for. I promise, however, that I won’t let anyone else know that when corpses are cremated they are not completely reduced to ash, and instead oil is secreted and taken elsewhere . . . You should sell it to me. I won’t underpay you—I won’t underpay you by a single cent. You don’t need to concern yourself with the question of where my money is coming from. Xiaomin and I have already decided what kind of business we want to pursue. As long as you agree, then starting with this barrel of my mother’s corpse oil, you can sell me all of your corpse oil. I will treat your sister as well as though she were my own, and you won’t need to worry about our family . . . If our business makes a profit, then not only will I pay you every cent I owe you for the oil, I’ll even repay you every cent I owe you for the three-room house you built us . . . You must trust me, Brother Dacheng. I’ll keep my word. Although I’m only one-point-five meters tall, my promises are in no way shorter than those of others. You must trust me this time, Brother Dacheng. You must sell me all of these barrels of corpse oil.
“Sell them to me. As your brother-in-law, I’m begging you.
“OK? If you were to sell them to others, you wouldn’t necessarily get three hundred yuan for every barrel.”
At that point, as my father was going on and on, the shouts of the Gaotian villagers could be heard outside.
“Li Tianbao, your mother has already been cremated, and yet you are still in there with your brother-in-law warming by the fire!
“Li Tianbao, damn you, we came out here in the cold to help you prepare your mother’s funeral, while you are just sitting in there with your brother-in-law warming by the fire!”
BOOK THREE
Geng 2, Part Two: Birds Build a Nest There
1. (21:51–22:00)
Heavens! . . . Gods! This is how things were. This is how my parents ended up opening the New World funerary shop in Gaotian. The shop sold wreaths, paper ornaments, and burial clothes. In short, the shop sold everything dead people might need. Then, my parents used the money to go up to that embankment to buy corpse oil. It was like cutting down a tree and then planting another one, only to repeat the process all over again day after day, year after year. This is how I grew up, becoming who I am today. When I was three or four, I would remove some paper blossoms from a wreath and pin them to my chest, and when I was five or six I would take an entire wreath and walk down the street with it. When I was seven or eight, I would wear a burial shroud as though it were a raincoat or a windbreaker, and when I was eleven or twelve I began going with my father to retrieve corpse oil from the crematorium.
I was fourteen on that night, on the sixth day of the sixth month. I left the store and proceeded alone to the crematorium on top of the embankment, to retrieve some corpse oil—as though I were a fourteen-year-old going alone to harvest, collect, and transport the autumn wheat. The crematorium was to the south of town. I walked along that solitary, sweltering road. It seemed as though my father, for some reason, always walked along the side of the road,
and never down the middle. Upon remembering how my father never walked down the middle of the road, I made a point of walking right down the middle. “The first time I went to inform on someone, I felt as though I was dreamwalking.” This is what my father had told me. “The first time I went to the crematorium to fetch the barrel full of my mother’s corpse oil, I felt as though I was dreamwalking.” It seemed that my father had told me this as well, and this also made me think of dreamwalking. When I reached the wheat field at the front of a neighboring village, I stood there for a while. I looked to see whether or not there were any dreamwalkers like Zhang Mutou out in the fields threshing wheat. I expected that there probably weren’t any, and, in fact, there weren’t. Instead, the dreamwalkers appeared as impassive as bricks. While dreamwalking, a dreamwalker could see everything he could possibly imagine, but was unable to see anything from Gaotian and the world outside his dream. He was unable to see a tree or a shrub, unless that tree or that shrub had also appeared in his dream.
The wheat field was in the shape of an oval. There were two dreamwalkers at one end of the field, and a third in the middle. They were harvesting wheat under the light of a lamp, calling out to one another as they worked. The sound of their voices drifted over from the field, like birds flying overhead. “Aiya, do you know? I hear that an entire family was dreamwalking, whereupon the father raped his daughter-in-law out in a field.” This remark was followed by hearty and obscene laughter—like an evil bird flying from one end of the field to the other, and then back with more lewd remarks. “If he raped his daughter-in-law, why didn’t he also rape his daughter?” After listening for a while longer, I found I could no longer hear them clearly. I was more than a dozen paces from the field, and in the middle of the field there was a haystack that blocked my line of sight. In the distance, a field resembled a resplendent lake. The wheat had already been harvested and carted away. The familiar smell of the soil was like a steamer basket that had just been removed from the pot. It was radiating steam and fragrance. The smell of sweat and hot water noisily drifted over.
I had to quickly get to the crematorium to haul away the corpse oil. Uncle himself had come over in a cart to tell me. If we didn’t haul it away overnight, Uncle would come over the next day and spit in Father’s face. “You don’t appreciate what I’ve done for all of you. Do you know for how much I can sell this oil in Luoyang? Five hundred yuan a barrel! Sometimes I can even sell it for six or seven hundred yuan a barrel. Now I’m selling it to you for only three hundred yuan a barrel, yet you don’t haul it away quickly enough.” This is how things were, but I didn’t know why. When Father initially bought the oil, he bought several dozen—or even several hundred—barrels, but then he didn’t want to buy any more. Uncle replied that if Father didn’t want any more, that was fine, because the price of the oil had risen to eight hundred yuan a barrel. It was quite possible the oil could even be used to power a tractor. Father purchased oil generated over more than two years and hauled it away. Father didn’t really want to buy any more, but Uncle said that it would be fine if he didn’t, because Uncle could then take the oil to a rubber plant in Zhengzhou and have the plant convert the oil into rubber, for which he could then receive nine hundred yuan a barrel. Father considered this, then decided to continue buying and hauling away the oil. In this way, he continued buying and hauling away the oil right up to the present. Father secretly asked around for the price of the oil. In the suburbs of the provincial capital, some people called this lubricating oil, and if they were using it to lubricate their machinery, they would pay nine hundred or a thousand yuan a barrel. A decade earlier, three hundred yuan a barrel had seemed like an astronomical price, but now when Uncle sold the oil to our family for only three hundred yuan, it was as if he were virtually giving it away. He threatened that he was going to take the oil to a small factory in the countryside in the south, where he said he could sell it for eleven hundred yuan a barrel—and sometimes he could even get twelve or thirteen hundred yuan. Everything can increase in price—even a fart. However, Uncle never raised the price on the oil he sold to our family. Instead, we continued buying it for three hundred yuan a barrel, and could have resold it for a thousand yuan a barrel. In this way, for each barrel that Uncle sold us, our family could have made a profit of seven hundred yuan—or even as much as eight hundred or a thousand yuan—per barrel. But my parents didn’t sell the oil. My parents were good people, which is why they wouldn’t sell it. That oil was from people’s bodies, and therefore couldn’t be sold. Instead, Father took the oil to a cave below the reservoir and stored it there, as though storing a small trickle of water in a vast lake. Year after year, month after month, it was as if he were melting silver dollars back into ingots. Each time he hauled a barrel of oil over from the crematorium, it was as if he were taking a pile of money from the field, and every time he stored another barrel of oil in that cave, it was as if he were melting a barrel of silver dollars into ingots.
On that night, I again needed to go to the crematorium to fetch some silver dollars that I could then melt back into ingots. I left that neighboring village’s field and followed the road toward the crematorium. It seemed as though once I left the town, I could reach the crematorium in less time than it takes to finish a bowl of rice. I saw the crematorium to the west of the embankment. It was surrounded by a brick wall, and inside there were two long buildings, and a two-story furnace building. This was the crematorium I was going to visit, and this visit would mark the beginning and the end of this night’s events. It would mark the beginning and the end of this story.
I entered the crematorium through a small door inside the main iron gate. The crematorium was as peaceful as a cemetery. Originally, it was a cemetery—a cemetery where thousands or even tens of thousands of corpses were buried. Thousands, tens of thousands, an entire world of corpses—were all brought here in hearses, only to be reduced to ashes and taken away in urns. The building on the left was a new office complex that had been built by the crematorium, including the manager’s office—this was my uncle’s two-room office. The unfortunate thing was that after my uncle became the general manager, he no longer attended to the day-to-day operations. His office had fewer rooms than an office normally would, and his desk was covered in so much dust that you could write directly on it. My uncle would come by once every few days to collect his salary, and each time he would write several characters on his desk: “Life,” “Death,” “Corpse,” “Money,” and so forth and so on. Sometimes he would write the character for “Flower,” or practice writing the phrases “Floral fragrance and hot days” or “The days are too hot.” Because he was the general manager, after he finished writing the characters, an assistant would come in and help him wipe his desk.
The assistant would wipe Uncle’s desk so that not a single speck of dust remained.
The office complex also included the accountant’s office, the revenue collection office, and the reception room. The building across the way included the crematorium workers’ dormitories and a utility room. There was also a canteen and a warehouse. The warehouse was used to store flour, rice, and funeral urns. When the crematorium was first built, living people would never enter this courtyard, but eventually they did begin to visit. When the crematorium was first constructed, everyone hated this site, but as time went on people gradually stopped hating it. When the crematorium was built, people wanted to smash my uncle’s skull with a brick, but as time went on they began addressing him as “Manager” and “Boss.” And if they wanted a relative’s ashes to be left particularly white and the bone residue to be especially brittle—such that they wouldn’t need to smash it with a hammer when transferring it into the urn—then they would address him as “Chief Director Shao.” Sometimes they would even invite him out for drinks or for a meal, and slip him a couple of cigarettes. Sometimes, the relatives of the dead would need to wait in line, and priority would be given to those who had a note from my uncle. If family members wanted their relative to be cr
emated first, they would slip Uncle some money—the same way that someone wanting to buy a train ticket to return home often needs to have an acquaintance or relative pass someone some money.
I was as familiar with the crematorium as I was with my own home. Our family ran the only funerary shop in the entire town. In the past, I would often go alone to the crematorium in the middle of the night to take care of some things. I would often go alone to the New World flower garden, where I would write for a while and then nap. I would read from Yan Lianke’s novels and then fall asleep, resting my head on a pack of gold foil. I would dream of a pile of treasure as tall as a mountain. While sleeping in the garden, I would dream that the village and even the entire town had been transformed into a garden, a public park. Flowers bloomed, there were birds flying, and a willow branch was floating on the water’s surface. Fish were leaping out of the water, as butterflies and dragonflies flitted around on both banks.
It was very poetic.
It was very amusing.
