Lenin's Kisses (29 page)

“You fucking sun, you made us kick off our shoes.”

“You fucking sun, we’re burning up here, and still didn’t manage to get a ticket.”

By dusk, it was the police who were standing in front of the theater selling tickets. The smart people who had bought fistfuls of three-yuan tickets had already resold them for five yuan each. Those who bought fistfuls of five-yuan tickets, meanwhile, were reselling them for seven or even nine yuan each.

By the next day, ticket prices had risen to between nine and thirteen yuan each.

A day later, ticket prices reached fifteen yuan. While it is true that fifteen yuan a ticket is expensive, the auditorium was nevertheless left with only a few vacant seats.

After the third performance, the focus of the county committee and county government was quietly redirected to the Liven special-skills troupe. They not only released a statement announcing the establishment of the Shuanghuai County Special-Skills Performance Troupe, but also confirmed the appointment of an honorary troupe director, an acting troupe director, a business deputy troupe director, and a publicity officer, together with people in charge of makeup, lights, supervision, and a host of other things that do not need mentioning here. The honorary troupe director was Chief Liu, and the acting troupe director was the director of the Balou tunes
opera troupe.

As for the disabled Liven performers, although they were a little nervous at the troupe’s debut, by the second performance they were more relaxed, and by the third they were already completely in their element. On stage they were no different from the people who chatted and worked in front of the village, but in view of their efforts the county issued each of them one hundred yuan in compensation. The villagers happily accepted the money, talking and laughing, hopping and jumping. Some of them took the money and immediately went to buy clothes for their parents, which they then entrusted to other people to take back to Liven for them. Some bought toys to take back to their own children. The young men and women bought cigarettes and alcohol.

Huaihua, meanwhile, bought some of the lipstick and face cream that young women in the city use. One night she didn’t return to sleep with the rest of the troupe, and when she appeared the next morning she claimed she had gotten lost and spent the entire night wandering around in circles until she eventually ran into Secretary Shi, who took her to the county government’s guest house. She described how nice the guest house was, and said that there was running water even when you didn’t need it. She also said that all these years she had wanted to marry someone in the city, a respectable wholer like Secretary Shi.

The other villagers laughed at her, and said, “Have you forgotten that you are merely a nin from Liven?”

She replied angrily, “
You’re
the nin!” She claimed she was actually growing taller, and that now she was already taller than her sisters. When the villagers measured her, it turned out that she was indeed a finger taller, and they said happily that Huaihua had begun growing just a few days after leaving Liven. If she started growing furiously, like corn during the growth season, in less than three months she could become a wholer. She continued growing until, a few days later, the performance troupe left the county seat.

The night before the troupe was scheduled to depart, Huaihua once again didn’t return to sleep in her own bed, and the next day she claimed that after the performance she had gone to stay at the house of a girlfriend she had just met. Other than Yuhua, no one had ever dared to even spit in her presence, and therefore none of the residents of Liven said anything, and no one could even think of what to say. In this way, the troupe arrived to perform at Jiudu.

The first night in Jiudu was carefully planned out. It would be held on a weekend and they wouldn’t sell tickets. Instead, Chief Liu would bring the county’s theatrical troupe to accompany the special-skills troupe into the city, where everyone would use the goodwill of friends and family and compete to see who could give away the most tickets and invite the most prominent guests. Therefore, Chief Liu invited Secretary Niu, while others invited friends from the newspaper, radio, and television industries. Because Secretary Niu, who was most directly concerned with Shuanghuai county, came to the theater, the leaders of the various offices in the district all came out as well.

Needless to say, everyone was awestruck after watching the performance, and applause rained down from the rafters. Secretary Niu applauded so hard after every act that his hands became red and swollen. Most important, the next day the district and city newspapers devoted half an acre of newsprint to cover the performance. The newspaper, radio, and television media all declared that each and every resident of Liven was one of the top artists in the world, and that the performance troupe would certainly provide an enormous boost to Shuanghuai’s economy, making it more vigorous than an eagle and more beautiful than a phoenix. As a result, the Liven performance troupe became a miraculous story, and news of it spread through the streets and alleys of the entire district. Even three-year-old toddlers knew that a disabled performance troupe had arrived in the city, and they all threw a tantrum in order to be allowed to go.

The schools canceled classes and went en masse to buy tickets and see the performance.

The factories implemented a system of rotating vacations so that each of their workers could take a day off and go watch.

The filial sons of parents who had been lying paralyzed in bed for many years carried their parents to the theater. Afterward, they returned home and complained to their parents, “You’ve been lying in bed half your lives—why haven’t you learned to embroider on a leaf? Why is it that you can’t even eat by yourselves?”

Parents with a deaf or mute child took them to watch, and afterward they had their children practice the Feeling-Words-and-Seeing-Color and Firecracker-on-the-Ear routines. As a result, the children’s eardrums ruptured and started bleeding. The newspapers immediately reported this, while also devoting several columns of newsprint to warning readers that although they were welcome to enjoy the troupe’s performances, they certainly shouldn’t force their own disabled parents and children to attempt similar feats.

The performance troupe was a huge sensation in Jiudu, and on the fourth day, when the troupe had its first official performance for which it charged admission, the tickets were priced at forty-nine yuan each, and more than a thousand tickets were sold in less than an hour. It was like the time several decades earlier when the entire county went to Liven in search of grain, and people immediately snatched up everything they could find.

The next day, ticket prices rose to seventy-nine yuan.

By the third performance, prices had risen to a hundred yuan per ticket.

Eventually, prices stabilized at around a hundred and eighty-five yuan for a premium seat, a hundred and sixty-five yuan for a second-tier set, and a hundred and forty-five for a third-tier seat, with the average price hovering around a hundred and sixty-five yuan. These prices vastly exceeded everyone’s expectations. On the black market, a one-hundred-and-eighty-five-yuan ticket could easily sell for two hundred and eighty-five yuan, while a two-hundred-and-five-yuan ticket could be resold for two hundred and sixty-five yuan. This was truly a case of a rising tide lifting all boats. The people in the city had gone mad, and it was as though everyone, adults and children alike, had suddenly gone quite mad. At the mere mention of the Shuanghuai County Special-Skills Performance Troupe, everyone would immediately throw down their rice bowls and chopsticks and start panting with excitement. Once it was reported that there was a one-legged performer who could cartwheel over a sea of fire, all the local boys started turning somersaults in the street with their backpacks, making drivers slam on the brakes. When people described how there was a paralyzed women who could embroider a leaf with an image of a bird or a cat, all the girls immediately began drawing pictures of chickens, cats, dragons, and phoenixes in their school textbooks.

Indeed, all of the city’s streets and alleys were quite crazed by the troupe’s performances. In the factories, there were many workers who for years hadn’t been given any work and therefore hadn’t been able to draw a salary, and who when the harvest season arrived wanted to return to the countryside to harvest their crops and earn enough to live on. But now they were swayed by the excitement of their neighbors, and acted as though they would have lived in vain if they were to pass up this opportunity. Therefore, they ground their teeth in anguish as they took from under their mattresses the money they had earned from collecting trash and selling recyclable paper and bottles, and then went to buy the cheapest tickets available to see the performance. There were invalids who had lain in bed for months without moving, constantly trying to calculate whether Western or Chinese medicine is cheaper, but who now took out their medicine money and went to buy a ticket to the performance, announcing that no matter how bad the illness and how good the medicine, it was not as important as their happiness. They said that as long as someone is in good spirits, all illnesses could be cured, and therefore they set aside everything and went to watch the performance.

Previously, the bus didn’t stop at the Chang’an theater, but now it changed its route so that it would stop right by the front door. When it did, the vehicle was completely packed with passengers, and consequently the end-of-month bonus awarded to the driver and the ticket seller was much higher than usual. The cars went insane, and the bicycles went insane. The entire area in front of the theater was full of bicycles belonging to people who had come to watch the performance. If someone couldn’t find room to park his bike, he would simply lift it up and hang it from a tree, a wall, or even a signpost. The attendant in charge of watching the bicycles discovered that he had run out of little bamboo receipts, and therefore cut up pieces of cardboard and affixed his fingerprint or signed his name, and proceeded to use these pieces of cardboard as receipts for people parking their bikes. Then he used rope to tie together all of the bicycles that were on the ground and hanging from trees and walls.

As the bicycles were going insane, so were the electrical poles. Previously, the city would cut off electricity before midnight, and during the latter half of the night the city would sink into darkness, but now night was as bright as day. Lightbulbs quickly burned out and had to be replaced. Because the troupe performed twice each night, the streetlights needed to illuminate the way for people leaving the theater.

Having arrived in such an insane land, the troupe, though it had originally planned to perform in the Chang’an theater for only a week, ended up performing there for twice that. When it finally moved on to the next theater, the manager of the Chang’-an theater became angry and threw a drinking glass at the stage, exclaiming,

“How have I wronged you? Why do you have to leave now?”

But given that the troupe had already signed a contract with the next theater, they had no choice but to depart.

To the troupe’s surprise, they discovered that theaters began competing among themselves for the right to host them, and it was said that a couple of theater managers even got into a fistfight over this. In the end, the troupe turned down theaters with air-conditioning, instead selecting ones equipped at most with electrical fans. This was because lower-quality theaters had comparatively more seats, with a capacity of up to one thousand five hundred and seventy-nine occupants, while the good theaters had a maximum capacity of only a thousand two hundred and one.

The Liven performance troupe’s time in Jiudu was insane, absolutely insane—as though a single-stem and single-branch tree from deep in the Balou mountains had suddenly entered the city and within days grew tall enough to scrape the sky. It was as if sickly yellow grass growing under the awnings of a Liven house were to enter the city and, in the blink of an eye, become a luxuriant green lawn with enormous red, yellow, green, and blue blossoms.

This was all simply incomprehensible. By the time Chief Liu returned from the district to the county seat, the performance troupe had already performed thirty-three times in twenty-one days. After arriving in the county seat, Chief Liu didn’t go home right away, but rather went directly to the county committee’s conference room to convene a meeting of the standing committee. The conference room was on the third floor of the county committee’s office building, and had an oval table and more than a dozen wooden chairs. There were several portraits of important figures hanging on the walls, together with an administrative map of the county. The walls were whitewashed, and the floor was made of rough cement. In this simple three-room meeting hall, the mid-morning sun was shining brightly in the sky while clouds were blocking the sunlight from spilling into the room. When Chief Liu opened the window, a refreshing breeze blew in, immediately cooling off the entire room. He had not napped, and instead during the entire hundred-
li
ride he had become increasingly excited by the success of the performance troupe. Now, however, he began to feel a little sleepy, so he removed his shoes, lay down on the meeting room table, and took a nap with his bare feet facing the window, his thunderous snores echoing throughout the room and shaking the maps hanging on the wall.

After a moment, the seven members of the standing committee arrived together.

Chief Liu knew that they had arrived, but he also knew that he was going to sleep a while longer, and therefore he made the standing committee wait for him in the conference room. Nearly an hour later, he was finally able to dispel his drowsiness. He woke up, rubbed his eyes, yawned, and stretched. He felt reinvigorated. Barefoot, he sat in a seat at the center of the conference table, so that everyone else had to sit on either side of him. As was his custom, before the meeting began he spent a while picking his toes. He was doing this not because his toes were swollen, but rather because the spaces between his toes itched. In front of guests who included the deputy secretary of the county committee and the deputy county leader of the standing committee, Chief Liu placidly picked his toes as everyone sat there silently.