Lenin's Kisses (58 page)

It appeared that the wholers had organized everything very thoroughly. Along the wide cement path leading down the mountain, under the white sunlight, it was as if there was a layer of smoke and dust, and everything was bright and pristine, without a soul in sight. The tourists who had come up the mountain the previous day had all gone back home, and now the weather was so hot that no one seemed to have any interest in visiting. Or perhaps the people who had come up the day before had all been gathered and tricked into returning home, while the people who now wanted to come up were being blocked at the base of the mountain. Whatever the reason, the mountain ridge was extraordinarily quiet, and apart from those seven or eight wholers, there was no one around.

Through the window, One-Legged Monkey could see the pines and cypresses that surrounded the memorial hall on all sides, while the chestnut and locust trees next to the gorge were all green and budding in the heat. From this greenery, the cicadas also quietly emerged, and they sat on tree branches and leaves crying a torrent. In the blink of an eye, the wild grass and brambles on the mountain slope had become densely overgrown, and within that greenery there were countless grasshoppers and other insects flying about. All of the vegetation on the mountain was green and blooming.

As the weather grew warmer, the villagers locked in the memorial hall felt even more suffocated and oppressed, as though they were indeed locked inside a bamboo steamer. One-Legged Monkey gazed out of this window for a while, and then moved the box and chairs over to a different window and peered out, confirming that they were indeed locked inside the memorial hall as though it were a steamer. This figurative steamer, furthermore, was suspended in midair, such that if you were to try to leave through the window you still wouldn’t be able to get down. The windows in back and on either side of the building all faced out over a cliff, and were positioned several dozen feet
above the ground. The window in front was slightly lower, but even it was as high as a typical second-story window. In front of the kowtow steps, on the other hand, the window above the door was low enough that you could push it open with your shoulder and crawl in or out. But there were two young sentries watching the door, each with a three-foot-long club he was prepared to use if the need arose.

It was impossible to escape through the windows. Not even a wholer would dare jump from them, much less one of Liven’s disabled villagers. And, furthermore, how could they go down the mountain while in plain sight of the people outside?

When One-Legged Monkey climbed down from the window, everyone gazed up at him expectantly. His face was covered in dust, as though he had just walked into a wall.

They asked, “Is there any hope?”

He said, “Not a trace.”

They immediately lost their last remaining hopes of escape. Instead, they opened several windows to air out the memorial hall. The breeze brought in the smell of the mountain vegetation, and they could peacefully sit or lie down in their respective rooms. Time inched forward like a horse or an ox trudging through tall grass, and when the sun finally passed its zenith, there was a shout from outside the memorial hall door:

“Hey, are you hungry in there?
. . .
Are you thirsty in there?

“
. . .
If you are hungry and thirsty, just pass us the money under the door, and we’ll send you in some soup and food through the window.”

This shout entered the memorial hall, where it reverberated loudly. But the villagers didn’t respond, and instead merely let the sound fade on its own. Once the hall was silent again, the villagers’ hunger and thirst became even more acute, as though they had been awakened from a deep sleep. They felt as though there were herds of animals galloping through their stomachs. In this way the day passed, and eventually dusk was about to fall.

At that point, however, there was a thump on the memorial hall window. People emerged from their side rooms to take a look, and then returned and reported that all of the windows had been nailed shut. They reported this as though they had known all along that something like this would happen. It was as if they felt that, since they were all disabled and couldn’t climb out even if the windows had been within reach, they might as well have the windows nailed shut. Therefore, no one paid attention to the villager who was speaking, and instead they all focused on the sound of hammering on the windows. They kept sitting or lying silently where they had been, trying to use silence to suppress their hunger and thirst. It was as if they were trying to use a mosquito to control a fire that kept burning ever hotter.

The hammering sound at the windows echoed like thunder inside everyone’s heart. With each thud, the villagers’ hearts would pound, and as the sun traversed the hundreds of
li
of sky from late afternoon to evening, they continued to endure this incessant pounding.

As the sun set, everyone’s hunger and thirst once again erupted with a vengeance. Some people had been sleeping, and at this point they woke up in a daze. The sunlight streaming in through the window had shifted from blazing white to bright yellow, and then again to blood red. The sun had moved from the window in the front of the memorial hall to the window over Lenin’s portrait and crystal coffin, and then on to the window in the back of the memorial hall. It appeared as though there were a sheet of red silk over each pane of glass. From inside the room, you could see the cover that had been nailed over the windows, like a little cap. The people outside were all tall wholers, and despite the steep cliffs and gullies below the windows, they had still been able to easily nail the covers over them.

Grandma Mao Zhi hadn’t lain down this entire time, and merely sat there staring stupidly at the door. Through it she could see the crystal coffin in the center of the main hall, together with the white cloth draped across the coffin, on which ten or twenty people had left their fingerprints affirming their support of withdrawing from society. No one had any idea what Grandma Mao Zhi was thinking as she sat there. When the sun went down, she finally turned away from the coffin and gazed instead at her four granddaughters: Tonghua, Huaihua, Yuhua, and Mothlet. Then, she looked at Paraplegic Woman, who was lying across from her. Speaking half to them and half to herself, she asked,

“Are you hungry?”

They all looked at her.

“If you have money, then go buy something,” she said. “It won’t do for everyone to starve to death.”

“It’s almost nighttime,” Paraplegic Woman said. “Maybe tomorrow they will open the doors for us.”

Grandma Mao Zhi went into another room. She looked at the villagers who were sitting or lying there, and said,

“If you are hungry, then buy something. It won’t do for everyone to starve to death.”

No one spoke. They just gazed out the window at the setting sun.

She proceeded to another room, and said,

“I’ve decided that if you need to buy something, you should. It won’t do for everyone to starve to death.”

She went to yet another room, and repeated,

“If you need to buy something, you should. It won’t do for people to starve to death.”

She went to each of the individual side rooms, telling everyone the same thing. In the end, however, no one went to buy a bun or a bowl of water. One person said, “I don’t have a single cent on me!” Another said, “All my money was fucking stolen!” They all claimed that they didn’t have any money and that if they were about to die of hunger and thirst, there was nothing they could do about it.

Day changed to dusk, and dusk to night. Around dinnertime, the people outside the door repeatedly called to the villagers inside the memorial hall, saying, “If you are thirsty and hungry, just pass the money under the door.” Apart from one villager who couldn’t endure it any longer and passed fifty yuan under the door in exchange for half a bowl of water, no one else paid them any heed. No one could bring himself to spend two hundred yuan for a bowl of noodles, or five hundred yuan for a bun.

In this way, the night passed.

A new day arrived.

By the third day, the villagers were so hungry that their eyeballs looked as though they were about to fall out of their sockets, and when they walked they had to support themselves by leaning against the wall. But the sun was still as piercingly hot as on the preceding days, and when it shone in through the glass window, it was as if countless red-hot iron rods had been extended through the window. Everyone’s lips were so dry that they bled, and in order to stanch their thirst, the villagers didn’t stay in the side rooms but rather all went into the main hall or to the latrine. The air there had a little more moisture, but because the pump was no longer working, there was also crap and urine everywhere.

The people outside had hardened hearts and resolved to wait things out. They knew that when the villagers had endured all the hunger and thirst they could stand, they would eventually hand over their money. Therefore, except for calling out at mealtimes to see if the villagers were hungry and thirsty, the people outside didn’t bother them, and instead merely used time itself to torment them.

And, in the end, the villagers were indeed worn down.

At noon of the third day, the people outside called to the villagers in the memorial as if they were peddling goods, saying,

“Hey, do you want some water! One hundred yuan for a bowl
. . .
”

“Hey, do you want soup? Two hundred yuan for a bowl of egg noodle soup, so full that the bowl is overflowing.
. . .
”

“Hey, do you want a steamed bun? Our white buns are as big as a child’s head or your wife’s breasts, and our burned yellow baked scallion buns are as yellow as gold, and as tasty as a fried dough cake. Do you want one? Five hundred yuan for a white steamed bun, six hundred for a yellow baked bun.”

They kept hollering outside the door, and periodically would climb the ladder and peer inside. They would shout the same thing through the window over and over, like a loudspeaker repeating an announcement ten or more times, and then would extend a bowl of water through the window, asking, “Does anyone want this? Do you want it? If you don’t, we’ll just pour it out.” Then, they did in fact pour the bowl of water into the memorial hall. The water was like a sheet of silvery white beads, shimmering briefly in midair before splattering onto the cement floor. The ground was immediately covered in a layer of water.

They also extended a bun through the window and asked, “Does anyone want this? Do you want it?” They crumbled the bun into tiny crumbs and scattered them outside the window, as if they were feeding birds, leaving the memorial hall with only the savory aroma of the bun, like the fragrance of wheat wafting over during that earlier period of famine.

By crumbling up the bun and pouring water all over the ground, they attracted the villagers into the main hall of the memorial hall, where they all stood or sat, watching as one bowl of water after another was poured out and bun crumbs rained down like sand onto the ground outside the window.

The noon sun was so hot it couldn’t possibly get any hotter. It hadn’t been this hot for several hundred years. Inside the memorial hall there wasn’t a trace of a breeze. The air felt as though it had already been breathed. Everyone seemed as if they needed to sweat, but their bodies didn’t have any moisture to release. If the heat continued, everyone would soon start sweating blood. Because there was no water to flush away the urine and feces that people had deposited in the memorial hall’s latrine, by this point the stench filled the room and enveloped everyone.

The wholer who had been pouring water and crumbling buns through the window left to take a nap, and inside the hall everything became as silent and stuffy as a tomb. The villagers were all so hungry and thirsty that they were about to pass out, and everyone sat on the ground as though paralyzed.

Their lips were as white and shriveled as cracked sandstone.

Apart from the sound of those wholers talking, there was absolute silence outside the memorial hall. That is to say, over those three days, no one else had come up the mountain, and therefore no one knew about the unprecedented event that had taken place. No one knew that the residents of Liven were locked up in the Lenin Memorial Hall and for three days hadn’t had a taste of food or water.

No one knew that little Polio Boy was running a fever, or that each time the villagers wanted to get him half a bowl of water they had to pass fifty or a hundred yuan under the door.

The boy’s uncle had already passed out next to one of the memorial hall’s marble pillars.

Deafman Ma had been lying motionless at the base of the wall for an entire day and night. It was as if not even his eyes wanted to move.

The paralyzed woman who had been traveling with the troupe to help cook for them had become so hungry she couldn’t endure it any longer. She used a bowl to capture her own urine and then drank it, but immediately proceeded to vomit it up again.

Eventually, in the heat of the afternoon of the third day, Grandma Mao Zhi emerged from the side room where she was sleeping. She was holding her crutch and leaning against the wall. Her face was ashen as a result of her having endured three days and three nights of misery. Her hair was gray and disheveled. Her blue shirt used to fit her just right, but now it looked like it was draped loosely over a clothes hanger. When she walked out of her room, the villagers paid her no attention, figuring she had nothing to report, since, like everyone else, she had spent the preceding three days sitting or lying down. But now, she opened her mouth and spoke, such that everyone had no choice but to listen, hanging carefully on her every word. She had not been in the main hall when the people outside splashed water and crumbled buns through the window, but she knew very well what they were doing. She stood there, holding her crutch in one hand and leaning against the wall with the other. She asked,