Lenin's Kisses (65 page)

Chief Liu had no choice but to depart.

Before departing, Chief Liu took one final glance at the governor’s office. This was the first time he had ever stepped foot inside and it would probably be the last. He told himself he must make an effort to examine it carefully. The office was not as big as he had imagined, nor as stately. All told, there were three rooms, with a desk, a leather chair, and a row of bookcases, together with more than a dozen flowerpots and the sofa behind him. In addition, there were three or four telephones on the desk.

Later, Chief Liu was not entirely certain what else had been there. Of course, he saw and remembered the governor’s expression and appearance, just as he remembered the precise size of the crystal coffin in Lenin’s Memorial Hall. The governor’s face had a layer of deep red beneath its surface swarthiness, as shiny as if it had been soaking in ginseng soup for many years. The governor had a round face, narrow forehead, and white hair. His face resembled a well-aged apple, which had developed many wrinkles over time but which, because it was originally of high quality, still retained a delicious apple fragrance. The governor was wearing a light yellow sweater, under a well-made gray jacket and a tan wool coat. He was wearing a pair of black round-toe leather shoes, and his pants were made from a dark blue fabric. Actually, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about his outfit, it being no different from that of any older man of a certain class whom you might encounter in the street.

The only difference was his tone of voice, which was very calm and measured, but carried a trace of icy coldness. He was the governor, and could discuss a cataclysm the way other people would discuss a light breeze and drizzle. Things that would leave other people petrified, he could discuss as though they were icy hot—when, in fact, those embers contained a piece of ice that would never melt.

The governor mentioned this cataclysmic event as though it were a willow catkin floating to the ground, or a sesame seed that had gotten wedged in an ox’s hoofs. At this point, Chief Liu did not realize that the governor’s speech was deeper than the sea, and instead he was merely thinking that he had traveled all night and then waited all day only to find that the governor merely intended to say a few words to him. Chief Liu desperately wanted to offer a remark, even if this remark was as short as a bean sprout or as fleeting as a flame, but the governor took his leather attaché case and prepared to walk out, leaving Chief Liu with no choice but to depart as well.

With those few words—which lasted no longer than the length of a chopstick, or the amount of time it takes a drop of water to fall from the roof of a house—and before Chief Liu even had a chance to come to his senses, he was ushered, weak-kneed, out of the governor’s office. It was only then that he suddenly awoke to the fact that the governor had actually seen him—and he had seen the governor—and that the governor had said everything he wanted to say, and in the process had thrown away everything Chief Liu had worked for his entire life. Chief Liu felt as though he had been hurled from a hot summer into a bitterly cold winter, that his life’s work had been tossed to the wind. In the blink of an eye, everything was blown away to who knows where. However, even though Chief Liu and the governor had just seen each other, as Chief Liu was leaving the office it occurred to him that he had not had a chance to utter even a single word.

While staying at a guest house in the provincial capital, Chief Liu got sick. He caught a cold and started running a fever. If he had been in Shuanghuai, his secretary and the county hospital would have sent him the very best medicine, but here in the provincial capital he had no choice but to spend the next two or three days in a delirium, popping one fistful of pills after another, as though they were fried peas. He was afraid that his fever wouldn’t break, and that he would keep coughing until his cold developed into pneumonia. By the time the delegation had been summoned back from Beijing by cadres from the provincial Party committee, and the governor had spent a drop of time seeing them, Chief Liu found that his cold was somewhat improved and that his fever had begun to subside. It was as if he had come down with the cold and the fever solely in order to have an excuse to sleep while waiting for the delegation to return from Beijing—waiting for them to return so that he could speak to them.

“What did the governor say?”

“The governor didn’t say anything. He just wanted to see us, to see what was wrong with us. He said that if we needed, he could have the provincial psychiatric hospital set up a clinic in Shuanghuai.”

“Set up what kind of clinic?”

“He said it would be a political psychology clinic. He said he was concerned that we were all suffering from a form of political insanity.”

“Fuck his grandmother. What else did he say?”

“He told us to return to Shuanghuai, where we will report to our post for the final time, because in a few days he was going to send someone to relieve us of our responsibilities.”

“Fuck his grandmother. Fuck his great-grandmother. Fuck his grandmother’s grandmother.”

After cursing for a while, Chief Liu had no choice but to lead the delegation from the provincial capital back to the county seat. They felt like people who, after studying diligently for an exam for more than a decade, discovered just as they were about to enter the examination room that they had been denied entry by the site’s managers, and as a result their ten years of diligent study had disappeared in the blink of an eye and the dreams they had nurtured their entire life had collapsed behind them.

The delegation set out when the sky was still dark, and first took a train to the district, then proceeded back to Shuanghuai in a car sent by the county. For the duration of the trip, there was commotion everywhere, but neither the country chief nor his companions uttered a word. Chief Liu resembled someone on his deathbed, and it was truly heartrending. During this entire journey of several hundred
li
, he sat in the front row without saying a single word, and therefore no one dared to say anything to him either.

The delegation had left for Beijing after having filled out a mountain of paperwork to go to Russia. They had even bought the tickets to fly from Beijing to Russia. But it was at this point that—because they were traveling to Russia for the express purpose of purchasing Lenin’s corpse, which was interred beneath Moscow’s Red Square—they discovered that they needed to get one of China’s departments to stamp the forms they had brought with them from the county seat. This was a round, red stamp, containing only a dozen or so characters. But when they went to that department to get the stamp, someone asked them to sit down and wait for a moment, inviting them to have a drink of water and not to worry. The person brought them each a glass of water, and then left.

Soon someone else arrived to lead them away. He asked them many questions, such as whether they had prepared enough money to buy Lenin’s corpse, where the memorial hall housing Lenin’s corpse was located, how big it was, and whether they had worked out the technology needed to maintain the corpse. He also asked about the Spirit Mountain Forest Park where the corpse would be installed, including how much admission tickets would cost, and how they planned to use the money after the county became rich. Eventually, after he had asked everything that could conceivably be asked, and they’d answered everything that could be answered, he told them not to worry, saying that the person in charge of issuing the stamps had just left that morning with some other cadres to visit the Great Wall at Badaling. He said they had already notified him and told him to return immediately, and therefore asked the Shuanghuai delegation to wait patiently. He said, “When it is time to eat, we’ll have someone bring you some food, and that way you can wait for the provincial cadres to return. If necessary, we’ll send someone to lead them back.”

In the blink of an eye, everything had ended, and it suddenly felt like a theater after a performance has concluded and everything has been put away. No one knew what Chief Liu was thinking during the ride home. No one knew what he had seen as he was climbing Spirit Mountain to visit the memorial hall. In any case, it was nightfall by the time he arrived at the eastern gate of the county seat. Chief Liu’s face looked like a dead man’s, and his hair had gone completely gray. It wasn’t clear whether his hair had turned gray following his meeting with the governor or upon his return to the memorial hall. At any rate, it was now as gray as a nestful of white sparrows.

He had aged overnight.

He had become completely and utterly old.

Like an elderly man, Chief Liu trudged back to the county seat. His legs were weak, and it seemed as though he would topple over if he wasn’t careful.

From the time Chief Liu left the debut performance at Spirit Mountain led by Grandma Mao Zhi, pace by pace,
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only a few days had passed. Yet, he felt as if he had been away from Shuanghuai for several years, several decades, even half a lifetime. Now it seemed the people of Shuanghuai didn’t even recognize him. In the past he would always ride in a car, with the scenery passing by outside the car window like wind blowing by his eyes. What was past was past, however, and now nothing was left.

Occasionally back then, he would get out of the car for some reason, and all of the people in the streets would recognize him and erupt into a tumult. In the commotion, they would call out affectionately, “Chief Liu, Chief Liu,” and would immediately surround him. If they weren’t trying to drag him home for dinner, they were bringing a stool over for him to sit on, inviting him to rest in their doorway. Some people would stuff a newborn baby into his arms, asking him to hold it and begging him to grant the infant some good fortune and to give it a name. Others would ask him to use his rather mediocre handwriting to write out a couplet that they would then paste beside their front door. Students would bring him a textbook or homework, and ask him to sign it. When he walked through the city, he felt like an emperor strolling down the street, and his mere presence would make people deliriously happy, such that he wouldn’t even pay attention to the scenery.

But today, it was dusk and fairly chilly, and there were very few people out in the street. The doors to the shops and stores were all closed, and even the little alleys had barely anyone in them. The main street was as quiet as an empty room, and the only people still outside were the streetwalkers.

It was because he was afraid of being seen that Chief Liu had gotten out of the car before reaching the city gate, in order to cross the old city streets on foot. However, the street was completely empty and there was no one to be seen. No one was there to recognize him, as people would have done in the past. Chief Liu craved that sort of recognition. This was
his
county seat, and Shuanghuai was
his
county. In Shuanghuai, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t know who he was. When he walked down the street, everyone should have reacted in surprise. Today, the street was nearly completely still. Occasionally he would see someone, but he or she would quickly scurry away, hurrying home without even glancing back. At one point he saw a woman, but when she opened her door to call her children to come home and eat dinner, she gazed at Chief Liu for quite some time, acting as though she didn’t really recognize him, and proceeded to call out, then closed her door and went back inside.

The old city could not compare with the new one. The street was full of houses with broken bricks and cracked tiles, though occasionally there might be one or two houses with new tiles. Those houses were square-shaped with redbrick walls, and on this winter day they were like red pine coffins that had just been completed and had not even been painted yet.

Chief Liu walked alone, feeling that he had entered a graveyard, as if he had died and been brought back to life. Therefore, when people saw him, they didn’t dare look him in the eye.

At one point, two people walked by him bearing shoulder poles full of fruit, heading to the market to sell their produce. Needless to say, they were both from Shuanghuai, and probably were from families that had been living there for many generations. Chief Liu told himself that as long as they recognized him as the county chief, and stopped and greeted him by name, the next day he would make sure to appoint one of them to be deputy director of the business bureau and the other to be deputy director of the foreign trade bureau. He was still Shuanghuai’s county chief and Party secretary, and if he wanted to appoint someone to a certain position, there was nothing to stop him. Not only could he appoint them to serve as deputy directors, he could even appoint them to serve as bureau directors. All he wanted was for these two fruit-sellers to recognize him, put down the produce they were carrying, bow to him, and address him as Chief Liu, just as people used to do when they encountered him in the street.

Chief Liu stood there without moving, waiting for the men to recognize and address him.

The men only glanced at him before walking past. The rattling of their carrying poles gradually died off as they moved away, until eventually it could no longer be heard.

Chief Liu stood there in shock, watching the two figures as they disappeared into the darkness. They hadn’t recognized him as the county chief! This made him feel as though there were snakes and bees in his heart. However, he continued smiling. It occurred to him that these two men would feel utterly wronged
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at having missed out on their chance to be named deputy director.