Lenin's Kisses (8 page)

The resulting assemblage didn’t resemble a funeral procession as much as an endless sea of white-clad mourners descending the mountainside like a cloud of mist. They trampled the wheat sprouts on either side of the road, and walked all over the hill on which the grave was located. Their wailing scared off all of the crows and sparrows on the mountain; the birds dispersed like clouds in the distant sky. After the funeral, the visitor returned to Singapore, and the money he had promised disappeared without a trace. As a result, all the owners of the fabric stores and heads of garment factories went to Chief Liu demanding payment.

Chief Liu had swallowed the Singapore visitor’s bait—hook, line, and sinker—and subsequently grew so anxious his mouth became filled with painful sores that wouldn’t go away unless he sucked on some bitter melon. He decided there was no need to reimburse the stores for the cost of the fabric used to make the mourning outfits, since he would consider it their collective contribution to the Lenin Fund.
¹
He added that the garment factories didn’t need to be reimbursed either, and that if the factory heads were to ask for payment, Chief Liu could simply replace them. The factory heads were so terrified when they heard this that they didn’t dare ask again. Meanwhile, everyone else who participated in the funeral procession was compensated—in the sense that they not only received a brand-new set of white clothes, but for the next several days also had something new to talk about whenever they got bored. In the end, however, the Lenin Fund did not reach its target.

If it had been only a question of the visitor from Singapore that would have been one thing, but as it turns out there was something else that had infuriated Chief Liu even more, leaving him utterly speechless. The previous night, Chief Liu and his wife had had a falling-out—one that was as unexpected as the summertime blizzard that would suddenly befall Liven. While Chief Liu was out hosting a fund-raiser to help purchase Lenin’s remains, his wife was home watching television. Around midnight, he returned to their house and he and his wife went to bed. Since it was the weekend, they theoretically should have had their customary conjugal enlivening. This was their agreement, which they had written down, signed, and sealed with their fingerprints. They had agreed that they needed to carry out their connubial enlivening every weekend, in order to keep the chief from getting too big for his britches and forgetting his own wife. She was almost seven years younger than he, and after they slept together the first evening following his appointment as township chief, she took advantage of his good spirits and made him write down this vow. Therefore, every weekend they would make sure to have an enlivening.

But after Chief Liu began planning to purchase Lenin’s corpse and realized he would need to raise a large sum of money in order to bring it back and install it on Spirit Mountain, he forgot all about his weekly conjugal enlivenings. His head
³
was filled with plans to build a mausoleum to house the corpse, but now the Singapore visitor was nowhere to be found and the Lenin Fund, which was supposed to have become bigger than a mountain and higher than the sky, had similarly failed to materialize. Chief Liu was exhausted and furious at the Singapore visitor, and when he got out of his fund-raiser that weekend and returned home after midnight, he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, his snores reverberating through the house. Just before dawn, his wife woke him up and said something astounding:

“Liu Yingque, I want a divorce.”

He rubbed his eyes and stared back at her. “What?”

She said, “I’ve been thinking about this all night, and decided that it would be best if we got divorced.”

Chief Liu finally understood what she was saying. He sat up in bed, and his shoulders began to feel a little chilly, as the night breeze washed over him like a bucket of cold water. He wrapped his shoulders with a big red quilt cover, looking as though he were holding up a large, fluttering flag. His wife was sitting in a chair in the center of the room, in the same moon-colored underwear she had been wearing the previous day, together with the kind of pink cotton tank top that had recently become fashionable among women in the Shuanghuai county seat. Underneath this white and pink outfit, her skin was as bright and supple as pristine white jade, while her hair looked as though it had been painted black. Though she was only seven years younger than Chief Liu, she looked as though she was not even thirteen, pretty and refined. As she sat in the chair in front of Chief Liu, she looked like a coquette girl
⁵
sitting in front of her much older brother.

He asked, “Fuck, is this because I haven’t been enlivening you recently?”

She replied, “It’s not because of that. Besides, the enlivening is not just for me.”

He said, “Nowhere else would you find a preschool teacher willing to divorce a county chief.”

She said, “I want to get divorced. I really do.”

It was at this point that the township chief had arrived at the government building where Chief Liu and his wife lived. He stood in the doorway listening for a while, then walked in, smiling. Standing next to Chief Liu, he said, “Girl, have you forgotten? Have you forgotten that the county chief is the head of the county, and that you are his wife? After he is promoted to district commissioner or district Party committee secretary, you would then become the wife of the district commissioner or Party secretary, and if he is promoted to provincial governor or provincial Party committee secretary, you would then become the wife of the governor or Party committee secretary.”

She stared at the township chief with a disdainful smile lurking in the corners of her lips and her eyes.

Chief Liu added, “I’m telling you, by marrying me you have fallen into a nest of riches, and your family will burn incense for three generations.”

She replied softly yet firmly, “I don’t want to enjoy riches, and I don’t want to be your wife.”

He said, “After I become as famous as Lenin, then even if you die, there will still be someone around to make you a memorial tablet and build you a memorial hall. Do you realize that?”

She shouted back, “I’m only interested in what happens when I’m still alive. I couldn’t care less what happens after I die.”

He paused, then retorted, “How could your parents have given birth to someone like you?”

The township chief interjected, “Chief Liu, let it go. Don’t argue with her. Besides, she’s just a woman. You should go up to Spirit Mountain to take a look, and see if the contractors have put the Hanbai jade back on the latrine wall again.”

Chief Liu said, “Fuck his grandmother. Make them come down.”

The township chief said, “Fuck them back for eight generations. They say that they aren’t willing to listen to anyone other than the county chief.”

Chief Liu called out to his secretary, “Let’s go. Secretary Shi, have the driver bring my car around.”

His wife said, “Go, go! If you can, then stay away for ten days or two weeks.”

Chief Liu laughed coldly. “In fact, I won’t come back to this house for another month.”

His wife retorted, “You shouldn’t come back for another two months.”

He said, “I won’t come back for another three months.”

She said, “If you return, you won’t even deserve to be called human.”

Chief Liu said, “If I cross this threshold within the next three months, you can consider me a bastard and tear down that memorial hall I just built, so that after we bring back Lenin’s remains, we won’t be able to sell even half of an admission ticket. You can leave me to wander the streets, burning up when the sun shines in the winter and freezing to death when it snows in the summer.”

And, in fact, that summer it did snow.

Once he left the house and was on the road, the driver complained, “Fuck. This bedeviled day is getting colder and colder, and the car windows are covered with snowflakes.”

Chief Liu and the township chief stuck their hands out the window to try to catch a snowflake.

The township chief said, “That’s what the weather’s like here in Balou. Every year it snows a bit during the third lunar month, and there is a major blizzard once every few years.”

Secretary Shi said, “That’s crazy. I can’t believe it.”

The township chief replied, “Secretary Shi, everything I said is the absolute truth, and if there is even the slightest falsehood, may this summer snow freeze me to death, and the winter sun burn me up.”

Secretary Shi asked, “Really?”

The township chief said, “Really. Have you ever seen red dates growing on a peach tree? Or a one-legged man outrun a two-legged one? Or a blind person who can use his hearing to find where everything is? Do you believe any of this? Or a deaf person who, by feeling your ears with his fingertips, can hear everything you are saying? Or someone who has been dead for seven days and buried for four, but is still able to come back to life? Have you ever seen anything like that? Or a black crow that bears and raises chicks that look just like doves? If you don’t believe these things, then when we arrive in Liven I will show you, thereby expanding your horizons. Okay?”

He added, “Secretary Shi, these things are all common occurrences in the Balou mountains. Fortunately, you are still a college student, because I’d really love to take a crap on your college textbooks and wash your blackboard with my piss. After studying for so many years, you earn more each month than I do, and sleep with more women, but you don’t even know that here in Balou the temperature can drop to four or five degrees below zero in the summer, and can rise to thirty-four or thirty-five degrees in the winter. Don’t you agree that I should take a crap on your textbooks, and wash your blackboard with my piss?”

Secretary Shi said, “Chief, your mouth is like a toilet.”

The township chief replied, “Ask the county chief whether I was telling the truth.”

Both of them turned to Chief Liu, and noticed that his face had turned a deep shade of purple and he was trembling from head to toe. Back in the county seat, he typically wore only a T-shirt, but now his entire body was covered in goose bumps. He was hugging his shoulders, and his teeth were chattering madly. In front of the car, snow was falling heavily and the windshield wipers kept trying to clear it from the windows.

The entire mountain was covered with a layer of pristinely white snow.

The township chief asked, “Chief Liu, are you cold?”

He shivered, but didn’t respond.

In order to reach Spirit Mountain, they had to traverse the Balou mountains and take the road up to Liven. The base of Spirit Mountain was located about seventeen
li
or so beyond Liven. They were driving an old car with all the windows open, but even then they’d each had sweat pouring down their bodies. When they’d started out on their drive, warm wheat fragrance had wafted over the car, and the peasants beside the road had disappeared into the wheat fields. It was more than a hundred
li
from the county seat to the Balou mountains, and it took them more than half a day to cover the distance, since the driver was afraid that if he went too fast they might get a flat. When they had arrived in the Balou mountains, they drove through a forest of pagoda
trees, where they were able to enjoy a breeze. As the temperature dropped, however, the fragrance of ripe wheat began to fade. The smell of summer gradually changed to that of fall, and as the car scurried over the mountain the weather became increasingly cool, even downright chilly. If the car’s occupants hadn’t kept the doors and windows tightly shut, they would have felt as though they were out in a field in the dead of winter.

The driver said, “It’s getting colder and colder. What’s going on?”

The township chief replied, “Fuck your family for eight generations. That’s just how the weather is here. In the third lunar month they sometimes have peach blossom flurries, while in the middle of winter it can be scorching hot.”

The driver said, “Fuck, if it really is snowing, we should use the windshield wipers to clean the snow off.”

Secretary Shi asked, “Chief Liu, are you cold?”

The township chief said, “Why worry whether he’s cold or not? Let the heat bake him to death, and the cold freeze him to death.”

Chief Liu said, “I didn’t bring any other clothes. If it’s this cold in Shuanghuai, where will I get warm clothes?”

The township chief said, “If you wear heavy clothes you will burn up, but if you take them off you will freeze to death.”

The township chief added, “It’s snowing. Let’s go—we need to get the county chief a padded jacket.”

Secretary Shi said, “Let’s pull into the village up ahead.”

Chief Liu said, “Fuck, I simply can’t believe it could possibly get too cold for me.”

As he was saying this, the car pulled into a village halfway up the mountain and stopped at a wheat factory, where they borrowed a jacket and an army coat. After the driver stored the new clothing, they continued making their way up the mountain. It was on that snowy day that they encountered Jumei and her three nin daughters, and succeeded in finding Grandma Mao Zhi.

They arrived at Liven’s guest house, where they stayed for the night.

The snow finally stopped falling.