Peking Story (4 page)

I was with friends on the night of old Mr. Yu's death. Aimee telephoned me. When I arrived at the mansion gate, the Communist soldiers were milling uncertainly about the front courtyard, aware that something had happened inside the house. A servant told me Aimee was at the well in the garden, and I set out, by way of a small door in the courtyard wall, to look for her. It was a moonless night and the garden was very black. A wind was shaking the high trees and rustling through the bamboo. Thinking of the old man newly dead, I might have been uneasy had it not been for the very ordinary horses of the soldiers stamping at their tethers in the darkness all around me.

A white stone path that began at the door ran past the well, and I had followed it for a considerable distance when I was startled to see someone in white coming toward me, carrying what looked like a raised umbrella. Then I heard the figure call, in Aimee's voice, “David, is that you?”

As she came closer, I could see that she really was carrying an umbrella, and a pail of water besides. Her white dress, I knew, was mourning attire. “The dead must be washed with water drawn at night,” she said when I asked what she was doing. “The water must not be touched by the light of the sky, even the night sky. It is a custom.”

We walked back to the door of the main courtyard together, past the bamboo and the trees and the horses. I wanted to say something comforting, but Aimee looked capable and in control of herself, and I could think of nothing that seemed right. When we had gone through the door, I heard weeping and chanting. Aimee stopped, and then suddenly began crying, “Ai ya! Ai yo!” and went toward the main hall. I followed, feeling bewildered and wondering if, as Fourth Brother, I should cry out, too.

The whole family and about twenty Buddhist monks were gathered in the hall. Aimee folded her umbrella and surrendered her bucket to one of her aunts, who carried it away. The relatives, including a number of people I had never seen before, were dressed in unhemmed gowns of unbleached muslin and were moaning and wailing. The monks were chanting the Feast of the Dead, and were making a good deal of noise with gongs, wooden blocks, and bells. Aimee brought me a white sash and tied it around my waist under my suit coat, and told me to sit down. The only people making no outcry or other noise were the servants. I saw one of them going out of the hall with the rusty ice-cream freezer in his arms. The sock-knitting machine was already gone. Other servants were cleaning, laying carpets, or polishing furniture. The wall mirrors, of which there were many, had been covered with sheets of white paper.

Actually, the old man's death had come as no shock to the family. It had been expected, and they knew that Mr. Yu would never have been able to approve of “New China,” and that in a short time the inviolability of his own courtyard would have been shattered. They felt he was better out of it — honored in death rather than humiliated in life. And partly because, in their relief, they also felt guilty, and partly because they were uncertain of their own future, they had decided that the old man's funeral was to be a sort of symbol of the past as he had known it — a last flaring of gold-and-red pomp before they should all be submerged in the drab puritanism of the revolution.

After I had sat with the mourners for some time, Aimee took me outside into the cool night air. She explained that what I had been witnessing was the first-night wake, and that it would go on until morning. As a member of the family, I had honored her father by being present, but as a foreigner, I was not expected to stay the whole time. She told me that the ceremonies of the funeral would last for forty days, but that the most elaborate rites would take place on the third day. Then she walked with me through the still, empty courtyard. The family was waiting, she said, for the coffin, which was being brought from the ancestral family temple in the North City. Her father had bought it, as was the custom, many years before, and the wood, a species of camphor, was of a quality and thickness now unobtainable. Every month for at least twenty years, a fresh layer of lacquer had been put on it.

We walked on, and just as we reached the main gate, the immense coffin arrived on the shoulders of six bearers, its surface black and sparkling in the light from their lanterns. One end of it was high, made to look like the stern of a Chinese junk, and its sides had been shaped like those of a boat, to enable it to cleave the black waters where the dead travel. As it came sliding darkly through the gate, the Communist soldiers, most of whom had been recruited from superstitious peasant stock, drew back, muttering, their eyes wide. Aimee touched the coffin as it passed, and a moment later we said good night. I walked away, and, outside the huge gate, turned back and saw her standing there, looking ghostlike in her white robe, watching me. The soldiers were in clumps about her, though they did not stand too close, and I could still see, behind her, the dark shape of the coffin receding into the darkness.

In the three days before the climax of the funeral rites, the Yu mansion changed considerably. Over all the tiled outdoor courts, box-shaped roofs of reed matting, looking something like large sheds, were erected on bamboo scaffolding. Framed panes of brightly painted glass were set in the sides of these, above the level of the surrounding buildings and galleries. In this way almost an acre of open courts was changed into lofty rooms smelling of straw and filled with golden-yellow dust.

I was in the house early on the second morning, when a Communist cadre came. In Western usage, the term applies to a number of men forming the skeleton of a larger group, but it is the approved Chinese Communist designation for one man acting as a sort of political commissar. This man arrived just as the workmen were beginning the day's construction and cleaning. He strode angrily about the courts watching the bustle, and after he had asked the workmen (most of them professional funeral caterers and descendants of funeral caterers, who took pride in their work and charged enormous prices) what they were doing and how much they were getting paid, he joined the soldiers and conferred with them. Presently, they produced from somewhere a flaking blackboard, and for the next hour the main courtyard rang with Communist hymns. The cadre wrote the first lines on the blackboard, and the soldiers shouted them and went on from there.

“Out of the East comes the sun, out of the East comes Mao Tse-tung,” they sang. “In Red Leaf Village, the landlords are gone. Ai ya! The farmers dance and sing. Red Warriors liberate the south. The people are throwing flowers at their feet.”

When the soldiers were done singing, they took out the paper-bound Communist catechisms that they all carried and, in response to the questions of the cadre, read aloud in their flat country accents.

“What is the place of the soldier in New China?”

“The soldier protects the people and drives the running dogs of imperialism from our shores.”

“What is the Soviet Union?”

“The Soviet Union is China's big brother and is helping us drive the imperialist reactionaries into the sea.”

After quite a lot of this, the soldiers all sat down on the folding campstools they carried strapped to their backs, and the cadre began barking out a lecture on the evils of bureaucratic capitalism and amassed wealth. “All this is the old, evil China,” he said. He waved his arms as if to sweep away the mansion and the workmen. The soldiers glared about them. “All these people employed for one dead old man is a reactionary crime against New China!” The soldiers stirred, and snarled at the workmen. “But wait!” the cadre cried.

“They are doomed! We need not even push them! They are already dying from their own inner decay.” The soldiers smiled complacently. “Watch them and learn!” said the cadre.

The climactic third day was bedlam. Since the principal rooms of the Yu mansion were in a direct line, separated by courtyards, and their main doors had been removed and the courtyard gates opened, one could look down a huge vista filled with wild but purposeful disorder.

In some of the courtyards, the caterers had set up tables for refreshments. In others, great bouquets of paper flowers and life-size paper figures of horses and servants, for the equipage of Mr. Yu in the other world, were being prepared. These would later be burned, to send them on their way. Meanwhile, ingots of gold paper, also for his use, were kept blazing in an iron brazier. A drum at the main gate, so huge that the man beating it had to stand on a ladder, was struck at intervals to announce the arrival of guests — one beat for a man, two for a woman. In two courtyards, there were chanting monks and Buddhist-temple orchestras composed of gongs, drums, trumpets, racks of bells, and hand-held reed organs. The Communist soldiers, dressed in uniforms of Yenan yellow, sat doggedly in the midst of the turmoil, eating pickled radishes and cooking vegetables over a coal-ball fire. (Coal balls are made by mixing coal dust and mud. They make a good fire, but leave enormous clinkers.) And in and out of halls and courtyards, through clouds of incense, wandered the guests. There were the Chinese ones, the declining aristocracy of Peking — silk-gowned ancient men with those elegant beards that only the Chinese can grow; their slender, white-faced, pomaded sons; and their first wives, second wives, concubines, and mistresses, smelling faintly of sandalwood, face powder, and soap. There were also foreign guests, who, in sunglasses and slacks, and loaded down with cameras, tripods, and light meters, seemed to be everywhere at once, snapping pictures. Most of them were friends of mine, whom the family had been happy to invite for the express purpose of getting pictures of the occasion taken, and, as a matter of fact, the pictures were to have a kind of historical value. Though nobody realized it at the time, this was to be the last of the great funerals for which — along with dust, duck, and opera — Peking was famous. Thereafter, the new government simply reassessed the property of any family foolish enough to produce the money for a funeral of such dimensions.

I was wearing a dark-blue Chinese gown, with a white sash — a symbol of limited mourning. I had had difficulty finding the white socks that gave a more formal appearance to a Chinese gown, because most of mine had, along with my summer clothes, been locked away in camphor chests that at the moment were inaccessible. So I had on a pair mismatched both in weave and in the degree of whiteness.

Deciding to go to the garden to escape the noise and confusion for a moment, I saw Ninth Sister through a window of one of the small inner rooms, and went inside to speak to her. She saw my socks almost immediately, and tears came to her eyes. “Your socks don't match,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She began to cry. “Papa's dead and we're all becoming poor — even you, an American!” she said. She was only eighteen, and she looked very tiny and lost in her square-cut muslin mourning sack.

“Don't cry,” I said to her. “Your father was an old man, and …”

“Oh, I'm not crying for Papa,” she said. “I'm glad he's dead. He can never see what's happened. Elder Brother says that next month, after we finish paying for the funeral, we must give up all the servants but two. He told me I must remember to turn off lights, and he's already asked a man to cut down the big trees in the front court and sell them for wood, and he says he's going to raise pigs in the garden. Oh, I'm
glad
Papa's dead! He loved this house and the garden and the trees. I love them, too, and I wish I were dead with Papa.”

There wasn't much I could say. The Yu family
were
poor. Their stocks and deposits had become so much paper, and even if they tried to stay together and keep the house, they would have to live very differently from the way they had lived before the revolution. “Don't worry,” I told Ninth Sister. “Do as your brother says, and everything will be all right.”

Actually, I didn't believe that anything would ever again be all right for them — their way of life was ending unconditionally — but she looked up, brushing away her tears.

“Yes,” she said. “We are still the Yu family, and if we stay together, everything will still be as it used to be. I will help. I promise I will. I have a plan, too.”

“You have? What plan?” I asked.

“I don't want to tell you now,” she said, “but I've been thinking about it for a long time.”

I didn't see Ninth Sister again until late that afternoon, when I was taking my place in a procession consisting of the family, the guests, the monks, and the orchestras. At its head marched a group of monks blowing ten-foot-long horns carried for them by little boys, who marched before them. The horns were to dispel evil spirits. Each could sound only one note, but, blown several at a time or all together, they produced uncanny harmonies. After the horns came the orchestras, playing, and then more monks, now quite hoarse but still chanting. Next came the spirit tower of Mr. Yu, borne on bamboo poles — a small paper pagoda in which was enshrined a fading framed photograph, taken some thirty years before, of Mr. Yu wearing a European suit and high collar.

Behind the spirit tower came the immediate family, and then the other relatives, all carrying bundles of lighted incense sticks and wearing white paper flowers. Mr. Yu's eldest son, as chief of the mourners, wore white net blinkers over his eyes, symbolizing a grief so deep as to make him unable to see. Although actually he could see, and could walk quite well, ceremony demanded that he be supported on either side by attendants. Every ten feet, he knelt on a cushion placed before him by an attendant, knocked his head on the ground three times, and wailed. He would then be helped to his feet and taken forward another ten feet. Behind the family, at a pace respectfully — and necessarily — slow, came the several hundred guests. They, too, carried incense and wore paper flowers.

At intervals in the procession were the paper servants and paper horses, held up on poles by funeral caterers. There was also a paper sedan chair, and there was a paper pleasure boat about fifteen feet long, complete in every detail. Through its windows I could see, among other surprising furnishings, paper tables with paper teacups on them, and a miniature paper model of an old-fashioned, round-topped Zenith radio.