The Explosion Chronicles (41 page)

Minghui said, “If only Eldest Brother and Sister-in-Law were here… .”

Mingyao was silent for a moment, then asked, “Do you want me to remove Second Brother from his position as mayor? Do you want me to have him return home to live with Second Sister-in-Law?”

Minghui didn’t know what to say and instead just stared at Mingyao.

Eventually, Mingyao realized that Minghui wasn’t going to say anything, so he continued softly, “Brother, you should leave. It’s too soon to bring Second Brother down. You should look after things at home, until the situation in the Middle East has been sorted out and I have restored peace to the world—if Second Brother still hasn’t returned home by that point, I can force him to return, and can organize a dinner for all four brothers, where we can discuss our family responsibilities.” Then Mingyao stood up, looking as though he were about to see Minghui out. Minghui stood up as well, placed his unfinished cup of tea on the table, and watched in astonishment as Mingyao went over to the sand table to tell the craftsmen to make the city of Baghdad twice as big, so that every street and alley could be clearly visible. Then Mingyao escorted Minghui out.

4. MOTHER

Mother died.

With a warm smile, she departed this cold world.

Not even heaven could have anticipated that that year’s winter would be so bitterly cold. After Minghui left Mingyao’s office, he ran home. He rushed inside and closed the courtyard gate, and the first thing he saw was that the trunk of the courtyard’s old elm tree had frozen solid and developed several finger-size cracks, revealing the pristine white wood inside. He saw that a rice bowl that had been
forgotten on a windowsill had frozen and shattered, with shards scattered all over the ground. When he walked inside, he saw that the hour and minute hands of the clock on the wall over the bed were frozen in place, while the red second hand had fallen off completely and was stuck in the bedding like a needle.

Minghui froze.

He stood in the doorway for a long time and then eventually ran toward the inner room. “Mother … Mother …” he shouted, his voice like a piece of bamboo that has been split open. Before he had even run out of his own room, his voice had caused the door to the main room to open. He proceeded to the doorway and shouted, “Ma, are you OK? … Ma, are you OK?” His cries caused the curtain to his mother’s room to open, and he rushed inside and saw that his mother was still lying in bed. Her complexion, however, was no longer bright and rosy, as it had been when he left her, and instead it was pale and mottled. She was facing the interior of the room, her eyes were half open, and she looked as though she had just seen something on the wall. It was as if a gust of bitterly cold air had blown through that wall and onto her face.

“Mother is going to leave tonight, so you should tell her the truth. Have your eldest brother and his wife gotten back together? Has your second brother reconciled with his wife?

“… Has your third brother married and started a family? Did he marry a woman from our old Explosion Street?

“… You yourself are already one of the elders of our street. If you don’t hurry up and get married, this is the one thing I won’t be able to get over.

“Minghui,” his mother added in a very weak voice, “you must answer these questions. After you do, Mother must go find your father.”

Minghui did not know how he had suddenly become so composed, as though he had known all along that his mother would
die. When he heard his mother’s questions, he slowly took several steps forward and then stood in the middle of the room, as though he were an incense stick stuck in front of her bed.

“Eldest Sister-in-Law is pregnant with twins—a boy and a girl.

“… Second Brother has taken Second Sister-in-Law into his home in the city hall complex, and every day when Second Brother goes in to work, Second Sister-in-Law stays home to cook and take their children to and from school.

“… Third Brother is married. His wife is an instructor from Explosion and teaches my nephew, Little Victory.

“I’m also engaged, to that girl you saw while sitting in your doorway before winter fell. She is pretty and virtuous, and works in the hospital. We plan to get married later this year.”

When he finished saying all of this, his mother turned over and faced him. On her lips she had a trace of a smile, which lasted several seconds, after which she closed her eyes for good.

Before burying his mother, Mingliang signed a directive from Beijing ordering that the weather of Explosion City must improve, and therefore the weather warmed up and the sun overhead became so hot that people wanted to take off their padded clothes. When Minghui finally received a phone call from Mingliang, he told Mingliang that their mother had died, whereupon Mingliang said that Explosion’s redesignation as a provincial-level metropolis was about to be approved. Minghui asked Mingliang if he was going to return home for the funeral, and Mingliang suggested that they leave things as they were for the moment, because the most important announcements were about to begin. When Minghui tried to find Mingyao to tell him about their mother’s death, he discovered that Mingyao was not at the mining company headquarters but rather had installed himself in some military barracks deep in the Balou Mountains. On that particular day, Mingyao was wearing his military uniform and was
leading a spring training mobilization meeting for his troops, saying that the Japanese prime minister had again gone to visit the Yasukuni war shrine, while some Rightists had landed on China’s Diaoyu Islands. Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party had already secretly drafted a new constitution in anticipation of Taiwan’s independence. Meanwhile, in an attempt to overturn the Iraqi and Afghan governments, the United States was using the most advanced and most brutal equipment available, for which it was borrowing an enormous amount of money from China—as a result the value of the RMB had skyrocketed, making Chinese people want to hurl themselves from the tops of Beijing’s skyscrapers. Germany had originally agreed to sell China weapons but now went back on its promise. Even neighboring Vietnam, which was as tiny as a grass seed, was drilling for oil in China’s Spratly Islands. A Philippine printing company had even included China’s island on its own map, which was about to go to press. The messenger Minghui had sent to inform Mingyao of his mother’s death returned and told the rest of the Kong family,

“Throughout history, there has never been a hero who has mastered the ideals of both loyalty and filial piety.”

Together with Mingguang and his wife, Minghui dressed their smiling mother’s body and placed it in the coffin. Without troubling any of their neighbors, they buried their mother. That unusual winter snowfall had already melted on the sunny side of the hill, but the opposite side was still covered in pristine white snow, and a cold breeze was blowing over. From there, you could make out only the tops of Explosion’s distant high-rise buildings, just as you could see only the crowns of the trees in that forest in the ravine. From behind the buildings, however, a continuous rumbling sound could be heard coming from mining and quarry sites.

After burying their mother in the same grave site where they had previously buried their father, Minghui and Mingguang were both
exhausted, so they sat down in front of the grave to rest. They gazed out at the tops of the city’s buildings, the smoke from the mines, and the snow on the mountains in front of them. They could hear the sound of a train approaching from the other side of the mountains, as well as planes landing at the airport. Mingguang said to Minghui, “Let’s go back. It’s time to eat. For lunch, we can have dumplings.”

They stood up, grabbed their shovels, and prepared to leave. At that point, however, Mingguang went up to Minghui and, with a smile, said quietly, “Your eldest sister-in-law is pregnant, with a son.”

1. MEGALOPOLIS (1)

Mayor Kong Mingliang did not wake up on his own that morning but rather awoke in a shock. He initially didn’t want to open his eyes, so with his eyes still tightly closed he tapped on his bed’s yellow pear-wood headboard with his fingers. When the assistant standing outside his room heard the mayor tap three times on his headboard, he immediately went outside and used a bamboo pole to shoo away all of the sparrows that had gathered on the windowsills overnight. The assistant also summoned several young people and told them that if any sparrows or crows flew to the windows or to the trees in front, they should use the bamboo poles to shoo them away. But later, after everything had quieted down, the mayor could still hear something flying around, so he tapped even louder on his headboard.

The assistant became anxious and instructed the three sentries standing guard in the courtyard of the city government building
complex that they should stand a dozen meters from each other and that each of them should hold a long bamboo pole—and in this way they could prevent all sparrows from flying over. The courtyard’s garden was in the process of awakening from its winter slumber and, regardless of whether it was the flowers planted on either side of the stone path or the trees and flowers planted around the mayor’s house, everything had turned so green that it appeared as though the sap was about to gush out. The peonies in the greenhouse were the first to burst into bloom, looking as beautiful as a young girl’s face. When the sun came out, it shone down on the road that the mayor, after he woke up and got out of bed, would follow to go to work. That morning, when the gardeners were tending the flowers, the young men with the bamboo poles gestured toward their feet, indicating that they had taken off their shoes, whereupon the gardeners quickly removed their own shoes. Afraid of making a racket as they were arranging the flowers, they covered the edges of the flowerpots with their fingers and didn’t remove them until they had put the pots down.

The enormous courtyard was like an ancient garden and was located several
li
to the east of the city government building. There was no one of consequence—only a vast wall and a set of empty villas and other buildings, together with cooks, gardeners, electricians, and other service workers. These people all gathered in the courtyard, like grass seeds in an empty field. They walked very quietly and whispered when they spoke. When they saw one another they would quickly nod. Particularly when Mayor Kong was about to go to sleep, the workers would remove their shoes. When his personal attendants entered his room, they would change into soft-soled slippers imported from Japan. They kept quiet not in order to avoid waking the mayor but rather because he had grown accustomed to silence. In the tile-roofed house Mingliang had built in the center of the city government courtyard, there was a corridor with many
twists and turns, and the rooms were all linked to one another. Among those rooms there was a large meeting hall, a small meeting hall, a large and a small dining hall, a teahouse, and a coffeehouse, together with a workers’ dormitory that was located where the sun didn’t even shine. When the mayor was in his bedroom, if he needed anything he wouldn’t pick up the telephone or ring a bell but rather would simply tap the table or headboard, and this would notify his assistants. If he wanted to have a certain girl come sleep with him, he would tap his headboard with a slightly different intonation and his assistants would understand. Given that Mingliang worked very hard all day, he was even more appreciative of peace and quiet. In the morning, apart from the sound of the sun rising, there was no other sound to be heard. His assistants would even hold their breath as they were removing their shoes and shooing away the birds. But in this silence, Mingliang still felt that there was some sound coming from somewhere, and just as he was about to tap on his headboard out of annoyance, it occurred to him that the sound was not coming from the courtyard but instead was coming from the preternatural silence in his brain and the extreme isolation of the courtyard. When he realized this, his finger—which was about to tap on the headboard—suddenly froze.

After dinner the previous evening, the ninth observational delegation from Beijing—which was there to examine Explosion’s qualifications for being redesignated as a provincial-level metropolis—had told Mingliang that within a month Beijing would host its final discussion of whether or not to redesignate Explosion as a provincial-level metropolis on the same level as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, and even Beijing itself. The delegates said that the key consideration was not the city’s population or the speed and dimensions of its economic growth, but rather whether Mayor Kong could capture the attention of the experts and the government officials charged with making the decision, because these questions of redesignation necessarily came
after discussions of national personnel. They added that by that point it would already be time to eat and, in order to retain the delegates’ attention, he would need to ensure that any further discussion would be at least as appealing as the expected food. He would therefore need to prepare the rhetorical equivalent of delicious dishes and pair them with rare wines—and only then would the officials be willing to put off their meal and continue their discussions in the meeting hall. As the delegates were saying this, everyone was in the meeting hall next to the city government’s dining hall enjoying dinner, and after the delicious meal had ended the investigation team and several people from the city government stayed behind in the conference room. In front of each of them there was a wooden basin, on which seven or eight bottles of Maotai
baijiu
wine had been poured for them to soak their feet. The room was full of the smell of
baijiu.
Several one-of-a-kind beauties were also on hand to give the men massages. When the head of the investigation team had been fully massaged, he faced the mayor. Then, with his sixty-year-old feet rubbing together in the
baijiu
, he said that he had never before used
baijiu
to soak his feet and that it was making his toes a bit numb.

At that point the mayor gazed at the investigation team, whose gray heads and wrinkled faces were all glowing radiantly. He pondered for a while, then said three things—each of which seemed to be part question and part observation:

“In Beijing, does no one care about women and money?”

He added, “Does no one care how quickly the city is developing?”

He added again, “If I can build a one-hundred-kilometer subway line and the largest airport in Asia in less than a week, is it possible that no one would take an interest?”

When he made this third statement, the eyes of everyone in the investigation team widened, like a row of red lanterns lined up in front of him. “Can you really build a hundred-kilometer subway
line in only a week? Can you really build the largest airport in Asia in only a week?” The head of the investigation team rubbed his feet together in the
baijiu,
repeating these two questions over and over again. Finally, when they were about to leave to board the airplane, he asked these questions again while staring at Mingliang. After Kong Mingliang had escorted the investigation team onto the airplane, he went home to sleep. During the entire eighteen days that he had spent with the investigation team, he had been responsible for everything—even the chopsticks they had used were ones Mingliang had picked out himself and had personally distributed to each member of the team. He was bone tired after escorting this ninth investigation team around for eighteen days, and felt as he had back when he was village chief and was taking the villagers out to the railroad tracks to unload goods. But he was no longer as young as he once was, and rest, recuperation, and quiet were now as important to him as air and water. He slept so soundly that he would have no memory whatsoever of what he had said and what he had done, but as he was falling asleep something kept buzzing in his brain. He could hear people asking him the same question over and over again: “Can you really construct a subway line in only a week?” He nodded several times, while the people kept asking him, “Can you really build the largest airport in Asia in less than a week?” In the end, it was as if everything was decided at that juncture, and as long as Kong Mingliang could build a hundred-kilometer subway line and the largest airport in Asia in less than a week, Explosion’s redesignation as one of China’s provincial-level metropolises would be all but guaranteed. Kong Mingliang lay in his enormous bed, opened his eyes, and saw that the ruby-encrusted hair clip of one of the women from the night before was still lying next to his pillow. He took the hair clip and placed it on his bedside table and reminisced about the woman. Then he sat up, grabbed his clothes, and got out of bed.

He suddenly grasped the thing that was ringing in his head—which was that he had to go see his third brother, Mingyao. In order to construct a subway line and an airport within a week, he would need Mingyao’s help, and specifically he needed Mingyao to offer the services of his soldiers. As Mingliang was about to put on his shoes, he coughed lightly and someone immediately brought over a pair of slippers that had been custom-made by a specialty store in Japan. When he went to the bathroom door, he knocked and someone immediately squeezed out his toothpaste and also placed a disposable towel—printed with a future image of Explosion—next to the faucet. When the faucet was turned on and started producing the sound of running water, the staff in the dining hall began placing all sorts of breakfast food and drinks at Mingliang’s seat at the table.

After taking several gulps of milk and eating several bites of his favorite pickled vegetables and fried egg, Mingliang did not knock on the table or say a single word to anyone. The workers knew that after eating, the mayor liked to stroll through the garden alone, and therefore they retired to their respective places, to allow him to stroll around in peace. The assistants who didn’t have a chance to retreat in time stood by the side of the road, and as he walked by they would smile and bow, and softly say, “Greetings, Mayor.” By this point the sun was already high in the sky and shining down on the eastern half of the courtyard. It looked as though molten gold had just solidified into an orb with a golden halo around it. As Mingliang was following the corridor under the courtyard’s grape trellis, he found that even though winter was over there were nevertheless several grapevines with branches that were still white and bare. Most of these branches were full of spring greenery, but there was one that seemed about to break off and did not yet have any green buds. Mingliang walked down the middle of the grapevine corridor and looked out. He knew that there were workers standing at his side and behind him, and all
he needed to do was cough lightly or stop and turn, and they would immediately appear before him and ask, “Mayor Kong, what do you need?” It was as if they had been standing and waiting for millennia for him to say those words, and now that the opportunity had finally arisen the excitement was clearly visible on their faces. All of this had been arranged by Cheng Qing, who had been by his side ever since they were children in Explosion Village. Cheng Qing was the administrative secretary of the city government and was responsible for looking after Mingliang’ life, work, and talks, and when he felt lustful and wanted a woman, his old passion for Cheng Qing would be awakened. He knew that Cheng Qing was in one of the villas in this courtyard, and that all he had to do was give the word, and in a few minutes she would be in front of him. But at this moment he didn’t want to see her, nor did he want to see anyone else. He simply wanted to walk alone for a while, to consider how to discuss with Mingyao the question of building a subway line and an airport in a single week.

He therefore went for a walk alone.

The sun shone down through the half-green grape trellises, so that one large round golden orb after another appeared over the corridor, like the Olympic rings. A squirrel ran over from the pine trees in the field to one side, stood beneath one of the grapevines, and saw that the mayor had an amused gleam in his eye. This squirrel was one of many that Mingliang had told his worker to bring down from the mountains. In all there were several hundred of them, and they frequently appeared in trees and on the roadside. The previous year Mingliang had been strolling through the courtyard when he happened to remark that it would be nice if this garden had some squirrels, and soon enough there were squirrels everywhere. Similarly, one night the previous summer he had been walking through the courtyard and it occurred to him that he didn’t hear any crickets,
and he asked why there were no crickets. Upon hearing his question, the government promptly sent all of the city’s residents into the mountains to catch hundreds of thousands of crickets and bring them back to the garden. Now, this squirrel ran up to him as though it had some business to attend to. It had a pleading look in its eyes, and when Mingliang walked over to it, it didn’t run away and instead faced him and sat down on the side of the corridor. The benches along the way were made of pine and their red paint smelled like a palace garden, like Beijing’s Palace Garden. However, Beijing’s Palace Garden was as crowded as an anthill, while this city government garden, which was not much smaller, had only Mingliang and this squirrel. Mingliang stood in front of the squirrel. The squirrel quietly chirped at him a few times, whereupon Mingliang squatted down and the squirrel eagerly ran up to him.

Mingliang knew exactly what the squirrel wanted. He glanced over at the field and the forest, and saw that apart from the sunlight and the wind, there was no movement. He thought to himself, “Are there any more squirrels over there? If so, they should come out, because this one is rather lonely.” Then he saw several squirrels in the forest turn around, and their uneasy eyes were like stars in a winter sky. Annoyed by those squirrels that had turned in his direction, he shouted, “I am Mayor Kong and order you to come here. Do you hear me?” Upon hearing his shouts, several dozen gray squirrels ran out of the forest together. The squirrel sitting near the bench saw the group of squirrels approaching and, after wagging its tail at Mingliang, quickly ran to join the others.