Under the Red Flag (7 page)

His mother smiled and said, “His grandma died a timely death, as if she waited for her grandson to come home to look after her and make the money for her funeral.”

Sheng gave a thought to that. Somehow he felt his mother was right; it looked as though everything had mysteriously fallen into place. He turned and saw a pile of small steamed buns in a large basket. “What are these for?” he asked.

“For kids,” his mother said. “A lot of them come to steal a bun, because your grandma lived eighty years. Their parents think the buns from us can make the kids live longer, so they tell them to come here and steal some.”

Sheng remembered eating such a bun when he was ten. He picked up a dozen or so and carried them out to refill the plates at the head of the coffin.

It was getting dark. He sat on a low bench beside the coffin. Four more wreaths had been added to the rows since he came home. He noticed some clothing, perhaps his grandmother’s sheets and quilts, hanging on the fence, but they were almost torn to rags. A young woman was busy cutting the clothes with scissors. He stood up and was about to stop her, but Uncle Wang intervened, “Let her take a piece, Sheng. Your grandma was a blessed woman. That’s why they want a piece of her clothes to put into their babies’ quilts, to make the kids easier to raise.”

Then the old man described to Sheng how their roof had been covered with birds that morning. Thousands of swallows, sparrows, doves, and magpies landed on the house. Even the electric wires were fully occupied. People were amazed and thought
that the birds were angels who had come down to fetch the dead, and that the old woman must have done a lot of good works in her life.

Together with the men who were either the family’s friends or grateful to his father, Sheng was to keep vigil beside the coffin. He took out some candles and joss sticks for repelling mosquitoes. On the narrow table along the coffin were a basket of steamed bread stuffed with pork and garlic bolts, cups filled with green tea, plates containing Peony cigarettes, roasted peanuts, toffee, and haw jelly. The Dings had to be very generous on this occasion.

At seven in the evening Huang Zhi, a vice-chairman of the commune, called at the Dings. After giving his condolences, he followed the host into the inner room with a teacup in his hand. “Old Ding,” Huang said uneasily, “I heard that the Carpentry House is preparing a coffin for your mother. Is that true?”

“Well, news travels fast, doesn’t it?” Ding Liang said with a bitter smile.

“Old Ding, I don’t mean to interfere with your family affairs, but as a colleague I should advise you to think it over before you bury your mother.”

“What have you heard exactly?”

“Secretary Yang told me about the coffin. You see, you ought to think of the consequence.”

“Damn his grandmother, he’ll never leave me alone. Even if he rules heaven and earth, he can’t rule things in my household.”

“Chairman Ding, I don’t mean I agree with Secretary Yang on everything, but I do think you should take into account the political effect of your mother’s burial. You are the head of the commune. Thousands of eyes are staring at you.”

“You mean I should burn my mother?”

“I don’t mean that. In fact, I came to inform you that we’re going to have a Party meeting tonight and discuss this matter. Please come at eight.”

“A Party meeting to discuss how to get rid of my mother’s body?”

“No hard feelings, Old Ding. This is a decision made by the Party committee. I’m here only to deliver the message and make sure you will be present.”

“All right, I’ll come.”

In fact, Huang was not Ding’s enemy in the Commune Administration. He always sat on the fence. That was why he had been sent to notify Ding of the meeting, which the men of Ding’s own faction wanted to hold more eagerly than others. Secretary Yang was on bad terms with Ding and had his own men. The two factions were almost equal in power and would fight over whatever involved their interests and by any means except for assassination. As a precaution, however, the Dings would dump the edibles given to them by those who belonged to the opposite faction whenever they suspected there was poison in them.

At eight Ding arrived at the Commune Administration on Bank Street. The other six committee members were already in the conference room, waving fans and drinking tea. Ding was not afraid of such a meeting, since two men here, Feng Ping and Tian Biao, were loyal to him. Though Yang was the Party chief in the commune, he had only one man on the committee, Dong Cai, who obeyed him like a dog. The other two members, Huang Zhi and Zhang Meng, were fence-sitters and would trim their sails according to the wind.

After they gave condolences to Ding, the meeting started.
While the secretary was introducing the topic, Ding was somehow bewildered, seeing that Yang seemed uninterested in this matter. He had expected Yang would jump at him and criticize him severely for having the coffin made.

“In short,” Yang said, “I think this belongs to family affairs. We should let Old Ding decide by himself. Now everybody may express his opinion.”

Ding couldn’t understand why all of a sudden the secretary appeared to be so gentle and sympathetic. Then his own man, Tian, began to speak. “I agree that it’s a private matter, and Chairman Ding has the right to decide on his own. But as the head of the commune, he ought to think of the consequences, the political effect. What will we do if lots of commune members begin to follow Chairman Ding’s example and refuse to cremate the dead?”

“I agree,” said Feng, who was also Ding’s man. “I think the political consequence is enormous. We can’t afford to let our leader make such a mistake.”

Ding was unhappy about his men’s performance. Why do they all turn against me today? he asked himself. They all have a mother. Could they burn their mothers’ bodies? I can bury my mother secretly without a ceremony. Few people will know where. I just don’t want to burn her up. I promised her not to do that.

While Ding was lost in his thoughts, Dong Cai, Yang’s man, began to speak: “I agree with Secretary Yang. I think this is a personal matter that we shouldn’t interfere with. We all have old parents. I wouldn’t have my mother cremated if she died. That would wreck my family’s fortune; at least my father would think so. No, never.”

“Thank you,” Ding said, so grateful that he couldn’t contain himself anymore. “I promised her not to burn her body! Before she died, she begged me with tears not to do that. She just wanted to be buried somewhere deep in the earth. I won’t take any arable land.”

The meeting dragged on for an hour without reaching a decision. Finally, the secretary proposed a vote, not on whether to bury or cremate the dead but on whether to let Ding choose himself. The result was 4 to 3, in favor of personal choice. Ding felt relieved.

Without saying good night to his men, Ding set out for home. When he turned at the corner of Old Folk Road, Feng and Tian emerged from the side entrance of the Commune Administration. They called Ding and wanted to have a word with him.

“Chairman Ding,” Tian said, “do you trust a bastard like Dong Cai or us?”

“Of course I trust you.”

“We’ve followed you for years,” Feng said. “We know you are a good, filial man. But they don’t think so. Don’t be taken in by them. They want you to make a mistake and then they’ll jump at you and rip you apart.”

“Well, how come?”

“They set a trap for you, Chairman Ding,” Tian said, his narrow eyes glittering. “If you bury your mother tomorrow morning, I’m sure they will report you to the higher-ups tomorrow afternoon. To prevent ground burials is a major political task this year, you know that. In fact, Secretary Yang didn’t want to hold tonight’s meeting. It was Feng and I who persuaded Huang Zhi and Zhang Meng to propose the meeting. They just want to see you fall into a well and then they’ll stone you to death, but we want to stop you before you fall.”

“Yes,” Feng said, “as the saying goes: ‘Loyal words jar on your ears—bitter medicine is good for your illness.’ We don’t want to please but save you.”

Ding was shocked. He held out his hands and laid them on both Feng’s and Tian’s shoulders and said, “My friends, I just realized the true intention behind their sympathy. At the meeting I was too emotional to see through them. I’m grateful for your timely words, which made me stop before it was too late. All right, I will follow your advice.” He paused to think for a moment, then said resolutely, “Please help me arrange with the crematory for the service tomorrow morning. Do it tonight, my friends.”

Having watched Feng and Tian disappear in the dark, Ding turned and went his way home. A cicada was chirring sleepily in the clear night, and someone was piping a bamboo flute in the distance. By now Ding knew that he had no choice, and that his official career would have been ruined if he had given his mother a ground burial at this moment when the superiors were eager and ready to punish someone so as to check the trend of ground burials. But he had promised his mother. How could he convince his family that the change was reasonable? There would be little trouble with his wife, since she understood such a matter and wouldn’t insist on a ground burial; besides, the dead was his mother, not her own flesh and blood. The trouble would come from his son, who had heard him promise the old woman and might not understand how serious this matter was.

Ding was right. When he broke the new decision to the family, Sheng wouldn’t accept it. “You promised her yourself. How can she rest in peace if we burn her up?”

“Yes, it’s true I promised her,” Ding said, trying to be as calm as possible. “Remember what she said about death? She said,
‘When I am dead, everything will be over for me.’ She can’t feel anything now. What matters is us, the remaining ones. We have to live and work.” Reasonable as he sounded, Ding felt his voice lacking the force it should have.

“Sheng, your dad is right,” Yuanmin said.

“No.” Sheng shook his head. “A ground burial is the least thing we can do for her.” He turned to his father. “I know it may keep you from being promoted, but at worst you’ll be demoted one rank.”

“Damn it, it’s not a matter of demotion or promotion. Those bastards, they want to bury me together with your grandma. Don’t you understand? They want to destroy us!”

“Don’t yell at each other, please,” Yuanmin begged.

As the son couldn’t be persuaded, the father proposed a vote. Certainly the wife agreed with the husband, but Sheng wouldn’t give up. He mentioned his aunt in Shandong, who was also a family member and should be a voter. “That’s ridiculous,” Ding said. “Even though we send her a telegram tomorrow morning, it’ll take two days to get her word back. Do you want your grandma’s body to rot in the heat?”

Seeing that his son couldn’t answer, Ding said in a soft voice, “I’m not a dictator in our family. The minority is subordinate to the majority. That is the principle of democracy, isn’t it? Our family must unite together in a crisis like this, at least in appearance. I have sent a letter to your aunt and she may come soon. Once she’s here, I will explain everything to her. I’m sure she won’t be as stubborn as you are.”

Sheng knew it was no use arguing. Besides, he was not certain whether his father was totally unreasonable. He went out and sat down on a bench beside the coffin. Several men were
dozing away in the candlelight. The night had grown quiet, except that in the distance a pulverizer was humming away in the Harvest Fertilizer Plant. Sheng remembered his grandmother’s words and wondered if everything really ended when a person died. Don’t we have a soul? he asked himself. If we don’t, why do these wreaths say: “May the Spirit of the Departed Remain Forever?” Why do we visit those tombs of the revolutionary martyrs every spring? Why do the folk present dishes, pour wine, and burn paper money before the graves of their family members? If one has a soul, then how does it feel when the body is destroyed, burned? Does the cremation hurt the soul?

Too sleepy, he couldn’t focus his mind on any of these questions, which gradually faded away. Soon he began dozing off in the starlit night, like the other men.

Early next morning a junior clerk in the Propaganda Department came with a camera and took some pictures of the wreaths, the coffin, the awning, the men and women in mourning. At nine, two Liberation trucks and a Great Wall van pulled up in front of the Dings’. A dozen young men got off the vehicles and began to load the coffin onto a truck. All the neighbors and friends who wanted to go to the crematory climbed on the other truck, whereas the Dings and a few women who had helped with the needlework took the van.

The crematory was on the western outskirts of Dismount Fort, on the bank of the Blue Brook. A tall chimney stood atop a knoll and spat out thin, whitish smoke whenever the furnace burned. Seeing the ghostly cloud, the old people in town would say, “They are burning a body again. That soul will come back and haunt their homes and lure their children into the marshes.” But
day by day there were more bodies burned over there, and everyone could tell the business was booming. Young people knew that was where they would have to end up, but they didn’t seem to care, since there were so many things to worry about.

The coffin was unloaded in front of the furnace house, and the body was taken out and placed on a narrow, long carriage. Sheng saw his grandmother for the first time after her death. She wore black clothes; everything was brand-new, even the felt hat, the sheets, the quilts. Her pale face was swollen, but she looked very calm, as though in sleep. People began to gather into a line to show their final respect for the old woman. To the Dings’ surprise, Secretary Yang, Dong Cai, and several other men of the enemy faction also turned up at the crematory. A few bluebottles were buzzing and circling above the dead face, and Yuanmin waved a handkerchief to keep them away.

Two workmen came and pushed the carriage away to the furnace. The Dings were told that the best kerosene would be used, and that if they wanted to watch they should go to the left-hand side of the furnace and view the cremation through a small hole. Several friends and the Dings moved to the spot; then the carriage was pushed in. The worker pressed the buttons on the handles, and the body and the clothes fell on the floor in the furnace. The moment the carriage came out, flames sprang up from every direction and swallowed the clothes and the body. The viewers could hardly see anything, only fire dancing and swirling before their eyes. Ding Liang couldn’t contain himself any longer and burst into a cry, “Oh, Ma, I’m sorry! I’m a bad son. Ma, you wait. Don’t go so fast.” Tears flowed down his pudgy face. His wife and son began crying too.