Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

‘Everything is decided for you by your superiors,’ the dog said one day, ‘what job you do, who you marry, how many children you have. You have no belief in your ability to control your destiny. Your lives are so dull and monotonous, if you weren’t subjected to various trials and tribulations, you would never be strong enough to look death in the face.’ The dog uttered these words on the roof terrace, his head framed by the azure sky. The fumes pouring from the chimney stacks behind him smelled like the sour steam that rises from fermenting tofu. Against the blue sky, the smoke was blindingly bright.

‘I seem to have caught a cold,’ the dog said. ‘The breeze up here is bad for my health.’ He had picked up that last phrase from me.

I still don’t know how he died, though.

Sometimes I think he must have jumped from the roof. I imagine him darting across the terrace, then retreating to the edge as the old carpenter and the other two from the dog extermination brigade approached, followed by a pack of Young Pioneers brandishing spears and spades. He was either lassoed with a rope and dragged downstairs or beaten to death on the spot. His sharp claws and teeth couldn’t protect him from them. Once they had decided he should die, there was nothing he could do.

My three-legged dog never liked the Young Pioneers. He said that after years of being told to sacrifice their lives to the Revolution, they turn into little hooligans who lack any sense of morality or common decency.

‘They are children,’ I said. ‘We should forgive them. Childhood is sacred.’

He curled his lips and, glancing at the street below, said, ‘See those children making fun of the blind man? Look at their ugly faces! If their teachers sent them out tomorrow to perform good deeds, they’d fight for the chance to grab the blind man’s hand and help him across the road.’

Although their faces were a blur, I could see them racing across the blind man’s path, performing karate moves they had picked up from some martial arts film. Then the dog asked: ‘If you had to choose between me and a child, which one would you save?’

I couldn’t answer. Even today I wouldn’t be able to give an answer to that question. Naturally, I should put a human life before a dog’s, but my feelings for the survivor far exceeded any I felt for those children in the street — they were even stronger than the feelings I had for my girlfriend. If those children were indeed responsible for the survivor’s death, I know he wouldn’t have put up a fight. He could have bitten off one of their legs had he wanted to, but he would have chosen to suffer in silence rather than cause them any harm.

When I returned from the conference, I made a thorough inspection of his body to try and find out the cause of his death. He reeked of formaldehyde, but there were no wounds on his skin. I patted him on the back and said, ‘Look, they didn’t hurt you at all! Why have you been lying to me in my dreams?’

A couple of weeks later, I returned to the workshop to speak to the carpenter. When I entered the room, he was nailing the skin of a Dongbei tiger onto a wooden frame. I asked him how the three-legged dog had died. He smiled amiably, and drawing the tiger’s pelt across the frame, he said: ‘A three-legged dog? I’ve seen a five-legged donkey and a five-legged bull. Ha ha! Those fifth legs were half the size of the others!’ He roared with laughter, and made a lewd gesture above his groin.

I am convinced that Secretary Wang knows exactly how the dog died. I even suspect that he planned the murder himself He is the museum’s Party secretary, after all. Maybe he wanted to use this episode to test my loyalty to the Party. How could he not have known that I was keeping a dog on the terrace? Perhaps at first he decided to sit back and wait for me to confess my crime. But when he saw me commit mistake after mistake, he packed me off to a conference and got rid of the dog while I was away. When I returned from the trip, he convened an enlarged session of the Party cell, and encouraged the members to come forward and give their opinions on my relationship with the dog.

‘The higher organs are putting me to the test,’ I told the stuffed survivor the next time I visited him in the workshop. ‘In the meeting before my trip, they asked if any comrades had something they wanted to reveal. I should have owned up about you there and then. You had the cheek to criticise my girlfriend for committing suicide, and then you go and die yourself!’

‘Did you love her?’ the stuffed survivor asked me suddenly. ‘Don’t you feel responsible for her death? Why was she so willing to throw her life away? How could you have let her go through with it? What was she trying to tell you?’

His questions left me speechless. I remembered the first time I met her, when I was chairman of the student union at school. If I hadn’t got involved with her, I would probably have entered the Party that year. After I graduated from university, I was assigned a room in a staff dormitory block, and our friendship deepened. She would visit me every day and stay until ten at night, slipping out just before the security guard locked the front gates. In my darkened room, I would rest my head on her stomach and listen to the growling of her intestines. She lay down on my bed and gave herself to me. But even today, I don’t know what I loved about her. She was a woman, my girlfriend, but had she been any other woman, would I have felt any different? How would I have reacted if my leaders hadn’t agreed to our relationship? (She was still at drama school at the time and her lifestyle wasn’t faultless.) Just before she died, her eyes were full of kindness and goodwill. I wondered whether she was hoping I would rush to her rescue.

‘Then why didn’t you try?’ the survivor asked.

‘I did jump to my feet at one point. But I had skived off a political meeting at work that day, and if news had got out that I wasn’t ill at all, but had come to watch the performance, I would have got into terrible trouble. She knew very well that the higher organs were in the process of considering my application to join the Party.’

‘You should be held responsible for her death.’

‘No, my only responsibility is towards the Party,’ I said, refusing to give in to him.

But there is one matter that still puzzles me, and that I suspect might have contributed to the dog’s death. After I left for the conference, the dog somehow managed to climb to the top shelf and bring down those unhealthy books that only a select group of cadres are allowed to ‘Read and Criticise’. They contain the reactionary thoughts of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, and the much-discredited Hegel. The poor dog was completely unprepared for these ideas — he had never attended any political meetings, and he even held the reactionary opinion that Marxist-Leninism was out of date! Those books corrupted the minds of many poets and university students (including my girlfriend), driving them to a life of decadence, causing them to lose their normal sense of judgement. The dog must have squatted in the corner and read through every wretched book. If this did indeed happen, then I would certainly hold myself responsible for his death.

Now that he’s gone, I have no use for the leftover bones in the cafeteria. But at mealtimes I still glance under the table looking for them, and when no one is watching, I kick them towards me, then wrap them up in a newspaper and take them home with me. This isn’t a normal way to behave. Of course I know in my heart that the survivor is just a stuffed specimen now, but my feelings for him can’t change overnight. In the evening, I wait for darkness to fall, then I walk to the edge of the terrace and toss the bones onto the streets below.