Ma Jian - The Noodle Maker

Unfortunately, the minute the artist put down his brush, a woman from the neighbourhood committee turned up with two policemen in tow. They ordered the artist to paint over the line of cleavage (a stroke of brown paint slightly darker than the surrounding flesh tone). Once the offending cleavage had become flat and uninviting, the artist was ordered to mask the girl’s bare legs. The muslin skirt he painted over them seemed to satisfy the policemen, as it fell just below her knees. At the top left hand corner of the mural he had painted a skinny little god, China’s Lord of the Sky, and without waiting to be asked, the ‘Wild Beast’ quickly daubed a white cloud over the god’s penis, and painted two more under his feet for the sake of symmetry. Then, in the background, he added a crowd of representative workers, peasants, businessmen, students and soldiers rising to the heavens with big smiles on their faces. Among their ranks were a couple of ‘Four Eyes’ (otherwise known as intellectuals) who had been allowed back on the scene since the Open Door Policy. The artist filled the remaining blank spaces with pretty angels and beguiling devils — you could tell them apart by the horns. At the bottom of the picture stood the Lord of the Underworld, who held opposite duties to the Lord of the Sky. It was clear from the images that he was responsible for punishing the most serious category of criminal: counter-revolutionaries. He employed torture techniques borrowed from Christianity, Islam and Buddhism: drowning in boiling fat, being run over by a car, pecked to death by eagles and eaten alive by snakes. The entrepreneur’s mother later stuck a pair of paper horses over this section to hide the gruesome scenes.

The old apartment building with the half-blocked entrance passage looked very similar to the August 1 stUprising Memorial Museum in Beijing (without the ornate portico and huge arched windows, of course). The decoration of the facade reflected the different stages of prosperity brought about by the recent reforms. A few well-off families had replaced their old wooden cased windows with aluminium frames and tinted glass. A bureau head had even installed air-conditioning, a foreign machine that sucks out hot air and blows in cold. You could guess the wealth of each household by the style and condition of the clothes that hung from the windows on bamboo poles. Most of the rooms on the ground floor had been converted into shops. A poster of a foreign movie star was pasted to the window of the Comrade Lei Feng Hair Salon.

The mother crossed her legs and picked up a burial nightshirt. The smoke from the burning incense coil spiralled through the morbid stench. One shirt had been worn by three different corpses already, and you could still smell aftershave (probably French) on the collar. She searched the garment for imperfections as carefully as though she were inspecting her own body. Her nimble fingers laboured through the night, darning every hole and tear. By the morning the shirt was looking brand new again, folded up on the top shelf of the office.

There was one embroidered jacket still lying on the bed though. If the entrepreneur had been more astute, he might have guessed what use she had in mind for it.

(At this point in his thoughts, the professional writer exhales a deep breath and moves his gaze to the night sky. Colours always look more seductive in the dark, he says to himself, as he listens to the noises coming from inside and outside the lit-up windows. Since it is quieter than the daytime, you can hear pebbles bounce off the shoes of a passer-by, and children under a street lamp humming ‘Learn from the Good Example of Comrade Lei Feng’. A bicycle bell rings out occasionally, then melts into the darkness. At this time of night, people become sad and mysterious creatures. It’s only when they are cooking, resting or chatting that the flavour of life pours from the streets and drifts into every home. As long as there are no women quarrelling, people can stare at the stars, share a meal with some friends, or go out on a date …)

At dusk, the entrepreneur would start burning the bodies that had been collected during the day. He would work until midnight, then return home laden with clothes and belongings. Sometimes he came back with gold teeth or pieces of jewellery. In the mornings he drove his army motorbike out of town through a string of houses that until recently had been a stretch of open field, to his crematorium in the suburbs, a simple shack he had built from the bricks of an abandoned chicken shed. An iron barrel welded to the rectangular metal roof served as the chimney. His two drivers would dump the corpses on the shack’s cement floor or on one of the three stretchers. When the bodies entered the crematorium, they seemed as comfortable in their new surroundings as music lovers in a concert hall.

The entrepreneur always made sure that the bodies were collected on the day of registration. He understood how things work. If a dead person hangs around the house for more than three days, the relatives not only stop weeping, they begin to resent its presence. He also ensured that the ashes were returned to the family within the week. Any later and he knew he would get a very frosty reception at the swooners’ homes.

Sometimes the relatives would visit the office in the centre of town (finding their way from the address at the top of the entrepreneur’s invoice) to collect the ashes themselves. But the boxes seldom contained the swooner whose photograph was stuck to the lid. The entrepreneur often divided one corpse’s ashes between several boxes. He was forced to cheat in this way if he was to guarantee a prompt delivery of the remains. Anyway, as far as he was concerned, one person’s ashes were the same as the next’s. His drivers drove a small second-hand Fiat whose sides were emblazoned with the bright text:

WE CARE FOR OTHERS, WE CARE FOR THE PARTY, WE CARE FOR OUR MOTHERLAND. WE CARE FOR THE CAUSE OF DOUBLING THE NATION’S PRODUCTION BY THE 21ST CENTURY. GO DOWN AMONG THE PEASANTS! GO TO THE BORDER AREAS! GO TO THE SWOONERS’ CREMATORIUM!

On the boot of the car was a picture of a huge crowd of people standing on a globe the size of a football. The eye-catching slogan below read: UP WITH PRODUCTION! DOWN WITH POPULATION!

‘I really love them — the dead are much nicer than the living,’ the entrepreneur once said to some weeping relatives when he arrived to deliver the ashes.

‘China has a population of 1.2 billion. If more people don’t hurry up and die, our country will be finished,’ he told another family. ‘Anyway, it’s not as if he was a hero of the revolution, is it?’ he added, noticing the word ‘proletarian’ in the political class column of the dead man’s form.

The entrepreneur’s greatest talent was in recommending music for the deceased. He only had to glance at the profession, political class, age, sex and photograph on the form and he could select the appropriate music from his list. The price of each song had to rise, of course, in line with the inflation brought about by the Open Door Policy.

BEETHOVEN’S ‘FIFTH SYMPHONY’: 5 YUAN

CHOPIN’S ‘NOCTURNE’: 7 YUAN

(Suitable for young girls and poets)

TCHAIKOVSKY’S ‘PATHETIQUE’: 8 YUAN

(Karajan’s latest recording)

POTTIER’S ‘THE INTERNATIONALE’: 1.5 YUAN

ORFF’S ‘FORTUNE, EMPRESS OF THE WORLD’: 2 YUAN

(On special offer. A popular choice for intellectuals)

There were also some more familiar tunes at only half a yuan a go. These included the old favourites ‘Riverwater’, ‘The Moon Reflected in Two Ponds’, ‘No Communist Party, No New China,’ as well as ‘Young Cabbages’, ‘I Give My Life to the Party’ and ‘Learn from the Good Example of Comrade Lei Feng’. If the deceased was a member of the Young Pioneers, he would play ‘There are Many Good Deeds to be Done on Sunday’ free of charge.