Yan Lianke - Lenin's Kisses

No one said a word. Everyone was consuming the sight of him swallowing the water and the sound of him eating the steamed bun. One-Legged Monkey was standing to the side licking his cracked lips. Deafman Ma for some reason was covering his mouth with his hand. Tonghua, Huaihua, Yuhua, and Mothlet were not watching the boy, and instead were just staring at their grandmother as if she, who was standing right next to them, might suddenly pull out a wad of cash and buy each of them a steamed bun and a bowl of water.

By this point it was already afternoon and it seemed as though the air in the room, and even time itself, was being chewed up by the boy.

Suddenly, Deafman Ma unbuttoned his pants, and muttered, “If we’re all about to die, then what the hell do I need money for?” He pulled twelve hundred yuan from his underwear, and shouted at the door,

“Give me two steamed buns, and two bowls of water!”

He passed the money through the crack under the door.

The smiling face of a thirty-something-year-old appeared at the window, and handed down buns and water.

The Mute wailed several times, stomped his feet, then suddenly went back to the side room where he slept. He started counting the bricks along the wall behind his bed, and when he reached the fifth one, he lifted up the corresponding bricks beneath his bedroll and removed several wads of cash. He removed a pile of bills, and as he walked forward he stuck out three fingers and wailed. Grandma Mao Zhi took his money and explained to the smiling face in the window, “He wants three steamed buns, and three bowls of water. Here is eighteen hundred yuan. Count it yourself.” She then passed the wad of bills through the window into the person’s hand.

The smiling face accepted the money. Without even counting it, the man immediately shouted out to the people below him, “Quick, bring us three steamed buns and three bowls of water.”

In this way, the situation slowly began to shift. The villagers no longer needed to avoid one another. As Grandma Mao Zhi had claimed, their money had been stolen three days earlier, but they still had some cash stashed away on their persons. The women opened their shirts in front of everyone, and most of them had money hidden away in little pockets that they had sewn inside. There was one woman who didn’t have this sort of pocket, but she retreated to the latrine and, in the blink of an eye, reemerged holding several hundred yuan.

The boy’s uncle sat there without moving. Eventually, he ripped open his pants leg, revealing several hundred — or perhaps even several thousand — yuan.

The old man who had gone on stage playing the role of a hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old didn’t rummage around in his clothes for money, and neither did he retreat to the side room to retrieve it. Instead, he went over to Lenin’s crystal coffin and, lying down, starting feeling around on the ground underneath the coffin, eventually withdrawing the sort of wallet that usually only city folks use. The wallet was full of crisp, new hundred-yuan bills. He pulled out who knows how many bills, muttering, “Fuck her grandmother. If everyone is going to die, what use will our money be to us?” He didn’t buy a steamed bun, though, nor a bowl of water. Instead, he purchased three baked buns and three bowls of noodles. The buns were baked to a succulent shade of brown, and the noodles were similarly cooked to perfection.

After the old man accepted the three baked buns and three bowls of noodles, he placed two of the bowls at his feet and held the third in his left hand while cradling the three baked buns in his right. He then took the buns and bowl over to Lenin’s crystal coffin before going back to collect the remaining two bowls of noodles. The coffin was light and bright, and when he placed his noodles and buns on top, it was as if he were placing them on an imperial jade table. In this way, it wasn’t as though he were eating simply because he was hungry, but rather as though he were saying, Eat and drink, because the important thing is simply to survive. What use is your money? What’s special about it? Food is the most valuable thing in the world.

He savored his bun as happily as a cow chewing its cud, and drank his noodles as if he were guzzling water in the middle of a desert. He focused only on his eating and drinking, completely ignoring everyone else. It was as though he were on stage performing the role of a starving man.

Several people stood there watching him, while others retrieved money from various places and, like him, bought armfuls of buns and noodles. As they did so, they said, “Grandmother! If people can’t even survive, they should at least eat and drink well.”

One-Legged Monkey had been hiding motionless behind the crowd of villagers, but after watching everyone eat and drink, he suddenly took out some money from somewhere. Then he saw Cripple: the “hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old man.” He was eating and drinking on top of the crystal coffin, while peering beneath the coffin at the brick from which he had just removed his money. From this, One-Legged Monkey began to develop a suspicion, whereupon he cursed, “Fuck your mothers!” It was unclear whether he was cursing the old cripple or himself. He took off the special hard-soled shoes that he wore while performing his Leaping-Over-a-Mountain-of-Knives-and-Crossing-a-Sea-of-Fire routine and removed several hundred-yuan bills, then used them to buy some buns and noodles.

As One-Legged Monkey ate and drank, he looked around, and his gaze would periodically come to rest on that area below the crystal coffin, where Cripple kept glancing.

Meanwhile, the main hall erupted into tumult, with everyone calling out for buns and water. The villagers all hobbled over to the door of the memorial hall, where, like the old cripple, they would say, “That’s right. Fuck your mother! If people are starving to death, what the hell do they need money for!”

They said, “Eat, drink. It won’t do if everyone dies of hunger or thirst.”

They said, “It doesn’t matter if a bowl of water costs one hundred yuan. Even if it cost a thousand yuan, I wouldn’t accept this sort of death sentence.”

Soon, the entire hall was filled with the sound of people eating and drinking.

One person gulped down a bowl of water, then extended a hundred-yuan bill toward the window and shouted, “Sell me some more water! I need some more water!” Another person devoured a bun in a few bites, then shouted, “Sell me another bun, sell me another. I want that oil-baked bun!”

At this point, however, the four small windows above the memorial hall door were pushed open, and in them appeared the faces of four wholers. In the middle window appeared the face of the driver, but he wasn’t smiling contentedly like the wholer beside him. Instead, he stuck his head in and looked around, cleared his throat, and said,

“If you had done this earlier, you wouldn’t have had to go hungry for so long!”

He added,

“I apologize. . . The price of the buns has gone up. . . They now cost eight hundred yuan each. The price of water has also gone up, to two hundred yuan a bowl.”

All of the villagers immediately fell silent, as though the driver had suddenly thrown water onto a burning fire. Some of the people holding up their money to buy buns and water promptly pulled their arms back down, but one woman remained frozen there with her arms suspended in the air, the money still in her hands. One of the wholers in the window quickly grabbed her money, and the woman shouted,

“You stole my money. . . You stole my money. . . ”

The person who had taken her money leaned into the hall and said with a laugh, “If we had wanted to steal your money, why on earth would we have waited here for three days and three nights to do so?”