Yan Lianke - Lenin's Kisses

There was another long silence, and still no one raised a hand.

“If no one raises their hand, this means that all the votes go to permitting the village of Liven to withdraw from society.” Chief Liu said to the recording secretary sitting beside him. “The vote is unanimous. After you have recorded this decision, please go implement it.” Then he added, “Have the driver immediately bring the car over.”

Finally, Chief Liu turned back to the members of the standing committee, and asked, “None of you want to relocate to Liven?” He added, “If not, then the meeting is adjourned.” After announcing the meeting’s adjournment, Chief Liu was the first person to step out of the conference room. Everyone thought he was going to greet the thousands of people kneeling outside the courtyard of the government building, so who could have expected that as soon as he walked out of the building, there would be a bloody scream,

“Come quickly, there’s been a horrible accident. The county chief has been run over by a car. . . ”

“Come quick, the county chief’s own car has shattered both of his legs. . . ”

Those shouts rained down from the sky like blood, splattering the government building courtyard, and the entire world.

Grandma Mao Zhi departed. 1

By that point the new lunar year had arrived, and the weather had gotten somewhat warmer. The willows, poplars, and wild grass were all green and budding. Spring had indeed come early, in the first lunar month, and in the Balou mountain range, there was the fragrantly foul smell of grass everywhere. In this transition from winter to spring, someone showed up from Boshuzi township. He was on his way to a relative’s house deep in the Balou mountains, and when he passed Liven, he stood in front of the village and began shouting,

“Hey . . people of Liven . . people of Liven . .

“Do you hear me? . . This is a letter for your village. . . It is a document. . . ”

Although it was warm on this day, the winter chill had not yet fully gone away. The villagers were all sunning themselves around the old honey locust tree in the center of the village. Grandma Mao Zhi had aged so much she didn’t have a single black hair left, and instead her entire head had turned as gray and brittle as a patch of dried grass. When she returned from Spirit Mountain after having led the villagers on their performance tour, she didn’t remove her burial clothes. In fact, she wore them all day to cook, eat, and even sunbathe, and at night she wore them to bed.

She rarely spoke anymore, her lips being so tightly sealed that it seemed as though she were already dead. But when she did open her mouth, she always repeated the same thing:

“I’m about to depart for a cause. If I’m going to die, so be it. When you die, your body becomes stiff. When I was alive I wasn’t able to help the villagers withdraw from society, and I let down the entire village. When it comes time to dress me in my burial clothes after I die, they will take the opportunity to tear me apart limb by limb.”

She added, “That is why I won’t remove my burial clothes, and neither will I give the villagers an opportunity to tear me apart limb by limb.”

Therefore, she wore her burial clothes all day long — and regardless of whether she was resting at home or walking through the village, she always had those sixteen or seventeen blind, crippled, or half-paralyzed dogs following her around.

The side of Deafman Ma’s face was completely disfigured as a result of the six months he spent performing his firecracker routine. He actually didn’t have any problems while he was still performing every day, but as soon as he stopped, that half of his face became covered with pus, and while he was idle that winter he frequently went to the center of the village to sun himself, orienting the injured side of his face toward the light. It is said that the sun can cure many illnesses, and after Deafman Ma sunned himself the entire winter his face did in fact gradually heal. Paraplegic Woman no longer embroidered anything on paper or leaves, but rather spent her time sunning herself and mending shoes. While she worked, she kept muttering about her children, saying that they must have grown teeth on their feet, because otherwise how could their shoes fall apart so quickly?

When One-Legged Monkey returned to Liven, he didn’t have a cent to his name, but he did have a large pouch of gold strips that would last him his entire life. Even though he couldn’t eat or drink the strips, he often said that he wanted to build a two-room house at the top of the ridge and open a store and a restaurant. He said that he wanted to be the boss, and before turning thirty he hoped to transform the gold deposit into a substantial investment. At this point, he borrowed all his tools from the carpenter, and worked at home every day building shelves for his store, until the entire village and the hillside were full of the sound of his hammering.

Huaihua was pregnant, and even though her belly was growing larger by the day, she still always wore her red wool shirt. Given her slender figure, as her belly grew she came to resemble a carrying pole with a round willow basket tied to it. Because she was pregnant, and particularly because she was pregnant with a bastard child as a result of what happened on Spirit Mountain, her mother Jumei felt humiliated and didn’t want to see anyone, and stayed at home day after day. Just as everyone who saw Huaihua’s belly knew what had happened to her, they also knew that Blind Tonghua and her nin sisters Yuhua and Mothlet had also been violated by that group of wholers and, consequently, had dropped out of sight.

The fearless Huaihua, however, began walking through the village every day, since she had been told that it was good to keep active while pregnant. She would stroll around like a ball rolling back and forth, with a bright smile on her face and always eating a snack of some sort. As she strolled back and forth, she looked proud of the baby in her belly.

People would ask her, “Huaihua, how many months along are you?”

She ate her melon seeds and replied, “Not very long.”

They would ask again, “When are you due?”

She replied, “It’s still early.”

They asked, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

She said, “I don’t know, but at least I know it will be a wholer.”

Little Polio Boy wanted to learn to become a carpenter, and he spent every day at One-Legged Monkey’s house, running errands for him and helping out with other tasks.

No one knew what One-Eye was doing all winter, and when the other villagers were hanging out in the streets he was nowhere to be found. When the villagers were not around, however, he could be seen strolling aimlessly about. He would occasionally ask someone, “Where is everyone? Where did everyone go? Did they all sneak out to perform?”

In this way, everything went back to the way it had been. But though it appeared as though nothing had changed, in reality everything was different from the way it had been before.

On that day, as Grandma Mao Zhi was sunning herself under the honey locust tree in her burial clothes, surrounded by those sixteen or seventeen dogs that she treated like her own grandchildren. Paraplegic Woman was sitting on a wooden stool on the western edge of the village, mending shoes, and Deafman Ma had set up a door plank in a location where he could get direct sunlight while being shaded from the wind on the pus-covered side of his face. Some people were off to the side playing poker and chess to while away the winter boredom, when a loud shout was heard from the mountain ridge,