Yan Lianke - Lenin's Kisses

Chief Liu had swallowed the Singapore visitor’s bait — hook, line, and sinker — and subsequently grew so anxious his mouth became filled with painful sores that wouldn’t go away unless he sucked on some bitter melon. He decided there was no need to reimburse the stores for the cost of the fabric used to make the mourning outfits, since he would consider it their collective contribution to the Lenin Fund. 1He added that the garment factories didn’t need to be reimbursed either, and that if the factory heads were to ask for payment, Chief Liu could simply replace them. The factory heads were so terrified when they heard this that they didn’t dare ask again. Meanwhile, everyone else who participated in the funeral procession was compensated — in the sense that they not only received a brand-new set of white clothes, but for the next several days also had something new to talk about whenever they got bored. In the end, however, the Lenin Fund did not reach its target.

If it had been only a question of the visitor from Singapore that would have been one thing, but as it turns out there was something else that had infuriated Chief Liu even more, leaving him utterly speechless. The previous night, Chief Liu and his wife had had a falling-out — one that was as unexpected as the summertime blizzard that would suddenly befall Liven. While Chief Liu was out hosting a fund-raiser to help purchase Lenin’s remains, his wife was home watching television. Around midnight, he returned to their house and he and his wife went to bed. Since it was the weekend, they theoretically should have had their customary conjugal enlivening. This was their agreement, which they had written down, signed, and sealed with their fingerprints. They had agreed that they needed to carry out their connubial enlivening every weekend, in order to keep the chief from getting too big for his britches and forgetting his own wife. She was almost seven years younger than he, and after they slept together the first evening following his appointment as township chief, she took advantage of his good spirits and made him write down this vow. Therefore, every weekend they would make sure to have an enlivening.

But after Chief Liu began planning to purchase Lenin’s corpse and realized he would need to raise a large sum of money in order to bring it back and install it on Spirit Mountain, he forgot all about his weekly conjugal enlivenings. His head 3was filled with plans to build a mausoleum to house the corpse, but now the Singapore visitor was nowhere to be found and the Lenin Fund, which was supposed to have become bigger than a mountain and higher than the sky, had similarly failed to materialize. Chief Liu was exhausted and furious at the Singapore visitor, and when he got out of his fund-raiser that weekend and returned home after midnight, he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, his snores reverberating through the house. Just before dawn, his wife woke him up and said something astounding:

“Liu Yingque, I want a divorce.”

He rubbed his eyes and stared back at her. “What?”

She said, “I’ve been thinking about this all night, and decided that it would be best if we got divorced.”

Chief Liu finally understood what she was saying. He sat up in bed, and his shoulders began to feel a little chilly, as the night breeze washed over him like a bucket of cold water. He wrapped his shoulders with a big red quilt cover, looking as though he were holding up a large, fluttering flag. His wife was sitting in a chair in the center of the room, in the same moon-colored underwear she had been wearing the previous day, together with the kind of pink cotton tank top that had recently become fashionable among women in the Shuanghuai county seat. Underneath this white and pink outfit, her skin was as bright and supple as pristine white jade, while her hair looked as though it had been painted black. Though she was only seven years younger than Chief Liu, she looked as though she was not even thirteen, pretty and refined. As she sat in the chair in front of Chief Liu, she looked like a coquette girl 5sitting in front of her much older brother.

He asked, “Fuck, is this because I haven’t been enlivening you recently?”

She replied, “It’s not because of that. Besides, the enlivening is not just for me.”

He said, “Nowhere else would you find a preschool teacher willing to divorce a county chief.”

She said, “I want to get divorced. I really do.”

It was at this point that the township chief had arrived at the government building where Chief Liu and his wife lived. He stood in the doorway listening for a while, then walked in, smiling. Standing next to Chief Liu, he said, “Girl, have you forgotten? Have you forgotten that the county chief is the head of the county, and that you are his wife? After he is promoted to district commissioner or district Party committee secretary, you would then become the wife of the district commissioner or Party secretary, and if he is promoted to provincial governor or provincial Party committee secretary, you would then become the wife of the governor or Party committee secretary.”

She stared at the township chief with a disdainful smile lurking in the corners of her lips and her eyes.

Chief Liu added, “I’m telling you, by marrying me you have fallen into a nest of riches, and your family will burn incense for three generations.”

She replied softly yet firmly, “I don’t want to enjoy riches, and I don’t want to be your wife.”

He said, “After I become as famous as Lenin, then even if you die, there will still be someone around to make you a memorial tablet and build you a memorial hall. Do you realize that?”

She shouted back, “I’m only interested in what happens when I’m still alive. I couldn’t care less what happens after I die.”

He paused, then retorted, “How could your parents have given birth to someone like you?”

The township chief interjected, “Chief Liu, let it go. Don’t argue with her. Besides, she’s just a woman. You should go up to Spirit Mountain to take a look, and see if the contractors have put the Hanbai jade back on the latrine wall again.”

Chief Liu said, “Fuck his grandmother. Make them come down.”

The township chief said, “Fuck them back for eight generations. They say that they aren’t willing to listen to anyone other than the county chief.”

Chief Liu called out to his secretary, “Let’s go. Secretary Shi, have the driver bring my car around.”

His wife said, “Go, go! If you can, then stay away for ten days or two weeks.”

Chief Liu laughed coldly. “In fact, I won’t come back to this house for another month.”

His wife retorted, “You shouldn’t come back for another two months.”

He said, “I won’t come back for another three months.”

She said, “If you return, you won’t even deserve to be called human.”

Chief Liu said, “If I cross this threshold within the next three months, you can consider me a bastard and tear down that memorial hall I just built, so that after we bring back Lenin’s remains, we won’t be able to sell even half of an admission ticket. You can leave me to wander the streets, burning up when the sun shines in the winter and freezing to death when it snows in the summer.”

And, in fact, that summer it did snow.

Once he left the house and was on the road, the driver complained, “Fuck. This bedeviled day is getting colder and colder, and the car windows are covered with snowflakes.”

Chief Liu and the township chief stuck their hands out the window to try to catch a snowflake.

The township chief said, “That’s what the weather’s like here in Balou. Every year it snows a bit during the third lunar month, and there is a major blizzard once every few years.”