Yan Lianke: Lenin's Kisses

“They are cadres — cadres looking for your grandmother.”

When Huaihua heard that it was the county and township chiefs, her face initially froze in disbelief, then erupted in joy. It goes without saying that these little nins all resembled one another, but if you looked carefully you would notice that Huaihua was fairer and more distinctive-looking than her sisters. She, too, recognized this, and therefore always tried to take the lead. She stared back at the men on the ridge for a long time, then turned to her mother and said, “Ma, Grandma is crazy. If it really is the county chief, wouldn’t it be better for you to go see him instead? Why don’t you. I’ll go with you.”

Mothlet said to Huaihua, “If the visitors say we should get Grandma, then she must not be crazy after all.”

Jumei sent Mothlet back to the village to look for the girls’ grandmother.

Huaihua continued to gaze at the ridge, but appeared disappointed. She kicked the snow several times, blushing anxiously.

The girls’ grandmother was the heroic Grandma Mao Zhi described in the county gazetteer, and she was now hobbling with Mothlet across the field. By this point Grandma Mao Zhi was already in her seventies and had gone through several dozen crutches — though she, unlike the other villagers, used hospital-style crutches consisting of two white aluminum tubes screwed together to yield a pair of perfectly proportioned tubes, with a rubber stopper fastened to one end to keep them from slipping, and several layers of cloth wrapped around the other end, which rested comfortably in her armpit. No one else in the village had such nice crutches, and at best they used canes fashioned from willow or pagoda tree branches, from which a carpenter had sawed off the tip, chiseled a hole in the side, and then nailed it together with a wooden or iron nail.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s crutches not only were attractive and durable but also granted her a sense of dignity and authority. Whenever there was a crisis, all she had to do was tap the ground with her crutch and everything would immediately be resolved. For instance, when the township government had sent several imposing wholers to the village of Liven to demand that everyone pay a hundred-yuan transportation tax, hadn’t those men immediately turned back the instant Grandma Mao Zhi brandished her crutch at them? And the winter that the government tried to make everyone in Liven pay two pounds of cotton in taxes, wasn’t it Grandma Mao Zhi who’d removed her cotton jacket and thrown it in their faces and then, standing before them with her sagging breasts, demanded indignantly, “Is this enough? If not, I’ll also take off my pants,” and before they could react had begun to unfasten her belt?

The officials had exclaimed, “Grandma Mao Zhi, what on earth are you doing?”

She’d waved her crutch at them. “If you want to collect cotton, I’ll take off my cotton pants right here and now, and hand them to you.”

The officials had dodged her crutch and departed.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s crutch was her weapon, and now she was alternately leaning on it and pulling it out of the snow. She hobbled along behind Mothlet, followed by two crippled dogs she had adopted. By this point, everyone in the village knew that the county and township chiefs had come to investigate the crisis. Given that the Balou region had endured a hot snow that had fallen for seven straight days and left more than a foot of accumulation that completely buried the wheat crop, it was only natural that the government would come investigate the villagers’ hardships, comfort them, and offer them money, grain, eggs, sugar, and cloth.

Administratively, the village of Liven belonged to the county of Shuanghuai, and the township of Boshuzi.

The villagers noticed that the county chief waiting on the ridge was getting impatient.

They also saw Grandma Mao Zhi striding up to meet him.

She passed a pair of blind men leading each other down from the ridge. They were each carrying a basket of wheat, and one called out in greeting: “It’s Granny Mao. I can tell it’s you from the sound of your crutch. Other people’s crutches make a hard thump in the snow, but yours sounds like a soft puff of air.”

Grandma Mao Zhi asked them, “Are you returning from harvesting wheat?”

The blind man replied with a request. “Please ask the county chief for more money. Ask him to give every family in the village ten thousand yuan.”

Grandma Mao Zhi asked skeptically, “Would they even be able to spend that much money?”

He replied, “If they can’t spend it all, they can always stuff it under their mattresses for their grandchildren.”

A deaf man came over and called out, “Granny Mao, please tell the county chief that all he needs to do is provide everyone in Liven with a pair of those headphones that are all the rage back in the city.”

A mute approached and used his notepad to communicate the fact that his family had endured considerable suffering, and that their wheat was buried so far down beneath the snow they couldn’t dig it out. He worried that this year he once again wouldn’t be able to find himself a wife, and asked Mao Zhi to request that the county chief help him find one.

Mao Zhi asked him, “What kind of wife do you want?”

He gesticulated to indicate a tall figure, a short one, a fat one, and a slender one, and then waved his hands in the air.

A one-armed carpenter walked over and instantly understood what was going on, explaining, “He means that any kind of wife is fine, as long as she is a woman.”

Mao Zhi turned to the mute and asked, “Is that correct?”

The mute nodded.

In this way, Mao Zhi took the hopes and wishes of the entire village with her when she went up the ridge.

The two chiefs were waiting anxiously, their impatience written all over their faces. When the township chief saw Mao Zhi hobbling, he quickly stepped forward to help her. To his surprise, however, before she reached him she stopped in front of the county chief and brought her icy gaze crashing down on him, whereupon he immediately looked away and stared off in the direction of a mountain on the far side of the ridge. The township chief said, “Mama Mao Zhi, this is the county chief and his secretary.” Mao Zhi turned pale and placed her crutch behind her for support. Whenever she was about to use her crutch to hit something, she always began by positioning it behind her for support.

The township chief said, “This is the recently appointed county chief, Chief Liu. . ”

Mao Zhi looked intently at the county chief, then dropped her gaze and cried out, “ This is the county chief? My god, how could he be the chief? He is but a pig, a goat, a maggot crawling in a putrid piece of pork! He is a flea on the corpse of a cold dead 7dog!” And then. . and then, she puckered her toothless mouth and spit in his face. The sound was surprisingly loud, reverberating through the air and blowing away the clouds on top of the ridge.

As things began to calm down, Mao Zhi abruptly turned and began hobbling back to the village, leaving the township chief, the county chief, and his secretary — together with Jumei and her surtwin daughters — all staring after her in shock.

After a long pause, Chief Liu kicked at a stone and cursed, “Blast your grandma. What’s her problem? I’m the only real revolutionary here!”

1)Surtwin. In Balou, multiple births of three or more siblings are called surtwins. In the middle of the twelfth month of the gengshen year, nothing particularly noteworthy was taking place in Balou — or in the rest of the country, for that matter. Apart from a Party Assembly being held in Beijing, everything was the same as before. On television and in newspapers, however, that assembly was subsequently compared to Mao Zedong’s founding of the People’s Republic of China thirty-one years earlier. The event lasted for five days, and on the last day Jumei went into labor. Her belly was swollen tight as a drum, and she cried in agony as she delivered three daughters — this being the triple phoenix birth that everyone in Balou had heard about but never before witnessed. Although the babies were no larger than kittens, each was nevertheless a tiny person, able to wail and nurse. As Jumei lay there, her blood flowing down the legs of the bed and her forehead bathed in sweat, Mao Zhi elatedly brought the midwife one bucket of boiling water after another. The midwife washed her hands and placed a hot towel on Jumei’s forehead, asking, Is your belly livening yet? Jumei replied, It hurts, and feels like I’m still having contractions. The midwife was eating a bowl of bean noodles that Mao Zhi had prepared for her, and asked in surprise, You’re still having contractions? I’ve been delivering babies my entire life, but this is the first triple phoenix birth I’ve ever seen. How could there possibly still be a fourth or fifth child in there?