Lenin's Kisses (47 page)

Someone asked, “Really?”

He said, “The throne room is so tall that it brushes the clouds. How could they have transported all of those bricks and stones up there?”

The person responded, “That’s not a throne room, that’s a memorial hall.”

She said, “In any event, it’s the same thing as a throne room.” She added, “That crystal coffin is as white and bright as jade. I heard that that single crystal coffin alone is so expensive that even if we were to sell our entire county we still wouldn’t have enough money to pay for it.”

The person said, “How could it not be enough? The people of Liven went on a performance tour, and in just a few days they earned enough money to buy the coffin.”

Upon turning to the topic of the troupe’s performances, one man sighed and said,

“Heavens, I wish I were disabled. If only I were deaf, then I too would dare to explode a firecracker right next to my ear.”

Sitting on the cart, his wife added,

“If I were blind, I too would be able to embroider flowers on paper or a leaf.”

An old man walked past and said,

“I still can’t understand this. I’m fifty-three years old and am losing my eyesight, and have lost all my teeth. That crippled old woman is a hundred and seven, so how is she still able to chew fried corn and thread a needle?”

His daughter, who was accompanying him, said, “Father, it’s because she wears her burial clothes every day, even when eating or sleeping. I would never want you to wear your burial clothes around the house.”

At this point, a group of excited children between the ages of seven and nine were dragged down the mountain by their parents. They saw many fellow villagers heading up the mountain, and while they didn’t specify what they had seen up there, the children just shouted to their parents,

“I want to go back!
. . .
I want to go back!”

As for what they wanted to see, they themselves couldn’t say. But even though they couldn’t say, their cries resounded through the heavens. In the end they were beaten, whereupon the more obedient children quieted down while the more insistent ones went back up the mountain with relatives or friends.

Spirit Mountain was extremely crowded and tumultuous. The ten-meter-wide cement path leading up the peak was like an anthill, full of people from dawn to dusk. The formerly clean path became covered in wastepaper, rags, kindling, chunks of steamed bun, empty cigarette packs, shoes, socks, hats, and all sorts of debris, as though it were a road to a recently ended temple festival. There were also chopsticks, bowls, vegetables, drinking glasses, garlic and scallions, boiled eggshells, and sweet potato cakes scattered all about, as though it were a theater just after a performance. Lining both sides of the path were countless small stoves made of bricks or rocks. People would take a few branches from the trees alongside the road and use them to start a fire. After they used the stove to cook some soup or steamed buns, those bricks and rocks would be black on one side, and the ground next to the stove would be covered with charred kindling, leftover food, and stones that had been brought over to serve as seats, together with used matches, lighters, clothes that children had taken off and left behind, and old pots and pans that people for some reason didn’t want to take back with them. Scattered about everywhere there were also books, newspapers, magazines, toys, tobacco pouches, wooden guns, paper airplanes, paper wallets, aluminum necklaces, and glass bracelets that people no longer wanted.

The road was completely filled with people.

The road was completely filled with debris.

The road was filled with ashes left over from cooking. With a smoldering bush here and a smoking shrub there, the mountain looked as though a forest fire had just swept through. There were many
Beware of Fire
signs, yet the fires continued to spread unchecked.

That winter, it had snowed heavily in many of the areas outside the Balou region, and in some villages the sheep, pigs, and plow oxen had all frozen to death. Visitors from Gaoliu and Shangyu counties reported that not only had it snowed back home, it had snowed so much that people couldn’t get out their front doors, that when they woke up in the morning they were not even able to open their courtyard gates. But if they walked a few dozen or a hundred
li
over a mountain to the Balou region, it no longer seemed like winter. The trees along the mountain ridge were all still leafless, but the alpine rush, fountain grass, and twitch grass on the lower slope were turning green as if with the arrival of spring, their winter dormancy having ended in the blink of an eye. Below that layer of dry vegetation, flowers were beginning to bud, and the pagoda and elm trees along the mountain were already producing new leaves. Even the pine trees, which had not lost their original green color, began displaying their new verdure within just a few days.

The areas with wheat fields were also perfused with this light green color.

Lenin was coming, and spring had arrived a step early. Really, this was heaven’s decree. The ceremony celebrating the completion of the memorial hall was upon them, and winter here had begun to assume some of the characteristics of spring, or even early summer. The yellow sun was shining down brightly on the mountaintop and a gentle warmth enveloped the entire region. Thin clouds were hanging in the sky like balls of cotton. People surged up the mountain, and the commotion they made echoed throughout the valley like a thunderstorm.

A humid scent of early summer hung in the air.

There was also the sound of firecrackers everywhere, as at a New Year’s festival.

The memorial hall emerged out of this cacophony of sound and shadows, and could be seen from miles away. The visitors who came to observe the excitement would not have gotten halfway up the mountain before they would see the memorial hall waiting for them up at the top. Under this winter sun—which was actually warmer than in either spring or fall—the yellow tiles that covered the memorial hall’s roof sparkled, revealing a splendor comparable to that of a legendary palace throne room. The distant mountain ridge, meanwhile, appeared as still as the back of an ox or camel. The trees were light green, as were the ridge and the gorge. In fact, the entire world was light green. In this green land, the memorial hall rose up out of nowhere, a palace that suddenly appeared out of thin air, making people’s eyes light up in excitement. You could clearly see the flash of gold in the light reflected from the roof tiles, together with the heavy lead in the light reflected from the marble walls.

You could also see the Hanbai jade railing on either side of the fifty-four kowtow steps
¹
leading up to the memorial hall, its light containing many silvery traces of green. As the marble kowtow steps sparkled in the sunlight, they gave off glimmers of gold, aluminum lead, and silver jade, with traces of bronze, all blurring together to produce a heavy and powerful mercury-like light resembling a strip of wet white silk that stretched into the sky, or the mysterious purple lightning that often appears in the sky. When people saw the palace and the purple light, they gasped in amazement.

They said, “Heavens, it’s purple lightning.”

They said, “Heavens, how did they ever find such beautiful scenery?”

They said, “Heavens, this is truly the kind of place where someone like an emperor would rest.”

With all of this oohing and ahhing, everyone unconsciously picked up their pace.

Upon reaching the memorial hall, the visitors saw a large sign under the eaves of the entrance. Just as there is a sign in clerical script in front of Mao Zedong’s mausoleum that reads,
May the Great Leader, Chairman Mao, Be Eternally Remembered by Posterity,
this one read,
May the Great Teacher of the World’s People, Lenin, Be Eternally Remembered by Posterity
. The visitors saw that this memorial hall on top of the mountain was as large as a wheat field, while below it there was a public square as big as two wheat fields. The square was paved entirely with cement bricks, and if you wanted, you could use it to sun-dry a whole village’s worth of sorghum, millet, and wheat. You could dry a village’s entire year’s harvest. On either side of the square, it was like any other tourist area, with two rows of small buildings selling a variety of local products such as tree fungus, gingko, and mushrooms, together with imported products such as low-quality jade that is purchased cheaply from the south and then resold up north at a higher price. These trinkets include jade bracelets, pendants, horses, sheep, knives, swords, figurines of the twelve animals of the zodiac, jade pagodas, and incense burners. Everything looked both new and familiar.

People who had come from afar knew that not a single one of these products was authentic. When the seller roared like a lion, asking for a hundred yuan, a visitor would reply as meekly as a mouse and offer instead ten yuan, and then the seller would in fact accept ten yuan, and still make a substantial profit. And when naïve people who enjoyed a comfortable existence and spent all their time at home would hear someone announce that a jade pendant was selling for ten yuan, their first thought would be that ten yuan was really too cheap, and in order to demonstrate to the seller that they were in fact well-off and not lacking in money they would offer nine yuan for it. The seller would pretend to consider for a while, and then reply disappointedly, “I’ll sell it to you, because for the opening ceremony of Lenin’s memorial hall, I’m not trying to make a profit, but rather merely trying to produce some good fortune.”

Many visitors started to file up to the memorial hall carrying assorted tourist trinkets. One person said, “Lenin died young, departing the world at the tender age of fifty-four. If you carefully count the kowtow steps beneath your feet, you will find that there are precisely fifty-four of them.” Furthermore, when everyone counted, they found that the railing on either side of the steps had exactly twenty-seven columns—which, when added together, also totaled fifty-four. All those walking up these steps, including men and women, young and old, all counted out loud like schoolchildren: one, two, three, four, five
. . .
all the way either to fifty-four or to halfway to fifty-four, which is to say twenty-seven. When the total came out as expected, their faces would break into broad smiles, as though they found this extremely amusing.

Then, they would arrive at the door to the memorial hall. Some people would bound into the hall, while others with somewhat more experience, who might have been to Beijing and visited Mao’s mausoleum, might proceed more deliberately, wanting to appreciate the similarities and differences between Mao’s and Lenin’s mausoleums. From a distance, of course, they primarily noted the similarities between the two structures, which were roughly the same size and height, with stone walls and a flat, square roof covered in yellow tiles.

In fact, it turned out that the architecture of the two edifices was identical. Everyone knew that when the Lenin Mausoleum was first conceived, Chief Liu took his workers to Beijing, where they spent an entire day visiting Mao’s mausoleum, going in and out at least seven or eight times. They not only memorized the mausoleum’s layout, but furthermore managed, while avoiding the notice of the police stationed all around the site, to measure the structure’s precise length, width, and height. They also took countless photographs, calculating hundreds of measurements of the mausoleum’s location and the distances between its various components. Given this, why
wouldn’t
the Lenin mausoleum be identical to Chairman Mao’s?

Strictly speaking, the only salient difference between the two structures was precisely that Mao’s mausoleum was in Beijing while Lenin’s was located in Shuanghuai, in northern China. Or, to be more precise, Mao’s mausoleum was located in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, while Lenin’s was at the top of Spirit Mountain, in the depths of the Balou mountain region.

What other differences were there between the two halls? None to speak of. But some experienced people were nevertheless able to notice some interesting details. Lenin lived to be fifty-four years old, and the stairs in front of his mausoleum had fifty-four steps, and the railing fifty-four columns. At Mao Zedong’s mausoleum, there were four columns on either side, for a total of sixteen, while the Lenin Mausoleum had four columns in front and ten in back, with none on either side, making fourteen in all, which is two less than sixteen. Why is this? Educated people who had attended the country’s soc-schools and Party schools, and who always memorized their lessons, would tell you that the four columns in front of the Lenin Mausoleum and the ten in back were in recognition of Lenin’s birth date. Under the old lunar calendar, Lenin was born on the tenth day of the fourth month of the
gengwu
Year of the Horse. These four and ten columns, therefore, foretold that Lenin would receive a new life in the mausoleum, and would never grow old.

In addition, there were no columns on either side of the mausoleum, but there were twelve mid-sized pine trees on the left and sixteen midsize cypresses on the right. All of the trees were several dozen feet high, and their canopies blocked out the sky. The numbers twelve and sixteen, meanwhile, correspond to the date of Lenin’s death. Given that Lenin passed away on the sixteenth day of the twelfth month of the first year of the preceding sixty-year
jiazi
cycle, these twelve and sixteen trees symbolized his eternal life. Why didn’t they plant newly sprouted saplings or, conversely, why didn’t they simply transplant full-grown trees? Full-grown trees would have completely blocked out the sun, as though they had been growing there for several centuries, or even millennia.