Lenin's Kisses (7 page)

Deputy Chief Liu went to fetch another glass and Secretary Niu, left alone in the room, again glanced at the
Reference News
article and the two internal document reports. He picked them up and was about to read them again, but instead placed them down on the table.

About a month later, there was an upheaval in the county government, as a result of which the county chief was transferred to an office in the district seat of Jiudu and the district Party committee secretary was sent elsewhere to study. As a result, Deputy County Chief Liu was promoted to the position of county chief.

Under the expert direction of the county’s standing committee, County Chief Liu selected a date for purchasing Lenin’s corpse, and then went to an area outside the city to spend the night and reflect on his decision. The prospect of purchasing Lenin’s remains struck him as cold and tragic—though he wasn’t sure if this feeling was due to his sentiments about Lenin or to his misgivings about the idea itself. This was late autumn—the crescent moon hovered over the harvested wheat field ends,
¹¹
and the fragrant scent of crops and soil was everywhere. Chief Liu sat there deep into the night, pinching his leg and slapping his face to stay awake, then awkwardly knelt down and bowed three times in the direction of Lenin’s hometown in Russia, silently offering his apologies. The next day, he composed a document entitled “Shuanghuai County’s Directives Concerning Fund-raising and Attracting Investment in Order to Purchase Lenin’s Remains,” and distributed it to every council, office, township, and village throughout the county.

Several months passed in the blink of an eye, and the county’s tourism industry began to show signs of life. A road was opened running from the county seat to the Spirit Mountain forest, and although it was initially paved with cement, the visitor from Southeast Asia who had supplied the county with roads, electricity, and running water agreed to subsidize the entire cost of repaving it with black oil.
¹³
On Spirit Mountain, various stones and other landmarks throughout the canyon were given distinctive names. One stone was called Horse-Whinny Stone, and another was Deer Looking-Back Stone. A cypress with a chinaberry tree growing out of a hole in its trunk was called the Husband and Wife Embracing Stone; and there was also a Guillotine Cliff, a Black Dragon Pool, and the Cave of the Green and White Serpent.

For each landmark, people were invited to come up with explanatory stories. For instance, the name “Horse-Whinny Stone” was inspired by the rebel Li Zicheng, who helped bring down the Ming dynasty. (It was said that after Li Zicheng’s defeat at Mount Funiu, he passed through here with a dozen or so followers, not realizing that more than ten thousand Qing imperial troops were waiting in ambush behind the next mountain, intent on finishing him off right then and there. When Li and his entourage arrived at this particular stone on Spirit Mountain, however, his horse suddenly came to a full stop and began whinnying incessantly. Eventually, Li had no choice but to turn around and head west, foiling the Qing ambush.)

The Deer Looking-Back Stone was said to have been inspired by a hunter who shot a deer and then pursued it for three days and three nights until he finally succeeded in trapping the animal at the edge of a cliff. As the deer was about to fall over the precipice, however, it suddenly turned to look back at the hunter, and at that moment it was transformed into a beautiful girl. The hunter married the girl, and proceeded to give up hunting and become a farmer, after which he and the girl lived happily ever after. The Husband and Wife Embracing Stone had a very moving story, and the Guillotine Cliff a tragic one. The Black Dragon Pool was once the home of an evil spirit, and the Green and White Serpent Cave was named after Xiao Qing and Bai Suzhen, the protagonists of the popular opera
Legend of the White Snake
.

In addition, a waterfall was being constructed that would be called Nine Dragon Cataract, and each county board and committee was expected to fund the construction of a new hotel or guest house on the mountain, which would be built in a classical Ming-Qing style. The heads of these local boards and committees began going to the bank to apply for credit, and some county boards—such as the wealthy postal-electric and transportation boards—even made direct investments of their own.

Construction had already started on a Lenin Memorial Hall, which from the outside would resemble the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Beijing, and inside there would be a crystal coffin containing Lenin’s preserved corpse. In the front of the hall there would be a room with Lenin’s corpse, a gallery of his images, and a collection of his writings, while in the back there would be a small theater showing films about his life and work. On both sides of the hall there would be temperature and humidity machines, to help preserve the remains. There would also be a break room for the workers, as well as a tea and a meeting room for distinguished guests. In front of the memorial hall there would be a garden, beyond which there would be a field flanked by parking lots, ticket booths, and gift shops. In the immediate vicinity of the memorial hall there would of course be plenty of restaurants and restrooms. The food in the restaurants wouldn’t be too expensive, and while there was some dispute within the county’s standing committee over whether or not the restrooms should be free or available for a fee, everyone agreed that they definitely needed to be clean. The stone path up the mountain would have a specified number of turns, and each of the hundred-year-old trees in the forest would be labeled with plates claiming that they were three hundred or even five hundred years old, while the five-hundred-year-old trees would be fenced off and labeled with plates claiming they were eleven hundred, nineteen hundred, or even two thousand years old. These sorts of arrangements were already well under way.

At present, the most important consideration was how to raise enough money to fund the trip to Russia to purchase Lenin’s remains. The district informed Chief Liu that it would help provide half of whatever was needed, but that Chief Liu would have to find the remaining half himself. Over the preceding several months, Liu had raised as much as he could, yet had managed to secure only a small fraction of the total amount. He worried himself sick about how to go about obtaining the remaining funds to be able to take someone to Russia to negotiate a price and sign a contract for the corpse.

Further Reading:

1)
Full.
D
IAL.
Full
means “entire,” and
full face
means one’s “entire face.”

3)
Inside.
D
IAL
. Means “in the middle of,” “in the center of.”

5)
Afoot.
D
IAL
. Means “under his foot.”

7)
Peak.
D
IAL
. Means “highest” or “most.”

9)
Astep.
D
IAL
. Means “walking.”

11)
Field ends.
The front or sides of a field.

13)
Black oil.
Asphalt. Because it is black, locals call asphalt “black oil.”

C
HAPTER 3:
G
UNS GO OFF, CLOUDS DISPERSE, AND THE SUN EMERGES

Chief Liu, together with his secretary and the township chief, had been on his way to Spirit Mountain, where construction on Lenin’s Mausoleum had already been under way for three months. The ground in front of the mausoleum had been broken, and the bricks and stones for building the structure had been brought up from the plateau below. But the work group had taken the pair of Hanbai jade tablets erected at either end of the plateau and placed them on the walls of the provisional latrines that had been erected for the construction site, and as a result they had become splattered with urine and excrement. Spirit Mountain was under the jurisdiction of Boshuzi township, and consequently Chief Liu had asked the township chief to take care of the situation.

The township chief had ordered, “Take the Hanbai jades down from the latrine walls.”

The head contractor replied, “This is just temporary, and besides, what are you worried about? We’ll rinse them off afterward, leave them as good as new.”

The township chief said, “I’ll fuck your mother, that’s what I’ll do. This is some of the Han jade that we’ll be using for the mausoleum.”

The head contractor said, “There’s no need to insult my mother. When we were building a bank in Jiudu, we almost used gold bricks to build the bathroom.”

The township chief said, “I
will
fuck your mother. Are you or are you not going to take them down?”

The contractor said, “You really don’t need to talk about my mother. The county chief has overseen all the plans, and any changes would have to be approved by him.”

The township chief then spent the entire day driving down to the county seat to negotiate with the county chief. When he arrived, Chief Liu was animatedly cursing the mother of a man from Singapore. The man’s mother had died. She was from Shiliu Village in the western part of the county, and many years earlier her son had joined the army and been sent somewhere in Taiwan. For a while it was unclear whether or not he was even alive. Years later, it turned out that the son not only had survived but had gone on to become a successful businessman in Singapore. It was said that he became so rich that he could construct a building out of bricks made from actual cash.

Despite all of his money, however, he couldn’t transfer his mother’s remains to the coast from the village where she was buried. His sister went to take a look, as did his brother, together with many other relatives who owed him favors. But given that the mother had already died, it was determined that her remains had to remain in the village. The people in the county told her son that she had passed away two months earlier. By this point the son was sixty years old, and although he was a man, he often wore the sort of floral outfits that resembled a jujube tree covered with tropical bananas and mangoes. As soon as the son returned to Shuanghuai, Chief Liu himself had gone to the Jiudu train station to join the visitor’s honorary escort, and the entire ride back he enthusiastically regaled the visitor with descriptions of the fabulous plans the county had made. When he finished, he announced, “We plan to buy Lenin’s corpse from Russia.”

The Singapore visitor was astounded. “Is that even possible?”

Chief Liu laughed. “With money, anything is possible.”

The visitor reflected for a moment, and then observed sadly that his mother had passed away. While she was alive, she had not been able to enjoy even half a day of happiness with him, but now that she was deceased, he wanted to give her a magnificent
sheng
burial. He had heard that a
sheng
burial wasn’t necessarily very expensive, and all that was needed was some bricks and stones with which to construct the tomb. The problem, however, was that theirs was only a single family in the village; it would seem just too desolate if there weren’t other relatives to help carry the coffin. He said, “Chief Liu, if you can find me another filial son, I will donate ten thousand yuan
to the county, and if you can find me eleven filial sons, I will donate a hundred and ten thousand yuan. This should help you make up some of the funding you need to buy Lenin’s corpse.”

Chief Liu asked, “And what if I find you a hundred and one filial sons?”

“Then I’ll give you a million and ten thousand yuan.”

“And if I find you a thousand and one filial sons?”

The visitor replied, “Then I’ll give you ten million and ten thousand yuan.” He then added that regardless of how many filial sons the county managed to provide, the most he would be able to donate would be fifty million yuan, because if he were to give more, it would cut into the financial backbone of his business. Fortunately, with that fifty million yuan, the county would have a total of about a hundred million yuan, and if it could raise a hundred million, the higher-ups would contribute another hundred to bring the total to two hundred million—with which the county would surely have enough to negotiate an agreement to purchase Lenin’s remains.

Chief Liu placed all of his hopes on this visitor from Singapore, and on the day of the mother’s burial not only did he come up with more than seven hundred residents of Shiliu Village—including both men and women, young and old—all wearing filial caps and gowns, but he recruited more than a thousand additional filial sons from neighboring villages and townships. In this way, he organized a filial procession consisting of more than two thousand people. The caps and gowns were all prepared at the township level, for which every store throughout the township and indeed the entire county sold all the white cloth it had in stock, and garment factories worked around the clock for seven straight days. Even then, there were some people in the procession who were not able to obtain clothing for the occasion. It was agreed that those who did receive funeral garb would be allowed to keep it, and after washing it they could use it as regular clothing.