the county crematorium. Nuwa authorities have ruled that all corpses must be cremated. So now, after someone dies, the family has to pay the state crematorium two hundred yuan for a hearse, a thousand yuan for the cremation and five hundred yuan for the urn. The authorities want to make as much money as they can from the dead before they allow any funeral to go ahead.’
The brother stares down at his feet. ‘Yes, we knew we couldn’t afford to get Grandmother cremated, so Dad secretly buried her body in the garden, under the shed where we keep the straw. We tried to keep quiet, so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear us, but Mum couldn’t stop herself from crying. A neighbour peeked over the wall, saw what we were doing and reported us to the police. All tip-offs are given a hundred-yuan reward now. The next day, officers from the municipal court turned up, searched the garden, found the grave and dug out Grandmother’s corpse. They couldn’t be bothered to take it to the crematorium, so they doused it in petrol and set fire to it, right in front of us. Then to cap it all, they demanded we pay a fine for illegally burying a body. We didn’t have enough cash on us, so they confiscated two of our pigs.’
‘Those fascists – have they no conscience?’ Mother cries out, then winces in pain as her tongue brushes against the large ulcer that’s formed on the inside of her cheek.
‘These days, you have to pay the government nine thousand yuan to be born and two thousand yuan to die,’ says Father, taking off his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.’
‘After the officers left, we wanted to give Grandmother a proper burial. Her body was so charred and mangled by the fire, we couldn’t put a white funeral robe on her, so we just laid it over her charred remains, then wrapped her in a big cloth and buried her under the peach tree.’ He wipes his eyes, spits onto the floor again, then grinds the saliva into the ground with his shoe.
‘What day did they burn her?’ Mother asks.
‘Three days after she died. October the 12th. I hadn’t returned to the coal mine yet.’
Mother feels her hair stand on end. Three days after my birthday? she mutters to herself. That’s the day I set fire to the nightclub, and Grandmother’s face appeared before me crying: I’m burning, burning . . . After a long pause, she looks up at her brother and says, ‘There’s a photograph at home of Grandmother when she was twelve, with a flower in her hair, standing in front of the entrance of Nuwa Temple. Make sure it’s put in a safe place . . .’
The brother pours himself some tea and changes the subject. ‘The Nuwa County authorities are giving tourism a big push,’ he tells Father. ‘The reservoir near Kong Village is a pleasure lake now, with three barges, a small pier and a ticket office. Cao Niuniu designed it. He’s the son of that guy, Old Cao, who did the mural for you, isn’t he? Well, Niuniu’s a successful painter now. He has a studio in Beijing’s 678 Art District. He even has an American girlfriend. He drove down to Kong Village last year in his expensive jeep, followed by TV crews and packs of journalists. He’s bought the hotel you both worked in, and has got a hundred young locals to live there and churn out copies of Western masterpieces: Lunch on the Grass, The Last Supper – or is it The Naked Lunch? I forget the names. So, Kong Village is now a famous artists’ colony!’ The brother’s eyes light up.
‘So, is Old Cao still living in his son’s apartment in Nuwa County?’ Father asks.
‘I don’t know. But I have some other news from your village. The local police uncovered a secret plot to subvert state power. It was all over the Public Security Evening Post. The ringleader was a guy called Kong Qing. He had some gall, that man. But he’s behind bars now, serving an indefinite sentence. He formed a secret cell of three hundred peasants who called themselves the China Fertility Freedom Party. Every member wore a yellow thread around their left arm. They planned to take over the County Family Planning Commission on National Day, and declare a Fertility Freedom Law which would