The committee had already decided that the future hero should write down not only his thoughts but also his acts. They had discussed at length whether these records should take the form of letters, articles, or reports made during political training sessions. Other possibilities were denunciations to the Party committee or the relevant ministry. But in the end a kind of personal log-book was judged to be most appropriate. A sub-committee of two was working on a mock-up of this log-book, containing individual examples of thoughts and actions already agreed on in principle.
Thursday’s session lasted till three the next morning, when the chairman suggested they take a break before tackling the last item on the agenda. The members, preparing to take an uncomfortable snooze where they sat, were pleasantly surprised when the chairman said they might go home briefly and get some proper rest. No such concession had been allowed so far that week, and they couldn’t believe their ears until the chairman repeated what he’d said. The remaining point concerned the hero’s death, and the chairman apparently thought the arms of Morpheus an appropriate preparation for deciding it.
It had been established earlier that the hero must eventually die, for only thus could his words and deeds carry their full weight. Moreover, this would enable them to conceal him if necessary from thecuriosity of his contemporaries, especially that of the foreign journalists who were sure to do all they could to obtain an interview with the model man of the new China.
All Friday — the last day before the deadline — was spent deciding on how the model man should die. No one had foreseen that this would be one of the most difficult parts of their task. On the contrary, they’d looked forward to it as a piece of cake, a foregone conclusion.
But Friday morning went by, and so did Friday afternoon, and even when dusk was falling they still hadn’t made any progress. In fact, the later it got, the more hopeless it seemed. “My God,” groaned the chairman, “now we’re really in a mess!”
There was no shortage of suggestions from all quarters, but the meeting kept coming back to where it had started. They felt as if they were shrouded in a thick fog which no one knew how to break through. No sooner would they start debating whether their man should die from natural causes or by accident than an argument would start up as to the kind of final illness that would be most suitable. It mustn’t be one of the spectacular, far-fetched maladies that bourgeois intellectuals deemed appropriate for the heroes of their novels: they didn’t want any heart attacks, brain haemorrhages or any other maladies indirectly glorifying intellectual labour; nor would they hear of diabetes or leukemia. What they wanted was something nice and ordinary, as simple as the rest of the hero’s characteristics and as much a target for the intelligentsia’s mockery: a stomach ache, or one of those diseases you get from working in the country or from contact with beasts of burden. Then someone pointed out that a lot of precious time had been wasted on medical talk, when it still hadn’t been settled whether death was to be caused by illness or accident. So there they were back again, trying to choose between chance and necessity, fatal accident or mortal illness. This was accompanied by endless quotations from Mao, and these contradicted one another so often, and thus gave rise to such complicated debates, that everyone lost the thread of the argument. They then strayed off to a consideration of the different kinds of accidents, in case this option should be adopted. Was it to be an ordinary accident or an extraordinary one? — a choice even more ticklish than that between ordinary and extraordinary illness. For if the hero was to be run over by a train, fail off a horse, die in a fire or drown in a river, the considerations such happenings aroused might eventually conflict with the general Party line, or affect the struggle between the two factions within the leadership, or, worst of all, add to speculation (it gave you goose-flesh to think of it!) about who was to succeed Chairman Mao.
For hours the committee was buried in these considerations. They ruled out letting the hero be trampled to death by a horse: such an image might provide ammunition for the reactionaries, who claimed that the peasantry hampered the progress of the revolution. They were about to consent to his being run over by a train when someone pointed out that this conflicted with Mao’s notion that the country should encircle the town: for in this scenario the train (the town) could be said to triumph over the hero (the country). So then they had another think about falling off a horse, until it occurred to two or three members of the committee that the two solutions might be combined, and the hero might perish trying to save a horse from being run over by a train. At first this was greeted as a marvellous idea, but its drawbacks soon became evident. In the course of discussion the permutations and combinations of man, horse and train became so involved that the committee abandoned the tangle in despair. Fire and water then came under review, but they too proved unsatisfactory. For one thing, weren’t fire and lames symbols of the revolutionary movement? And as for water, didn’t Mao have a special feeling for rivers — witness the many references to them in his Thoughts, and his famous swim in the Yang-Tse, after which millions of Chinese had flung themselves into the sea, into rivers, canals, lakes and ponds and even into cisterns. It would be positively indecent to have the hero drown in a river! — almost tantamount to suggesting that Mao himself had lured him to his fate!
It was half-past three in the morning, and the committee was still discussing the last point on the agenda. Everyone’s lucidity was fading fast. All minds would soon be blank, or worse. If we don’t finish soon, groaned the chairman inwardly, we’ll all go round the bend! At half-past four they were still going on about rivers and ponds and trains trying to run horses over, but by now it was all mere babble. As dawn was breaking, one member of the committee suddenly shouted, as if he’d just woken up: “What, isn’t he dead yet? Strangle him, then, for the love of God! Bash him on the head! Anything you like, so long as you put a stop to our agony too!”
This outburst at least had the virtue of bringing the chairman to his senses. Mustering such strength as still remained to him, he declared: “I suggest we just say he dies by accident, trying to save a comrade. That’s the best I can do. It’s all too much for me.”
The others all nodded agreement. Their heads were all so heavy the chairman was surprised their necks could support them.
The secretary noted the form of death agreed on, and the chairman was about to close the file when a voice cried: “What about the name? We’ve forgotten to give him a name!”
The baptism didn’t take long. They gave their man the first name that came into their heads. Lei Fen, And the file was closed.
The sun was rising as they straggled, silent as ghosts, out of the chairman’s office. The chairman himself sat on for a while at his desk. The file lay in front of him. Then he got up, went over to the window, and watched his colleagues walking away along the empty road. They were as unsteady on their feet as if they’d just given birth!..
And then his dazed mind realized what he and his committee really had done: they’d just given birth to a dead man.
Morning found the chairman still there, sitting alone with his file. He gave it to the first messenger who arrived, to deliver to the Zhongnamhai. Then, while the man went down the stairs, he went back to the window. He waited to see the messenger emerge and go off down the road with the file under his arm. Then he had to restrain himself from running after him, shouting out to the passers-by, “Stop him! Bring back the monster before it’s too late! Kill him as if he were a bastard! Choke this anti-man, this seb-man,this new-born non-man!” Then he himself would catch up with the messenger, snatch the file away from him and tear it to shreds in full view of everyone. As he imagined the scene he clenched his trembling hands, driving his fingernails into his palms as if he were wresting from the file the flesh and bones of the man he and his committee had borne and then killed with such pain.