The Dog by Jack Livings

The Dog by Jack Livings

Author:Jack Livings
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374710019
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux


THE CRYSTAL SARCOPHAGUS

On the morning of September 9, 1976, Comrade Zhou Yuqing was awakened before dawn by the loudspeakers mounted on tarred poles outside his building. Chairman Mao was dead. Zhou rose in the dark and made for the bathroom, located at the other end of the building, across an open-air passageway. When he returned, his wife was up and getting dressed, and said she was leaving for the flower shop, which she knew would be open early and mobbed. Zhou tried to stop her. Lan Baiyu hadn’t been well, and he didn’t think she should exert herself. They lived on the fifth floor in an east-facing apartment that allowed them an unobstructed view of the rising sun over the rooftops of Beijing. The apartment, and its view, was a reward from the Party, but the building’s only elevator was a rickety freight cage off-limits to residents. Zhou was afraid the climb back to the apartment would cause her to miss yet another day of research at the Academy of Sciences, where she was a mathematician. He demanded that she stay put. He would go for the flowers. She told him to mind his own business.

She was back with a bunch before he’d had a chance to get the tea water boiling, and she inserted one into the buttonhole of his chest pocket, pinning it there in an under-over-under piercing of the cloth that resembled a metal stitch and held the chrysanthemum neatly in place. She was breathing heavily from the climb, exhaling warmly on his neck as she worked at his pocket. He sat down at the table and looked into the dark reflection of the window. “The Great Helmsman has passed,” he said.

Lan Baiyu said, “Very well, now, Director. You’ve marked the occasion. Put out the cups and get the leaves ready.”

He arrived at the Glass Institute just as the dawn sky was waking the birds. The air was weeping with humidity, and his short-sleeve shirt was plastered to his back by the time he climbed to his third-floor office. He touched the flower to confirm that it was still secure, took his vacuum bottle from his desk, and went back downstairs to the communal kitchen on the first floor to fill it. Some researchers were gathered around a table, listening to a transistor radio, their faces buried in their hands. He recognized them from Institute political meetings, where they always occupied the front row. Their grief was real, he knew. They were Communist Youth League members, the raw red heart of the People’s Republic. It had been a bad year for the people of China. Premier Zhou Enlai had died the previous January; then protests; then the disciplining hand of the government. Then, just over a month ago, the earthquake in Tangshan had killed hundreds of thousands of their comrades. And now this. If Zhou didn’t feel exactly separate from their sorrow, he was insulated from it by his age and rank, and he felt an obligation to be a strong father for them.



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