Peking Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

wait!” the cadre cried.
    â€œThey are doomed! We need not even push them! They are already dying from their own inner decay.” The soldiers smiled complacently. “Watch them and learn!” said the cadre.
    The climactic third day was bedlam. Since the principal rooms of the Yu mansion were in a direct line, separated by courtyards, and their main doors had been removed and the courtyard gates opened, one could look down a huge vista filled with wild but purposeful disorder.
    In some of the courtyards, the caterers had set up tables for refreshments. In others, great bouquets of paper flowers and life-size paper figures of horses and servants, for the equipage of Mr. Yu in the other world, were being prepared. These would later be burned, to send them on their way. Meanwhile, ingots of gold paper, also for his use, were kept blazing in an iron brazier. A drum at the main gate, so huge that the man beating it had to stand on a ladder, was struck at intervals to announce the arrival of guests — one beat for a man, two for a woman. In two courtyards, there were chanting monks and Buddhist-temple orchestras composed of gongs, drums, trumpets, racks of bells, and hand-held reed organs. The Communist soldiers, dressed in uniforms of Yenan yellow, sat doggedly in the midst of the turmoil, eating pickled radishes and cooking vegetables over a coal-ball fire. (Coal balls are made by mixing coal dust and mud. They make a good fire, but leave enormous clinkers.) And in and out of halls and courtyards, through clouds of incense, wandered the guests. There were the Chinese ones, the declining aristocracy of Peking — silk-gowned ancient men with those elegant beards that only the Chinese can grow; their slender, white-faced, pomaded sons; and their first wives, second wives, concubines, and mistresses, smelling faintly of sandalwood, face powder, and soap. There were also foreign guests, who, in sunglasses and slacks, and loaded down with cameras, tripods, and light meters, seemed to be everywhere at once, snapping pictures. Most of them were friends of mine, whom the family had been happy to invite for the express purpose of getting pictures of the occasion taken, and, as a matter of fact, the pictures were to have a kind of historical value. Though nobody realized it at the time, this was to be the last of the great funerals for which — along with dust, duck, and opera — Peking was famous. Thereafter, the new government simply reassessed the property of any family foolish enough to produce the money for a funeral of such dimensions.
    I was wearing a dark-blue Chinese gown, with a white sash — a symbol of limited mourning. I had had difficulty finding the white socks that gave a more formal appearance to a Chinese gown, because most of mine had, along with my summer clothes, been locked away in camphor chests that at the moment were inaccessible. So I had on a pair mismatched both in weave and in the degree of whiteness.
    Deciding to go to the garden to escape the noise and confusion for a moment, I saw Ninth Sister through a window of one of the small inner rooms, and went inside to speak to her. She saw my socks almost immediately, and tears came to her eyes. “Your socks don’t match,” she said.
    â€œI know,” I said.
    She began to cry. “Papa’s dead and we’re all becoming poor — even you, an American!” she said. She was only eighteen, and she looked very tiny and lost in her square-cut muslin mourning sack.
    â€œDon’t cry,” I said to her. “Your father was an old man, and …”
    â€œOh, I’m not crying for Papa,” she said. “I’m glad he’s dead. He can never see what’s happened. Elder Brother says that next month, after we finish paying for the funeral, we must give up all the servants but two. He told me I must remember to turn off lights, and he’s already asked a man to cut down the big trees in