Authors: Jack Livings
With a fist of welding technicians gathered behind him, he set to stitching the cubes together, torch in his right hand, his left applying the thin rod of quartz to the seam. It was a familiar pose, his feet planted firmly shoulder-width apart, a slight bend at the knees. Many of the workers had learned calligraphy this way, taught by an old master at the blackboard with his horsehair brush and cup of water, the strokes applied with energy and spirit from the heart, the characters appearing, then glistening, vanishing from the slate as the students hurried to copy them in black ink.
Each seam had to be flawless. He worked from the top to the bottom, right to left, as if composing a poem. It was a laborious process, and upon completing a seam, he snapped his wrist, making the supply hose jump and recoil itself by his silver moon boot, leaving behind a ghost loop on the wet concrete.
Gu had reached the age of constant discomfort, and while at the slab he fought mightily to keep his mind focused. His comrades had seen that upon waking, whether on a bench in the workshop or the dormitory bed he sometimes retired to, he tested his knees as he unfolded them, as he might the hinges of an old chest. They were serviceable but delicate. His hands were petrifying with arthritis, his shoulders ramped, scapulae sharp and protrusive. He had sand in his hips and thorns stabbing the balls of his feet. The first steps of the day were always experiments. When nothing shattered, he tried to go about his business as though he weren't a broken-down machine headed for the scrap pile. Of course, he coughed endlessly.
It was on the second seam that Gu's gloves began to smolder. He'd felt the heat on the first, but that wasn't unusual, and there was nothing to be done about it. He carried on. He didn't notice the smoke from his gloves until Xi Xifeng, one of the welding technicians, shouted at him. “Fire!” he yelled, jabbing his finger urgently.
Inside the hood, behind the goggles, Gu's eyes went to Xi, then back to his work. It was hard to hear, and he was having a bad enough time trying to concentrate with all the heat. There was no problem with sweat condensing on the inside of his visor, as they'd feared, because at fifty degrees Celsius, any moisture that touched the inside of the visor sizzled away.
“Fire, Teacher Gu! Fire!” Xi was yelling. Gu then noticed the smoking knuckles of the gloves. He killed the torch feed and set it and the quartz rod down atop the mixing cabinet. Xi had marshaled a hose and as soon as his teacher turned toward him, he opened up the nozzle. Gu held out the gloves, steam pouring off his suit. In no hurry, he turned his hands in the water, as if rinsing them after a wash. He'd been on fire plenty of times.
Rooster Yan approached with a pair of medium-weight tongs and held them up to Gu's visor, opening and closing the paddles to indicate his intentions. Gu held still while Rooster tugged at the gloves, first the right, then the left. Once they were off, he held his hands up, palms out, in front of the visor. The little hairs between his knuckles had melted into balls of keratin. He felt the heat from the hood on his bare skin.
“More water,” he said, pointing at the hose, and Xi obliged, soaking him down, more steam billowing. With some assistance, Gu removed the hood and jacket, shaking out of them in a staggering dance, careful to protect his hands. The pants were held up by a pair of wide suspenders. On the floor, the hood sizzled in a puddle of water. He nudged it with one square toe.
“That worked well,” he said before sitting down heavily on the concrete, then tipping over, felled by heat exhaustion.
“Oh, my,” said Xi, dropping the hose and running to Gu's aid. Being a stout fellow, the son of farmers, he easily hoisted Old Gu onto his shoulder and carried him to the infirmary. Saline was administered and Gu was back in the workshop a few hours later.
It had been a full moon the night Gu received the telegram calling him back to Beijing from his home in Shandong Province. He'd told the story many times. Blind as he was, he'd set out walking, glad for what little light there was, especially when the road passed by forests known to be inhabited by wolves. Twice he heard their cries, and his grip on his walking stick tightened. He could have turned back to wait for daylight, but he'd forged ahead. He was acquainted with a wolf from those woods, one his neighbor had trapped, a long gray male with pale blue eyes. He seemed to have quickly become domesticated, but Gu recognized the intelligence in this animal, and he knew the wolf was only waiting for his opportunity. He lay in his cage with his head on his paws, his eyes tracking every moving thing. Gu Yasheng thought about that wolf when the cries stopped, knowing that they could be tracking him, waiting for the right moment to attack, but he made it to Red Flag Commune without incident. It's best, he told his comrades, to act with courage. Most times you won't need it.
The workers were all thinking of the story and Comrade Gu's quiet bravery when Comrade Zhou ordered a galvanized metal tub to be positioned at Gu's welding station. He would stand in the tub while technicians would rotate past, dumping buckets of water over him. The tub would catch the runoff. Every seven minutes, Gu was to step back from the slab and into a second tub for three minutes, where technicians would continue to douse him with water.
In reality, Gu remained at the slab for up to an hour at a time before stepping away. The tub overflowed. His gloves smoldered. In the first week, he burned through a set of gloves a day, the skin beneath undergoing a slow crisping process. The pain became unbearable, an agony that threatened to drive him insane. When the technicians removed his hood to pour cold water down his back, he babbled at them about fishing for carp on Xihai Lake, and his eyes settled on those around him but he didn't see them. His work didn't suffer, though, and after a ten-minute break they'd re-hood him and lead him back to the slab. After the tenth day, the affected nerves died, and the pain went away. He became himself again. He completed the final seam on July 16, forty days after he'd begun.
While Gu had been at work, the Beijing First Tool Works had modified a giant German milling machine and installed it in the 505. When Gu finished a panel, the grinding team would wheel it away and immediately begin smoothing the surfaces and edges. The slabs were still hot when they were laid on the polishing stands, which caused the polishing paste to decompose at an increased rate, but they were ready with vats of abrasive powder and tubs for mixing new batches of slurry. They stood watch over the slabs as the bobs spun across the surface, and at any sign of thinning viscosity stripped out the paste and applied a fresh coat.
Four technicians were standing watch over the first slab, intended to serve as the lid of the sarcophagus, when a powerful tremor rolled through the workshop. It was, according to the Municipal Seismological Bureau, the 197th registered aftershock from the Tangshan quake, and it was sharp, a muscular flinch like a horse twitching its flank. Everyone in the factory felt it. The polishing technicians shut down the polishing wheels and crouched by the slab, waiting. The lights above them swayed. A fluorescent tube shattered and rained down on them just as a duct cover rattled loose and crashed to the floor. Without thinking, two of the technicians, Zhu Meiling and Song Jianfeng, threw themselves onto the slab to protect it from any more falling debris. They howled in pain until the tremor subsided eight seconds later and their comrades pulled them off. Both were wailing, their clothes seared away, third-degree burns along the length of their bodies. Polishing continued.
After polishing was completed, the coffin was laid up and shipped to the Glass Institute, where it was vacuum-coated in a nonreflective film.
On August 18, the coffin was crated and loaded into a covered troop transport. There was no color guard, no celebration at the 505. The workers were not yet finished. The transport driver, chosen from the ranks of the Central Guard regiment that protected members of the Standing Committee, had practiced the route for two weeks and departed the 505 at exactly eleven forty-five in the morning. Two white-clad People's Armed Police on Chang Jiang 750s roared out in front, followed by a jeep, then the transport, and two more CJ750s bringing up the rear. The caravan did not exceed forty kph. The route had been laid out not for expedience, but for the quality of asphalt. Thousands of people straddling bicycles blinked from behind roadblocks. The truck was unmarked, but its funereal pace and police escort led many to believe they were viewing the procession of Chairman Mao's body. He would come the next night in a specially equipped, refrigerated Red Flag hearse.
The caravan rolled across the cobbles of Tiananmen Square, approaching the Memorial Hall from the south. A Jiefang construction crane was ready at the entrance to the hall, and the truck pulled into a corral beneath the crane's hook. Soldiers removed the canvas awning and bamboo support ribs from the bed and ratcheted tight the straps threaded underneath the crate and up its sides, cinching them together at the top like a bow on a present. The coffin in its crate weighed as much as an adult Holstein. The crane's hook came down and a soldier threaded the loops, gave the cable a tug, and up went the crate. It swiveled overhead, where workers from the 505 had assembled on the stairs, the crate swinging gently as it reached its target area; four construction workers in hard hats reached up with gaffs and guided it onto a wooden dolly. Once it was down and secured to the dolly, the 505 workers began to push. The rubber wheels squeaked against the marble peristyle.
Inside, their Task One comrades waited, along with hundreds of other model workers selected from factories in Beijing. At the door, the dolly was handed off and rolled through the main hall by a rotating succession of workers, until it had reached the entrance of the tomb itself. The crate was opened. The coffin would make the rest of the journey on a platform designed especially to navigate the space. The sixty-four workers from the special shop at the 505 would take the coffin to its final seat, a titanium gutter on which an engineer from the Sichuan Chemical Research Institute laid a neat bead of silicone sealant. Once inside the inner room, the coffin was tethered to a small hand-cranked crane, the chains slowly ratcheting up until they had clearance and the arm was swung over the rectangular cavity in the black marble base that would allow Chairman Mao to descend every night into the bowels of the Memorial Hall, where his corpse would lie until morning in a darkened cold storage unit.
There was no shouting, no barking of orders by cadres competing to exert control over operations. The crane operators, selected from workers at the 621 steelworks, communicated by hand signals with their riggers and spotters. Technicians from the Jinzhou 155 Glass Plant helped guide the base onto the bead of sealant. A single photographer, An Youzhong, recorded the event. His cameras were arranged on high tripods in two corners of the room, with lights rising above them. He stood off to the side with air bulbs in his hands, and the clicking of his shutters was the only sound other than the hiccupping ratchet of the crane's chains lowering, ever so slowly, the coffin onto the base.
A Leica hung from a strap on An's neck. He lifted it slowly, like a sniper shouldering a rifle, to catch the face of Zhou Yuqing, whose cheeks were sunken and shoulders slumped at the unmistakable angle of exhaustion. He wore a white cotton shirt damp at the armpits, and blue cotton trousers. He stifled a cough from time to time. This photo would have to be destroyed, An thought, even as he shot. All his film belonged to the people. His eye belonged to the people, as did the finger that pressed the shutter release. Zhou Yuqing belonged to the people, too.
The coffin was seated, checked, and Zhou, with a small team, stepped over the low glass parapet surrounding the base and approached the coffin. They wrenched loose the bracing clamps on the coffin, working in unison to avoid asymmetrical pressure on the coffin's seams. Once they'd unscrewed the metal arms, Comrade Zhou counted down in a firm voice. Three. Two. One. They pulled the vises away.
Their work finished, they averted their eyes from the immortal home of the Chairman. To stare any longer into his empty tomb, to see the pit from which the body would riseâthat was not their role in Task One. They filed out carrying the braces. A washer pinged against a bolt, and Comrade Zhou stopped them, hand-tightened it, and they resumed their march through the hall and out into the humid day. The sky was heavy with storm clouds, and later there would be thunder but no rain, and then the clouds would clear.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
They return the next day for the official dedication, the workers receiving two buttons each commemorating their efforts, one depicting the Memorial Hall, one depicting the departed Chairman, which they pin to their cotton jackets. Collars buttoned tight, they stand at attention in four ranks, sixteen abreast, the victorious workers of the Beijing 505 Glass Factory special fused quartz construction team of Task One. The most powerful men in the country, members of the Central Politburo Standing Committee, file by, their shoes clapping on the stone, each one carrying a bouquet, which he lays at the base of the white marble statue of Mao Zedong, who is seated, one leg swung casually over the other, a grandfather beckoning to his grandchildren. In muted blues and grays, Deng Xiaoping, Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying bend to set down their flowers as tripod-mounted flashbulbs pop. Each rises slowly and rejoins the others.
The leaders enter the inner sanctum, where Mao's body lies, leaving the sixty-four alone in the outer hall. Gu Yasheng's grating cough echoes off the marble walls. His complexion is that of a high-altitude climber, his cheeks mottled brown and pink where the black skin has peeled. Some dark crusts levitate, speared by the shafts of his gray stubble. His nose has been roasted, his eyebrows and lashes burned away.
He purses his lips, spits into his handkerchief, and painstakingly corrals the globule of phlegm, no easy procedure, as his hands are balls of gauze. He folds the handkerchief with an attention usually reserved for a flag or wrappings for the dead. His bandages are stained with muddy brown spots, seepage. Only the tips of his fingers protrude, like charred tree stumps on a mountainside, enough for him to manipulate the handkerchief, but the task requires determination and a little ingenuity when it comes to keeping the joggling mass from sluicing out of the fabric after he makes the first fold. His thumbnails have melted away. The rest of his fingers are cracked, black. He's not distracted by the pain. He has a method: he brings the handkerchief close to his face so that he might focus all his concentration on it, and makes a little basket so that the expectoration can soak in before he joins the four corners, then a quick perpendicular fold, and he's done. There is speculation among his comrades that Task One has taken a mental toll. The heat was immense, and Gu seems to have become more childlike in the wake of his work on the slab.