Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories (19 page)

Diesel opened the door from the inside. Meng, standing
outside, turned sideways, avoiding Diesel’s eyes.
Diesel opened his mouth wide to pant and said, ‘Come
in then. What are you standing outside for? Huh? I’ve
opened the door, haven’t I?’

Meng stood motionlessly. He saw Diesel rush at him,
and suddenly fell prey to the illusion that the man would
strike him, but Diesel just pushed him into the room.
Then he began brushing the dust off his own clothes,
saying, ‘What were you standing out there for? You’re
the guest; I’m here to serve. You locked yourself out and
I climbed through the window to let you in. What is it
you’re considering now? Do you want to swear at me
some more?’

Meng grew hot in the face, and said haltingly, ‘I didn’t
swear at you. Why would I swear at you?’

Diesel again gave Meng a hard push and said, ‘Well,
if you didn’t swear at me then that’s all right.’ And then,
‘Now, young man, get into bed and go to sleep.’

Diesel closed the door behind him. Meng heard him
pick the keys up outside the door and move the chair
back to its original position, then there was silence. Meng
stood in the room and had a premonition that the affair
would not conclude in silence; and indeed, Diesel’s voice
suddenly broke out in the corridor, a voice of suffering
and complaint.

‘Young man, let me tell you something. I’m sixty
years old this year! You would let me crawl through the
window, huh? You let me crawl through the window!’

Meng left the hostel soon after dawn. The woman at
reception was only half awake. She showed understanding
for his early departure and commented, ‘I guess
you didn’t sleep too well. This place used to be quite
all right, but they’re about to knock it down and these
last couple of business days have been a little chaotic.’
Meng chuckled and said, ‘It was only one night, in any
case, it’s over with now. I’ll get a good sleep tonight.’ In
the duty room he saw a folding bed with Diesel’s body
underneath the overcoat. He couldn’t see his face, though
he could hear the light puff of his snoring. Indicating the
bed with his mouth, he asked the woman, ‘Is the old
man’s name Di?’

The woman said, ‘No, it’s Chen, C-H-E-N. Why? Was
there something wrong with his attitude?’

Meng shook his head, ‘That’s not what I meant. Can I
ask something? Did he used to teach physics at Eastern
Wind High School?’

The woman responded, ‘Well, he used to be a teacher,
but whether it was at Eastern Wind, or if he taught
physics, that I don’t know.’ The woman looked at him
with curiosity. ‘Were you his student? Wake him up and
ask him, then you’ll know for sure.’

Meng waved his hand and said, ‘Never mind. I’m not
sure myself. He might have been the physics teacher,
then again he might not. I don’t really remember.’

The woman seemed quite eager to clear up the identity
of her co-worker, ‘Wake him up. I’ll wake him up myself.’

Meng stopped her with a cry that was almost one of
fright, ‘No, no!’ he said, ‘Let him sleep. I still have lots of
things to see to. I should go.’

Meng opened the door of the guesthouse. Outside,
the ground was a single stretch of mire – ice and snow
– and the winter sunlight illuminated the city that he
hadn’t seen for so long. It was a place he had once lived,
but to know whether any trace of him had remained
in the disorder of the rubble, you would have had to
ask the rubble itself. Meng didn’t know. But in the
morning Meng was as vigorous as the morning itself, and
yesterday’s moodiness was left behind with yesterday. He
walked quickly towards the road, and discovered to his
surprise that the sun, which shone so splendidly over the
city, hung by some good fortune right over the famous
Song Dynasty tower.

A Xiali taxi appeared out of nowhere and turned
to approach Meng. The driver poked his head out the
window and looked out at him. Meng took a few leisurely
steps to the taxi window and asked, ‘Do you have a
meter?’

And this time he spoke in genuine Tiancheng dialect.

There are some people whose thieving habits simply
cannot be corrected. This kind of problem was especially
serious in Mahogany Street, which is where I am from. If
you broke your vigil for even a moment, your salted fish,
cigarettes or even your broom might vanish from your
home. So when I found I was missing the Q of Hearts
from my deck of cards, I immediately assumed that
someone had stolen it.

You don’t know how I loved those cards. It was 1969,
and they were my only toys. My brother and I often
played a game called Lucky with them. When you play
cards, you can’t afford to be missing even a single one
from the deck, and for exactly that reason I had written
my name on the back of every card. I had thought that
now no one would dare to steal them, but I was wrong.
When I asked my brother about the whereabouts of my Q
of Hearts he said, ‘Who cares if you lose a card? Fat Man
Li’s kid from our school’s lost and no one’s looking for
him, who the hell’s going to help you look for a stupid
old card?’ But from his expression I could tell that there
was something fishy going on. A few days before, he had
asked me to lend him ten cents and I had ignored him. I
suspected that he had stolen the Q of Hearts in spiteful
revenge. Entertaining these suspicions, I extended my
hand under his pillow. There was a drawer beneath the
bedding, and I began to rummage in it. You should know
that my brother has a bad temper and he suddenly cried
out, ‘You think I’m a frigging cow demon? You frigging
looking through my things?’ And as he spoke he aimed
an angry kick at my bum.

After that we started wrestling. Of course I was the one
who ended up bawling. My brother, seeing that the situation
was beyond help, leaped out the window and landed
on the street outside. Through the window, he said, ‘Don’t
be a baby. What’s the big deal about a card? It’s just a Q of
Hearts. I’ll get you another one sometime, OK?’

My brother was the king of big talk, and even supposing
he meant it, I didn’t believe he could get his hands on
that Q of Hearts. The year was 1969, and the city was
going through some kind of weird revolution. People
had abandoned all entertainment, the streets were empty
and the shop doors were all left slightly ajar. You could
have walked clear through the city without seeing a trace
of a playing card. Imagine a day in the winter of 1969:
the snow is falling fast and there is a child walking along
Clothmarket Street – which was called Red Flag Street
then – pausing frequently and pulling himself up to
every counter along the way to gaze up at the goods on
the shelves. The storekeeper says, ‘Well now, what does
the little comrade want?’ To which the child replies,
‘Playing cards.’ Then the storekeeper frowns and says
in an aggravated tone, ‘As if we’d stock playing cards.
Nothing of the kind.’

The reason I relate my search for the playing cards in
such detail is that I want you to believe that everything I
say really happened.

I went with my father to Shanghai for no other reason
than to buy a new deck of cards. It took about two hours
by train to get there from our home city. Though it was the
first time in my life that I had been on a train, I have no
recollection about how I felt. Besides, a trip of two hours
was too short for to me remember anything apart from
my father talking about rubber and steel or something to
the man sitting next to him. They talked and talked until
the train stopped, and then we were in Shanghai.

Shanghai in 1969 was a dusky, dead city. My saying
that is actually mostly a literary deduction, since besides
the tan buildings with the clocks and big domes, and the
wooden rack for putting bean products on that I saw near
the hotel, I have almost no recollection of the streets of
Shanghai as I saw them on that trip. My father was on
official business, and I followed him down the big streets,
looking intently at the displays in the windows of every
store we passed. It shouldn’t surprise you that, although
it was 1969, Shanghai’s stores were more like
real
stores
than the ones we had at home, with soap, toilet paper,
sweets and cakes all neatly laid out on the shelves. A few
times, I saw something that at first glance looked like the
little cardboard boxes playing cards come in, but as soon
as I ran over to take a better look, they would turn out
to be either a package of pain-killing cream or cigarettes.
Weren’t there any playing cards in Shanghai, either?
Shanghai had no playing cards, and this was a discovery
that disappointed me through and through. I thought of
how the women on Mahogany Street were always cawing
and crowing about the things you could get in Shanghai.
From the way they talked, Shanghai should have been a
city stocked with everything anyone could want. Now it
seemed it had been an outright lie.

As I said, my father was on official business, so he
didn’t have time to take me into the stores to look for
cards; he had to finish up his affairs before everyone got
off work for the day. In front of a large beige concrete
building covered with hanging slogan banners, my father
let go of my hand and pushed me up to the window of
the registration room. To the middle-aged woman inside,
he said, ‘I have to go up to your revolutionary committee
to see about some arrangements; look after my son while
I’m gone.’

I saw the woman’s detached glanced sweep over us and
a snort issued from her nostrils. ‘Taking your son with
you on business! Is that any way to go about things?’

My father was in no mood to justify himself. Carrying
his black briefcase, he sprinted up the stairs and left
me alone in the strange concrete building, standing in a
strange woman’s cold glare.

I saw that there was a pot of water in the registration
room giving off puffs of steam, and that the water was
boiling over a little. The several red flags and the portrait
of Mao Zedong on the wall seemed damp and hazy.
Beneath her desk, the woman was making some kind
of mechanical movement with both hands; occasionally
she looked at me askance. I very much wanted to know
what she was doing and so, supporting myself on the sill,
I jumped up to see. One pale hand gripped a circular
embroidery frame, while the other pale hand held a
needle and thread. I even saw the red flower on the white
silk; a large, half-finished red flower.

‘What are you doing?’ The woman had noticed my
hop, and with an action that was almost fearful, she
threw down the things in her hands. Then she stuck out
one hand to grab me by the arm, but I managed to escape
her. Something ferocious lit up in her eyes as she picked
up a piece of chalk from her desk and threw it at me, and
with great anger in her voice she said, ‘You little spy! You
little mole! Nasty brat! Get lost!’

I ran to the other side of the road. I thought the woman
very weird: weird for secretly embroidering under the
office desk and weird for her volcanic anger. What did
I care what she was hiding her hands for? She was just
embroidering a flower. Why did she have to do it on the
sly? If I had known she was just embroidering, I wouldn’t
have taken the trouble to look. The problem was that she
didn’t know what I had had in mind. In fact, when I had
lifted myself up to look at her hands, I had hoped to see
a playing card; maybe even the Q of Hearts.

And so it was that the first time I went to Shanghai,
I was filled with an immense sense of loss. My father
took me by the hand and walked me angrily through
the streets. He said, ‘Playing cards! Playing cards!
Don’t you know that’s the feudocapitalistic plaything of
revisionists? A very bad thing!’

I am now certain that the hostel we stayed in on that
occasion was near the Bund or the Huangpu River,
because during the night I heard the great Customs
House clock strike and the sound of whistles from the
little steamboats and cargo ships. I also remember that
there were three beds in the hostel, and over each bed
was hung a tent-like mosquito net which would usually
be for summer use. Besides my father and me, there was
another man with a northern accent and a full beard as
hard as hog bristles.

Initially, I slept by myself in one bed. The light was on,
and outside my window, the wail of the city descended
into darkness. I couldn’t see anything outside; I could
only see through the mosquito net to the wall of the
room. The wall was off-white, and on it was a Patriotic
Hygiene Month propaganda drawing. It seemed to me
that the man grasping a fly-swatter on the drawing
looked a lot like Cathead from our street – Cathead might
also have been connected with the stolen Q of Hearts,
another likely suspect – and so I pondered the question
of Cathead and the Q of Hearts. Then suddenly I saw the
bloodstain. It was like a map that had been printed on
the wall, right against the mosquito net and only a palm’s
width from the edge my pillow.

‘There’s blood on the wall!’ I cried out loudly to my
father, who was lying on the next bed over.

‘What blood?’ My father raised himself up slightly on
his bed and gave it a cursory glance. ‘It’s mosquito blood,’
he said. ‘Someone killed the mosquitoes in summer and
the blood stuck to the wall.’

‘It’s not mosquito blood.’ I examined the bloodstain
with no little fear. ‘Who ever heard of so much blood
coming from a mosquito?’

‘Don’t worry about it. Close your eyes and have a good
sleep. They’ll turn off the light in a second,’ my father
said.

I saw the hog-bristle man extract himself from the
mosquito net. He ran over to my bed in a few steps and
lifted the mosquito net up over my bed. ‘You mean this
bloodspot?’ First he glanced at me, and then he directed
his shining gaze at the bloodspot on the wall. I saw
him make an alarming action: he put his index finger
in his mouth and kept it there for a moment. Then, he
cold-bloodedly extended it to scrape off some of the
blood before returning it to his mouth. Next I saw him
frown slightly and spit on the floor.

‘It’s human blood.’ He jumped back into his own bed
and chuckled from inside the net. ‘Human blood. As
soon as I saw it, I knew that’s what it was.’

For a moment, the dread made my heart beat madly
in my breast and I threw myself into my father’s bed and
said nothing, covering myself under his blankets.

‘It must have spurted up from someone’s head; I could
tell as soon as I saw it,’ the hog-bristle man said. ‘If you
use an awl to crack open someone’s head, that’s exactly
what the blood looks like when it spatters on the wall.
And if you swing your belt at someone it’s about the
same. I could tell as soon as I saw it. They must have
detained somebody here.’

‘Impossible. This is a hostel,’ my father said.

‘You think you can’t detain people in hostels?’ The
hog-bristle man emitted another contemptuous laugh
and said, ‘I guess you haven’t been around for much of
all this. They detained someone in our unit’s bathhouse,
and the blood there isn’t on the wall, it’s on the ceiling.
On the ceiling! Do you know how human blood gets on
a ceiling? If you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, you’ll
never guess.’

‘Never mind that. I’m with my son.’ My father said,
interrupting his monologue. ‘I’m with my son and kids
are easily frightened.’

Then the man stopped speaking. The lights were
turned off and the hostel rooms suddenly sank into
darkness. Even the bloodspot on the wall fell into the
oblivion. Except for an unclear whitish glare, I could see
nothing on the walls now. I heard the hog-bristle man
on the bed across from me snoring thickly, and then my
father started snoring too.

Kids are easily frightened. The whole night I clasped
my father’s arm, imagining the events that had happened
in the hostel, imagining one person bleeding and another
one holding an awl or a belt. For a long while I couldn’t
fall asleep. I remember clearly being in Shanghai and
hearing the midnight toll of a clock and thinking that it
must be the sound of the famous clock on the Customs
House.

The next day there was no sun in Shanghai, and the sky
looked like a greyish iron sheet covering the tops of the
high buildings and telephone poles. My father, grasping
a slip of paper, took me back and forth through an
enormous emporium. On the paper was a list of knitting
wool, bedsheets, leather shoes including sizes, plus
other such products – a list entrusted to my father by my
neighbours, for him to make purchases on their behalf. In
that building, which still held obvious traces of colonial
taste, the people were as many and as jumbled as the
goods for sale. At the leather shoes counter, I very nearly
lost my father. I had gone up to the stationery counter,
mistakenly thinking that a box of paper clips might
contain playing cards. When I returned, crestfallen, to sit
on the shoe-trial stool, I saw that the person sitting next
to me was no longer my father, but a stranger in a blue
woollen tunic suit.

At this point I opened my mouth wide, stood on the
chair and wailed. My bewildered father rushed over,
threw down what he was carrying and gave me a couple
of spanks. He said, ‘I told you not to run off, and what
did you do? How many times have I told you? This is
Shanghai. If you get lost, no one will find you.’ I said
that I hadn’t run off, I had been looking for some cards.
My father made no further recriminations, but took me
by the hand, and in silence we set off towards the exit.
‘There aren’t any cards in Shanghai, either,’ he said, as if
to himself. ‘Maybe you can get some in the little towns
and villages. When I get sent to Jiangxi I’ll take a look for
you, OK?’

To cheer me up my father took me to the banks of the
Huangpu River to look at the boats. When we reached
the river, a slushy rain began to fall and there were few
pedestrians along the Bund. We walked along the iron
railings, and I saw for the first time the river heading out
to sea. The water was a greyish yellow with ripples of oil;
I was thoroughly disillusioned, for it was the complete
opposite of what I had imagined. I also saw a great many
gulls, with their slender, nimble wings; their cries were a
hundred times more sonorous than those of the sparrows
outside our eaves in the trees of Mahogany Street. It was
the boats that excited the most profound excitement
though, both those moored and those moving about the
river; their masts, portholes, smokestacks, anchor posts,
not to mention the colourful flags whistling in the wind.
It seemed to me that they were no different from those I
had drawn in my sketchbook.