Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories (22 page)

The photo from the past century tickled him: ‘A photo
like this is cool, man.’ He tried to take it out of his
mother’s hand, but she threw the photo back into the
cabinet as if it had scalded her.

Her expression was very strange. She said, ‘I made a
mistake. This photo isn’t of our family.’

He couldn’t absorb this information right away and,
lifting the photo up to have a look, he said, ‘No wonder.
I didn’t think the girl looked like you.’

Yongshan’s lips were trembling, as if she were afraid
she might burst into tears. Suddenly she covered her face.
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ she said. ‘How could this be? This
isn’t our cabinet.’

All at once, her son realized the full extent of the
injustice he had suffered transporting the cabinet and
shouted, ‘And so after all that, you were making me lug
somebody else’s stuff around town! You’ve got to be
kidding, right?’

‘How could this be?’ she squatted down and looked
vacantly in the direction of Cabbage Market saying, ‘I
wonder who left the cabinet there? It was in our house,
and it looks just like the one we had.’

Her son produced some derisive hooting noises. Having
thus finished mocking his mother, he relaxed and
took a closer look at the strangers’ family photo. ‘Whose
picture is this? It must be some neighbour’s. Man, do
they look lame; so lame, it’s almost cute. Do you know
these people?’

Yongshan scanned the photo blankly. ‘No,’ she said.
‘I left here a long time ago. They might be people who
moved to Cabbage Market later; I don’t know them.’

Now that he’d been relieved of his onerous burden,
her son joyfully dragged the cabinet to the side of the
road. He put it next to a ceramic garbage can that was
about half the size of a person, with a tiger’s head and a
huge mouth to throw the garbage in. Once he’d finished
this bit of business, he took a step back and examined
how the garbage can and the cabinet stood, so to speak,
shoulder to shoulder: an old piece of furniture with an
unknown owner and a majestic garbage can. Underneath
the pale light of the street lamps, the garbage can looked
like a bodyguard protecting the cabinet. The son looked
at his mother who was squatting on the ground and
seemed to tacitly agree to the disposal of the cabinet. Her
son was very pleased with himself, and giving himself a
clap he said, ‘Cool, man! Modern art!’

Yongshan didn’t look at the cabinet again. She stood
up slowly and, as she rose, her eyes welled up with tears.
The lights were on in the windows of Licheng, and the
newly paved road glimmered with an orange and white
glow that seemed to flow like a river. Yes, her eyes welled
up with tears, for she felt that she had now truly left her
native city far behind, and it her. Besides some memories,
the city had left her nothing, and she knew in her heart
that she had bequeathed it no part of herself. Yongshan
fished out her handkerchief and wiped away the tears.
She heard her son say, ‘Where are we going to go now?’

She hesitated and, looking back at him, she began to
feel the stirrings of a guilty conscience. ‘Where do you
want to go?’ she asked.

He looked at her doubtfully and said, ‘I dunno. I’m
going where you’re going. Didn’t you want to go and see
your cousin?’

Yongshan bent down to brush some dust off the
suitcase and said, ‘Suppose we didn’t go?’ It seemed like
she was soliciting her son’s advice. ‘I haven’t seen her in
seven years.’ Her son said nothing, and a kind of pity,
and lenience, began to emerge in his eyes as he looked
at her.

‘Whatever.’ Then he joked, ‘You’re the boss; I’m just
staff. I’ll go wherever you’re going.’

Night-time Licheng was nothing like it used to be.
After seven o’clock the streets looked splendid all lit up,
and Yongshan took her son to a famous local restaurant.
They ate Licheng’s famous crab dumplings, noodles with
congealed duck’s blood and fried wontons. After stuffing
themselves with a filling meal, both of them felt their
strength return, so Yongshan took her son to a large
department store, where they walked around and rode up
and down in the lift. Yongshan bought some of Licheng’s
famous silk, as well as some other local specialities, for
gifts. She got a pure wool sweater for her husband, and
even bought her son some brand-name sneakers, which
were on sale; he picked them out himself. Then they
rolled their suitcase to the train station, one in front
of the other, as before, except that now Yongshan was
carrying a few shopping bags. One was an ordinary white
plastic bag, but the other was a red bag with an elaborate
design, covered in countless white pear blossoms.
¹⁴

On the way to the station, Yongshan saw her son
furtively take something out of his pocket and stick it
into the suitcase’s inner lining. He had always enjoyed
collecting, and he must have found the picture very
amusing: four strangers in a family picture. Well then, let
him keep it. Yongshan didn’t stop him. She was leaning
on a lamp post, waiting for her son, when she took a deep
breath and smelled something. ‘The air in Licheng is
better than at home,’ she said, ‘I wonder what flower that
is. Lovely smell. The air here is best in April and May.’

Then they walked with their luggage to the train
station, looking very much like tourists who had come
for the day on an organized trip. Yongshan was a very
thrifty woman; they had walked all day and yet still she
couldn’t bring herself to hail a taxi. She told her son, ‘We
can rest once we’re on the train. Why should we pay for
something we don’t need?’

The town doctor took a piece of bread out of his basket.
Even this simple lunch had been delayed again and again
on account of the sheer number of his patients: childless
women who came to him looking for a cure to their
infertility. To make matters worse, the bread was a few
days old and already quite stale. Just as he was taking his
army canteen off the wall to take a sip of water, footsteps
sounded. They were followed by the appearance of a
woman’s shadow swaying back and forth on the bamboo
curtain before stopping by a very small window that had
once been used to dispense medicine. Through it, the
doctor could see a white blouse with red flowers, and
underneath it the slight bulge of the woman’s breasts,
though he couldn’t see her face.

‘Come in,’ said the doctor, biting off a mouthful of
bread, ‘I can hardly examine you if you’re standing out
there.’

‘Out here will be fine.’ The woman’s voice was very
low, as if she feared that passers-by might hear her. Then
she said, ‘Just give me some medicine, doctor. That’ll be
enough. I have to rush home, so please hurry.’

The doctor laughed and took a swig of water from his
canteen. ‘That’s a new one. How am I supposed to give
you medicine without examining you? And what medicine
do you need, anyway?’

‘The childbearing soup,’ she said in an even quieter
voice. ‘Everyone says it works. But please hurry up,
doctor, I have to get home straight away.’

Something about this woman was very odd, and so
the doctor decided to go outside and get a good look at
her from the steps of the clinic. She was wearing a straw
hat with cotton cloth wound around it that covered her
face. Because of the cloth, he couldn’t tell who she was or
whether he knew her.

He decided to ignore this furtive woman, and instead
he sat down, opened up his logbook and wrote down the
date. Then, all the while loudly chewing his bread, he
informed the woman outside, ‘I’m a doctor, not a temple
god. My medicine might work well enough, but it’s not
some kind of Taoist cure-all. I don’t know where you get
your ideas from!’

At some point the woman had come inside. The doctor
heard the creaking of the stool behind him, and at the
same time he noticed a powerful, acrid smell of sweat.
He looked behind him to find her sitting stiffly on the
stool.

‘I won’t take off my pants,’ the woman said.

‘Nobody asked you to,’ the doctor replied, a little
annoyed. ‘Is that why you think I became a doctor? Now
just hold out your hand so I can take your pulse.’

Hesitantly, she did as she was told. Irritated as he was,
the doctor pressed her hand roughly down on the table
and took her pulse. Meanwhile, he occupied himself by
staring at the profuse grime that had accumulated under
her fingernails. Her hand emitted the slightly nauseating
smell of chicken shit.

‘I suppose there is a man?’ the doctor asked casually.
He knew that wasn’t the proper way to ask such a thing;
but for some reason he felt thoroughly malicious towards
this woman.

She hung her head and didn’t respond. He noticed
that she had sweat stains all over her straw hat, just like
a man. She also had a silver necklace on, which was the
kind of old jewellery women in the town had long ago
stopped wearing. She must be from the mountains, up by
Wangbao, he thought, for that was the only area where
women still wore necklaces like that.

‘Are you from the mountains? From Wangbao?’ The
doctor listened carefully to the woman’s pulse, but her
long silence aroused his suspicions, so he asked, ‘What is
this, anyway? Do you mean to tell me there isn’t a man?
Are you even married?’ The doctor stared at the cloth
hanging from the straw hat and was suddenly seized
by the desire to tear it off, but her reflexes were quick
and she managed to dodge his lunging hand. The doctor
scoffed at her, saying, ‘You’re nuts, do you know that?
Do you want to get pregnant without a man? You can
drink childbearing soup till hell freezes over before that
happens!’

The woman’s body twisted on the stool, and her
breathing became more rapid. Then the doctor heard the
sound of her muffled sobbing. All of a sudden, she was
down on her knees embracing the doctor’s leg and crying
‘Save me, doctor, give me a child, give me a son, so I can
take revenge.’

Automatically, the doctor jumped up to free himself.
His arm knocked off her hat, and she gave a sharp cry.
At that moment the doctor saw the world’s most hideous
face, the face of a severe burn victim. Apart from her
unscathed eyes, the skin of her face resembled nothing
more than blackened pine bark.

What happened next seemed to the doctor to be part of
some kind of dream. He recalled that the woman picked
up her hat and ran out, while he sat petrified by shock
in front of the window. He thought she had left, but
a moment later her filthy, grime-fingered hand thrust
through the window and the woman said, ‘I beg you,
give me the soup. Give me the soup, so I can take my
revenge.’

In shock, the doctor picked up a pile of medicine
packets and passed them to her, accidentally brushing
her hand in the process. At this touch, he was seized by a
sensation of intense dread, and grabbing at the woman’s
fingers he said, ‘Revenge! Revenge for what?’ She freed
her hand and said, ‘Wait till I have a son and you’ll find
out.’

It was a summer afternoon and the weather was
oppressive. The doctor remembered rushing out after
her to see which direction she would take, and even
then he had the premonition that this woman would
one day become the subject of much tongue-wagging.
He was about to call out to the people from the barber’s
across the street, or from the cooperative next door, so
that they too could come out and see the woman, but the
ingrained idlers were all dozing behind their counters.
Thus, the hideous mountain woman passed through the
cobblestone streets of the town as if she were a normal
farmer’s wife, without attracting anybody’s attention.
The doctor watched as she turned off and disappeared
into the cornfields, following the paths up to the
mountains.

The matter preoccupied the doctor for the entire
afternoon, and at about four o’clock he heard a terrible
thunderclap from the horizon, so sharp and resounding
that both he and the few women in the room had to
cover their ears. For some reason the doctor thought
immediately of the woman. He supposed she must still
be on her way up the mountain, hurrying on amidst the
lightning flashes and rumbling thunder. An invention of
his mind’s eye disquieted him: the dim image of a blue
bolt of lightning hitting the woman’s straw hat, the paper
medicine packets in her hand torn and the black herbs
within leaking into the mire of the mountain trail.

It was rare for the people from around Wangbao to come
down from their mountain village. They grew corn,
sweet potatoes and apples to bring to market, while
they themselves ate only the simplest fare. As a result,
they enjoyed sturdier health than the relatively affluent
townspeople below, and rarely went down the mountain
for medical attention. For a long time the doctor took
pleasure in discussing the woman from Wangbao with
his patients, but nobody knew who she was; nor did
anyone recall a woman with a straw hat. No one was very
interested in his story, so when the doctor began to speak
again about the vengeful, child-hungry woman, they all
repeated the same sentence: ‘She must be crazy!’

Then, in the spring, when the cooperative’s itinerant
wagon was sent up to Wangbao, it returned with
sensational news: a virgin birth had occurred there.
And there was more: the girl’s labour had lasted three
days and three nights and the newborn was enormous.
According to their account, he weighed 9 kilograms
and looked like a little boy of three, with swarthy
skin and a powerful voice, but only four fingers on his
right hand. The most baffling part of his anatomy was
his willy, which the people from the cooperative said
was like a ‘top-notch carrot’. One of the clerks who had
seen him said, her eyes popping with astonishment,
‘Cross my heart, I swear there’s even a ring of hair
around it!’

The doctor, who happened to be buying cigarettes
in the cooperative at the time and who commanded
respect in medical matters, berated the women: ‘Are you
really that brainless? Do you believe every half-baked
rumour?’

But one of them responded, ‘You’re the brainless one!
And it’s not a rumour. We saw the baby ourselves.’

The doctor asked, ‘And how do you know it’s a
newborn? People from those parts are backward and
superstitious. Who knows, maybe the kid was three years
old!’

The woman gave him a reproachful glance and raised
her voice: ‘We saw her give birth with our own eyes. We
even gave her cotton blankets and quilts. It was with our
own eyes that we saw it, right in front of us. Her face
is so badly burnt that no one wants to marry her; she’s
an old maid. The whole village stood around outside,
watching her give birth.’ Someone nearby snickered and
said, ‘What I’d like to know is, if this immaculate virgin
wasn’t sneaking around with
someone
, then how did she
get pregnant?’

The clerk, her eyes still glowing excitedly, said, ‘Exactly.
That’s what’s so strange. Everyone in the village says she’s
never been with anyone. They’re saying it’s the thunder
god’s son. I mean, how else can you explain a giant baby
like that?’

At this, the doctor realized something. For a moment
he was bewildered, but then he said, ‘The medicine!’
and ran directly to his clinic. His thoughts in disarray,
he began searching through the previous year’s logbook
until he found the entry he was looking for. He saw the
woman’s name: Ju Chunhua. Next to it, he saw the question
marks he had drawn in the columns designated for
‘marital status’ and ‘reasons for infertility’.

He had given her six packets, he remembered. The
formula for this medicine was something that had been
handed down in his family for generations, but unexpectedly
he was overcome by a kind of horror. Rather
than the theory of conception-by-thunder-god, he had to
admit that this preternatural birth was more likely to be
a consequence of his own fertility treatment.

In the spring, the doctor quietly raised the price of his
childbearing soup. Though some patients complained,
he refrained from mentioning Ju Chunhua’s pregnancy
to them as justification. He realized that if he tried to
capitalize too brazenly on his success with her, he risked
provoking the opposite reaction: they would say that a
miracle was a miracle and write him off as a quack. What
he did instead was to leave the logbook open on the
relevant page, with a note beside it written in ballpoint
pen: ‘Ju Chunhua from Wangbao got her medicine here.’
Any time a patient saw the entry, her face would light up
with the same expression of enthusiasm, and she would
exclaim, ‘I always said it wasn’t the thunder god who got
her pregnant, didn’t I? I don’t care what anyone says, I’ll
bet it was your medicine.’

In response, the doctor would laugh coolly and say,
‘You know, my medicine’s strong stuff, so you get what
you pay for.’

One day a group of panic-stricken women appeared on
the streets of Liushui carrying their children; their silver
necklaces marked them out as Wangbao people. The cries
of the women and children alarmed the townspeople as
the mothers clumsily held up their children’s right hands,
bound in bloodstained rags and cotton wadding. One of
the Wangbao women showed her son’s hand, and in her
distressed tale Ju Chunhua’s name came up once again:
‘That’s not a child that Ju Chunhua gave birth to it, it’s
vermin! The little wolf cub bit my son’s thumb off!’

Weeping and pushing one another, they pressed into
the clinic. The doctor, who had never encountered such
a situation, became flustered. When he finally began to
examine their injuries, he discovered that the thumb
on the right hand of each child looked like it had been
crushed by a combine harvester, and hung from the
hand like a mown-down plant. The doctor, who knew
exactly how to deal with infertile women, broke out in
cold sweat at the sight of these little thumbs. He found
the merchurocrome and absorbent cotton and asked
urgently, ‘What happened? Is there a rabid dog loose in
Wangbao?’

This provoked another round of wailing from the
mothers of Wangbao: ‘It’s not a rabid dog, it’s that miscarriage
of Ju Chunhua’s. He runs around everywhere
biting the fingers off the other children.’

The doctor asked, ‘Nonsense. He’s only six months old;
he won’t even have all his teeth yet.’ But the mothers of
Wangbao said, ‘Doctor, he’s got all his teeth already! And
he bites worse than a wolf.’

‘That’s impossible. A six-month-old baby can’t even
walk.’

‘It’s not a normal child, doctor, it’s a demon! He was
running around when he was eight days old, suckling at
everybody’s nipples. We all gave him our milk, because
he was so strong that it was no use trying to push him
away.’

The doctor stared in alarm and said, ‘How can that be?
His mother, Ju Chunhua, doesn’t she look after him?’

The women began to yell altogether, ‘That’s what you
don’t understand, doctor! She
wants
him to do it! When
her son bites off someone’s thumb she’s right next to
him, looking on. She even smiles.’

As the women were speaking, Ju Chunhua’s burnt and
hideous face flashed before his mind’s eye. He muttered
to himself for a moment before asking, ‘This woman, Ju
Chunhua: why does she want revenge?’

Immediately, the Wangbao women fell silent, and
traces of remorse and self-accusation appeared on their
faces. One of them said, ‘It’s true we didn’t treat her very
well, but you can’t blame us, the way she looks.’ Another
one said, ‘She must hold it against us that we wouldn’t let
the children see her. You know how children are easily
frightened: we thought she would scare them. But she
just isn’t human; if she had to take revenge then it should
have been on us. Why did she have to take it out on the
children?’