Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

by Su Tong

  ‘The ghost. This one’s the ghost.’

  The folklorist laughed. He felt light-headed, although he knew there was no good reason to be. He turned around to face the now restless crowd. Laughing, he said, ‘Isn’t that funny? I’m the ghost.’ At this point, four men rushed out from behind the old man, dragging a large sheet behind them. They wrapped the folklorist in it from head to foot and, lifting the bundle, ran outside. Initially the folklorist retained his composure at this turn of events, but when he heard their wild, earsplitting cries, he began to feel afraid. Summoning all his strength, he cried out, ‘Where are we going? Where are you taking me?’

  The ghost-bearers answered, ‘To the longfeng urn! How could you forget? It was your idea!’ At this the folklorist calmed down again. Through the white sheet he could dimly see a dense crowd of villagers running along like madmen. Some of them were shouting, ‘The ghost! The ghost!’ He was being carried above Eight Pines now, soaring, flying over the village. Suddenly he remembered the old man at the urn who had mentioned Wulin’s name. The memory made his heart skip a beat. The ghost-bearers gradually picked up speed. They were heading to the urn so quickly that their feet barely touched the ground. The folklorist could dimly see the great urn, with its cracks and clamps, its inch of melted snow and moss. He suddenly called out sharply, ‘No! Put me down! Put me down right now!’

  Finally, the ghost-bearers and the crowd stood still and set the folklorist down. They unwound him from the enfolding sheet, and when his face emerged it was deathly pale. He kicked himself free from the sheet, brushed down his clothes and hair and told the village elder, ‘This is purely a re-enactment. It’s not real. I research folk customs. I am not a ghost.’

  ‘Of course it’s not real,’ said the old man. ‘If it were real it wouldn’t be like this at all. It wouldn’t be finished yet.’

  ‘I’m a little out of breath. I almost suffocated in there.’

  ‘It’s not finished,’ repeated the old man. ‘We have to put you in the urn, and then everyone has to hit you once, until you die.’

  ‘This far is fine. It’s been quite realistic enough.’

  The folklorist heaved a sigh of relief, sat down on the urn’s edge and stared around him at the stupefied-looking villagers. The crowd drifted away reluctantly. Feeling strangely weak, he remained there until the moon rose over the distant chimney of the brickmaker’s kiln.

  Gradually the people dispersed until finally only the scarecrow by the paddies was visible, rustling in the sobbing wind. His straw hat was gone; someone must have knocked it off during the confusion.

  How could this have happened? The folklorist patted his throat, which felt constricted after the ordeal; it was still hard for him to breathe. He struck the lip of the urn a few times with the flat of his hand, then stood up. Though he had been unlucky to be named as the ghost, the incident once written up would make for his most outstanding piece of research yet.

  I heard that it happened on the day he left Eight Pines.

  As he walked through the lanes with his rucksack, several villagers bade him farewell from their dark, humid homes. He couldn’t hear what they said exactly, but he knew that they were words of parting. Lost in his own melancholy thoughts, he walked along the unsurfaced roads towards the main highway. The road was slippery with melted snow which had now refrozen. The wind was blowing very hard that day, and he had to zip up the collar of his anorak and walk sideways. As he reached the edge of the village, he took a last look at the longfeng urn. Over the course of one night, the water inside had frozen into blue-tinged ice. It was then that he scented the acrid smell of melting tin in the air, a curdled odour streaming from the urn, tainting his face and luggage. He lifted his head and looked around him. The old man who had recently mended the urn was already quite far away.

  The pottery-mender was walking along the road ahead. Flame flickered from his kit bag, floating above the road like a firefly. The reappearance of the old man made the folklorist aware of a mysterious circle of events. All of a sudden he wanted to catch up with him, wanted to grasp the substance of that circle. Quickening his pace, he took the same gravelled road. He judged the old man to be about 300 metres away, from the length and speed of his stride, so the folklorist ought to be able to catch him up in five minutes or less.

  He broke into a jog, but soon realized that the gap between him and the old man wasn’t decreasing in the slightest. It remained at about 300 metres and this bewildered him. He kept running, but his forehead became beaded with sweat and his legs felt limp. Assailed by doubts and suspicions, he was staggered along like a worn-out old mare. Then, faintly, he heard a call resounding down the road, from somewhere out of sight, indistinct and echoing:

  ‘Wulin . . . Wulin . . . Wulin . . .’

  The folklorist stood in the middle of the road and looked around in every direction, but except for the old man’s flame ahead of him, there was nothing to be seen. The village behind him seemed deserted. On the brink of desperation, the folklorist turned on his heel and sent a loud cry echoing up to the skies: ‘Wulin! ‘ He listened to his cry reverberate across the desolate fields and at virtually the same time, a powerful current of air pressed in on him from behind, closely followed by a blunt object. It sent him flying a little distance before he sprawled to the ground.

  The lorry driver was a young man. He recalled sounding his horn from a long distance away, but the pedestrian stood blankly in the road without making the slightest movement. The driver had taken him for a hitchhiker, but he didn’t want to give him a lift. He had driven on believing that, like other hitchhikers, this one would move out of harm’s way in the end. But there was something wrong with this man: even when the front of the lorry hit him and he was sent soaring, he’d looked astounded, like an unwieldy bird frightened into flight. The terrified driver shifted into a higher gear instead of stopping and fled the scene of the accident as quickly as he could. But when he had driven all the way to the noisy, flourishing city, his own feelings of guilt began to oppress him. After parking his lorry in front of the county public security bureau, he jumped out and entered the building.

  The officers sent to examine the scene of the accident walked along the road, the young driver at their head.

  They all moved with their heads down, looking for traces of blood. Dusk was falling on the road and its gravelled surface was flooded with clean, white light. Neither blood nor body was evident.

  The driver told the policemen, ‘This is really odd. I’m sure I hit him around here. I don’t understand why we can’t find anything.’

  Someone suggested, ‘Maybe the villagers carried him back? We should have a look there.’

  They turned onto a narrow unsurfaced road and walked towards Eight Pines. As they reached the edge of the village, the driver cried out suddenly, ‘His rucksack! That’s his rucksack over there!’

  They saw a dark brown bag lying by a large urn. As they ran towards it, they began to make out the two legs protruding from the urn, while the rest of the body was curled up inside.

  The dead man’s eyes were open. From his clothing and appearance it was easy to identify him as an academic. His face was pale and cold as ice, and frozen on his brow was an expression of astonishment.

  ‘In the urn?’ murmured the driver. ‘How did he get into the urn?’

  The police officers, all experienced men, opened the dead man’s rucksack. Besides his clothing, towel, toothbrush, toothpaste and Thermos, they found a notebook with a plastic cover, the pages of which were covered in dense writing. The most notable circumstance was that a piece of foil fell out from between its pages. Though it was torn and damaged, a drawing of a ghoul could be discerned on the paper backing, along with the word ‘ghost’ written in large red letters beneath.

  ‘"Ghost!"‘ said the driver. ‘He was a ghost!’

  I knew the folklorist in question. His death was certainly shrouded in mystery. But at his memorial service, I heard another folklorist murmur to hims
elf, ‘It’s how the ceremony ends, that’s all.’

  The Private Banquet

  The last long-distance bus reached the town of Maqiao at dusk, and it was at that point that the passengers’ fears were realized: the bus broke down. Fortunately, it broke down at Memorial Arch, only fifty or sixty metres from its destination, and the driver decided to park the bus where it had failed. It turned out, however, that there was also a problem with the switch that opened the bus doors. The driver began by patiently, cool-headedly, pressing one button after another, but his movements became gradually more erratic, until he hit out at the controls with abandon. The bus passengers began to get up and look towards the driver’s seat and those at the back asked those further up front, ‘Why doesn’t he want to open the doors?’ And those up front answered, ‘It’s not that he doesn’t want to. It’s because the doors won’t open.’

  Inside the bus, a variety of sounds emanated and subsided: agitated murmuring, indignant calling. Somebody shrewd suggested loudly, ‘We should report a bus like this, and make the company give us half our money back!’ Other passengers excitedly echoed this sentiment, but then a more resigned voice spoke up mildly, ‘This is Maqiao, not Beijing or Guangzhou, you know. If you report something like this, they’ll think you’re mental.’

  Then someone in the know about certain particulars of the long-distance bus company’s ownership said, ‘If you want to report it, then you should go straight to Fatcat: that’s Huang Jian. Didn’t you know that he’s the contractor on this line?’

  Amidst the general uproar, the bus doors began to clatter. They carried on clattering for quite a while, then suddenly they threw themselves half open. Somebody nearly tumbled down, but it was a young man with good reflexes and he managed to catch the railing, though his luggage got jammed in the crack. The young man had a quick temper and he began to swear. ‘Motherf***er! Why the hell did you only open the door halfway? My bag’s stuck now; hurry up and open it!’ But the driver was in a foul mood himself and retorted, ‘Grandmotherf***er! You think it was easy to get the door open this far? This old dinosaur should have been sold for scrap ages ago. It’s no use swearing at me. If you’re such a bigshot, why don’t you give Fatcat’s old mum a screw?’ The passengers were all anxious to get off the bus, and those at the back didn’t have time to join in the recriminations or bother to help the young man out. They lifted their legs one by one to step over the obstructive duffel bag, pushing violently at one another to squeeze through the narrow space offered by the half-open door.

  The station’s PA system operator had wandered off, so the loudspeakers didn’t announce the arrival of the bus. Instead, the gay melody of March Of The Athletes poured out of it. The eagle-eyed members of the crowd waiting for the bus’s arrival spotted the commotion and said to each other, ‘I bet that’s the bus, but how come it’s stopped by Memorial Arch?’ They became restless, and some of them strode quickly towards the bus.

  ‘You’re late!’ they said, and those disembarking said, ‘Well, yeah, and no wonder. The bus is no good, the roads are no good and they couldn’t even get the door open! It would have been a miracle if we weren’t late!’

  It was already the evening of the Little New Year,6 and everyone who was coming home for the holidays had done so already. Since Bao Qing refused to join in the rush for the exit, he was the last one off the bus. He carried his suitcase to the bus doors, and outside he glimpsed his primary school classmate Li Renzheng in wellingtons, gripping a long brush in his left hand and hauling a rubber hose with his right. Bao Qing quickly turned his face away and, swivelling his body sideways to fit through the door, stepped off the bus.

  Bao Qing was a classic example of what people in Maqiao meant when they spat out the word ‘intellectual’. Intellectuals lacked warmth. Rather than exchanging conventional greetings, they often made the cowardly choice of pretending not to have seen you. This is precisely what Bao Qing did now. Like a thief, he crept around the bus and started walking west. Immediately, Renzheng’s voice called after him, ‘Bao Qing! Bao Qing! You’re back?’ Bao Qing couldn’t very well continue to feign deafness and so, much against his will, he turned around to face Renzheng.

  Uncharacteristically, Renzheng was sporting a red baseball cap, and above the brim was an eye-catching line of white letters: ‘Singapore–Malaysia–Thailand. Eight-Day Tour’. Bao Qing chuckled, and asked, ‘What are you wearing that cap for? I didn’t even recognize you. Have you been travelling abroad?’

  Renzheng stretched his hand up to touch his hat, and said, ‘I should be so lucky. No, someone gave it to me. My hair is, well, I’ll tell you later.’

  Bao Qing did not try to leave, as he could tell from Renzheng’s expression that there was something more he wanted to say. He had assumed it was going to be an explanation about his hair, but this turned out to be quite wrong. Instead, raising his voice, Renzheng suddenly said, ‘Fatcat is inviting you to have a drink with him. He’s told me many times to let him know if you came back, because he wants to treat you to a drink.’

  Bao Qing, said, ‘Who? Fatcat? You mean Huang Jian?’ Renzheng was now spraying water from the hose onto the glass of the bus’s rear windows, and said, ‘Of course, Fatcat. Don’t you remember Fatcat?’

  Bao Qing was speechless for a while, and in the end he murmured, ‘How could I forget him? A drink, then. I suppose.’

  So it was that Bao Qing returned from his distant Beijing home to celebrate the New Year. Going home was just as much trouble as not going home. For Bao Qing, the tradition of returning home for the New Year had become a ceremonial burden. A few years ago, when his mother had still been hale and hearty, she had come to the station to wait for him. It seemed a cruel ordeal to put her through, so he had withheld the exact date of his return from her. Even so, she had waited at the station for two days before Little New Year, a puny, emaciated form, standing in the wind underneath the archway. It made Bao Qing sick at heart to think about it, but he couldn’t refuse to come home, and so his visits became pilgrimages of filial piety. Only the thought of his mother made him return to Maqiao; and since his wife was sure he had no ulterior motives, she had no objections. Thus every New Year, he and his wife set off in different directions. His mother, too, understood the situation, so she hadn’t complained about the absence of her daughter-in-law in recent years. She spoke candidly on the phone: ‘I won’t live much longer. You have a few more years of filial responsibility before you, and after that you can go with your wife to spend New Year in Guangdong. It’s lively there at New Year, and the weather is warm. Just one sweater is warm enough.’

  As he walked over the New People’s Bridge, Bao Qing saw his brother-in-law coming towards him from the direction of the meat-processing factory, pushing his bike. He was running and Bao Qing’s elder sister trailed behind him. Evidently, they were late and were now hurrying to make up for it. He could see that his sister was telling her husband off. She was still wearing her white uniform. Bao Qing disliked it when his family made a big fuss over him, so he knitted his eyebrows and stood motionless on the bridge. Just then, a woman in a purple leather overcoat was leading her dog up onto the bridge. At first, Bao Qing didn’t notice her, but then the short, curly-haired dog began sniffing at his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers. Simultaneously, he picked up the same perfume which in summer suffused Beijing’s big department stores, and when he turned his head, Bao Qing found himself looking at Cheng Shaohong. She had assumed a flirtatious pose and gave him a sidelong look. Though he recognized her straight away, he couldn’t recall her name. The boys in town had all known her as Morning Glory. Shaohong took the initiative and pulled the dog towards her and then up onto its hind legs, commanding the curly-haired pooch, ‘Jubilee, bow to the professor.’

  Even after all these many years, Bao Qing was flustered to see Shaohong. As a matter of habit, he extended his hand, but seeing that she was not going to take it, he took it back and stared at a button on her overcoat. He said, ‘It’s been man
y years since we last saw one another. Are you still at the fruit company?’

  Shaohong responded, ‘As if there would still be a fruit company! That broke up a long time ago. I work in a private enterprise now. I have to live how I can; I’m not a clever clogs like you going around doing important things.’

  Bao Qing responded, ‘Oh, I don’t do anything that important, either.’

  Shaohong punched Bao Qing on the arm, and said, ‘No need to be modest. In a small place like Maqiao everybody knows who’s a lightweight and who’s got clout. Fatcat says he saw you on TV.’

  Bao Qing waved this off and said, ‘That’s not being "on TV". I was just reading a paper at a conference and somebody took a shot of it.’

  Shaohong responded, ‘And yet you’re modest about it. Not too shabby: still as modest now as when you were a kid.’ Some memory had occurred to Shaohong as she spoke, and now, covering her mouth, she made a tittering noise. Bao Qing was embarrassed, for he inferred that she was laughing about his past, although he couldn’t know which particular incident she was remembering. He turned away and watched as his sister and her husband walked up the bridge, apology written all over their faces. Bao Qing said, ‘I have to go now, my family’s here to fetch me.’

  He felt Shaohong give him another light slap, this time on the back. Then he heard her say, ‘Fatcat says he wants to invite you for a drink, but you’ve been all hoity-toity with us lately. The last two times he let you decline, but there’s no running away this time.’

  It rained on the second day of the new year. An unbroken cloud cover hung over the town, and the roads, where underground optical cables were being installed, became an expanse of mud. Underneath his umbrella, Bao Qing rushed between his relatives’ houses, bearing gifts and New Year greetings. At his uncle’s he heard once again that Fatcat wished to invite him for a drink, and his uncle even encouraged him: ‘If Fatcat asks you to dinner, see if he won’t give your cousin a job at the eiderdown plant or as a ticket-taker on the long-distance buses. You have a lot of prestige, maybe he’ll do you a favour.’