Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

by Su Tong

  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?’

  The doctor began to nod, since he had begun to grasp something of what lay behind the matter. ‘I understand’, he said, ‘why the giant baby goes for the thumbs. She wants her child to be the same as yours: four-fingered.’

  The women all agreed with his deduction and one of them said, ‘That woman! I wouldn’t give a pile of wolf-shit for her conscience.’

  There were seven children with seven little thumbs, and the doctor wrapped them all in gauze bandages the way you might set saplings in soil. Knowing this would do little to solve the problem, he advised the mothers to hitch a ride with the tractor to the district hospital where operations could be performed on them.

  While the women made ready to leave, picking their children up to go and wait for the tractor, the doctor asked them some questions about Ju Chunhua. Of course, the first thing he asked was about the huge burn covering her face. Their answers surprised him: they said she was like that as soon as she came out of her mum’s stomach, and that no one was to blame. At this, the doctor went silent for a moment, but then he asked the question closest to his heart: ‘Did Ju Chunhua . . .’ his eyes glistened as he looked at the anxious women. ‘Did Ju Chunhua tell you that she got the childbearing soup here?’ The women all looked at him in stupefaction; they clearly had no idea what he meant. Then one of them asked, ‘What "childbearing soup"? We all know the truth of it now. It wasn’t any soup, and it wasn’t the thunder god! She did it with a wolf, otherwise she wouldn’t have whelped a wolf cub!’

  Another woman added, ‘It stands to reason: the men all stayed away from her, but I guess the wolves didn’t.’

  The doctor realized that in the face of the ext
reme grief and anger of these women, it would be useless to ask for any further facts concerning Ju Chunhua. If he wanted to find out the truth about this seemingly fantastic occurrence, and about his family’s hereditary medicine, he would have to take a trip to Wangbao himself.

  The day for his trip to Wangbao was overcast, so he brought an umbrella in case of rain. The path was not a good one, and he was soaked through by the time he was halfway up the mountain. From that vantage point he could see the yellow mud huts of Wangbao on the slope of the mountain, with their famous giant apples hanging abundantly on the trees. Just outside the village, the doctor saw a girl picking apples and asked her how to find Ju Chunhua’s home. The girl looked at him curiously and replied with a question, ‘Are you the police? Are you coming to take the wolf cub away?’ Before the doctor answered, the girl took out her right hand and showed it to him.

  ‘The wolf cub bit me, too, but I pulled back quick, so all I got were his tooth marks.’ For whatever reason, the doctor didn’t approve of the way the girl referred to the giant baby.

  He spoke to her kindly though, ‘It’s not nice to call someone a wolf cub. He’s a child, the same as you. It’s just that he’s developing too quickly.’ The girl’s clear, innocent gaze made him unwillingly divulge his secret. He said, ‘You know, the giant baby’s mother got her medicine from me.’

  The girl led him into the village. Once there, the doctor became aware of the nervous, strange atmosphere. Many of the villagers were carrying hoes or iron harrows and hurrying towards an earthen structure at the foot of a pagoda tree. The faces of the adults were grim, but the children were delighted, as if attending a festival. There was already a dense crowd of people gathered at the foot of the tree, so he asked the girl, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘They want to drive Ju Chunhua and her son out of the village, so the wolf cub can’t bite anyone any more.’

  The doctor walked forward quickly, pushing people out of his way. This attracted the attention of the villagers and they turned towards him.

  ‘Who are you?’ they asked.

  The girl shouted out from behind, ‘He’s the district police who’s come to put the wolf cub in gaol!’

  But the doctor, who was in a great rush to see the giant baby, was in no mood to explain himself. The townspeople gave way to him without really understanding what was going on, and let him push open Ju Chunhua’s unlatched door, nearly striking her in the process as she was nursing the infant. The scene not only startled the doctor, but set the crowd outside in an uproar: no one had expected the two of them to be enjoying such a tender moment at a time like this. The doctor took one step backwards and watched as Ju Chunhua slowly put her boy down. Now he could see that the baby really was gigantic. He looked as if he was already seven or eight years old and his skin was as black as charcoal, though his features were regular. The boy looked at the doctor curiously and asked, ‘Are you the police? Why do you want to catch me?’

  The doctor started walking backwards, shaking his head at the giant baby and at the same time shouting to Ju Chunhua, ‘I’m the doctor from Liushui, don’t you remember? You took some of my medicine.’

  Over the giant baby’s gigantic skull, he saw Ju Chunhua tip her straw hat. Her face was still hidden under the shadows of the brim and the cloth in front of it, but he could sense her indifference. He watched as she patted the giant baby on the head, her hoarse but quiet voice striking the doctor like lightning.

  ‘Your daddy has come. Say "daddy" to him, son,’ Ju Chunhua told the giant baby.

  The doctor was petrified by shock as he stood there, listening to the drone of the crowd outside.

  The giant baby’s four-fingered right hand, which was neither large nor small, reached out to him impatiently. His bright eyes gazed at the doctor and his smooth red lips were already open, on the cusp of pronouncing that simple but resonant word: daddy. Finally, the doctor let out a wild cry.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m not!’ He dropped the umbrella he was carrying and pushed past the villagers to escape. He could feel that there were people behind him, chasing him, shouting something, but immense fear had caused the doctor to lose any sense of sound. All he could hear was something resembling the whistling of the wind in the open fields.

  Throughout autumn and winter, the doctor in Liushui was somewhat out of sorts; he even spent a period of time bedridden. The people in town had not learned of his visit to Wangbao, so that when he reappeared at the clinic, they asked him what illness he had been suffering from. He carefully concealed the story and claimed to have had nothing more than a cold brought on by exposure to wind.

  As soon as the clinic reopened, the infertile women of the town came flooding back. They were disappointed, however, for they found the doctor a changed man: he treated them coldly, and prescribed puny amounts of medicine. Some of them complained, asking, ‘But Dr Zhang, what happened? We’re happy to give more money, if that’s what you’re on about, but you’re prescribing medicine like it’s arsenic! What could this small amount possibly be good for?’

  The doctor made a grimace of irritation and laughed at them coldly. ‘You don’t want to have a giant baby, do you?’ he said, ‘If you want a normal child, this much is plenty.’

  In winter, the doctor would often sit in the sun with the barber from across the road. He was particularly alert when anyone went in or out of town, and asked the barber to warn him if he should ever see a woman wearing a straw hat. Of course, the barber was curious about what lay behind such a mysterious instruction. The doctor, however, though he had been on the point of telling him several times, simply told him that someone held a grudge against him and that sooner or later she was bound to come calling.

  Towards the end of the year, a woman with a straw hat did indeed appear on the town’s street, leading a boy of a little over ten. Both were dressed in rags and seemed worn out by the journey. People quite naturally connected their arrival with the floods south of the mountains, since quite a few victims of the disaster had already come to beg in the wealthy area around Liushui.

  As they passed by a noodle shop, the well-meaning owner ran out after them with a bowl of noodles that someone had left unfinished and handed it to the boy. Much to her shock, he glared fiercely at her and heaved the bowl back in her face. With a cry, she brushed off the spilt noodles, then she turned on the woman with the straw hat, swearing at her, ‘Damn you! Damn you! What kind of mother are you? Is that how you raise your son?’ She saw the woman incline her head and suddenly lift off the cloth covering her face to reveal her burnt and gruesome countenance. ‘This is the kind of mother I am, and this is how I raise my son,’ she said.

  The noodle shop wasn’t far from the clinic, and the doctor heard the owner’s sharp cry of surprise from inside. By the time he went out to see what had happened, Ju Chunhua and the giant baby were already standing on the steps. The doctor saw that in his hands the baby was holding the umbrella he had left that day in Wangbao. His mind went completely blank and he mumbled, ‘So you’ve come. I knew you would. But I don’t want anything to do with the two of you.’

  Ju Chunhua looked at him from under her straw hat. Against the sunlight, you could see dust drifting slowly up from her hat and clothes. As if she hadn’t heard his muttering, she pushed the giant baby forward and said, ‘Give daddy his umbrella back.’

  The giant baby grinned at him, revealing a row of pitch-black, much-worn teeth. He squeezed the umbrella into the doctor’s hand and then used his right hand to tug at the doctor’s beard. The four fingers on the baby’s hand were perfectly round but very coarse, and they moved wantonly on the doctor’s chin. Under the caresses of the giant baby, the doctor trembled from head to toe. He felt as if he had suddenly shrunk to the size of an infant. The giant baby, with his breath of garlic mixed with tobacco smoke, reminded him of his own childhood. It was an awful smell, the smell of nightmares, and he realized that it was absolutely identical to that of his father and grandfather. Fear and disgust fille
d his heart. He gripped the baby’s wrists and said, ‘Don’t do that. I’m not your father.’

  The baby turned back to look at his mother. The doctor, too, gave her a pleading look and said, ‘You shouldn’t lie to a child about a thing like that. Who is his father anyway? You can’t just make up whatever you like.’

  Ju Chunhua, standing on the sunlit stairs, suddenly belched. ‘If he says he isn’t your daddy, then he isn’t your daddy. And if he’s not your daddy, then he’s our enemy. Revenge, child! Revenge!’

  Then the doctor received a slap on the face that made his bones smart. The baby was brandishing his four-fingered fist, screaming, ‘Revenge, revenge!’ The doctor fell down the steps, not only because he had received such a fierce blow, but also because it felt like he had experienced a proverbial bolt from the blue, a bolt that had struck him on the cheek. The doctor forgot his pain and allowed the tears of panic to flow freely.

  * * *

  The year was nearing its end, and there were already children around setting off premature firecrackers. In the spot where Ju Chunhua had disappeared with the baby, there was now a man selling holiday goods and flirting with a group of women. Through the pain, the doctor regarded the town as it prepared for the festival. These oblivious people, he thought. They don’t know the giant baby has come. They’re still in the dark. They don’t know the baby is walking through this town with his mother right now. They don’t realize that this year vengeful blows will replace the bangers and firecrackers. Blows coming like bolts from the sky, striking every person once on the face.