Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories (10 page)

‘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 himself,
‘It’s how the ceremony ends, that’s all.’

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 many 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.’

The subject annoyed Bao Qing as soon as it was brought
up, but he couldn’t very well lose his temper. Instead, he
told his uncle, ‘I don’t have time to eat with him; I’ve even
declined the mayor’s dinner, and I’m leaving tomorrow.
Besides, I still have to go to the banquet the Education
Committee Director Liu’s giving.’

By the time Bao Qing left his uncle’s home, the
rain had become very heavy, so he took a short cut
through the little alleys. As he passed Maqiao’s second
Primary School, which he had attended long ago, he
automatically glanced through the school gates. What he
saw, however, was not the familiar sight of the school,
but rather Fatcat’s eiderdown plant. Four red lanterns
hung from the factory gates, making up the words,
‘Happy New Year Wishes!’ On both sides, the walls of
the factory grounds were pasted with the conspicuous
slogan ‘Demand Quality From Management, Reap Profit
From Quality’. Bao Qing stood beneath his umbrella and
listened to the sound of the raindrops as they struck the
red-brick building’s gutters and the plastic awning over
the propaganda board. The sound was so desolate that
Bao Qing shuddered, and then he felt a strange sensation
of resentment. ‘So he bought the school and made it into
a factory. That’s new money for you! New money!’

Fatcat’s invitation hung like a shadow over Bao Qing
as he paid his various family visits. Using the weather as
an excuse, he had resolved to decline Fatcat’s invitation
to dine at Prosperity Restaurant. His mother did not
encourage him to go, for she could still remember the
humiliating price her son had once paid for the privilege
of Fatcat’s friendship. As Bao Qing was making excuses
on the telephone, he heard his mother denouncing
Fatcat: ‘Now he treats you like a human being, but back
then he treated you like you were his servant; actually
worse than any master would ever treat a servant. He
used to ride on your shoulders and shit.’ Bao Qing did
not want to hear his mother prattle on about the matter,
so he motioned for her not to hover by the phone while
he spoke. She moved a few paces away and sat down,
remarking, ‘He’s rich. So what? There’ll be great food. So
what? Leave it for the folks who like that sort of thing.’
His mother’s attitude reminded Bao Qing that he could
safely shift all blame onto his mother. Into the receiver,
he said, ‘Of course I don’t wish to offend, but I’m off to
Beijing tomorrow and my mother says she simply won’t
let me eat my last meal anywhere but home.’

Bao Qing presumed that, with this, he had successfully
declined the invitation, but that evening, just as the
whole family was sitting down to dinner, they heard
the sharp squeal of motorcycle brakes outside, followed
by the sound of knocking on the door. Bao Qing’s sister
went to open it and came back to inform him that it was
Renzheng. She reported furthermore that he refused
to come in and was insisting that Bao Qing go out to
speak to him. As soon as Bao Qing went outside, he saw
Renzheng standing stiff and perfectly upright in the rain.
He had removed his helmet and Bao Qing saw that he
was now half bald. There were only a few tufts of hair
closely pressed to his brow, dripping from the rain. He
stood there in the rain with a mixed expression of terror
and disquiet, seasoned with a pinch of mystery. ‘Well,
Mr Professor, don’t you think your high horse is a little
too high? Your old classmate is just asking you to have a
drink with him, not to pass through fire and brimstone.
So how come it’s so hard to get you to agree?’