Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories (15 page)

Even after that, the matter of the incident at the city
wall remained unsettled. Colleagues of the inspector
managed to find the two people concerned. The girl
was a pretty little thing with narrow, foldless eyes, who
did in fact work at Fresh Wind Hairdressing. Her long,
raven-black braids were coiled into a bun on her head
and no trace of a wound was apparent. In the inspector’s
experience, if there had been any injury to the head, the
doctors would have shaved all her beautiful hair off at the
hospital. The hairdresser didn’t admit to being a victim,
and furthermore claimed that she never went to the
People’s Park and that if she did it was only to walk with
her parents. How could she possibly have been in among
the bushes and weeds beneath the city wall? Then, after
a few days, the officers located the other victim, a man
who had just returned home from a business trip. As the
inspector recalled, he was a mid-level cadre in a large
enterprise, one of those people you can see at first glance
have unlimited prospects. On his face there had been a
suspicious scar. But when the young cadre touched on
how the scar had come about, he said that he had been at
a cheap hotel in another city and had slipped on the stairs
returning to his room at night. That was all there was to
it, the young cadre said, and he categorically denied his
status as a victim. He said, ‘I’m a very busy man. When
would I find time to go to the park?’

In fact, the investigators of the city wall incident
actively sought to drop the case, realizing that neither of
the victims would cooperate with their proceedings, and
the investigator later told his colleagues, ‘Screw this. Who
the hell is going to take on this rubbish case? It doesn’t
really matter. What bothers me is that the little hoodlum
got away with it.’

The ‘little hoodlum’ was of course Li Dasheng, who was
then entering his third year at Red Flag Middle School.
The inspector kept the peculiar diary entry in his drawer,
expecting that the adolescent would sooner or later fall
back into his hands, but that was the strange thing: the
inspector never saw him again. Perhaps when he said
that he wasn’t a little thug it had been true after all.

Twenty years passed and in preparation for retirement
from his beloved post, the inspector was cleaning out
his desk drawers when he found the diary entry, folded
lengthwise. It reminded him of the incident, and he
gave an involuntary chuckle at the yellowing paper. His
curiosity piqued, a young colleague took it from his hand
and began reading. He got halfway through it before he
stopped, remarking ‘What’s so funny about that? I wrote
a diary like that back then, too; a whole bunch of diaries
like that.’

Of course, the young colleague had never heard
of the incident at the city wall twenty years ago, and
the inspector didn’t feel like going to the trouble of
explaining it to him. He slowly tore up the paper, and
said, ‘Yeah, there used to be lots of diaries like that.
Nothing strange about it.’

Men, too, have hopes; soft, malleable things, like aquatic
plants. In general, they are hidden deep inside, but the
pain they conceal can easily well up again, if some little
fish takes a nibble at the sore spot. This sensation is
known as recurrence, or wish recurrence.

My thickset frame means I’m destined for a life without
dance, but the story I wish to relate took place in my childhood.
People are all identical when they’re small, and I was
as lively and clever as the rest of you. And I was a good
dancer. It’s true. As a kid, I was a very good dancer.

It happened when I was in Grade 4, at Red Flag
Elementary School; but even today the whole affair
remains fresh in my mind. On one enchanting spring
afternoon, Ms Duan Hong called me over from the
rope-skipping crowd. She held my hand as we crossed
the playground while all the other children cast envious
glances my way. Ms Duan was a lady in her fifties who
wore white running shoes and had started teaching dance
and choir when my father was still at school. I should tell
you that if Ms Duan took you by the hand it meant you
were in luck. Perhaps you were going to be chosen for the
cultural propaganda team.

When I came into the office with Ms Duan, I immediately
spotted Li Xiaoguo standing by the window, drawing
chalk airplanes and artillery on the glass. Ms Duan said,
‘Xiaoguo, behave. Take a seat and don’t fidget.’ He came
running over with a titter and sat down on the one and
only stool. His face had been brightly painted with rouge,
and he cocked his head, looking contemptuously at me
with the whites of his eyes. I knew what he meant by this.
He meant, ‘What are
you
doing here?’

Ms Duan made me stand up straight and then, her
hand tightly clasped on the cosmetic case, she started to
do my make-up. Her fingers worked tenderly and ably
over my features. Finally, she clapped her hands, subjecting
me to close scrutiny and proclaimed, ‘Yes! Now
you look like a Red Child.’ At this point Xiaoguo almost
knocked over his stool. Pointing at me, he shouted, ‘Ms
Duan, he’s not pretty! He hides crickets in his desk. He
disturbs class discipline.’ She just laughed and patted
Xiaoguo on the head. ‘You’re pretty and he’s pretty too.
You’re both Red Children.’

At that moment, Xiaoguo had made me so angry I
could’ve dragged him out and shot him dead – so what
if his dad was some stupid chairman? But I knew I
couldn’t thrash him in the office, because all the teachers
watched out for him. In any case, Ms Duan soon had
me doing a movement where I hopped up and down
while pretending to wipe windows. I had to repeat this
movement ad infinitum, but in the end she called for
me to stop and said, ‘Excellent hopping; just like a Red
Child.’ She fished out a handkerchief and wiped the
sweat off my face. ‘Tomorrow you and Xiaoguo will come
and practice together, OK?’

I suddenly realized that the movement I had been doing
was straight out of
The Red Children
. This was a dance for
twelve, six boys and six girls, holding brooms, mops and
rags, and making cleaning movements. It was always the
finale of our school’s performance, but now the window-cleaning
boy had changed schools, so Xiaoguo and I
were being called in to substitute. Ms Duan said, ‘Now
you two make certain you practise, and whoever dances
better will be selected for the performance.’

Only many years later did I realize that what she had
meant was for us to compete. I didn’t catch on at the time;
back then all I knew was how much I hated Xiaoguo. I
was just itching to ask Cat Head, Jia Lin and some of the
others in the big kids’ gang to break his legs. No doubt
Xiaoguo’s thoughts were equally truculent. ‘The east
wind blows, the war drums boom, now we’ll see who’s
scared of whom.’ There was a song that went like that.
¹²

I was in fact only provisionally a member of the cultural
propaganda team; not really so very glorious a position.
The thirteen children of the cultural propaganda team
gathered in the big classroom on Wednesdays and
at weekends, and, at the sound of the music, began
dancing around Ms Duan like chicks around an old hen.
I mingled among them, filled with the kind of joy you
don’t ever forget.

What I will relate next concerns the dancing of
another child. She was an extraordinarily beautiful
little girl and her name was Zhao Wenyan, which means
swallow. Later, when I read about the art theorist Cai Yi’s
‘typical image’,
¹³
I felt that he must have had someone
like her in mind; no doubt this association was inspired
by impressions of her back then. For me, she was an
archetype.

And
she was the Red Child who held the mop.

Wenyan’s mother had been a dancer, but afterwards,
why I never knew, she kept trying to hang herself. This
happened over and over again, but she never actually
succeeded in taking her life. From what I heard, it was
always Wenyan who found her and, screaming and
wailing, would slide a chair under her mother’s feet. Her
mother then had no choice but to resign herself once more
to soldier on. I had seen her mother on the street before;
she looked almost identical to Wenyan, except she was a
little taller and a little older. She had two maroon stripes
on her neck, groove-like scars, left from the noose.

Once Wenyan had her make-up on, she had the power
of an angel to induce love and pity, but as soon as she
came on stage she began to get nervous. And as soon as
she was nervous, she squatted down and peed onstage.
This is called urinary incontinence, and I’ve heard that
many beautiful girls are afflicted with this peculiar
illness in their childhood. That the propaganda team had
not dropped Wenyan was in the first instance because of
her extraordinary beauty and in the second because Ms
Duan couldn’t bear to part with her. Ms Duan said, ‘She’s
had so many frights, poor child.’

I’ve never met another girl like her; she was a little
child of glass. Yes, exactly, a little child of glass, beautiful
in her sorrow, glowing cautiously with some emerald
light. She wore a little patterned dress, and when she ran
to centre stage, radiating her innate beauty, she held her
mop with such natural elegance that it might have been
a bouquet of fresh flowers. But as soon as you saw her
squat down, you knew that before long the cotton dress
would be wet. Even someone who was only a little boy
at the time could never have forgotten this archetypal
image of her, and that’s all there was to it.

Then, on another enchanting spring afternoon, I
fought with Xiaoguo. I made his little garlic-bulb nose
bleed, while he kept trying to pull down my trousers and
rip them. I had to cover up the seat of my pants with my
school bag all the way home that day.

Analysis today would conclude that I lost. Xiaoguo was
a wily old fox.

The east wind blows, the war drums boom. Spring
passed very quickly.

Only seven or eight days before the performance, Ms
Duan called me aside and whispered secretly into my ear,
‘Dance nicely and I’ll let you go on.’ That was precisely
the whispering-in-your-ear kind of woman Ms Duan was,
a rare kind of woman for this world. Her waist was more
supple than an eight-year-old’s, her dance steps more
graceful than the bending of a willow in the wind. She
had danced that way since her youth and forgotten to get
married or have children, so that she was an old maid.

That whisper was the last time she ever spoke to me.
During the rehearsal that followed, something terrible
happened. On that day Ms Duan’s cheeks were flushed;
as always, she was leading the team in our dance like an
old hen with her chicks: ‘Arms a little higher.’ And then,
‘Why do you always forget to smile? You must smile.
Smile beautifully like little red flowers.’ I remember Ms
Duan gripping Xiaoguo’s arm to prevent it stiffening,
but Xiaoguo was a born nincompoop, and his arms kept
flailing randomly in the air like wooden rods. Ms Duan
leapt in and out of our dancing ring, hopping about and
mimicking window-cleaning movements. I saw her as
she suddenly stopped moving, and her two lovely arms
hung in the air freeze-framed. During the space of that
moment, the light in her eyes slackened, then I watched
as her plumpish body fell backwards.

Wenyan was the first one to burst into tears; before the
rest of us reacted, she cried out, ‘Ms Duan’s dead!’ and
ran down to the office to fetch a teacher. After a spell
of confusion, we thirteen children went along to see Ms
Duan at the hospital.

It was called cerebral thrombosis: a sudden attack
brought on by high blood pressure. Given how much
we understood of the workings of the world, we children
were unable to comprehend the connection between
haemorrhage and death. I had always assumed that
school teachers were immortal; that if Ms Duan had
passed on for a moment, she would return to life a second
later. But the next day, as soon as I arrived at school, I
heard that Ms Duan had died. Wenyan was bent over her
desk, bawling her heart out. Her school bag was flung
out on the desk, and inside was a pair of white running
shoes – they had dropped off Ms Duan’s feet on the way
to the hospital.

The concept of a connection between death and dancing
was even harder to grasp. It was as if Ms Duan was
leading us as we danced, but how was it that she suddenly
had one foot in the Kingdom of the Dead?

People die all the time. Sometimes it comes heavy as a
mountain, sometimes as light as a goose feather.

After Ms Duan’s death, I assumed the propaganda
team had been disbanded because no one called me to
practices. Those were enchanting spring afternoons – in
simple stories, it is best to use phrases like ‘enchanting
spring afternoon’ quite frequently in order to avoid
complicating a simple matter. The redbud tree blossomed.
Wenyan started to wear skirts. And that’s all there was to
it.

One day, as I walked past the window of the big classroom,
I discovered to my amazement that Wenyan,
Xiaoguo and the others were rehearsing; the principal
and a strange woman were conducting them. There were
twelve children – six boys, six girls – but not me.

What about me? Hadn’t they said I would go on and
Xiaoguo would go to hell? I leaned on the windowsill
and peered in at them; I wanted to go in, but didn’t dare.
I couldn’t understand how they could have dropped me
and picked Xiaoguo, that champion nincompoop. It was
the first time in my life that I felt a sense of loss. I was
twelve at the time. A sense of loss at that age! And dance
being to blame. First they say they’ll let you perform,
then they suddenly don’t even want you at rehearsal; how
could you not feel hurt?

On yet another enchanting spring afternoon, I fought
Xiaoguo again. This time I held him down in the sandbox
so he couldn’t rip my trousers. With superhuman
strength, I began to fill Xiaoguo’s mouth with sand, then
suddenly I remembered what Ms Duan had said, ‘Dance
nicely and I’ll let you go on.’ So I let Xiaoguo go and instead
broke into tears myself. I was facing a broken-down
wall, and vaguely through my tears I saw that outside
the wall was a rapeseed field filled with grieving golden
flowers. This time I had won the fight, and yet incomprehensibly
I was the one who had ended up in tears. It
was the most embarrassing incident in all the historical
records of my brilliant youth.

The east wind blows, the war drums boom. Spring
passed very quickly.

The day I feared most finally arrived: the day of the
performance. The venue was the school’s large assembly
hall. On the day our school had a kind of orioles-singing-swallows-darting-one-hundred-flowers-contending-bunting-flattering-firecracker-popping
atmosphere. The
children, ignorant of worldly affairs, were scampering
and scurrying all over the place, making so much merry
noise that the heavens threatened to fall. I was the only
heavy-hearted one, sitting straight-backed like an old
man in the last row of the classroom, playing with a box
of matches. I piled the matchsticks on top of one another
and then took out a little mirror to reflect the light onto
them. Slowly, the pile of matchsticks spluttered and
caught fire. The smell of burning saltpetre surrounded
me and drifted through the deserted classroom.

Would you have played such heartbroken games when
you were twelve years old?

Carrying my stool, I fell into the back of the line of my
team as we trooped into the assembly hall. Enchanting
spring. No one wanted to know what was troubling me.
Who ever wants to know what’s troubling you? Suddenly
our group began to make a great hullabaloo as the six
boys and girls – the twelve red children with their makeup
on – processed past with their props. Xiaoguo, that
nincompoop, was of course among them. His face was
made up redder than any of them. I turned round in
order to avoid looking at them, and then I heard the
principal jog up to Wenyan and say, ‘Don’t be nervous,
and whatever happens, you must hold it.’ I knew what
the principal meant, but I reflected that if I were Wenyan
I certainly would not hold it, I’d definitely pee, since they
were blind enough to choose Xiaoguo and not me.

As you know, in the early seventies, the great masters of
dance were, by default, children, and anyway, watching
kids bounce around was better than watching nothing
at all. So for the performance that day, all the old men
and women in the street had brought along their stools
and chairs and sat glowing happily at the back. I saw
Xiaoguo’s grandma and Wenyan’s grandpa, both looking
as joyous as if they were on the stage themselves. I felt
like there was something pernicious about the merriness
of the world that day.

Then it was the turn of the red children to begin
their piece. The six boys and six girls danced in two
rows, holding brooms, mops and rags, and started to
clean. I saw how Wenyan’s eyebrows were knitted like
an old woman’s; she made only a few dance moves and
then squatted down. The principal, standing offstage,
immediately covered his head and rolled his eyes at the
sky.