Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories (21 page)

Yongshan glared at her son and went over to the tree
by herself. She walked, her back slightly bent, over the
pile of bricks, and made two turns around the tree.
What she saw was a cracked and battered tree trunk, on
whose coarse bark someone had written a line in red
paint: ‘Piss here and you’re a dog!’ accompanied by a
very rude drawing. Yongshan couldn’t find her name,
so she lowered her head, reflecting, and sullenly walked
down from the brick pile. Her son had taken a seat on the
suitcase; he must have guessed the result, for he looked
at his mother with eyes filled with ridicule. She tried to
smooth her disappointment over and said, ‘It’s good that
it’s gone. Who knows what kind of people rub up against
that tree. Disgusting!’

The sky suddenly began to grow dark. They had
reached the depths of the Cabbage Market rubble and
the orange sunlight had vanished from the scene of
devastation. They were a stone’s throw away from their
old home when Yongshan loosened her grip on the
suitcase. ‘Let’s put it down,’ she said to her son. ‘If I didn’t
tell you that behind this wall is our old house, would you
have recognized the place?’

‘No,’ her son said. ‘Who can remember stuff like
that?’

Yongshan stared at the half wall still standing. She
looked for the roof, but there was none. Nor was there
a door. She saw the cement steps that led up to the front
door, but they were swallowed in the debris. Yongshan
looked and looked, and suddenly she was angry with
her son. ‘You can’t remember anything? Your grandma
looked after you here till you were three. Right up until
her heart attack, when she had to go to the hospital, she
was the one who cared for you. Don’t you remember that
either? You don’t recognize this, you can’t remember that
– you’re not human, you’re a pig!’

Her son discovered, to his surprise, that his mother’s
eyes were shining with the glow of furious overreaction.
‘I remember grandma, but that doesn’t mean I remember
the house,’ he uttered quietly in his defence, then he said
nothing more; for though he understood that he had
provoked his mother’s wrath, he felt guiltless. And it
really was true that he had no recollection whatsoever of
Licheng, or of the old house in Cabbage Market.

Besides Yongshan and her son, the vast rubble of
Cabbage Market was completely empty. Sunset glowed
over the main street not far away, and the sound of
people and cars would occasionally subside, then a
fragmentary, hardly discernible, rustling would drift
across the rubble, a sound like a subterranean sigh. A
pigeon flew in the face of dusk towards the rubble and
circled over mother and son for a while. Then, panicking,
it flew to the parasol tree. It was probably somebody’s
domestic pigeon, lost a long time ago, and now that it
had finally found the way back to its shed, both shed
and owner had vanished.

There was only half a wall left of the old house, and in
it half a window. Yongshan walked up to it. The window-frame
had had many layers of red paint, and the long
years of sunlight and rain had given the surface stripy
wrinkles, like the wrinkles on an old man’s body. The
glass was broken, but the frame was still firmly set into
the broken wall. Yongshan stretched out her hand to give
the window a push, and it opened with a creak. Something
fell down off the windowsill. Yongshan looked in
and found that it was an ink bottle, which had fallen into
the debris inside without breaking.

‘It’s your grandfather’s ink bottle,’ said Yongshan. ‘He
used it to correct his students’ homework. He liked to
keep it on the windowsill.’

Her son, standing behind her, peered inside; perhaps
he was trying to remember the brief time he had spent in
this house as a child. Maybe he couldn’t recall, or maybe
he wasn’t trying, but he said, ‘It’s like an earthquake
zone. It’s as if we’re earthquake victims.’

Yongshan touched the window; the greasy frame was
covered in a layer of dust which came off on her hand.
‘When I was small, I liked to stand by this window and
play the accordion,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa could read
music, and sometimes before recitals he would make me
practice, then he’d stand next to me and turn the pages.’

‘I never knew you played the accordion,’ her son said.
‘What happened to it?’

‘I gave it to your uncle,’ she said. ‘Your grandpa wanted
him to learn it, but he didn’t take to it. Your uncle’s a
good-for-nothing; later your grandma told me he sold the
accordion to a scrap collector for twenty bucks.’

The pigeon on the pagoda tree flew back towards them,
so low they could see its grey feathers, which looked as if
they’d been dipped in water. The pigeon stopped on the
remaining wall of the old house, paused for a moment
and flew off again.

‘That pigeon can’t find its way home,’ Yongshan said.

‘Maybe it’s a homing pigeon?’ Pigeons were something
her son was interested in and his eyes brightened. He
followed the pigeon’s flight path with his eyes and said,
‘A homing pigeon can fly five hundred kilometres and
come back home. A homing pigeon can find its way back
home no matter how far it goes.’

‘Even people can’t find their way back home these
days. How can a pigeon?’ said Yongshan.

She stopped following the pigeon with her eyes and
bowed her head to look for something. ‘Let me see,’ she
said. ‘Maybe I can find your grandma’s flowerpots. We
could take one home as a memento. Do you remember
how grandma made a flower terrace outside the door?
She planted lots of flowers and the pots were all made
from Yixing clay. They were very good pots.’

‘What’s the use of bringing pots home? You never plant
flowers.’

‘We don’t have to plant flowers. It would be a memento,
don’t you see?’

It was obvious that her son was trying to suppress his
irritation; he picked up a tile fragment and threw it far
away. It happened to land on a piece of glass, which made
a crisp and resonant bang.

‘Can’t you behave like a decent human being?’
Yongshan said. ‘How old are you, anyway? It’s time you
grew up.’

‘If you take me to a trash heap, how can I behave
decently? Do you have some master plan or something?
It’ll be totally dark in a second. Are we going to look for
Uncle Yongqing or not?’

Yongshan looked blank for a moment, then turned
to look inside the house, supporting herself on the
windowsill. It was obvious that she had been avoiding
this question. While Yongshan had been pondering the
old home in the dusk, her heart, too, had sunk into the
shadows. ‘I’ll take you there in a moment. Don’t worry,
Licheng is my hometown; I won’t make you sleep on
the street no matter what.’ She spoke to her son, then
suddenly craned her neck to look into a corner. Her son
assumed that this was her final glance and was surprised
when Yongshan called out loudly, ‘The cabinet. Our five-drawer
cabinet’s still here!’

Only half believing her, her son quickly climbed in
through the window, and there against the broken wall
was indeed a cabinet, covered in plastic film and a few
newspapers, standing crookedly in the rubble. It was a
style of cabinet that had been popular in the south in the
seventies, and though it didn’t have five drawers, that’s
what it was called. In any case, it looked like it might
serve as a small wardrobe. Carved, symmetrical woodwork
was inlaid in the dark red drawers.

The sight of the cabinet made Yongshan nostalgic. Her
son was prepared for this, and having helped her through
the window, he kept his peace. He sat on an abandoned
plastic stool, and looked up at the dusky sky over the
rubble of Cabbage Market, remembering, no doubt, the
graphics from some computer game. He gave a giggle
and said, ‘It’s like I’m in the Infinite Magic Castle. Do
you know what that is? You go into the castle and forget
everything, but you have all these powers, so you can
walk with your brain, or talk through your nostrils!’

Yongshan tried to open the cabinet door, but saw that
somebody had hung a little lock on it, so the door could
not be opened. Yongshan went over the wood carvings
with her hands and said, ‘I’m sure you don’t remember
this cabinet, but I used it every day. I had to put the clean
clothes in it and take out the stamps to buy rice and oil.
You couldn’t possibly understand those things; you don’t
know anything about what it was like.’

‘What good would it be if I did?’ her son said. ‘What’s
the problem, as long as you know yourself?’

‘I wonder who put the lock on. Must be your uncle.
How could he have forgotten to take the cabinet with
him?’ Yongshan held the lock in her fingers, then
contradicted herself, ‘Maybe it’s not your uncle. He’s
a good-for-nothing; he’d throw it out or sell it. Maybe
some scrap collector locked it. If we hadn’t come, he
would have sold it.’

‘So let him. It’s not new and it’s not antique. Who
would want it in their home?’

‘You’re a good-for-nothing, too.’ She gave her son a
vicious glance and said, ‘When you grow up, you’ll be
even more useless than your uncle.’

Forced back into silence, her son gazed around the
rubble and saw that the lights of evening were turning
on in Licheng. He looked past the ruins of the house and
saw an even greater expanse of rubble, hazy with dust,
shrouded by the colours of the gloaming. This was his
mother’s city, his mother’s rubble, and her son didn’t
feel any close connection to it. He felt exhausted and,
bending down to hug his knees, he curled up like a cat.
He spoke to his mother in an attitude of great passivity,
‘Just call me when you’ve seen enough, and you’re tired of
wallowing in the past. I’m going to have a nap.’

Her son heard her rustling about, doing something
with the cabinet; he didn’t even lift his head, which
meant, ‘Go ahead, do what you want, it’s nothing to do
with me.’

But Yongshan suddenly shouted at him, ‘Get up, quick!
Help me carry the cabinet out.’

She had the cabinet bound with hemp rope and several
packing strings, so that it resembled a piece of luggage.
There was even a length of rope by which to haul it along.
Who knows where Yongshan had found the ropes. She
stood by the cabinet and looked at her son with some
pride. ‘It’s all properly tied together. I’ve tried it; it’s not
heavy at all. We can take it away.’

‘Are you mad?’ said her son. ‘Why on earth would you
drag this old thing off? Maybe you’ve gone mad, but I
haven’t. And I’m not going to take it.’

‘I don’t care if you want to or not; you have to.’
Yongshan’s voice became sharp, and there was also a
tremor in it. ‘You really make my blood boil sometimes.
Don’t you have any feelings at all? This is the last
memento we have of your grandparents. I can’t just leave
it here!’

Her son stood up, but turned away. He didn’t move, but
there was the sound of snorting. They stood like that, in a
stalemate, for about two minutes, and then he heard his
mother stamp her foot. She said, ‘If you’re not going to
help me, I can do it without you. I’ll take it out myself!’

On that May Licheng evening, Yongshan and son, having
returned for a family visit, were walking down the street.
Yongshan was in front, rolling a suitcase, but the thing
her son was dragging along puzzled the passers-by:
it seemed to be a piece of furniture. Everyone looked
back to examine it as it chafed against the road surface,
emitting occasional piercing sounds, creaks and groans.
People of a certain age recognized it as a five-drawer
cabinet, which had been popular in the seventies, and
there were some who called out, ‘Look! A five-drawer
cabinet!’

They had still failed to meet anyone Yongshan knew.
The last time she had returned, seven years earlier, she
had encountered old neighbours and elementary school
classmates on the streets of Cabbage Market, and even
run into someone who had played the accordion with
her in the Children’s Palace, but this time she hadn’t
seen a soul. Yongshan led her son along the streets of
Licheng, and it was as if they were in an unfamiliar city.
The cabinet had, to a large extent, relieved her helpless,
distressed mood. Every now and then she looked back at
her son and the cabinet he dragged behind him. ‘Watch
out; don’t let the string break,’ she said. ‘Don’t pull that
long-suffering face at me. There’s nothing wrong with
a boy of your age getting a little exercise. Hang in a
little longer; you just have to take it to your auntie’s on
Mahogany Street.’

Her son didn’t take great care at all. When he heard
one of the packing strings snap, he said nothing; soon
afterwards another packing string snapped and he heard
the clatter of the lock. Then, just as he had hoped, the
cabinet refused to budge. He stopped and said in an
almost delighted tone, ‘It’s snapped. They’ve all snapped.
I told you the strings would snap!’

Not only had the string snapped, but the cabinet door
had broken from the shock, and two of the drawers
creaked to be let out. Yongshan ran over and smacked
her son on the head. ‘You did it on purpose,’ she said. ‘I
knew you wouldn’t do a good job of it. If you won’t take
it, then I will.’

One of the drawers fell out of the cabinet. It was empty
and exuded the smell of mothballs. The newspapers that
covered the bottom were from 1984. Yongshan squatted
down and looked at what was written in the newspaper.
‘Eighty-four,’ she said to her son. ‘You weren’t even
around yet, then.’

He looked at his mother and said, ‘Just when I thought
it couldn’t get any more embarrassing! Can’t you see that
people are staring?’

Yongshan ignored his complaints. ‘Your grandma used
to like to put the residence permit and grain stamps
underneath,’ she said as she removed the old newspapers.
A photo abruptly appeared before their eyes. It was a
family photo of four people – a man, a woman, a boy
and a girl – sitting in two rows. All of them were wearing
army uniforms and, except for the little boy, who looked
miserable, the other three were smiling stiffly. The background
could be instantly identified as a painted curtain;
it depicted Tiananmen Square in Beijing.