Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories (23 page)

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 extreme 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 filled 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.

And, oh, will it hurt.

¹
Azalea Mountain
, written by Wang Shuyuan, was a popular play about
the heroine He Xiang and her revolutionary exploits in the late 1920s.
The play was adapted into
pingju
and several Beijing Opera scripts
(‘revolutionary’ and otherwise), as well as a 1974 film version.

²
A famous aria from
Shajiabang
, another revolutionary opera, named
after a centre of Communist resistance to the Japanese invasion. The
town lies on Yangcheng Lake, north of Suzhou in the east of Jiangsu
Province.

³
Tragic heroine of Cao Xueqin’s 18th Century novel,
Dream of the Red
Chamber
. Frail and emotional, she is associated with melancholy and
tears.

⁴
Many Chinese cities have outlying zones set aside to attract investment,
typically offering preferential taxation and financial-support
policies. A position in such a zone is, in general, highly desirable.

⁵
The Republic of China was established in 1912 (Year 1), after the
fall of the Qing Dynasty. The thirteenth year of the Republic would
therefore be 1924.

⁶
A festival on the twenty-third of the final lunar month, a week
before the New Year’s Festival.

⁷
The Hongmen banquet was an incident during the Chu-Han
contention (206–202 bc), a civil war which followed the end of
the Qin Dynasty. The warrior Xiang Yu tried to eliminate his rival
Liu Bang during a feast held in his honour. In modern Chinese, it
suggests a trap during festivities.

⁸
Tang Yin (1470–1523), also known as Tang Bohu, a leading Ming
Dynasty painter.

⁹
A Qing Dynasty reign name, lasting from 1796 to 1820, more than
250 years after Tang Yin’s life.

¹⁰
There is such a place on the Three Gorges. The word being used
for
goddess
in this story can, however, also be a (rather archaic)
euphemism for a prostitute. The Chinese reader is likely to make this
association by the end of this story.

¹¹
A short canon of Chinese Communist heroes. Lei Feng (1940–62)
was the archetype of the ‘nameless hero’, selfless and revolutionary.
Having died in an accident, he became the model for an official
‘Learn from Lei Feng’ movement. Wang Jie (1942–65) sacrificed
his own life and saved those of twelve other men in an accidental
dynamite blast. Qiu Shaoyan (1931–52) was a Korean War hero who
burned to death rather than move and reveal his unit’s position.

¹²
The song is ‘The People of the World will Be Victorious’, written
‘collectively’ by the national philharmonic in reaction to Mao
Zedong’s statement in May 1970 for the ‘people of the world to unite,
and defeat the American aggressors and their running dogs’.

¹³
Cai Yi (1906–92), Marxist thinker whose work
New Aesthetics
contained
an influential discussion of the ‘image’.

¹⁴
Licheng means ‘Pear City’.