Su Tong - Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

The girl’s eyes followed the direction of his finger. Labourers were assembled on the embankment by the factory. They were all bare-chested, some standing on the embankment and some of them in the water making a terrible noise. The girl hung on the railing and said, ‘I want to see.’ She turned back towards him and repeated, ‘I want to see.’

The labourer squinted at the girl, then laughed, revealing his yellow teeth. The girl watched as he walked off the bridge with his plank. She noticed the sturdy, protruding veins on his legs, like so many worms. His shins and ankles were stained all over with yellow mud.

That summer a gang of labourers constructed a small pier for the chemical factory. The girl stood on the bridge and patiently observed the entire process: how they drove in the piles, built the retaining walls and pumped out the water. At the beginning, no one noticed the girl on the bridge. She just stood there, holding a palm-leaf fan to keep off the afternoon sun. No one knew what she was doing or what had provoked her interest; she just stood and watched. Sometimes she adjusted the fan’s position in her hand, so that it was still covering half of her face, then she carried on watching. Once she called out, ‘Here comes the water demon!’ At first she called out tentatively, feeling a little bad about frightening them, but later it seemed as though she wanted to provoke their enmity, as she called out loudly, ‘The water demon! He’s here! Quick! Get out of the water or the demon will get you by the feet!’ Often the labourers would stop what they were doing and stare angrily at the girl on the bridge. Each time the girl would run away, tearing down the bridge with only a few strides. Then in the blink of an eye, she was gone.

The labourers started talking about the girl on the bridge; they all thought there must be something wrong with her. Fortunately the girl had made no impact on the progress of their work. They had planned eight days to build the pier, but it was complete after only seven. The day they finished work, they kept looking up at the bridge, but they saw no trace of the girl. They didn’t know why she wasn’t there that day, just as they had no idea why she had been there on every other day previously. Without the girl, the bridge seemed very empty.

The labourers did not know she was away, visiting her aunt.

On the seventh day, the girl had crossed the city to visit her aunt. She returned home only at dusk, and cried out in surprise when they crossed the bridge. Her mother had been dragging her along by the hand, but now she dropped it. ‘What did you do that for?’ her mother asked, ‘You scared me half to death. There’s nothing the matter. Why did you scream like that?’ The girl stood on the bridge, looking at the new pier not far away. She wanted to stay there, standing on the bridge, but her mother dragged her away roughly with her powerful grip ‘You shouldn’t be standing there like a halfwit. Do you know that’s what everyone thinks you are? Standing all day on the bridge in the heat. If you’re not a little dim-witted, I don’t know what you are.’

As the girl was being dragged off the bridge, she said, ‘Don’t pull so hard. You’re going to pull my hand off!’

But her mother replied furiously, ‘If I don’t drag you home, you’ll just stand on the bridge for everyone to laugh at.’

The girl struggled to free herself, ‘Don’t drag me! You’re as bad as the water demon!’ She looked at her mother pleadingly and suddenly the girl screamed, ‘I can see the water demon! You ‘ re the water demon!’

Her mother raised her hand and slapped the girl in the face. ‘It’s just non-stop nonsense with you, isn’t it? One day I really will tell the water demon to drag you down to where the Dragon King lives!’

On the night of the seventh day, the girl sneaked out of the house, right under her mother’s nose. She had never gone out at night before, so when her mother spotted her walking around the bamboo chair and going out with something like a flashlight in her hand, it didn’t occur to her that it might actually be a flashlight. And that was how the girl sneaked out, right under her mother’s nose.

On both sides of the concrete road there were people who had come out to cool down in the night air. A few of them looked over at the girl and called her name: ‘Where are you going so late?’ they asked.

The girl said, ‘I’m going down to the bridge to cool down.’

‘Smart girl. It’s windy on the bridge; good place to cool down.’

The girl walked towards the bridge, where a few young men there leaned on the railing with their cigarettes. When they saw the girl, they stopped talking and turned to look at her. Someone started chortling, saying, ‘It’s her again! The Deng family dumbo, standing all day on the bridge.’

She swept over them with disdainful eyes and said, ‘You’re the dumbos. You’re the ones standing on the bridge all day.’

She leaned on the railing on the other side, wearing an expression that said as far as she was concerned they should just stay out of each other’s business. She shone the flashlight on the riverbank below the bridge, then turned it off again. What she had wanted to see was the new pier; the new pier that been raised above from the waters. The newly poured cement diffused an indistinct white light under the moonbeams. The girl stood there and felt strangely hurt, yearning as she did to go down to the pier. She had kept watch for six days, seeing every detail of the labourers’ work, missing only the process of raising the structure out of the water. She wanted to have a thorough look at it, but the horrid young men behind her were talking, laughing in a peculiar way that made her feel uncomfortable.

Suddenly she decided to leave the bridge. She began walking away and headed in the direction of the riverbank. The young men on the bridge yelled after her, ‘Hey, dumbo, where are you going?’ but she ignored them.

To herself, she said, ‘If they want to monopolize the bridge, then let them, it’s not like I can’t go whenever I want to.’ She turned the flashlight on and began to walk towards the new pier. She saw the river water rushing underneath the bridge, and in the darkness the water looked thicker and darker than the night itself.

A large block of cement ground lay bare in the moonlight, emitting its naturally fishy smell, welcoming her. She carefully stretched out one of her feet to test the firmness of the cement. It wasn’t yet completely set, and in the flashlight’s beam, the girl could see her sandalprints in it, clearly marked.

The building shed had not been taken down. It was very dark inside and there was no movement. She shone inside it with her flashlight. The beam hit a straw mat and next to it was an enamel washbasin and a mess tin. This told the girl that there was still someone guarding the pier, but though she shone all around with her flashlight, she saw nothing and no one besides the large wooden cases and discarded machinery the chemical factory left there all year. A little further away, in a spot where the river was suddenly hidden from sight, the tower was bathed in moonlight, giving off a somewhat reddish glow. The discharge culvert wasn’t visible at all. The girl listened carefully to the sounds of the flowing river, her ears filling with the sound of the river talking to itself. Suddenly, coming from the tower she heard the unfamiliar sound of something smacking the surface of the water, getting closer and closer. With her eyes almost popping out of her skull, she stared at the surface of the water but saw nothing. There was no one swimming. But there was the sound of something striking the water, becoming ever clearer, and ever closer. She began to feel quite frightened and looked towards the bridge in the distance. The young men were still there.