Su Tong - Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

The women began to yell altogether, ‘That’s what you don’t understand, doctor! She wants him to do it! When her son bites off someone’s thumb she’s right next to him, looking on. She even smiles.’

As the women were speaking, Ju Chunhua’s burnt and hideous face flashed before his mind’s eye. He muttered to himself for a moment before asking, ‘This woman, Ju Chunhua: why does she want revenge?’

Immediately, the Wangbao women fell silent, and traces of remorse and self-accusation appeared on their faces. One of them said, ‘It’s true we didn’t treat her very well, but you can’t blame us, the way she looks.’ Another one said, ‘She must hold it against us that we wouldn’t let the children see her. You know how children are easily frightened: we thought she would scare them. But she just isn’t human; if she had to take revenge then it should have been on us. Why did she have to take it out on the children?’

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?’