Su Tong: Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

Eventually a white ambulance drove down Sunflower Alley. By that time the sky was almost pitch black and the ambulance lights worked like searchlights, lighting up Sunflower Alley so it seemed as bright as day. The lights dazzled Wenqin, and on her despairing face arose the dawn of triumph. The light shone on the neighbours gathered for the spectacle and they looked stunned; one by one they blinked and began whispering to one another. When the lights hit the madwoman’s face she lifted one hand. It looked like surrender, but at the same time as if she was struggling against the light. It was then that the people in Sunflower Alley heard the madwoman emit the most forlorn of all her cries; it came like a thunderclap from a clear sky. The people couldn’t help but cover their ears; cover their ears and watch the madwoman as she tried to escape. She ran a few steps forward — but the ambulance was in front of her; so she ran a few steps back — but the people were behind her. The madwoman, lost to any sense of shame by now, sat down on the ground, covered her face with her hands and cried. She kicked her feet; she even kicked off her T-bar leather shoes, and said, ‘I’m not going to cry. You can have my frog, you can have my brooch, just don’t come over here. I beg you, don’t come over here. Don’t come over here.’

But those who had to come over came over. Three men jumped out of the ambulance; they were wearing white suits and surgical masks, and one of them even had a length of rope in his hands. They seemed prepared for the patient to resist, but now that it was actually happening, the madwoman had lost all her strength. She just curled up into a ball and her whole body shuddered violently. She said, ‘I beg you, don’t come over here.’ She raised one hand, meaning initially to ward them off, but in effect meekly presenting them with it. She said, ‘Susu’s out of school. I should go home.’ With this, she raised another hand, and thereby gave that up, too. In the end, the madwoman ended up cooperating with the ambulancemen. The people on Sunflower Alley watched as two of them lifted her into the ambulance. The third looked to be very strong, but he wasn’t going to be needed today. He was the one who took the T-bar shoes from Wenqin’s hands and put them inside the ambulance.

Most intelligent people know where an ambulance would carry a madwoman, but some people are born stupid, and they ran after the ambulance asking, ‘Hey! Where you going to take her?’ And the people in the ambulance answered, ‘Where do you think? Sanli Bridge, of course.’

Sanli Bridge was about twenty kilometres from Mahogany Street. To get from here to Sanli means changing buses three times, and in the end you have to take the suburban line from the South Gate. People younger than me all know that Sanli Bridge is ancient and seven-arched. Under the bridge is a white building with a red-tiled roof; that’s the activity centre for retired cadres. What they don’t know is that under Sanli Bridge there used to be a shady patch of willows, and that there among the willows there used to be a mental hospital. So ‘going to Sanli Bridge’ didn’t mean going to the actual bridge, it meant under it. Just a simple rhetorical technique; I expect you know that.

Even when he had long since passed the scene of the accident, near the village of Siqian, the driver remained badly shaken.

The highway in the rain was a lonely stretch of road. Outside the lorry’s windows the sky was the colour of lead and the rain drummed down without interruption. The wipers swung feebly to and fro and there was a constant but irregular flow of water on the windscreen. In the rear-view mirror the road seemed like a black tide pursuing his lorry, which was buffeted by the wind and rain like a solitary boat. Also reflected in the rear-view mirror was his face, wan and fatigued, with traces of sweat faintly visible on his forehead, and an expression, a look in the eyes, that showed he had not yet recovered from the shock. He had a feeling like carsickness, or more precisely seasickness. He felt as if the road was tossing him up on sky-high waves. In his long career as a driver, this was the first time the highway had provoked such feelings of profound dread.

The rain still hadn’t stopped, but once he turned off and drove through a mountain pass the drops became noticeably smaller; the sound of the rain hitting the corn leaves was no longer so pronounced and the swift current of a river could be heard above it. The sky was still dark to the north, but towards the south it had become both bluer and brighter. Now, a few shabby red-brick sheds appeared ahead of him on the left, the sonorous voice of a pop singer drifting faintly from them. It was a song praising the highlands of Qinghai and Tibet. The driver knew he had reached Weeping Willow. He had passed through here a year earlier and the tape player had played that same song all day long: ‘Oh, the highlands of Qinghai, and the highlands of Tibet.’ Today it was still the same song, but these were neither the highlands of Qinghai, nor those of Tibet. Weeping Willow was a place that survived by serving long-distance drivers and which consisted of three roadside establishments. One was the petrol station, one the general store for cigarettes, alcohol and food, and the last a cross between a restaurant and an inn. The restaurant boldly fronted the road, while the inn was half-hidden behind it. Local people had told him they were all one business, belonging to the same woman.

A girl in a green miniskirt stood beneath an umbrella, trying to stop vehicles and attract customers. She extended one of her arms from under the umbrella in a gesture intended to be seductive, but which looked more like a traffic policeman ordering vehicles to proceed. The girl stood with her legs apart and exposed below her skirt. They were half light, half dark and extremely eyecatching. The driver took a long look at her and realized that it was because she was wearing black silk stockings, onto which were sewn glimmering mock pearls, like a patch of starlit night.

‘Hey, big boy. Have a drink and relax for a while.’ The girl gestured to him, and after she had finished, she covered her mouth and giggled.

The driver was used to gestures of this kind and didn’t respond immediately, letting his eyes wander between the girl’s face and the road, undecided. It was his hand that took the lead and chose to stop by pulling the brake. The driver’s mind obeyed his hand and his tightly wound body suddenly slumped forward over the steering wheel. ‘All right, I’ll rest here for a while.’ The driver knew his own nature, and was quite astonished by the way the girl’s invitation had been able to calm him down so quickly. As he was backing in and parking the lorry, he studied his face again in the rear-view mirror: although it was still pale, his eyes were already more lively, shining with obscure expectations, filled with intense light.

The girl was rather childish, and her graceful smile seemed both ingratiating and shy. She demonstrated great interest in his cargo, standing on tiptoe to look in the back of the lorry. When she saw that it was empty, she was evidently disappointed, and exclaimed, ‘Empty! The guest who just left had a lorry jammed with Coke!’

The driver said, ‘So what? It’s not as if he let you have any.’

The girl didn’t yet understand how men’s flirtatious small talk worked and concluded mistakenly that he was making fun of her. She closed the umbrella and shook off the water. ‘I wouldn’t drink it even if they did give it to me. It tastes like cough syrup. Totally gross,’ she murmured.

Weeping Willow looked the same as it had a year before. The muddy ground in front of the restaurant was rutted with tyre tracks, which turned into countless puddles of differing sizes as soon as it rained. By the garage wall was a mountainous pile of wet, discarded tyres. A few chickens that belonged to the restaurant wandered among the puddles, looking perhaps for something to eat.