Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

The Q of Hearts

There are some people whose thieving habits simply cannot be corrected. This kind of problem was especially serious in Mahogany Street, which is where I am from. If you broke your vigil for even a moment, your salted fish, cigarettes or even your broom might vanish from your home. So when I found I was missing the Q of Hearts from my deck of cards, I immediately assumed that someone had stolen it.

You don’t know how I loved those cards. It was 1969, and they were my only toys. My brother and I often played a game called Lucky with them. When you play cards, you can’t afford to be missing even a single one from the deck, and for exactly that reason I had written my name on the back of every card. I had thought that now no one would dare to steal them, but I was wrong. When I asked my brother about the whereabouts of my Q of Hearts he said, ‘Who cares if you lose a card? Fat Man Li’s kid from our school’s lost and no one’s looking for him, who the hell’s going to help you look for a stupid old card?’ But from his expression I could tell that there was something fishy going on. A few days before, he had asked me to lend him ten cents and I had ignored him. I suspected that he had stolen the Q of Hearts in spiteful revenge. Entertaining these suspicions, I extended my hand under his pillow. There was a drawer beneath the bedding, and I began to rummage in it. You should know that my brother has a bad temper and he suddenly cried out, ‘You think I’m a frigging cow demon? You frigging looking through my things?’ And as he spoke he aimed an angry kick at my bum.

After that we started wrestling. Of course I was the one who ended up bawling. My brother, seeing that the situation was beyond help, leaped out the window and landed on the street outside. Through the window, he said, ‘Don’t be a baby. What’s the big deal about a card? It’s just a Q of Hearts. I’ll get you another one sometime, OK?’

My brother was the king of big talk, and even supposing he meant it, I didn’t believe he could get his hands on that Q of Hearts. The year was 1969, and the city was going through some kind of weird revolution. People had abandoned all entertainment, the streets were empty and the shop doors were all left slightly ajar. You could have walked clear through the city without seeing a trace of a playing card. Imagine a day in the winter of 1969: the snow is falling fast and there is a child walking along Clothmarket Street — which was called Red Flag Street then — pausing frequently and pulling himself up to every counter along the way to gaze up at the goods on the shelves. The storekeeper says, ‘Well now, what does the little comrade want?’ To which the child replies, ‘Playing cards.’ Then the storekeeper frowns and says in an aggravated tone, ‘As if we’d stock playing cards. Nothing of the kind.’

The reason I relate my search for the playing cards in such detail is that I want you to believe that everything I say really happened.

I went with my father to Shanghai for no other reason than to buy a new deck of cards. It took about two hours by train to get there from our home city. Though it was the first time in my life that I had been on a train, I have no recollection about how I felt. Besides, a trip of two hours was too short for to me remember anything apart from my father talking about rubber and steel or something to the man sitting next to him. They talked and talked until the train stopped, and then we were in Shanghai.

Shanghai in 1969 was a dusky, dead city. My saying that is actually mostly a literary deduction, since besides the tan buildings with the clocks and big domes, and the wooden rack for putting bean products on that I saw near the hotel, I have almost no recollection of the streets of Shanghai as I saw them on that trip. My father was on official business, and I followed him down the big streets, looking intently at the displays in the windows of every store we passed. It shouldn’t surprise you that, although it was 1969, Shanghai’s stores were more like real stores than the ones we had at home, with soap, toilet paper, sweets and cakes all neatly laid out on the shelves. A few times, I saw something that at first glance looked like the little cardboard boxes playing cards come in, but as soon as I ran over to take a better look, they would turn out to be either a package of pain-killing cream or cigarettes. Weren’t there any playing cards in Shanghai, either? Shanghai had no playing cards, and this was a discovery that disappointed me through and through. I thought of how the women on Mahogany Street were always cawing and crowing about the things you could get in Shanghai. From the way they talked, Shanghai should have been a city stocked with everything anyone could want. Now it seemed it had been an outright lie.

As I said, my father was on official business, so he didn’t have time to take me into the stores to look for cards; he had to finish up his affairs before everyone got off work for the day. In front of a large beige concrete building covered with hanging slogan banners, my father let go of my hand and pushed me up to the window of the registration room. To the middle-aged woman inside, he said, ‘I have to go up to your revolutionary committee to see about some arrangements; look after my son while I’m gone.’

I saw the woman’s detached glanced sweep over us and a snort issued from her nostrils. ‘Taking your son with you on business! Is that any way to go about things?’

My father was in no mood to justify himself. Carrying his black briefcase, he sprinted up the stairs and left me alone in the strange concrete building, standing in a strange woman’s cold glare.

I saw that there was a pot of water in the registration room giving off puffs of steam, and that the water was boiling over a little. The several red flags and the portrait of Mao Zedong on the wall seemed damp and hazy. Beneath her desk, the woman was making some kind of mechanical movement with both hands; occasionally she looked at me askance. I very much wanted to know what she was doing and so, supporting myself on the sill, I jumped up to see. One pale hand gripped a circular embroidery frame, while the other pale hand held a needle and thread. I even saw the red flower on the white silk; a large, half-finished red flower.

‘What are you doing?’ The woman had noticed my hop, and with an action that was almost fearful, she threw down the things in her hands. Then she stuck out one hand to grab me by the arm, but I managed to escape her. Something ferocious lit up in her eyes as she picked up a piece of chalk from her desk and threw it at me, and with great anger in her voice she said, ‘You little spy! You little mole! Nasty brat! Get lost!’

I ran to the other side of the road. I thought the woman very weird: weird for secretly embroidering under the office desk and weird for her volcanic anger. What did I care what she was hiding her hands for? She was just embroidering a flower. Why did she have to do it on the sly? If I had known she was just embroidering, I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to look. The problem was that she didn’t know what I had had in mind. In fact, when I had lifted myself up to look at her hands, I had hoped to see a playing card; maybe even the Q of Hearts.

And so it was that the first time I went to Shanghai, I was filled with an immense sense of loss. My father took me by the hand and walked me angrily through the streets. He said, ‘Playing cards! Playing cards! Don’t you know that’s the feudocapitalistic plaything of revisionists? A very bad thing!’

I am now certain that the hostel we stayed in on that occasion was near the Bund or the Huangpu River, because during the night I heard the great Customs House clock strike and the sound of whistles from the little steamboats and cargo ships. I also remember that there were three beds in the hostel, and over each bed was hung a tent-like mosquito net which would usually be for summer use. Besides my father and me, there was another man with a northern accent and a full beard as hard as hog bristles.

Initially, I slept by myself in one bed. The light was on, and outside my window, the wail of the city descended into darkness. I couldn’t see anything outside; I could only see through the mosquito net to the wall of the room. The wall was off-white, and on it was a Patriotic Hygiene Month propaganda drawing. It seemed to me that the man grasping a fly-swatter on the drawing looked a lot like Cathead from our street — Cathead might also have been connected with the stolen Q of Hearts, another likely suspect — and so I pondered the question of Cathead and the Q of Hearts. Then suddenly I saw the bloodstain. It was like a map that had been printed on the wall, right against the mosquito net and only a palm’s width from the edge my pillow.

‘There’s blood on the wall!’ I cried out loudly to my father, who was lying on the next bed over.

‘What blood?’ My father raised himself up slightly on his bed and gave it a cursory glance. ‘It’s mosquito blood,’ he said. ‘Someone killed the mosquitoes in summer and the blood stuck to the wall.’

‘It’s not mosquito blood.’ I examined the bloodstain with no little fear. ‘Who ever heard of so much blood coming from a mosquito?’

‘Don’t worry about it. Close your eyes and have a good sleep. They’ll turn off the light in a second,’ my father said.

I saw the hog-bristle man extract himself from the mosquito net. He ran over to my bed in a few steps and lifted the mosquito net up over my bed. ‘You mean this bloodspot?’ First he glanced at me, and then he directed his shining gaze at the bloodspot on the wall. I saw him make an alarming action: he put his index finger in his mouth and kept it there for a moment. Then, he cold-bloodedly extended it to scrape off some of the blood before returning it to his mouth. Next I saw him frown slightly and spit on the floor.

‘It’s human blood.’ He jumped back into his own bed and chuckled from inside the net. ‘Human blood. As soon as I saw it, I knew that’s what it was.’

For a moment, the dread made my heart beat madly in my breast and I threw myself into my father’s bed and said nothing, covering myself under his blankets.

‘It must have spurted up from someone’s head; I could tell as soon as I saw it,’ the hog-bristle man said. ‘If you use an awl to crack open someone’s head, that’s exactly what the blood looks like when it spatters on the wall. And if you swing your belt at someone it’s about the same. I could tell as soon as I saw it. They must have detained somebody here.’

‘Impossible. This is a hostel,’ my father said.

‘You think you can’t detain people in hostels?’ The hog-bristle man emitted another contemptuous laugh and said, ‘I guess you haven’t been around for much of all this. They detained someone in our unit’s bathhouse, and the blood there isn’t on the wall, it’s on the ceiling. On the ceiling! Do you know how human blood gets on a ceiling? If you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, you’ll never guess.’

‘Never mind that. I’m with my son.’ My father said, interrupting his monologue. ‘I’m with my son and kids are easily frightened.’

Then the man stopped speaking. The lights were turned off and the hostel rooms suddenly sank into darkness. Even the bloodspot on the wall fell into the oblivion. Except for an unclear whitish glare, I could see nothing on the walls now. I heard the hog-bristle man on the bed across from me snoring thickly, and then my father started snoring too.

Kids are easily frightened. The whole night I clasped my father’s arm, imagining the events that had happened in the hostel, imagining one person bleeding and another one holding an awl or a belt. For a long while I couldn’t fall asleep. I remember clearly being in Shanghai and hearing the midnight toll of a clock and thinking that it must be the sound of the famous clock on the Customs House.

The next day there was no sun in Shanghai, and the sky looked like a greyish iron sheet covering the tops of the high buildings and telephone poles. My father, grasping a slip of paper, took me back and forth through an enormous emporium. On the paper was a list of knitting wool, bedsheets, leather shoes including sizes, plus other such products — a list entrusted to my father by my neighbours, for him to make purchases on their behalf. In that building, which still held obvious traces of colonial taste, the people were as many and as jumbled as the goods for sale. At the leather shoes counter, I very nearly lost my father. I had gone up to the stationery counter, mistakenly thinking that a box of paper clips might contain playing cards. When I returned, crestfallen, to sit on the shoe-trial stool, I saw that the person sitting next to me was no longer my father, but a stranger in a blue woollen tunic suit.

At this point I opened my mouth wide, stood on the chair and wailed. My bewildered father rushed over, threw down what he was carrying and gave me a couple of spanks. He said, ‘I told you not to run off, and what did you do? How many times have I told you? This is Shanghai. If you get lost, no one will find you.’ I said that I hadn’t run off, I had been looking for some cards. My father made no further recriminations, but took me by the hand, and in silence we set off towards the exit. ‘There aren’t any cards in Shanghai, either,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Maybe you can get some in the little towns and villages. When I get sent to Jiangxi I’ll take a look for you, OK?’

To cheer me up my father took me to the banks of the Huangpu River to look at the boats. When we reached the river, a slushy rain began to fall and there were few pedestrians along the Bund. We walked along the iron railings, and I saw for the first time the river heading out to sea. The water was a greyish yellow with ripples of oil; I was thoroughly disillusioned, for it was the complete opposite of what I had imagined. I also saw a great many gulls, with their slender, nimble wings; their cries were a hundred times more sonorous than those of the sparrows outside our eaves in the trees of Mahogany Street. It was the boats that excited the most profound excitement though, both those moored and those moving about the river; their masts, portholes, smokestacks, anchor posts, not to mention the colourful flags whistling in the wind. It seemed to me that they were no different from those I had drawn in my sketchbook.

After that, it was just rain and snow swirling down onto the Shanghai streets, all the way until my father climbed onto the short-distance train, which was the abrupt conclusion to my Shanghai trip. Also, the wretched weather made the afternoon darken prematurely, and my impressions of the road home are of gloom and cold.

The carriage was almost entirely empty, and every wooden seat seemed to exude its own chill. We started off sitting in the middle of the carriage, but one of the glass windows had been shattered and so my father led me to the back, near the bathroom, where the faint smell of piss could be detected, but it was warmer. I recall that when my father took off his blue woollen tunic suit to drape over me, I asked him, ‘Isn’t there anyone on the train? Just us two?’ and my father said, ‘The weather’s bad today and it’s a slow train, so there aren’t so many people.’

Just as the train was about to depart, four men suddenly boarded. Carrying with them the outside chill they burst into the carriage; the three young men were wearing padded army overcoats, and only the old one, who was wearing a gauze mask, had on a blue cotton tunic suit like my father’s. As soon as they came in I knew that it was snowing hard, for I saw that their hats and shoulders were covered in large flakes.

This is what I wanted to tell you about: these sudden arrivals, especially the man in the mask, who was constantly being pressed and jostled by the three others. They passed us and chose the seats in the middle of the carriage, where we had been sitting before; they didn’t seem to mind the cold. I saw the old man sitting between two of his companions. He began to turn his head towards us, but before he could finish this movement his grey head was jerked back by something. Across two rows of seats, I could see his stiff back; one of the others took his hat off to shake the snow off, but that was all — I didn’t hear them speak a single word.

‘Who are they?’ I asked my father.

‘I don’t know.’ My father, too, watched detachedly, but he wouldn’t let me stand up to have a closer look, just saying, ‘Sit down. You’re not allowed to walk over there; and don’t stare.’

The train sped through the wind and snow of 1969, along open country. Outside the window was almost nocturnal darkness, and a thin cloth of snow already lay on the idle winter fields. My father told me to look at the snowy landscape outside, so I peered out of the window. Suddenly, I heard a sound in the car. It was the four of them standing up; the three wearing overcoats clustered around the old man in the mask. They walked into the aisle towards us and I quickly realized they were heading to the bathroom. What astonished me, however, was the man in the mask. He was being propped up and pushed forward and as he glanced from behind his companions’ shoulders, he was staring at my father and me. I saw his tears clearly; the old man in the mask had eyes filled with tears!

Although my father pulled me forcefully towards the window, I nevertheless saw how three of them entered the bathroom, and that one of them was the masked old man. One of the young men stayed outside the door; he wasn’t much older than my brother but he threw me a frosty glance that frightened me. I drew back my head and quietly told my father, ‘They’ve gone into the bathroom.’

Three of them went into the bathroom, but the old man in the mask did not come back out, only the two young men. Then I heard the three men in overcoats whisper to one another as they stood by the carriage links. I couldn’t help but turn my head towards them, and what I saw was how the three men in overcoats, one of whom was straightening out his collar to protect his ears, opened the door to the next carriage and disappeared from my field of vision.

I didn’t know what had happened to the old man with the mask. I wanted to have a look in the bathroom, but my father wouldn’t let me move a muscle, saying, ‘Sit down. You can’t go anywhere.’ It seemed to me that my father’s manner and voice were very nervous. I don’t know how much time went by before the conductor led a cultural propaganda team into our carriage, carrying drums, gongs and copper cymbals. Only then did my father relax his grip on my hand, which he had been holding throughout. He sighed with relief and asked, ‘You need to go to the bathroom? I’ll take you.’

The bathroom door was unlocked and as we opened it a fierce gust made me shiver. With one glance, I saw that the little bathroom window was open and that wind and snow were blowing in. There was no one in the bathroom. There was no masked old man.

‘The old man isn’t here,’ I cried out. ‘Why isn’t he in here?’

‘Who’s not here?’ my father asked, avoiding my eyes. ‘They went into another carriage.’

‘The old man isn’t here. He was in the bathroom,’ I yelled. ‘How come he isn’t here?’

‘He went into another carriage. Don’t you have to pee?’ my father said, looking at the swirling snow outside the window. ‘It’s so cold here; hurry up and take a pee, all right?’

I did have to pee, but suddenly I saw that on the wet, grimy floor was a playing card. If I tell you, no doubt you won’t believe me, but it was a Q of Hearts. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was a Q of Hearts, the very Q of Hearts I had lost and been unable to find. I’m sure you can imagine what I did — I bent down and picked up that card from the ground or, to be more accurate, I scraped it up and wiped the muddy snow off it. I waved it at my father, ‘The Q of Hearts! It’s the Q of Hearts, the one I needed!’ I remember how my father’s expression altered rapidly — astonishment, confusion, shock and fear — but in the end it was nothing but fear; in the end my terrified father snatched the Q of Hearts out of my hand and threw it with one gesture out the window, yelling confusedly, ‘Throw it out! Hurry! Don’t just hold it, blood! There’s blood on the card!’

I would wager that there wasn’t one trace of blood on that card, but on the other hand, it isn’t as if my father had been speaking deliriously, either.

That 1969 trip to Shanghai acquired in my memory a mysterious postscript — the old man in the mask, the Q of Hearts. Through my entire childhood, my father refused to discuss what happened on the train, and for that reason I’ve always believed that the man on the train must have been mute. Only a few years ago, when my father was able to talk about events now long in the past, did he correct this error in my memory. ‘You were still a kid then, you couldn’t tell,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t mute. No way he was a mute. You didn’t see it, but the mask was moving — his tongue, his tongue had been. they had. had. ’

My father didn’t finish his sentence. He couldn’t; his eyes filled with tears. I didn’t need to say anything more, either, and the truth is that I don’t much like to dwell on these things any more than he does. Over the years I have often recalled the tears of the old man on the train, and when I recall those tears, I suffer.

In any case, the Q of Hearts was just a card. I still like to play poker with my cards, and every time I pick up a Q of Hearts, I feel like the card has some kind of singular import — no matter whether it’s a good move or not, I don’t let the card out of hand lightly. I don’t know why, but I’m used to playing it last.