Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

Thieves

‘The thief reminiscing in a box.’ An intriguing phrase like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere. In fact, it originated from a word game. It was late one Christmas Day and a few Chinese people, in an attempt to be trendy, had consumed a half-cooked turkey and quite a large quantity of red and white wine with surprisingly few ill effects. They chatted until at last there was nothing more to chat about, and finally someone suggested they should play a word game. The rules called for the participants to write down subject, verb and location on separate pieces of paper. The more slips of paper submitted, the greater the number of sentences that could be randomly assembled. They were all old hands at this, adept at choosing peculiar phrases. Consequently, the pieced-together sentences could be quite amusing, and sometimes there were real side-splitters. The participants wracked their brains before writing down the words on separate slips of paper and piling them all on the table. Afterwards one of them, a young man called Yu Yong, picked out the following three slips: ‘The thief/reminiscing/in a box.’

The game’s purpose had been achieved. The Yuletide merrymakers broke into uproarious laughter. Yu Yong laughed too. When the hilarity had died down, one of his friends teased him, asking, ‘Well, Yu Yong, do you have any reminiscences like that you can share?’

He responded, ‘What, you mean thieving reminiscences?’

And his friends all said, ‘Of course. Thieving reminiscences.’ They looked at him as he scratched his cheek, searching his memory, but he didn’t seem to be exerting himself unduly, and they were about to start the game again when Yu Yong cried out, ‘I’ve got one — a memory. I really do have a thieving reminiscence — there was something like that, a long time ago. ’

And to the surprise of everyone present, Yu Yong began a story which no one could have interrupted, even if they’d wanted to.

I’m no thief; of course I’m not. I suppose you all know I’m not from here originally. I was born in Sichuan and grew up there with my mother. She’s a secondary school teacher and my father was serving with the Air Force as ground crew at the time, so he was rarely at home. I’m sure you’ll agree that a child who grows up in such a home isn’t likely to become a thief. The story I want to tell you, though, is about thieves. Keep quiet and I’ll pick out some typical anecdotes. Actually, I’ll just tell one story. I’ll tell the story of Tan Feng.

Tan Feng was my one and only friend in that Sichuanese town. He was the same age as me: about eight or nine. Tan Feng’s family lived next door to us. His father was a blacksmith and his mother was from the countryside. They had a lot of kids but the others were all girls, so you can imagine how the rest of the family spoiled their only boy. They really adored him, but they didn’t know what he got up to, as Tan Feng stole things. He didn’t dare steal from my house, but apart from that almost every household in town had lost something to his thieving ways. He would swagger into people’s homes, ask whether their kid was in, and that was all it took — while he was there he would swipe a can of peppers or a picture book from the table and slip it under his clothes. Sometimes I would watch him steal and my heart would thump like mad, but Tan Feng was always as cool as could be. He didn’t hide these things from me because he thought of me as his most loyal friend, and in fact I used to cover for him.

Once, when Tan Feng had stolen somebody’s wristwatch — remember that at the time a wristwatch was something really expensive — he was suspected of being the thief. The whole family came out and shouted for him outside his house, but Tan Feng blocked the door and wouldn’t let them in. Then the blacksmith and his wife came out. They didn’t believe that their son would have stolen a watch. Tan Feng swore like a sailor, so the blacksmith kept pinching his ears, but he wouldn’t be quiet; he just yelled loudly for me to come and testify for him. So I came, and said, ‘Tan Feng didn’t steal that watch, I can vouch for it.’ I remember Tan Feng’s pleased smile and his parents’ grateful, tear-filled glances at me. To the onlookers they said, ‘That’s the son of Mrs Yu the teacher. He’s taught good manners at home and he never lies.’ And because of my intervention the matter remained unresolved. After a few days the victims discovered the watch at home. They even went to Tan Feng’s home to tell them they had found it, apologized for having done him wrong and gave him a big bowl of sweet soup dumplings to boot. He carried it over to share with me and the two of us were very proud of ourselves — I was the one who’d told him to go to their house and secretly put the watch back.

My mother disliked Tan Feng and his whole family, but people were very progressive thinking in those days, and she said that being friendly with proletariat children was a kind of education, too. Of course, if she had known what I was getting up to with Tan Feng, she would have gone bananas. ‘Pilfer’ — my mother liked to use that word — and ‘pilfering’ was the sort of aberrant behaviour she hated most, but what she didn’t know was that this word and I were already inextricably linked.

If it hadn’t been for a certain toy train, I don’t know how far my alliance with Tan Feng might have gone. Tan Feng had a hoard of treasure, all of which was stored in the pigsty of old Mr Zhang, who lived on communal welfare. Tan Feng was clever to hide his spoils there as old Mr Zhang was no longer good on his feet and the pigsty had no pigs in it. Tan Feng just burrowed a hole in a pile of firewood, and put all the things he had stolen inside. If anybody saw him, he could say he was bringing Mr Zhang firewood, and in fact he really did bring wood. Half of it was for the old man, and the other half, of course, was to hide his treasure.

Now, let me tell you about this treasure, although the things it contained seem laughable now. There were a number of medicine bottles and capsules which might have been stuff women took as contraceptives; there was an enamel cup, some fly-swatters, bits of copper and iron wire, matches, thimbles, a red neckerchief, a clothes rack, a long-stemmed pipe, an aluminium spoon — in short, a random assortment of tat. When Tan Feng let me in to see his hoard, I couldn’t hide my contempt for it. Then, however, he delved into the pile of medicine bottles and brought out a little red train.

‘Look,’ he said. He carried it with extreme care, at the same time elbowing me away roughly so I couldn’t get close to it. ‘Look,’ he said, but while his mouth repeated the word, his elbow blocked me from getting any closer to the train; it was as if his elbow were saying, ‘Just stand there. You can look, but you can’t touch.’

Ah, that little red iron-plated train: a locomotive and four cars. On top of the engine was a stovepipe, and inside it was a miniature conductor. If children today saw a train like that, they wouldn’t think it was so amazing, but at the time in a little Sichuanese town, you can imagine what it meant to a boy. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. I remember my hand felt like a piece of iron being drawn to a magnet. Overcome by an irresistible impulse, I kept making grabs for it, but every time Tan Feng fended me off.

‘Where did you steal it from?’ I almost screamed. ‘Whose is it?’

‘The Chengdu girl’s from the commune hospital.’ Tan Feng gestured for me not to speak too loudly, then he stroked the train for a moment and laughed out loud. ‘I didn’t really steal it. The girl’s such a dumb-bell that she just left it by the window. So since she was practically asking me to take it, I took her up on it.’

I knew the Chengdu girl; she was short and fat, and it was true that she was stupid. If you asked her what one plus one made, she would say eleven. I suddenly remembered having seen her crying that day in front of the commune hospital. She had cried herself hoarse, and her father, Dr He, had carried her home over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes. Now I was sure she had been crying for her toy train.

As I imagined the scene of Tan Feng taking the little train through the window my heart filled with a kind of envy, and I swear that this was the first time I’d felt such a thing for him. Strange to say, even though I was only eight or nine, I was able to disguise my emotion. Calmly, I asked him, ‘Can you make it go? If you can’t make it go, then it’s nothing special.’

Tan Feng flashed a little key at me, and I noted that he had taken it out of his pocket. It was the sort of simple key used to wind up a spring mechanism. A sweet, self-satisfied smile appeared on his face as he put the train on the ground and wound it up. Then he watched as it began moving around the pigsty. It could only go in a straight line, it couldn’t turn in circles or blow its steam whistle, but for me it was a wonder even so. I didn’t want to seem too excited, though, and simply said, ‘Well, of course you can make the train go. If you couldn’t make it go, then it wouldn’t be a train.’

My own terrible plan was hatched at that instant. It took shape vaguely, when I saw Tan Feng cover his treasure back up with firewood. He looked at me with anxious eyes and said, ‘You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’ By now, my idea was rapidly taking hold and I said nothing. I followed him out of the pigsty. On the way back, he caught a butterfly and seemed to want to give it to me as some sort of bribe. I refused; I wasn’t interested in butterflies. It felt as if my idea was gathering momentum, weighing on my mind more heavily until it became hard for me to breathe. But still I didn’t have the strength to chase it from my brain.

You can probably guess what I did. I went to the commune hospital and sought out Dr He, telling him that Tan Feng had stolen his daughter’s train. So that he wouldn’t recognize my face, I wore a big surgical mask, and after I rushed through what I had to say, I ran off. On my way home, I happened to meet Tan Feng, who was playing football on the school sports grounds with some other children. He called out for me to join in, but I said I had to go home for dinner and vanished like a puff of smoke. You know how the aftermath of tale-telling is the worst thing? That evening I hid at home and pricked up my ears so I could hear what might be going on in Tan Feng’s home, and before long Dr He and his daughter paid a call to the Tan family home.

I heard his mother shout Tan Feng’s name at the top of her voice; then the hammer in his father’s hand ceased its monotonous banging. They couldn’t find Tan Feng. All his sisters went around the town calling out his name, but they couldn’t find him either. Seething with anger, his father came to our home and asked me where his son had gone. I didn’t answer, and then the blacksmith asked another question, ‘Did Tan Feng steal Dr He’s daughter’s toy train?’ Even then I stayed silent; I lacked the courage to say yes. That day, Tan the blacksmith’s dry, haggard face spluttered with rage like a soldering iron — I thought he might kill someone. As I heard Tan Feng’s name resounding through the town in the shrill, crazed voices of his family, I regretted what I had done.

But it was too late for regret; soon my mother returned from school and stopped for a long while outside Tan Feng’s home. When she came in and pulled me out from underneath the mosquito nets, I knew that I had got myself in a fix. The blacksmith and his wife were right behind her and my mother said to me, ‘No lying. Now, did Tan Feng take that toy train or not?’ I don’t have the words to describe the severe and indomitable expression in my mother’s eyes then and my last line of defence suddenly collapsed. My mother said, ‘If he took it, nod. If he didn’t, shake your head.’ I nodded. I saw how Tan the blacksmith jumped with rage like a firecracker, and how Tan Feng’s mother sank down on our threshold, sobbing and blowing a string of snot from her nose as she cried and tried to communicate something. I didn’t pay close attention to what she was saying, but the general idea was that Tan Feng had been led astray by someone and now he had gone and ruined his parents’ good name. My mother was livid at this insinuation, but she was too well-bred to quarrel with her. Instead, she took out her anger on me and gave me a smack with her exercise book.

They found Tan Feng in the water. He had wanted to escape to the other side of the little river outside town, but the only stroke he knew was doggy paddle, and once he reached the deep water he just thrashed around wildly. He hadn’t even called for help. The blacksmith reached the riverbank, fished his son out and pulled him back on shore, then he dragged Tan Feng, who was soaked to the bone, all the way home. People from the town followed the pair of them as they headed back. Tan Feng was rolled over and over on the ground like a log, but with great effort, he lifted his head to see curious faces on both sides of him. He began spitting and swearing at these people who’d come to see the public spectacle: ‘What the f*** are you looking at? What the f*** are you looking at?’

Just as I had expected, Tan Feng refused to confess. He did not deny that he had stolen the little red train, but he refused to reveal where he had hidden it. I heard the blacksmith’s oaths and Tan Feng’s cries, each louder than the last; the blacksmith had always raised him using a judicious mixture of spoiling and savage beatings. I heard the blacksmith give a last ear-splitting howl, ‘Which hand did you steal it with? Left or right?’ Before the sound had died away, Tan Feng’s mother and sister began to wail in concert. It was an atmosphere of pure terror. I knew something terrible was going to happen, and I didn’t want to miss my opportunity to witness it, so while my mother was busy washing vegetables, I rushed out.

I was just in time to see the blacksmith maim his own son by pressing Tan Feng’s left hand onto a red-hot soldering iron. I recall that at that same moment, Tan Feng shot me a glance so full of shock and despair that it was like a red-hot iron itself, so searing that my whole body seemed to steam with shame.

I am not exaggerating when I say that a hole was burnt into my heart at that moment. I didn’t hear Tan Feng’s scream, which resounded high above the town, I just turned around and fled, as if afraid that Tan Feng, who was in the process of losing the fingers of his left hand, might yet chase after me. With dread and guilt in my heart, I ran away, and before I knew it I was at Mr Zhang’s pigsty. Despite all that had happened I still hadn’t forgotten the little red train, even in this dark hour. I sat for a moment on the stack of firewood and made up my mind to excavate Tan Feng’s treasure, taking advantage of the last rays of the setting sun to make my careful search. I was surprised to find, however, that the little red train wasn’t there. I took the stack of firewood apart, and still I didn’t find it.

So Tan Feng was not as foolish as I had thought; he had moved the train. I reasoned that he had done so after the theft had been exposed. Perhaps while his family had been calling for him he had moved it to an even more secret location. I stood in Mr Zhang’s pigsty and realized with a jolt that Tan Feng had taken that precaution against me. Perhaps he had suspected me long ago, thinking that I would tattle one day; perhaps he had another secret hoard. I pondered this and a nameless sense of loss and sorrow welled up in me.

You can imagine the chaos in the Tan household once the deed was done. Tan Feng fainted and the blacksmith wept, hugging his son to him and wandering through the town to find a tractor driver. Then he and his wife got on the tractor and took Tan Feng to the district hospital fifteen kilometres away.

I knew that Tan Feng would spend the next few days in extreme pain, and that time was very hard for me to endure too. There was also the punishment my mother inflicted on me. In her eyes I bore half the guilt for the whole affair, so I was confined to the house. Beside this she required me, like one of her students, to write a piece of self-criticism. Remember that I was only eight or nine at the time. As if I was going to be able to write a substantial piece of self-criticism! I wrote and doodled in an exercise book, and without realizing what I was doing I drew several little trains on the paper; so I threw it out. But afterwards I was still thinking about that little red train. There was nothing I could do — no way I could resist the spell that train had cast over me. I leaned over the desk, and heard in my ears a dim, metallic sound: the sound of the train’s wheels rolling over the ground. The four cars, the sixteen wheels, were constantly appearing in my mind’s eye; not to mention the stovepipe on top, and the conductor with the neckerchief tied around his miniature neck.

What made me disobey my mother’s orders was burning desire: I urgently needed to find that missing train. My mother had locked the door from the outside, but I jumped out through the window and walked down the streets of town positively thirsting for it. I had no destination in mind and just blindly looked for somewhere to go. It was a sweltering day in August, and the town’s children were gathered by the riverside, either splashing around in the water or playing stupid cops-and-robbers games on the bank. I didn’t want to splash around, and I didn’t want to play cops and robbers, all I could think about was that little red train. I walked until the only surfaced road in the town ended and I saw the abandoned brick kiln in the cornfields beyond. This must be what people mean when they talk about a moment of inspiration. I’d suddenly remembered that Tan Feng had once hidden several of old Mr Ye’s chicks in that kiln. Could it be his second hiding place for the treasure? The thought made me jittery with nerves. I moved aside the stone blocking the kiln’s door and ducked in. There! I saw the freshly piled cornstalks and kicked them apart. Have you guessed? You have. It was that simple. Don’t people often say ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves’? I heard a clear, melodious ring, and my heart nearly stopped beating. Heaven helps those who help themselves — it’s as simple as that. I’d found the Chengdu girl’s little red train in the brick kiln.

Did you think I was going to take the toy truck back to the commune clinic and ask for Dr He? No. But if I had, then the rest of this story would probably never have happened. To be frank, it didn’t even cross my mind to return the train to its original owner. Instead, I was more concerned with the question of how to take it home without it being discovered by anyone. I finally thought up a plan and removed my T-shirt, broke off some heads of corn, and wrapped both train and corn in my T-shirt to make a bundle. Nervously, I set off for home. Usually I never went shirtless like the other boys in town, mainly because my mother didn’t allow it, so as I walked down the narrow street, it felt as if people were looking at me. I was very anxious to begin with, and then someone took note of my unusual appearance. I heard one woman say to another, ‘What a blistering day — even Mrs Yu’s kid’s taken his shirt off!’ But what the other woman noticed was my bundle, and she said, ‘What’s he carrying? Do you think he’s stolen something?’ This scared me, but fortunately my mother enjoyed a spotless reputation in the town and the gossiping woman was brusquely cut off by her partner who said, ‘Hold your silly tongue. As if Mrs Yu’s son would steal anything!’

My luck held; my mother wasn’t around so I was able to find a hiding place for the train. Besides the box under my bed where I stored things there were two other places for emergencies or temporary deployment: one of them was the padded overcoat my father had left at home, and the other was the pressure cooker in the kitchen, which we weren’t using. I hid the toy train there, and from that moment on I couldn’t rest. I realized I still had a problem: the key to wind up the spring. No doubt Tan Feng had it hidden about his body, and if I couldn’t get the key, I couldn’t make the train run. And for me, a train that didn’t run had lost the greater part of its value.

The trouble that came later was all because of that key. I hadn’t even thought about how to deal with Tan Feng once he got home. Every day I tried to make a key myself, and one day I was at home alone, grinding a padlock key on the whetstone, when the door was kicked open and who but Tan Feng should come in. He walked up to me and glared at me threateningly, then he said, ‘You’re a traitor, a foreign agent, a spy, a counter-revolutionary and a class enemy!’

His tirade caught me off-balance. I held the padlock key tightly in my fist, and listened to Tan Feng abuse me with all the coarse language he knew. I looked at that left hand of his, wrapped tightly in white cloth, and my guilt submerged any impulse I might have had to retaliate. I remained silent, reflecting that Tan Feng might not yet know that I had been to the kiln. I wondered whether he would be able to guess that it was I who had taken the train.

Tan Feng didn’t touch me — perhaps he knew that with only one hand he would come off worse — instead he just swore. But after swearing for a while he grew tired and asked me, ‘What are you doing?’ Still I said nothing, and he must have thought he had gone too far. He put out his left hand for me to see. ‘You have no idea how much gauze they used to wrap it up — a whole roll!’ I said nothing, so Tan Feng examined the gauze on his hand and, after looking at it for a while, suddenly he laughed proudly and said, ‘I fooled the old man. As if I would use my left hand! It was the right hand, of course.’ Then he asked me a question, ‘Do you think it pays to have your left hand burnt or your right?’

This time I replied, ‘It doesn’t pay either way. Far better to have neither burnt.’

He looked stunned for a moment, then waved at me contemptuously. ‘Stupid. What do you know? The right hand’s way more important than the left. You need your right hand to eat and work and everything, don’t you?’

After Tan Feng came home, we didn’t play together any more. My mother forbade it, and the blacksmith and his wife wouldn’t allow me to play with him, either — they were now both of the opinion that I was the devious kind. I didn’t care what they thought of me, but I did listen carefully to the goings-on in their house, since I was anxious to know whether Tan Feng had been to the kiln yet, and whether he suspected me of taking the little red train.

That day finally came. We had already gone back to school when Tan Feng blocked my way in front of the gates. He looked distracted, and the expression in his eyes as he studied me was almost pleading. ‘Did you take it or not?’

I had prepared myself mentally for such a challenge; you wouldn’t believe how calm and streetwise I sounded. ‘Take what?’

Tan Feng answered quietly, ‘The train.’

I said, ‘What train? The train you stole?’

And Tan Feng replied, ‘I can’t find it. But I hid it so well, why can’t I find it?’

I urged myself to stay calm and not to mention the word kiln. ‘Didn’t you hide it in Mr Zhang’s pigsty?’ Tan Fang rolled his eyes at me, and after that he didn’t ask me any more questions. He took a few steps back, towards the sports grounds, his eyes fixed on me in confusion. I looked steadily back into his eyes and started walking in the same direction. You would never believe the way I acted that day, that an eight-year-old child could put on such a mature and composed manner. It wasn’t in my nature; it was all because of the little red train.

From then on Tan Feng and I went our separate ways. We were neighbours, but after that whenever we ran into each other, we would turn the other way. On my part, it was because of my guilty secret; on his the result of a deep wound. Because I believe Tan Feng’s heart was hurt as badly as his hand, and I have to take responsibility for both. I remember very clearly how, a few months later, he was brushing his teeth outside his home. I heard him call out my name and I ran out. Though he was still calling to me, he didn’t even glance my way. Instead he seemed to be talking to himself, saying, ‘Yu Yong, Yu Yong, I know what you are.’ I turned a deep red. He had obviously fathomed my secret. What puzzled me about it though was that ever since Tan Feng had returned from hospital, I had kept the toy train hidden away in the pressure cooker. Even my mother had failed to discover it, so how could Tan Feng know? Had he perhaps also relied on inspiration to guide him?

It sounds ridiculous, but after I got my hands on that train I rarely had a chance to play with it, let alone experience the joy of making it go. Only occasionally, when I was sure it was completely safe, did I take the lid off the pressure cooker and sneak a little look at it — only a look. What are you laughing at? At a thief ‘s guilty conscience? I did have a guilty conscience — actually it was more painful and complicated than that — I even saw the train a few times in my dreams, and in the dream it was always blowing its steam whistle. Then Tan Feng and the kids from town would come running to hear it and I would wake up quickly from fright. I knew that the steam whistle in my dream actually came from the Baocheng railway two kilometres away, but still I woke up in a cold sweat. You ask why I didn’t give the train back to Tan Feng, but that would have made no sense. Reason dictated I should give it back to the Chengdu girl, the real owner. The idea had occurred to me, and one day I even went up to the commune clinic’s door. I saw the girl in the courtyard playing Chinese skipping, happy as anything. She had forgotten all about the train a long time ago. Well, I thought, if she’s forgotten about it, what’s the point of doing a good deed and giving it back to her? And in an epithet I had learnt from Tan Feng, I swore at her, ‘Porkhead.’

Was I very bad? Yes, when I was a child, I was pretty bad: I went so far as to misappropriate stolen goods. But, in fact, that’s not the right question to ask. The real question is, with a secret like that — put yourself in my shoes — how could I surrender the train? And then, very soon, it was the winter holidays, and in the winter of that year my father was released from military service and we moved to Wuhan — our whole family moving here from our little town in Sichuan. This news made me extremely excited, not only because Wuhan is a big city but because it gave me the opportunity to put all the trouble with the train behind me. I looked forward more each day to our move; I looked forward to leaving Tan Feng and the town behind.

On the day we left, cold, heavy rain was falling. I was waiting with my family at the long-distance bus station when I saw somebody’s head appear and disappear outside the waiting-room window, then, after a moment, it appeared again. It was Tan Feng. I recognized him but decided to ignore him. It was my mother who had to tell me to go and say goodbye. ‘Tan Feng wants to say goodbye to you. You used to be good friends, how can you ignore him?’ And so I had to walk outside and go over to him. His clothes were soaked from the rain and he used his maimed hand to wipe away the water dripping from his hair; his eyes too were wet. He seemed to want to say something, but he didn’t open his mouth to speak. I grew impatient and turned away. He gripped one of my hands and I felt him slip something into it. Then he ran off, so fast he was almost flying.

As you will all have guessed, it was the key. The key to wind up the little red train! I remember that it was very wet, though whether from sweat or the rain I couldn’t say. I was very surprised; I hadn’t expected things to end like that. Even now I feel surprised by the way it ended. I wonder what Tan Feng meant by it?

None of the man’s friends seemed willing to answer the question. They were silent for a moment, and then someone asked Yu Yong, ‘Do you still have the train?’

He said, ‘No, not for a long time now. On the third day after we got to Wuhan, my parents packed it up in a box and sent it back to Dr He.’

Someone said awkwardly, ‘That’s really too bad.’

Yu Yong laughed and replied, ‘Yes, I suppose. But you have to consider it from my parents’ point of view. How could they have agreed to conceal stolen goods? How could they have let me become a thief?’