Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

How the Ceremony Ends

It was last winter that the folklorist paid his visit to the village of Eight Pines. Carrying his rucksack by the straps, he jumped off the public bus from the city and started walking north-east. The road was covered in a thin layer of fine snow which, from afar, assumed a light-blue tint; shadows from the winding lines of high-voltage wires and telephone poles chequered the surface evenly. Occasionally, flocks of birds passed over the man’s head: sudden, but orderly nonetheless. The folklorist walked towards Eight Pines. By now, he too has become part of the landscape of my memory.

By the entrance to the village, an old man sat on the ground mending a large ceramic urn, his kit bag lying to one side. A tiny, dark red flame licked at a piece of melting tin; the smell of it crept through the air, which otherwise held only the crispness that comes after snowfall. The old man grasped a tin clamp with his tongs and squatted to examine the urn for cracks, but hearing the crunch of footsteps in the snow, he interrupted his work and glanced behind him. He saw a stranger walking towards Eight Pines, then turning back to the task in hand, he took no further notice of him. Spitting on a crack in the urn, he exerted all his strength to force the clamp inside; it held for only a moment before falling into the fire. The old man frowned, and as he did so he discovered the stranger was now standing behind him, gazing intently at the urn.

‘I held it in too long, now it’s gone too soft,’ the old man explained.

‘What period is it from?’ asked the folklorist.

‘What?’ said the old man.

‘The urn.’ The folklorist flicked the side of it with his index finger and a clear ringing resounded from it. Then he observed, ‘Dragon-and-phoenix pattern. Longfeng. Qing Dynasty.’

The old man picked up another clamp with his tongs, and this time it fitted easily into the crack, filling it. He grinned at the folklorist and said, ‘There! That’s the way to do it! I’ve been mending pottery for fifty years now all around these parts. Where are you from?’

‘The city. Is this Eight Pines?’

‘More or less. What brings you here?’

‘I collect folk stories.’ The academic had hesitated before answering, thinking that an old man from the countryside might not understand what he meant by that.

‘Then you’ll need to find a storyteller. Who do you have in mind?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anyone here yet.’

‘You should look for Wulin.’ The old man grinned again. Then he bent over to blow out the fire and repeated, ‘Go and look for Wulin. He has stories coming out of his ears.’

The folklorist rested one hand on the urn and gazed around at the village in winter. The sun shone dimly on the paddies which were turning dry and white. The trees, scattered among the graves and ditches, had all let their leaves fall, and there was nothing to be seen of the pines he had envisaged. The most striking thing about the scene was a solitary scarecrow among the paddies, blackening with age, wearing a straw hat, in whose brim an intrepid bird had pecked holes.

Apparently the folklorist stayed in a classroom at the primary school. There are no hostels of any kind in Eight Pines, so that’s where outsiders are generally housed. You can sleep on the desks free of charge, but you have to be out by the time the morning bell rings. So in the mornings, the folklorist put on his rucksack and set out from the primary school. He demonstrated a particular interest in the village’s recessed doorways, walking in and out, examining them. His face was very pale and his upper lip clean-shaven; this, along with his beige anorak and the rucksack, made a deep impression on all the locals.

Before long, some of the older villagers of Eight Pines were relating what they knew of the area’s remaining customs while the folklorist took notes. They would sit in front of the village tavern’s stove, eating meat and drinking rice wine. By paying for everything, the folklorist was able to reap a new harvest every day. Once, remembering what the old man on the edge of the village had told him about Wulin, he asked the old people, ‘Which one of you is Wulin?’ The strange thing was that none of them could recall any such person, but then one of the old men, looking startled, called out, ‘I remember! Wulin. Wulin the ghost! But he’s been dead almost sixty years. He’s the one who drew the ghost, back when they used to cast lots for them.’

That was how the folklorist discovered that Eight Pines had once had a custom of casting ingot-shaped lots to designate a ‘man-ghost’. Immediately he sensed that this was likely to be the most valuable find of his research. He told the old people to take their time and give him a complete account of the practice, but they were all over eighty and expressed themselves so vaguely that he was only able to note down these brief impressions:

Notes

The custom of ghost-casting in Eight Pines was passed down from ancient times until the thirteenth year of the Republic⁵. The ceremony, held once every three years, consisted of choosing a human sacrifice from among the living in deference to the dead ancestors of the clan. All the people of the village gathered for the ceremony at the clan hall. Small ingots made of tinfoil were placed on the altar and unwrapped, one by one, by an elder. A single ingot was marked with the outline of a ghost, and the villager who drew this became the man-ghost. The man-ghost was then wrapped in white cloth, thrown into the large longfeng urn and beaten to death with sticks.

The folklorist was not particularly satisfied with these sketchy notes. Never in his entire career had he encountered such an appalling custom. In the heat of the tavern stove, his thoughts began to race feverishly, and finally it occurred to him that the ideal way of recording this custom for posterity would be to recreate it. Turning to a white-haired old man, he asked, ‘Do you recall how the ceremony used to be performed?’

The old man replied, ‘I remember it very clearly. No way of forgetting.’

‘Well then, why don’t we cast lots for a ghost, just so I can get a sense of it?’ said the folklorist.

The old man laughed merrily. ‘You can’t cast lots for ghosts any more.’

But the folklorist bought more bottles of rice wine and meat dishes and placed them in front of the old people, saying, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll do it just for fun. But I need you to help me a little, all right?’

From what I hear they were quick to consent, setting the winter solstice as the date and the elementary school as the location for the ceremony’s re-enactment. The arrangements were made in accordance with their recollections: they said that ghost-casting had always been conducted on the winter solstice, and that the school had been constructed on the grounds of what had once been the clan temple.

The weather preceding the solstice was chill but humid, and as the thin layer of snow melted into the black mud, the village recovered its former austere appearance. With the snow gone, barefoot farmers began to venture out into the paddies. They gathered the dried rice straw that had fallen throughout the autumn, and hurried home with it. Only the scarecrow stood still, watching over the frozen endless lands.

At the edge of the village, the folklorist saw the urn once again. It was listing slightly and an inch of water had accumulated in the base — melted snow, he presumed. He bent over to feel the moulded longfeng pattern of dragons and phoenixes, and then, giving it a few raps, said to himself, ‘This must have been the urn.’ The cracks had now all been filled by teeth-like tin clamps sunk solidly into the fissures. He nearly burnt his fingers on them, they were still scalding hot. He looked around and glimpsed the old pottery-mender with his kit bag, passing behind a grave mound and gradually disappearing from view.

‘Wulin,’ murmured the folklorist, remembering the ghost of sixty years ago. Then he couldn’t stop himself from laughing out loud. He walked around the urn once more; it was like walking into an older era in village life. It seemed as if the urn, which had once held corpses, was revolving on its base behind him. The fantastic customs of this village were provoking his imagination to greater and greater heights.

‘Wulin.’ Now he stretched his hand into the urn and felt the imaginary outline of Wulin’s wrecked skull. It was a mixture of blood and flesh, like jellyfish floating on the surface of the water. Removing his hand from the urn, he shook it to rid himself of the sensation, but nothing came off. Of course there was nothing in the urn but an inch of melted snow, and beneath that grey-brown moss. Nothing else. He hadn’t even really believed the illusion. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help but wonder about the old man who had given him that useless, even malicious piece of advice to look for Wulin, a dead man, and ask him to tell stories.

The folklorist examined the fingers he had put in the urn, but there was nothing unusual about them except for their bloodless pallor; the result of the weather and his own anaemia.

At the winter solstice, the ghost-casting ceremony was re-enacted at Eight Pines. Some of the participants were old people who had come spontaneously, and through the help of the village council, the folklorist had managed to assemble even more of the local people. The folklorist wanted the ceremony to be as realistic as possible, saying that for him the best thing would have been to go back in time sixty years.

The altar was formed by pushing together school desks in a long line on the dirt floor. The villagers lit several candles and set these on the altar, along with offerings of meat, fish and dried fruits. More troublesome was the question of the foil ingots. Since there were approximately three hundred villagers, it was necessary to make that many ingots to put on the altar. The folklorist helped the old people as they rolled the foil into shape. Finally, on the paper lining of one of the sheets of foil, he sketched the outline of a ghost in red ink. This he gave to the venerable white-haired old man who rolled the foil into an ordinary-looking ingot and threw it on the pile. Next, four people standing with their backs to the table mixed up the shimmering pile of ingots. Numbering over three hundred by now, these were arranged in a single long line, which wound from one end of the altar to the other, ceremonially confronting the villagers.

The villagers waiting to draw ingots stood solemnly in a similar winding line and filed gradually towards the altar. One after another, each of the villagers took an ingot and gave it to the old man. He unfolded each in turn, spreading it out on his palm. It was a long and solemn procedure and the villagers kept their eyes fixed on the old man, waiting for him to raise one of the pieces of foil above his head and say, ‘The ghost. This one’s the ghost.’

The folklorist’s place was towards the end of the line, and while he proceeded towards the altar he paid close attention to the events unfolding ahead. The villagers were passing one by one through the old man’s hands; the ghost was proving slow to appear. A thought occurred to the folklorist, but he dismissed it as too improbable. Shaking his head, he continued shuffling slowly towards the altar. Reaching it, he took one of the ingots, just like all the villagers had: there weren’t many left, but he had to choose one of them. As he walked up to the old man, he saw that there were thin white streaks of light, like snow, shining in his long beard, and as the old man held out his hand to take the ingot, it too was streaked with grey-white rays of light. The eerie sight made the folklorist shudder. Giving the old man the ingot he had selected, he thought, That’s not possible. It would be too theatrical. But he saw that the same light was now shining from the old man’s eyes too. He opened the ingot and raised it slowly above his head. Then the folklorist clearly heard the old man’s voice, brimming with emotion.

‘The ghost. This one’s the ghost.’

The folklorist laughed. He felt light-headed, although he knew there was no good reason to be. He turned around to face the now restless crowd. Laughing, he said, ‘Isn’t that funny? I’m the ghost.’ At this point, four men rushed out from behind the old man, dragging a large sheet behind them. They wrapped the folklorist in it from head to foot and, lifting the bundle, ran outside. Initially the folklorist retained his composure at this turn of events, but when he heard their wild, earsplitting cries, he began to feel afraid. Summoning all his strength, he cried out, ‘Where are we going? Where are you taking me?’

The ghost-bearers answered, ‘To the longfeng urn! How could you forget? It was your idea!’ At this the folklorist calmed down again. Through the white sheet he could dimly see a dense crowd of villagers running along like madmen. Some of them were shouting, ‘The ghost! The ghost!’ He was being carried above Eight Pines now, soaring, flying over the village. Suddenly he remembered the old man at the urn who had mentioned Wulin’s name. The memory made his heart skip a beat. The ghost-bearers gradually picked up speed. They were heading to the urn so quickly that their feet barely touched the ground. The folklorist could dimly see the great urn, with its cracks and clamps, its inch of melted snow and moss. He suddenly called out sharply, ‘No! Put me down! Put me down right now!’

Finally, the ghost-bearers and the crowd stood still and set the folklorist down. They unwound him from the enfolding sheet, and when his face emerged it was deathly pale. He kicked himself free from the sheet, brushed down his clothes and hair and told the village elder, ‘This is purely a re-enactment. It’s not real. I research folk customs. I am not a ghost.’

‘Of course it’s not real,’ said the old man. ‘If it were real it wouldn’t be like this at all. It wouldn’t be finished yet.’

‘I’m a little out of breath. I almost suffocated in there.’

‘It’s not finished,’ repeated the old man. ‘We have to put you in the urn, and then everyone has to hit you once, until you die.’

‘This far is fine. It’s been quite realistic enough.’

The folklorist heaved a sigh of relief, sat down on the urn’s edge and stared around him at the stupefied-looking villagers. The crowd drifted away reluctantly. Feeling strangely weak, he remained there until the moon rose over the distant chimney of the brickmaker’s kiln.

Gradually the people dispersed until finally only the scarecrow by the paddies was visible, rustling in the sobbing wind. His straw hat was gone; someone must have knocked it off during the confusion.

How could this have happened? The folklorist patted his throat, which felt constricted after the ordeal; it was still hard for him to breathe. He struck the lip of the urn a few times with the flat of his hand, then stood up. Though he had been unlucky to be named as the ghost, the incident once written up would make for his most outstanding piece of research yet.

I heard that it happened on the day he left Eight Pines.

As he walked through the lanes with his rucksack, several villagers bade him farewell from their dark, humid homes. He couldn’t hear what they said exactly, but he knew that they were words of parting. Lost in his own melancholy thoughts, he walked along the unsurfaced roads towards the main highway. The road was slippery with melted snow which had now refrozen. The wind was blowing very hard that day, and he had to zip up the collar of his anorak and walk sideways. As he reached the edge of the village, he took a last look at the longfeng urn. Over the course of one night, the water inside had frozen into blue-tinged ice. It was then that he scented the acrid smell of melting tin in the air, a curdled odour streaming from the urn, tainting his face and luggage. He lifted his head and looked around him. The old man who had recently mended the urn was already quite far away.

The pottery-mender was walking along the road ahead. Flame flickered from his kit bag, floating above the road like a firefly. The reappearance of the old man made the folklorist aware of a mysterious circle of events. All of a sudden he wanted to catch up with him, wanted to grasp the substance of that circle. Quickening his pace, he took the same gravelled road. He judged the old man to be about 300 metres away, from the length and speed of his stride, so the folklorist ought to be able to catch him up in five minutes or less.

He broke into a jog, but soon realized that the gap between him and the old man wasn’t decreasing in the slightest. It remained at about 300 metres and this bewildered him. He kept running, but his forehead became beaded with sweat and his legs felt limp. Assailed by doubts and suspicions, he was staggered along like a worn-out old mare. Then, faintly, he heard a call resounding down the road, from somewhere out of sight, indistinct and echoing:

‘Wulin. Wulin. Wulin. ’

The folklorist stood in the middle of the road and looked around in every direction, but except for the old man’s flame ahead of him, there was nothing to be seen. The village behind him seemed deserted. On the brink of desperation, the folklorist turned on his heel and sent a loud cry echoing up to the skies: ‘Wulin! ‘ He listened to his cry reverberate across the desolate fields and at virtually the same time, a powerful current of air pressed in on him from behind, closely followed by a blunt object. It sent him flying a little distance before he sprawled to the ground.

The lorry driver was a young man. He recalled sounding his horn from a long distance away, but the pedestrian stood blankly in the road without making the slightest movement. The driver had taken him for a hitchhiker, but he didn’t want to give him a lift. He had driven on believing that, like other hitchhikers, this one would move out of harm’s way in the end. But there was something wrong with this man: even when the front of the lorry hit him and he was sent soaring, he’d looked astounded, like an unwieldy bird frightened into flight. The terrified driver shifted into a higher gear instead of stopping and fled the scene of the accident as quickly as he could. But when he had driven all the way to the noisy, flourishing city, his own feelings of guilt began to oppress him. After parking his lorry in front of the county public security bureau, he jumped out and entered the building.

The officers sent to examine the scene of the accident walked along the road, the young driver at their head.

They all moved with their heads down, looking for traces of blood. Dusk was falling on the road and its gravelled surface was flooded with clean, white light. Neither blood nor body was evident.

The driver told the policemen, ‘This is really odd. I’m sure I hit him around here. I don’t understand why we can’t find anything.’

Someone suggested, ‘Maybe the villagers carried him back? We should have a look there.’

They turned onto a narrow unsurfaced road and walked towards Eight Pines. As they reached the edge of the village, the driver cried out suddenly, ‘His rucksack! That’s his rucksack over there!’

They saw a dark brown bag lying by a large urn. As they ran towards it, they began to make out the two legs protruding from the urn, while the rest of the body was curled up inside.

The dead man’s eyes were open. From his clothing and appearance it was easy to identify him as an academic. His face was pale and cold as ice, and frozen on his brow was an expression of astonishment.

‘In the urn?’ murmured the driver. ‘How did he get into the urn?’

The police officers, all experienced men, opened the dead man’s rucksack. Besides his clothing, towel, toothbrush, toothpaste and Thermos, they found a notebook with a plastic cover, the pages of which were covered in dense writing. The most notable circumstance was that a piece of foil fell out from between its pages. Though it was torn and damaged, a drawing of a ghoul could be discerned on the paper backing, along with the word ‘ghost’ written in large red letters beneath.

‘"Ghost!"‘ said the driver. ‘He was a ghost!’

I knew the folklorist in question. His death was certainly shrouded in mystery. But at his memorial service, I heard another folklorist murmur to himself, ‘It’s how the ceremony ends, that’s all.’