With that, I turned on my heel and walked out of the office pleased with myself. But that feeling lasted only till I was back in my own office and had drunk a glass of water. My mood turned dark. No one as bad as Melon Huang deserved to have an heir, and what a shame it was that Wang Xiaomei was carrying his child. I’d learned enough from delivering all those children to know that a person’s core — good or bad — is determined more by nature than nurture. You can criticise hereditary laws all you want, but this is knowledge based on experience. You could place a son of that evil Melon Huang in a Buddhist temple, and he’d grow up to be a lascivious monk. No matter how sorry I felt for Wang Xiaomei, I would not put ideas in her head; I simply couldn’t let that fiend find an easy way out of his predicament. If the world had another lascivious monk, so be it. But in the end I helped her abort the baby she was carrying.
Xiaomei herself came to me, wrapped her arms around my legs, and dirtied my trousers with her tears and snot. Gugu, she sobbed, dear Gugu, he tricked me, he lied to me. I wouldn’t marry that bastard if he sent an eight-man sedan chair for me. Help me do it, Gugu, I don’t want that evil seed in me.
So that’s how it was. Gugu lit another cigarette and puffed on it savagely, until I couldn’t see her face for all the smoke. I helped rid her of the foetus. Once a rose about to bloom, Wang Xiaomei was now ruined, a fallen woman. Gugu reached up and dried her tears. I vowed to never do that procedure again, I couldn’t take it any longer, not for anyone, not even if the woman was carrying the offspring of a chimpanzee. The slurping sound as it was sucked into the vacuum bottle was like a monstrous hand squeezing my heart, harder and harder, until I broke out in a cold sweat and began to see stars. The moment I finished I crumpled to the floor.
You’re right, I do digress when I’m talking — I’m old. After all that chatter, I still haven’t told you why I married Hao Dashou. Well, I announced my retirement on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, but that bastard Melon Huang wanted to keep me around and urged me to formally retire but remain on the payroll at eight hundred yuan a month. I spat in his face. I’ve slaved enough for you, you bastard. You have me to thank for eight out of every ten yuan this hospital has earned all these years. When women and girls come to the hospital from all around, it’s me they’ve come to see. If money was what I was after, I could have made at least a thousand a day on my own. Do you really think you can buy my labour for eight hundred a month, Melon Huang? A migrant worker is worth more than that. I’ve slaved away half my life, and now it’s time for me to rest, to go back home to Northeast Gaomi Township. He was upset with me and has spent much of the past two years trying to make me suffer. Me, suffer? I’m a woman who’s seen it all. As a little girl I wasn’t scared of the Jap devils, so what made him think I was scared of a little bastard like him now that I was in my seventies? Right, right, back to what I was saying.
If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends hosted a restaurant banquet on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk — I hadn’t drunk much, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ’63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye — to honour me, he said — but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.
Gugu said she staggered out of the restaurant, headed for the hospital dormitory, but wound up in a marshy area on a narrow, winding path bordered on both sides by head-high reeds. Reflected moonlight shimmered like glass on the water. The croaks of toads and frogs sounded first on one side and then on the other, back and forth, like an antiphonal chorus. Then the croaks came at her from all sides at the same time, waves and waves of them merging to fill the sky. Suddenly, there was total silence, broken only by the chirping of insects. Gugu said that in all her years as a medical provider, travelling up and down remote paths late at night, she’d never once felt afraid. But that night she was terror-stricken. The croaking of frogs is often described in terms of drumbeats. But that night it sounded to her like human cries, almost as if thousands of newborn infants were crying. That had always been one of her favourite sounds, she said. For an obstetrician, no sound in the world approaches the soul-stirring music of a newborn baby’s cries. But the cries that night were infused with a sense of resentment and of grievance, as if the souls of countless murdered infants were hurling accusations. The liquor she’d drunk, she said, left her body as cold sweat. Don’t assume I was drunk and hallucinating, because as soon as the liquor oozed out through my pores, leaving me with a slight headache, my mind was clear. As she walked down the muddy path, all she wanted was to escape that croaking. But how? No matter how hard she tried to get away, the chilling croak — croak — croak sounds of aggrieved crying ensnared her from all sides. She tried to run, but couldn’t; the gummy surface of the path stuck to the soles of her shoes, and it was a chore even to lift a foot, snapping the silvery threads that held her shoes to the surface of the path. But as soon as she put her foot down, more threads were formed. So she took off her shoes to walk in her bare feet, but that actually increased the grip of the mud, as if the silvery threads created suckers that attached themselves to the bottoms of her feet, so powerful they could rip the skin right off. Gugu said she got down on her hands and knees, like an enormous frog, and began to crawl. Now the mud stuck to her knees and calves and hands, but she didn’t care, she just kept crawling. It was at that moment, she said, when an incalculable number of frogs hopped out of the dense curtain of reeds and from lily pads that shimmered in the moonlight. Some were jade green, others were golden yellow; some were as big as an electric iron, others as small as date pits. The eyes of some were like nuggets of gold, those of others, red beans. They came upon her like ocean waves, enshrouding her with their angry croaks, and it felt as if all those mouths were pecking at her skin, that they had grown nails to scrape it. When they hopped onto her back, her neck and her head, their weight sent her sprawling onto the muddy path. Her greatest fear, she said, came not from the constant pecking and scratching, but from the disgusting, unbearable sensation of their cold, slimy skin brushing against hers. They drenched me in urine, or maybe it was semen. She said she was suddenly reminded of a legend her grandmother had told her about a seducing frog: A maiden cooling herself on a riverbank one night fell asleep and dreamed of a liaison with a young man dressed in green. When she awoke she was pregnant and eventually gave birth to a nest of frogs. Given an explosion of energy by that terrifying image, she jumped to her feet and shed the frogs on her body like mud clods. But not all — some clung to her clothes and to her hair; two even hung by their mouths from the lobes of her ears, a pair of horrific earrings. As she took off running, Gugu sensed that somehow the mud was losing its sucking power, and as she ran she shook her body and tore at her clothes and skin with both hands. She shrieked each time she caught one of the frogs, which she flung away. The two attached to her ears like suckling infants nearly took some of the skin with them when she pulled them off.
Gugu screamed and ran, but could not break free of the amphibian horde. And when she turned to look, the sight nearly drove the soul out of her body. Thousands, tens of thousands of frogs had formed a mighty army behind her, croaking, hopping, colliding, crowding together, like a murky torrent rushing madly towards her. As she ran, roadside frogs hopped into the path, forming barriers to block her progress, while others leaped out of the reedy curtain in individual assaults. She told us that the loose-fitting black silk skirt she was wearing that night was being shredded by the sneak attack. Frogs that swallowed the strips of silk were thrown into a frenzy of cheek-scraping from choking before they rolled on the ground and exposed their white underbellies.