Old Town (14 page)

The doctor and the young widow reached the hilly countryside to the south. Line after line of the wounded waited there. He soon was busy with his endless surgery and was unable to look after the division commander’s woman. Five days on, the fighting came to an end.

The newspaper and radio reports of that time all called this campaign a great and total victory, though, unfortunately, Division Commander Zhang had fallen in battle courageously defending the country. While the top military command in Chongqing had already heard the reports, the doctor and the young widow still had no idea of this death.

After the firing had died down, the medical station reopened in the same market town. This time there wasn’t a single continuous stretch of the city wall left. It was scorched earth as far as the eye could see and corpses were lying everywhere. The doctor hung a tent between two withered trees to treat the seriously wounded. The battlefield was being cleaned up and there in a pile of the dead they found soldiers who were still faintly breathing and these they sent to the station. The officers and men who had fallen for good were taken to an empty space nearby.

The young widow made her way through the smoking ruins in search of her lover. She had no idea what his rank was. She just called out his name as she went along, and moved and shifted the terribly mangled corpses one by one. The division commander’s orderly recognized her and took her to the open space where bodies had been laid out. When he lifted away the blanket covering Division Commander Zhang, she let out an agonized shriek and burst into a storm of weeping.

The doctor had finished with one of the wounded when he heard a woman’s terrible cry. Only then did he remember that the division commander had entrusted the young widow to his care and he hadn’t seen her at all for many days now. He lifted the flap of the tent and looked out. Immediately he knew what had happened.

“Young Li, Young Li…” The doctor’s voice went hoarse.

Young Li was over on the side lighting a fire to sterilize the surgical instruments. Looking up and following the doctor’s gaze, he was so dumbfounded for a moment that he dropped the top of the pot he had been holding and in tears rushed outside.

The doctor thought of saying a prayer for the division commander, to ask the Lord to have mercy and forgive him for all the sins he had committed in this world and to receive him back into his heavenly home. He had opened his mouth and said, “O Lord,” when everything within him fell apart and he sobbed and wept bitterly. He told himself not to cry, that Christians see death as a going home, that he shouldn’t say good-bye to the division commander in tears, but no matter what, he couldn’t contain his grief.

1.

G
RANDMA SAID THAT
when the Japanese planes appeared in the sky above Old Town, the streets were covered with ripe, golden-yellow loquats. Our Old Town was in one of those regions abounding in rice, fish, and fruit, and the Old Town folk were very particular about what they ate. Fruit, vegetables, and seafood were consumed only if fresh and in season. Oranges, bananas, loquats, “dragon eyes,” and litchis—each of these fruits spelled a season of the year. Farmers and their wives shouldered pole after pole of fresh and plump fruit along the streets and through the alleyways. They all had their own piece of territory and could bring their baskets right under the sky wells of the homes of old customers. The friendships between some of these buyers and sellers had continued for generations.

When the loquats ripen, early summer has arrived. Three generations of my grandmother’s Guo family all ate the fruits sold by Ah Shui. He was still a little boy way back when he and his father did their trade at West Street. By now, he himself had become a grandpa. Because Second Sister Guo married into the Lin home on Officials Lane, Ah Shui brought his trade there too. Second Sister, being the good-hearted person she was, would often give him clothes for his children. And Second Sister’s husband—Ah Shui called him Uncle—had treated his little boy without charging a single
fen
. Every time Ah Shui came back into town, the fruit he would give Second Sister was the very pick of the crop, the very best of all.

Ah Shui asked Second Sister, “Is Uncle doing all right up north there?”

“He’s fine, very fine. Only, he’s thinking of home and his three children.”

Second Sister was again packing up some clothing to give to Ah Shui’s children, and she stuffed in a few copper coins. The last time Ah Shui had brought home such coins he got a good scolding from his old lady. He removed the coins from the cloth bundle.

“Second Miss, I can’t accept your money.”

They were both going back and forth over this when suddenly the air raid siren sounded. Ah Shui practically died from fright, and as he trembled and shivered, some of the coins fell clattering onto the flagstones.

Second Sister said, “Don’t be scared. It’s only a drill.”

Starting the year before, from time to time the constables and the heads of several household groups would come to people’s homes to provide instructions on how to protect against air raids. They ordered the residents to paste strips of white paper on the glass windows of their houses. Now, more than a year later, the white paper had all turned yellow. Second Sister had just decided to do a big cleanup and scrape away all those depressing paper strips.

The ear-piercing shriek of the siren sounded more and more urgent. Now the slack and easygoing folk of Old Town couldn’t help feeling ill at ease. People dropped whatever work they were doing and ran into the streets, flustered and whispering rumors to each other.
What’s this all about? Are the Japanese really coming?
Many of them were looking into the skies, using their hands to shield their eyes from the sun’s glare. They still didn’t know what it meant for airplanes to be flying about. Someone said airplanes were as big as eagles. Another had it that they were bigger than buildings, and these two, each sure he was right, went on and on about this.

Right then, the skies resounded with something the people of Old Town had never heard before—the thunderous roar of engines. These were just like floodwaters or wild beasts surging and raging everywhere. The siren’s sound now sounded weak and ineffective in this great deluge.

The wolves had come—the wolves had really come! The Old Town folk stared dumbstruck at the planes over their heads.
Is this for real? Would Old Town, which for hundreds of years had never seen soldiers or weapons, now really be plunged into war?

This wasn’t just one or two planes; it was a whole swarm of them. They circled about in a dense mass, like some flock of crows gone mad. And from the crows’ bellies fell black eggs of iron, one after the other, making the earth shake and the skies quiver!

Ah Shui said, “Second Miss, bring your children and come with me to hide in the countryside for a few days. My old lady’ll fix up a clean room for you.”

Second Sister thought about her three children. If they had to die, she wanted to die with them. She pushed past Ah Shui and dashed off to South Street. That was where the children’s school was. She had to find them. As she ran, she murmured, “O heaven! O God! It’s not life or death we care about. Either we all survive, or none of us do, and we all die!”

The people who had been milling about out of curiosity in an instant all vanished and the streets were now deserted. My grandma ran on wildly like a terrified doe, her hair bun all disheveled and her
qipao
flapping. She had no idea of how desperate she looked, nor did she care in the slightest. There was only one thought that kept her going—to die together with her children!

The contingent of people running in the same direction grew larger. Mothers converging from all directions raced toward South Street. They had the very same feeling as Second Sister—if anything had happened to their children, they just wouldn’t go on living.

She saw the school now. The old banyan tree by the school entrance still stood there, calm and serene as always, and to her ears came the sound of children reading. She didn’t realize this was a hallucination. Her pace slowed as her legs weakened under her.
Nothing’s happened. I’m just too worried and upset
. Since Ninth Brother had gone, she was always seeing a snake’s shadow in the reflection of a bow, as the saying goes, and always imagining the worst of any situation. Pastor Chen admonished her, saying that this was wrong.
The pain and suffering God gives you will in no way be more than you can bear. Jesus said, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

She pressed her violently heaving breast, and gasped for breath through her open mouth.
Nothing had actually happened anywhere…just foolish me creating problems for myself.
And if nothing happened, that was good.

A bomb glanced off the banyan tree as it fell into the school and exploded with an enormous roar. Then it was as if some giant’s iron hand just swept away Second Sister and many of the other parents. As she lay flat on the ground she thought that she had been hit squarely in the bombing and was dead, for sure, and her children gone as well. But she felt strangely at peace. God in heaven had granted her prayer to let her die together with her children, and so there was nothing more to regret. She would take her three little angels back to heaven and wait for Ninth Brother there.

Everywhere parents were crawling up from the ground, keening and howling like wraiths or wild beasts. Second Sister raised her head and discovered that she was alive and in one piece. She rolled over, sprang up, and flung herself in the direction of the school, now in a fog of thick smoke. “Baoqing! Baosheng! Baohua! You can’t leave your ma all alone!”

The explosion had smashed all the doors and windows of the classrooms, and bits and pieces of shattered glass covered the ground. Desks and chairs were strewn about every which way. The old fellow who rang the school bell told them that the students had all been moved into the cave on Stony Mountain beyond South Gate. Second Sister turned and went rushing off there with the rest of the crowd.

The air raid alert had been lifted and several hundred children emerged from the cave. The fathers and mothers waiting there frantically searched for their own children among all the others. And, as if finally reuniting with the survivors of some calamity, they wept from the depths of grief and the heights of exultation.

Baoqing was the first to rush into his ma’s embrace, with Baosheng and Baohua right behind him. Second Sister squatted down, and pinched first this one and then rubbed that one to make sure that not a single strand of hair on their heads had suffered mishap. Only then did she break down in tears. “My children, my little dears, your ma will never let you go even one step away again.”

The children were too young. They didn’t understand how the adults could have gotten so panicky and lost their self-control. Baosheng stepped on Baohua’s little leather shoes and the two of them started quarrelling. Baosheng said, “Ma likes you the best. When there’s nothing to eat at home, she still buys you shoes.” Baohua said, “The money that Daddy sends is all for me!” But Baoqing, who was not yet seven years old, was like a little grown-up. Stretching forth his chubby hand, he wiped away his mother’s tears and said, “Ma, don’t be scared. When I grow up I’m going to earn a lot of money and buy you flatcakes and clothes to wear, and leather shoes also for Big Sister.” Second Sister took Baoqing in her arms. The relatives all said that she loved her little son the best. He was the little man of this family. Many times, he would quite consciously assume a father’s role, comforting and supporting his mother. This little boy was so accommodating and good at understanding what other people wanted, how could his mother not love him until her heart just ached?

The people of Old Town had never seen real guns or cannons and couldn’t bear this sort of fright. Though not a single person died from the air raid’s explosions that day, several people died out of sheer fright. There was one eighty-year-old lady on Stipend Lane who had a son who was an official. When she celebrated her great sixtieth birthday, he gave her a coffin of the very best wood. This coffin was a great delight to her. Every year she had a painter come and lay on a fresh, full coat of varnish. But all the upheaval and chaos of war made her worry that she wouldn’t get the chance to enjoy the use of her beloved coffin. Three days after the air raid, the old lady hanged herself and was laid out in her coffin and put to rest in the ground, all before Old Town itself was destroyed.

The Japanese planes had gone but they left behind a miasma of terror, and it was this terror, like an unstoppable plague, that brought Old Town down. By spreading the wings of their imagination, and treating imagination as absolute fact, people quite unconsciously did everything that would magnify fear. Rumors arose on all sides. Everyone suffered from such rumors and yet everyone invented them. Today it was reported that the Japanese were approaching from the sea. Tomorrow it would be said they had already arrived at Old Mountain. Old Town had relied forever on those endless mountain ranges to hide from war. Because of the airplanes, Old Town no longer had this protective screen. Several people back from the north told vivid and graphic stories of how the blue-faced and long-fanged Japanese raped and killed women, cooked and ate children, and how they chopped old folks into mincemeat and threw their remains into the rivers to feed the fish. Up north there was a big city called Nanjing that experienced just such calamities. There, after several years, the river waters were still running red.

The old sayings about cranes crying out at the whistling wind and enemies seen in every bush and tree describe just how jittery everyone was. For several days, the air raid siren at the corner of West Street would perversely go off, crazily sounding out several blasts from time to time, and even if it was just for a fleeting moment, this could lead to devastating panic. Men and women, the old and young, would dash about pell-mell, covering their heads with their arms.

The great catastrophe was approaching. When they see a bow, birds will fly off in all directions. One by one, the six tables in the back hall of the Lin home now became empty. Big Sister-in-Law and Eldest Brother Lin left Old Town for a mountain district about a hundred miles to the north where a serving girl, once part of Big Sister-in-Law’s dowry, now lived. Second Brother Lin and all of his household sought refuge in the home of his wife’s aunt. This woman’s husband was working in a porcelain kiln near the border of another province. The ways of the world were all changing now. While “such-and-such” may have been the case previously, now things were totally different. In the past, country cousins were a burden on their moneyed relatives, and just thinking about them was enough to bring on a headache. Now, though, having relatives in the countryside was the greatest bit of good fortune one could have. Being the first to wrap up one’s valuables and escape disaster was as enviable as going up to the capital to take the old imperial examinations.

Grandma could have chosen quite a few places to go to. Before she herself fled, her big sister had sent her rickshaw puller over to her home, but Second Sister didn’t want to leave. Ah Shui, the loquat seller, also tried to persuade her to go to his home. Her own family members had sent any number of messages welcoming her and her three children to stay with them. But she declined with thanks one invitation after the other, and closing the doors and watching over her three children, she calmly faced life or death. Underneath the kitchen cupboard there was a little jar of white arsenic, quite enough to end ten lives. If the Japanese really did come to their door, she would lead her children out of this world.