The Devil of Nanking (12 page)

‘I didn’t promise to call you—’

‘Yes, you—’

‘
No
. No.’ He stopped and held up his walking-stick, pointing at me. ‘I made no promises. I have a very good memory and I know I didn’t promise you anything.’

‘I can’t wait for ever.’

He gave a short laugh. ‘Do you like wise old Chinese sayings? Would you like to hear a profound truth about a mulberry leaf? Would you? We say that patience turns a mulberry leaf into silk. Silk! Imagine that, from nothing but a dried-out old leaf. All it takes is patience.’

‘Well, that’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Worms turn it into silk.’

He closed his mouth and sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I don’t see a very long life for this friendship, do you?’

‘Not if you don’t call me when you promise. You’ve
got
to keep your promises.’

‘I haven’t
got
to do anything.’

‘But . . .’ my voice was rising and one or two of the passing students gave us curious looks ‘. . . I’m at work in the evenings. How do I know you won’t call me in the evenings? There’s no answerphone. How do I know you won’t call me one evening and then never again? If I miss your call it’ll all go wrong and then . . .’

‘Leave me now,’ he said. ‘You have said enough. Now please let me alone.’ And he hobbled away across the campus, leaving me standing in the shadows under a gingko tree.

‘Professor Shi,’ I called, after his retreating back. ‘Please. I didn’t mean to be rude. I didn’t mean it.’

But he kept walking, disappearing eventually beyond the dusty rotary hedge, into the shaded forest. At my feet the shadows of the gingko trees shifted. I turned and kicked the low fence at the edge of the path, then put my face in my hands and began to shiver.

I went home in a kind of trance, going straight to my room, not stopping to speak to the Russians, who were watching TV in the living room and who made a sarcastic
ooooh
ing noise to my retreating back. I slid the bedroom door closed with a bang and stood with my back to it, my eyes shut, listening to my heart beating.

When you know you’re right about something, the important thing is to keep going.

After a long time I opened my eyes and went to where I kept my paints stacked, against the wall in the alcove. I mixed some paint, set the brushes and the water in a jar near the wall and opened the window wide. It was already getting dark, a burnt-food smell was coming up from the streets, and Tokyo was lighting up for the night. The city stretched away into the distance like a small galaxy. I imagined it from outer space – buildings like mountains, streets glittering like Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s rivers of mercury.

How could this be? When the air raids ended, when the last American bomber retreated over the blue Pacific, there were over a hundred square miles of flattened streets in Tokyo. The city was unrecognizable. Cars couldn’t drive through it because no one knew where the streets ended and the buildings began. In the shanty-towns along the river, the
tadon
they burned, a foul-smelling, smoky combination of coal dust and tar, hung over the city like a cloud.

The silk walls of my room had been ripped down to waist height. Below that they were intact. I loaded the paintbrush with cobalt and began to paint. I painted broken rooftops and the spindly rafters of burned-away houses. I painted fires raging out of control and streets strewn in rubble. As I painted my mind drifted free. I was in such a daze that at seven o’clock the Russians had to come and knock on the door and ask me if I was thinking of going to work that evening.

‘Or you just gonna stay in there? Like a crab, hmm?’

I pulled back the door and looked out at them, brush in my hand, face smeared with paint.

‘My God! You coming like that?’

I blinked at them. I didn’t know it then, but I was lucky they had knocked on the door: if they hadn’t I might have missed one of the most important nights of my time in Tokyo.

Shanghai fell last week. The enormity of this news is still sinking in. Our president’s best troops were defending the city: we outnumbered the Japanese marines ten to one, and yet somehow the city fell. The streets are said to be deserted, only the empty vomit and blister-gas canisters of the Japanese scattered in the gutters, dead zoo animals rotting on the floors of their cages. News comes that the Imperial Japanese Army is fanning out across the delta and now it seems that an assault on Nanking is inevitable. Ten divisions are pushing inland towards us: walking, riding motorbikes and armoured cars. I can imagine them, their army-issue puttees soaked to the brims with yellow river mud, certain that if they can only take Nanking, our nation’s great capital, they will have the giant’s heart in their fists.

But naturally it won’t happen. Our president will not allow harm to come to his city. And yet something has changed in the citizens, a wavering of faith. As I was walking home today after my morning class (only four students attended, what am I to make of that?), the fog that has been hanging over the city lifted and it became sunny, as if the sky had taken pity on Nanking. Yet I noticed that no laundry appeared on poles as it usually does at the first hint of sun. Then I noticed that the street sprinklers, the poor ragged coolies who clean our thoroughfares, hadn’t come through, and that people were scurrying from doorway to doorway, carrying more belongings than seemed necessary. It took me some time to realize what was happening and when I did my heart sank. People are fleeing. The city is closing down. I am ashamed to say that even some lecturers at the university were talking today about heading inland. Imagine that! Imagine such a lack of faith in our president. Imagine what he will think to see us fleeing his great city.

Shujin seems almost gleeful that Shanghai has been taken. It seems to prove everything she has always claimed about the Nationalists. She, too, has been caught up in the frenzy to desert the capital. When I returned home today I found her packing belongings into a chest. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting. Now, please bring the cart from the courtyard.’

‘The cart?’

‘Yes! We’re leaving. We’re going back to Poyang.’ She folded a white swaddling cloth from her grandmother’s
cui sheng
parcel, and packed it into the chest. I noticed she had reserved the largest space for a tortoiseshell money case of my mother’s – a case I remembered to contain several I Ching passages, written in blood, and wrapped in cloth. My mother had put all her faith in those words, yet they had been unable to save her. ‘Oh, don’t look so anxious,’ said Shujin. ‘My almanac marks today as a perfectly auspicious day for travel.’

‘Now, look here, there’s no need to be hasty—’ I began.

‘Is there not?’ She rocked back on her heels and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘I think there is. Come with me.’ She got up and beckoned me to the window, opened it and pointed up to the Purple Mountain where Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum sits. ‘There,’ she said. It was getting late and behind the mountain the moon was already showing, low and orange. ‘Zijin.’

‘What about it?’

‘Chongming, listen, please, my husband.’ Her voice became low and serious. ‘Last night I had a dream. I dreamed that Zijin was burning—’

‘Shujin,’ I began, ‘this is nonsense—’

‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘It is not nonsense. It is real. In my dream Purple Mountain was burning. And when I saw it I knew. I knew instantly that disaster was going to strike Nanking—’

‘Shujin, please—’

‘A disaster the like of which no one has seen before, not even during the Christian rebellion.’

‘Really! Tell me, are you as wise as the blind men at festivals, boasting they’ve smeared their eyelids with – with – I don’t know, the fluid from a dog’s eye or such nonsense? A soothsayer? Let’s put an end to this rubbish now. You cannot,
cannot
predict the future.’

But she wasn’t to be shaken. She stood stiffly next to me, her eyes locked on Purple Mountain. ‘Yes, you can,’ she whispered. ‘You
can
predict the future. The future is an open window.’ She put her hand lightly on the shutters. ‘Just like this one. It is easy to look ahead because the future is the past. Everything in life revolves, and I have already seen exactly what will happen.’ She turned and looked at me with her yellow eyes, and for a moment it seemed she was staring steadily into my heart. ‘If we stay in Nanking we will die. You know it too. I can see it in your eyes – you know it very well. You know your precious president is too weak to save us. Nanking doesn’t stand a chance in his hands.’

‘I will not listen to another word,’ I said firmly. ‘I will not have the generalissimo spoken about like this. I forbid it. Absolutely forbid it. Chiang Kai-shek will save this city.’

‘That foreigner’s lapdog.’ She sniffed contemptuously. ‘First his own generals have to force him to fight and now he can’t even defeat the Japanese – the very same army that trained him!’

‘Enough!’ I was shaking with anger. ‘I have heard enough. Chiang Kai-shek will defend Nanking and we, yes, you and I, we will be here to see it.’ I took her by the wrist and led her back to the chest. ‘I’m your husband and you need to trust my judgement. Unpack this now. We’re going nowhere – certainly not back to Poyang. Poyang killed my mother and for once I am instructing you clearly, as befits a husband: you will put your faith in Chiang Kai-shek, the supreme arbiter, a man far greater, far stronger than all of your superstitions put together.’

How I regret those words now. Now that I am here, alone in my study, the door locked, my ear pressed furtively to the radio, how I regret my proud stand. I am afraid to let Shujin hear the news the radio is delivering because she would crow with delight to hear today’s terrible report, so terrible that even I quake to write it down here. I will write it in small characters to make it easier to bear:
Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang government have fled the city, leaving it in the hands of General Tang Shengzhi.

Now I have written the appalling sentence what is there to do but stare at it, the blood rushing in my head. What shall I do? I can neither sit still, nor stand, nor think about anything else. Commander Chiang gone? General Tang in his place? Can we trust him? Am I to crawl to Shujin and tell her that I was wrong? Allow her to see me weakened in my resolve? I cannot. I cannot retreat. I am caught in a wretched web of my own making, but I must stand my ground, no matter how queasy it makes me. I will barricade the house and we shall wait out the arrival of the Imperial forces. Even if the unthinkable does happen, and our troops are defeated, I know the Japanese will treat us well. I visited Kyoto as a student and I speak the language well. They behave with infinite care and sophistication – one only has to study their deportment in the Russian war to know them as a civilized people. Shujin will be surprised to find that they even have things to teach us. We will prepare a sign in Japanese saying, ‘Welcome’, and we’ll be safe. Today I saw two families in an alley off the Hanzhong Road working on such a sign.

But as I write, as night falls on Nanking outside the walls of the house, as the city descends into perfect silence, with only the occasional distant shudder of a Nationalist tank prowling Zhongshan Road, my heart is like ice. It is all I can do not to go downstairs and confess my fears to Shujin.

She has hardened to me since I refused to return to Poyang. Daily I repeat my list of reasons for not fleeing, pretending not to know how hollow they sound: in the countryside there will be no medical care, no sophisticated methods for our child’s birth. I have tried to paint a picture of the disasters that would follow if we were stranded in the countryside, with only an old peasant woman to help Shujin in her confinement, but every time I say this she flies at me with fire in her eyes: ‘An old peasant woman? An old peasant woman? She would know better than your foreign doctors! Christians!’