The Devil of Nanking (13 page)

And maybe I have worn her down, because she has lapsed into silence. She has spent most of today sitting limply in her chair, her hands folded on her stomach. I can’t help thinking about those hands, so small, so white. All day I was unable to stop staring at them. They must have drifted unconsciously to her stomach because she would never knowingly stroke her abdomen – she is certain that to do so would make the baby spoiled and demanding, the very words my mother used with me: ‘Really, I must have rubbed my stomach too often to produce such a proud and obstinate child.’

When I consider the possibility that our child could be obstinate, or arrogant, or selfish, or any other undesirable characteristic, I could weep. Proud and inflexible or spoiled and demanding – all these things depend on one thing: on our child having life in the first place. It all depends on Shujin surviving the inevitable attack on Nanking.

Maybe the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose someone and not know where to look for them. The Japanese believe that on O-Bon night the dead come back to their loved ones. They swoop out of the ether, sucked out of their eternal doze by the call of their living descendants. I’d always imagined O-Bon night as dreadfully chaotic, with spirits zipping around the air, knocking people over because they were going so fast. Now that I was in Japan I wondered what happened to those who didn’t know where their dead lay. What happened if they had died in a different country? I wondered if spirits could cross continents. If they couldn’t, then how would they find their way back to their families?

It was spirits I was thinking about that night, sitting in the gloom with my endless cigarettes, trying to decide how I was going to convince Shi Chongming to talk to me, when Junzo Fuyuki and his men came to the club for the second time.

I was summoned by Strawberry to join them. They were seated at the usual long table – all except the Nurse, who was already sequestered in the dark alcove, the light malforming her shadow on the wall, horse-like, a chess-set knight, so tall that she almost appeared not to grow upwards from the floor but to be suspended by her shoulders from the ceiling. Fuyuki seemed to be in a good mood, and there was a new guest in the seat next to me, a huge man in a silver suit, with a congested face and hair so short that the fat ridges at the back of his skull were visible. He was already drunk – telling jokes, slamming his chair on the floor every time he got to the punchline, lifting his eyebrows comically and muttering something that made the men hoot with laughter. He spoke Japanese with an Osaka accent, the way I used to imagine all the
yakuza
did, but he wasn’t one of the gang. He was a friend of Fuyuki’s and the Japanese girls said he was famous – they were giggling at him, hands up to their mouths, sighing to each other over him.

‘My name is Baisho,’ he told the Russians, in stilted English, waving at them with his thick, gold-ringed fingers. ‘My friends call me Bai, because I have twice their money and I am twice’ – he waggled his eyebrows suggestively – ‘twice the man!’ I sat silently, painting the kanji for
Bai
in my head. Bai san was using it to mean double, but it had other meanings too – it could mean ‘plum’ if written with a tree combined with the symbol for ‘every’, or it could mean shellfish, or it could mean cultivation. But what Bai san really made me think of was the way his name sounded in English:
Bison
.

‘My job is singer. Me number-one Japanese singing boy.’ He waved his hand around the table at anyone who cared to listen to him. ‘And my new friend,’ he said, jabbing the cigar in the direction of the black spectre in the wheelchair, ‘Mr Fuyuki. He number-one man in Tokyo!’ He flexed his fist, curling it to make the muscles bulk out. ‘The oldest in Tokyo, but healthy and strong like his age is thirty years. Strong, very strong.’ He turned drunkenly to him and said in loud Japanese, as if the old man was deaf, ‘Fuyuki-san, You Are Very Strong. You are the greatest, the oldest man I know.’

Fuyuki nodded. ‘I am. I am,’ he whispered. ‘I am stronger today than I was at twenty.’

Bison raised his glass. ‘To the strongest man in Tokyo.’

‘The strongest man in Tokyo!’ everyone chorused.

Sometimes it’s a mistake to show off – you can never know for sure when things are about to change, and you’re going to end up looking foolish. Less than half an hour after he’d been boasting about his health, Fuyuki began to look unwell. No one drew attention to it, but I could see – he was breathing hard, muttering something and groping for the arm of the ponytailed man, who leaned forward and listened carefully, his eyes expressionless. After a few moments he nodded, then stood, pulling himself up straight and smoothing down his sweater, pushing his chair sharply under the table. He went discreetly across the club to the alcove, hesitated then stepped inside.

One of the other men sat a little closer to Fuyuki, watching him discreetly, but otherwise there seemed to be an effort at the table to pretend that nothing had happened, as if it might be disrespectful to draw attention to the old man’s discomfort. I was the only one following the ponytailed man with my eyes. I saw him sit where Jason had sat, the shadows deep on his face as he spoke to the Nurse. There was a moment’s pause, then the Nurse reached inside her jacket and fished out a pouch from which she retrieved what looked like a small phial. With her long white fingers held out delicately at an angle, she tapped something from the phial into a glass, filled it with water from a jug on the table, and handed it to the man, who covered it with a white napkin and came back silently to the table, handing the glass to Fuyuki. The old man took a trembling sip, then another. I noticed a residue of something coarse, something like nutmeg, clinging to the glass. In the alcove the Nurse returned the pouch to her jacket, pushing it deep inside the pocket. She smoothed down the wig with her big hands.

At my side Bison made a small, fascinated noise in his throat, sitting forward with one elbow on the table, the cigar in his fingers heavy with ash. He watched, entranced, as Fuyuki downed the rest of the drink, dropped the glass on the table and sank back, both hands on the arms of the wheelchair, his head tipped back, breathing noisily through his tiny nose.

Bison began to laugh. He shook his head and laughed until his whole body was shaking and his face was getting red. He leaned across me and spoke to Fuyuki in a loud, slurry voice. ‘Hey,
onii-san
,’ he said, indicating the drink with his cigar. ‘Haven’t you got some medicine for me too? Something to make me stand up proud, like I did when I was twenty?’ Fuyuki didn’t answer. He continued breathing laboriously. ‘You know what I mean, you old goat. A cure to keep you as strong as when you were twenty.’ Around the table one or two conversations stopped and people turned to look. Bison smacked his lips and waved a hand in the air. ‘Something to keep the ladies happy? Eh?’ He nudged me roughly. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? You’d like a twenty-year-old man, someone who could
STAND UP
.’ He leaped to his feet, stumbling against the table, sending a plate crashing to the floor. ‘This is what I want. I want to stand up like Mr Fuyuki! Like my
onii-san
, I want to live for ever!’

His neighbour reached out to touch his sleeve; one of the other men rested a finger on his mouth. ‘I want to stand up stiff like I used to,’ Bison sang, in his crooner’s voice, his hands on his chest. ‘As stiff as I was at eighteen. Oh, tell me,
kami sama
, is that too much to ask?’

When no one laughed he stopped in his tracks, the words drying in his mouth. Everyone had stopped talking, and the ponytailed man, in a small, barely perceptible gesture, not even raising his eyes, had pinched his lips together discreetly with his thumb and forefinger. Bison’s smile dissolved. He opened his hands in a mute gesture:
What? What have I said?
But the ponytailed man had already removed his fingers and was pretending to be interested in inspecting his nails, just as if nothing had happened. Someone else coughed, an embarrassed noise. Then, almost as if at a signal, all the conversations restarted at once. Bison looked round the table. ‘What?’ he said into the noise. ‘
What?
’ But no one paid him any attention. They had all turned in opposite directions, finding more interesting things to look at, more important things to talk about, swirling their drinks, clearing their throats, lighting cigars.

After a long, puzzled hesitation, he sat down very, very slowly. He picked up a hot towel, held it to his face and breathed in and out. ‘My God,’ he muttered, lowering the towel, and looking anxiously to where the Nurse’s shadow flickered on the wall. ‘It can’t be true . . .’

‘What he say?’ hissed Irina, leaning towards me. ‘What he say?’

‘I don’t know,’ I murmured, not looking at her. ‘I didn’t understand.’

For some time after that the conversation at the table was conducted on a high, slightly forced note. Fuyuki gradually recovered. Eventually he wiped his mouth and folded the glass into the napkin, placed it inside his pocket, then tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling for a while. The men went on talking, the girls refilled their drinks and no one referred to the incident. Only Bison didn’t join in – he sat in a stunned silence, one moment staring glumly at the bulge in Fuyuki’s jacket where the glass was hidden, the next glancing across at the ominous shadow of the Nurse. His cheeks were damp, his eyes watered, and for the rest of the night his Adam’s apple worked painfully as if he might be sick.

There is wholescale panic in the city. Last week Japanese forces took Suzhou, the Venice of China, and began to move north of the Tai Wu lake. They must have travelled quickly, going in an arc along the Yangtze and coming in from the north, because four days ago Zhejiang fell. General Tang has vowed to do his utmost to defend us, but nothing about him inspires confidence in the citizens, and now almost anyone who can afford to is leaving. ‘It will be like the Taiping invasion again,’ they whisper. The trucks are piled high, the poor and the desperate clinging to the sides, the vehicles swaying wide-bellied out into the tiny distance. I pray that the specks you can occasionally observe dropping from the sides of the trucks as they disappear towards the rail ferry at Xiaguan, the dark objects that once or twice fall away and drop in slow motion against the misty background, I pray they are belongings: baskets or chickens coming untethered. I pray they are not the children of the poor.

Today the Red Cross issued a warning. They have defined a refugee zone centred on the university, not far from our house, just south of the railway line, and they are urging all non-combatants to gather there for safety. Most of the teaching rooms and offices have been converted into dormitories. I wondered if I had found a solution to my anxieties: in a safe zone there would be no talk of leaving Nanking, of not trusting the Kuomintang. And yet there I’d be able to protect Shujin.

With this in mind today I went in secret to the zone, where I saw crowds and crowds of people piling up at the entrance with their bedding and belongings, the air-raid warnings howling overhead. Some of the refugees had livestock in tow, chickens, ducks, a water-buffalo, even, and I saw a family arguing with officials about whether they could bring in a pig. Eventually they were persuaded to abandon the animal and it wandered away, disoriented, into the crowd. I lingered for a while, watching the pig, until another refugee further back in the crowd spotted it, claimed it, and slowly led it back through the crowds to the gate, where the argument with the official started all over again.

For a long time I stared at that throng of the poor and the itinerant, some coughing, some squatting casually in the gutter to defecate as must still be the practice in some rural communities. Eventually I turned away, pulling up my collar, and walked back to the house with my head bowed. I cannot take Shujin there. It would be no better than dragging her across the Yangtze and back to Poyang.

We are some of the last people left in the alley – there are only us and a few labourers who work in the brocade factory on Guofu Road. They live in the dormitory building at the head of the alley and are very poor – I doubt they have family or places to flee. Sometimes, secretively, I stand in the road and look at our alley, trying to see it through the eyes of an invading army. I am convinced that we will be safe – the alley leads nowhere and few people have call to pass our house. With the shutters locked you wouldn’t believe anyone was living here. In the tiny courtyard at the front, where Shujin dries vegetables in shallow pans, I have stockpiled several
jin
of firewood, wax-sealed jars of peanut oil, several sacks of sorghum grain and supplies of dried meat. There is even a pannier of dried hairy crabs, a luxury! I pray that I am adequately prepared. I even have several old-fashioned caskets of water stored because the city supply is unreliable and the ancient well on our land is beyond question.