The Devil of Nanking (24 page)

She didn’t look up at me. She had probably intended to lock those doors anyway, I thought. There was no reason to think she’d known I was there. Fuyuki muttered something to her, his frail hand groping for her sleeve. She lowered her head to his mouth, and I held my breath, staring at her nails, each oval painted a careful matt red. The nail on her smallest finger had been grown long and curved, the way Chinese merchants traditionally grew them to show they didn’t do manual labour. I wondered if Fuyuki was telling her about my insistence that he show me the apartment, but after a few moments she straightened and, instead of looking at me, slipped silently away past the pool, through the opposite doors.

I sat forward, tense, my hands grasping the chair, my attention going with her, following her every inch of the way along the corridors, maybe down the stairs. I knew what she was going to do. I knew it instinctively. The noise of the party faded into the background and all I could hear was the pulse of the night, the lapping of water against the pool filter. My ears expanded with my heart, until all the small sounds seemed amplified a thousand times and I thought I could hear the apartment shifting and murmuring around me. I could hear someone washing dishes in the kitchen. I could hear the Nurse’s soft footfalls moving down the stairs. I was sure I could hear padlocks rattling, iron doors creaking open. She was going to get Fuyuki’s medicine.

And then something happened. In the pool, at a depth of about eight feet, there were two underwater windows covered by slatted blinds. I hadn’t noticed them before because they had been in darkness. But a light had just come on in the room, sending vertical yellow stripes into the water. Quickly I fished inside my handbag, lit a cigarette and got up, moving past the crowd and going casually to the pool edge. I stood, one hand in the small of my back, taking a few draws on the cigarette to calm myself. Then, when I was sure no one was watching me, I peered down into the water. A guest nearby began to sing a loud
enka
song, and one of the hostesses was giggling loudly, but I was barely aware of it. I closed off my mind until all there was in the world were me and those stripes of light in the water.

I was sure, without knowing how, that just beyond those blinds was the room where Fuyuki’s medicine was kept. The slats were open far enough to show part of the floor and I could see the Nurse’s shadow moving around in there. From time to time she came sufficiently close to the window for me to see her feet in their hard, shiny stilettos. My attention narrowed. There was something else in the room with the Nurse. Something made of glass. Something square, like a case or a—

‘What are you doing?’

I jumped. Jason was standing next to me, holding his drink and looking down into the water. Suddenly all the noise started again and the colour came back into the world. The singing guest was grinding out the last few bars of his song, and the waiters were opening bottles of brandy, distributing glasses among the guests.

‘What’re you staring at?’

‘Nothing.’ I shot a look back down into the pool. The light had gone out. The pool was dark again. ‘I mean, I was looking at the water. It’s so – so clear.’

‘Be careful,’ Jason murmured. ‘Be very careful.’

‘Yes,’ I said, stepping away from the pool. ‘Of course.’

‘You’re here for something, aren’t you?’

I met his eyes. ‘What?’

‘You’re looking for something.’

‘No. I mean – no, of course I’m . . . What a funny thing to say.’

He gave a short, dry laugh. ‘You forget, I can tell when you’re lying.’ He looked at my face, then at my hair and my neck, as if they had just asked him a complex question. He touched my shoulder lightly and a bolt of static made my hair leap up at him, wrapping itself round his fingers. He looked down at it with a long, slow smile. ‘I’m going to get all the way inside you,’ he said quietly. ‘All the way. But don’t be scared, I’m going to do it very, very slowly.’

At last I can write. At last I have some peace. I have been gone from home for more than a day. When, in the late afternoon, I made up my mind to leave the house, nothing could have stopped me. I pinned my refugee certificate to my jacket and slipped out into the alleyway, dragged onwards by the smell. It was the first time I had been outside in daylight since the thirteenth. The air seemed heavy and cold, the snow stale. I went quietly, using alleys and climbing over gates to get to Liu’s house. His front door was open and he was sitting just inside, almost as if he hadn’t moved since I left him. He was smoking a pipe, a desultory look on his face.

‘Liu Runde,’ I said, stepping into the receiving room, ‘can you smell it? Can you smell the meat cooking?’

He bent forward and put his nose out into the cold air, tilting his head and looking up thoughtfully at the sky.

‘It could be the food they stole from us,’ I said. ‘Maybe they’ve got the gall to cook it.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m going to search. Out on the streets. Shujin needs food.’

‘Are you sure? What about the Japanese?’

I didn’t answer. I was recalling with some embarrassment his insistence that we would be safe, I thought of the example we were to be setting. After a long silence I gathered myself and patted my refugee certificate. ‘Haven’t you – haven’t you got one of these, old man?’

He shrugged and got to his feet, putting down the pipe. ‘Wait there,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get it.’

He had a hurried, whispered conversation with his wife. I could see them in the dimly lit room at the back of the house, facing each other, just her faded blue silk sleeve visible in the doorway, moving every now and then as she raised her hand to make an earnest point. Shortly he came outside to meet me, closing the door carefully behind him and glancing up and down the alley. He had his certificate pinned to his jacket and an anxious, drawn look on his face. ‘I never expected it would come to this,’ he whispered, turning up his collar against the cold. ‘I never would have imagined. Sometimes I wonder who is the foolish one in my marriage . . .’

We crept to the head of the alley and peered along the deserted street. There wasn’t a sound or a movement anywhere. Not even a dog. Only rows and rows of shuttered houses, blackened with soot, an abandoned handcart up-ended against the front of a house. Small fires burned on the roadside, and in the direction of the river the sky was red with flames. I sniffed the air. That incredible tantalizing smell seemed stronger. Almost as if we could expect at any moment to hear the sizzle and pop of frying coming from one of the houses.

We crept up the road like a pair of starving cats, hovering in the shadows, scurrying from doorway to doorway, all the time working towards the Zhongyang gate in the north, the direction the thieves had run. From time to time we happened on bundles of possessions, the owner nowhere to be seen, and we would drag them into the nearest doorway, rummaging desperately through them, hoping for food. Every rickety house we saw we pushed our noses against the doors, whispering through the knotholes, ‘Who’s cooking? Who’s cooking?’ A fist of hunger was working its way through my body, so intense I found it difficult to stand up straight. I could see from the look on Liu’s face that he felt the same. ‘Come out,’ we hissed into the houses. ‘Show us – show us what you are cooking.’

In winter, darkness comes early to us in the east of China, and before long the sun had gone and we were picking our way through the streets using just the light from the fires to guide us. We were exhausted. We seemed to have walked several
li
– I felt as if I had walked all the way to Pagoda Bridge Road – yet we still hadn’t passed through the city wall. The only other living creature we had seen was a lean and hungry-looking dog, wild and covered with such terrible sores that part of its backbone was exposed. It followed us for a while, and although it was horribly diseased we tried half-heartedly to entice it to us: it was big enough to feed both our families. But it was nervous and barked loudly when we got near it, the sound echoing dangerously through the silent streets. Eventually we abandoned the pursuit.

‘It’s late,’ I said, stopping somewhere near the gate. The smell of cooking had been replaced by something else, the stench of polluted drains. Our spirits were failing. I looked at the rickety buildings lining the street. ‘I’m not so hungry any more, old man. I’m not.’

‘You’re tired. Only tired.’

I was about to answer when something over Liu’s shoulder caught my eye. ‘Be quite still,’ I hissed, gripping his arm. ‘Don’t speak.’

He whipped round. At the end of the road, in the distance, his face lit from underneath by a small lantern placed on a water barrel, a Japanese soldier had appeared, his rifle hooked on his shoulder. Only five minutes ago we had been standing exactly where he stood now.

We darted quickly into the nearest doorway, breathing hard, pressing ourselves back and shooting looks at each other.

‘He wasn’t there a minute ago,’ Liu hissed. ‘Did you see him?’

‘No.’

‘How in heaven’s name are we going to get home now?’

We stood there for a long time, our eyes locked, our hearts thudding in our chests, both hoping the other would decide what to do. I knew this road ran in a straight line with no gaps in the houses for a long way – we would have to cover a lot of ground in full view of the soldier before we found a side road to disappear into. I took a deep breath, pulled my cap down low on my brow, and risked putting my head out into the street, just for a second, just long enough to see the soldier. I shot back, flat against the wall, breathing hard.

‘What?’ hissed Liu. ‘What can you see?’

‘He’s waiting for something.’

‘Waiting? Waiting for—’

But before he could complete the question the answer came to us: a familiar sound rolling menacingly out of the distance, a low, dreadful rumbling that made the houses around us shudder. We both knew what that sound was. Tanks.

Instinctively we pushed away from the street, inwards, throwing our weight at the wooden door, trusting that the noise of the tanks would drown our efforts. We were ready to climb the side of the house barehanded if necessary, but the door crumpled with an appalling splintering, just as the noise of the tanks grew louder behind us – they must have turned a corner into the street. The door fell inwards with a sudden rush of stale air, and we tumbled inside, a mess of sweat and fear and heavy clothing, tripping and stumbling into the darkness.

It was pitch black, only a faint wash of moonlight creeping in from a hole in the roof.

‘Liu?’ My voice sounded hushed and small. ‘Old man, are you there?’

‘Yes. Yes. Here I am.’

Together we pushed the remains of the door closed as best we could, then shrank to the walls, inching our way round the room, heading for the hole in the ceiling. It is astonishing the rural habits that people import to a city: livestock had been living in this house, maybe to keep the residents warm at night, and Liu and I were wading through warmish animal bedding and manure. The roar of the tanks was getting louder in the street, rattling the little house, threatening to make it collapse.

‘This way,’ Liu whispered. He had stopped, and now I saw he was holding the rungs of a ladder that led up through the hole in the roof. I followed him to the foot and looked up. Above us the night sky was bright, the distant stars cold and polished. ‘Let’s go.’

He scampered up the ladder more agilely than I could have imagined for a man of his age and stopped at the top, turning to hold out a hand to me. I took it and climbed hurriedly, letting him haul me through the gap. At the top of the ladder I straightened and looked around. We stood in the open air: the building was a ruin, the roof had long since been destroyed, leaving only a scattering of rotting millet stalks and lime mortar.

I beckoned to Liu and we crept to the edge, peering cautiously over the broken wall. We had made it just in time. Below us a barrage of tanks proceeded slowly down the street. The noise was deafening. It funnelled along the street and rose, like a heatwave, powerful enough, it seemed, to reach up and shake the moon. Lamps swayed on the tank turrets, sending strange shadows shooting up the outsides of the houses. Soldiers carrying swords and glittering carbines walked erectly on either side of the tanks, their faces expressionless. It must have been a mass movement to different quarters because behind the tanks came other vehicles: scout cars, a water-purifying truck, two pontoon bridges towed by a truck.

As we watched I noticed a dog, maybe the same one we’d been pursuing earlier, appear as if from nowhere and get itself hopelessly tangled among the soldiers’ legs. Yelping and whimpering it allowed itself to be kicked so ferociously by the men that within a very short time it was edged into the path of the tank tracks, where it rapidly disappeared from view. Two soldiers in the tank turret noticed this and bent over the side to watch, laughing and curious, as the wretched beast reappeared, mangled in the tread, one hind leg, the only part not crushed, protruding sideways from the track, still twitching convulsively. I am no lover of dogs, yet the pleasure in the soldiers’ laughter turned my heart to stone.