The Devil of Nanking (26 page)

‘Look,’ he urged. ‘Look.’

Hurriedly I brushed at the layer of snow that had fallen on me in the night and tried to push myself up. I was so cold that my body creaked and seized up, and Liu had to grab me by the shoulders and lift me to a sitting position, setting my body in a westerly direction, forcing me to look in the direction of the mountain.

‘Tiger Mountain. See?’ There was a kind of ghastly awe in his voice, something that made him sound very young and unsure. He stood at my side, brushing the snow from his gloves. ‘Tell me, Shi Chongming, is that the Tiger Mountain you know?’

I blinked, sleepy and confused. The skyline was red with fire, as if we were in hell, its oblique blood-tinted light falling on the terrible mountain. And then I saw what he meant. No. It wasn’t Tiger Mountain at all. I was looking at something completely different. As if the earth had coughed up something poisonous. Something too fearsome to keep in its bowels.

‘It can’t be,’ I whispered, pushing myself to my feet in a daze. ‘Old Father Heaven, am I imagining this?’

It was a hundred, no, a thousand, corpses. They had been carelessly piled, one on top of the other, countless levels of twisted bodies, their heads pointing in unnatural directions, shoes hanging from limp feet. Liu and I had fallen asleep gazing at a corpse mountain in the moonlight. I can’t chronicle here everything I saw – if I put down the truth it might burn through the paper – the fathers, the sons, the brothers, the infinite variations of sorrow. There was a noise, too, a low murmur that seemed to come from the direction of the mountain. Now that I thought about it, I realized that it had been there for a long time, since before I had woken. It had been in my dreams.

Liu got to his feet and picked his way across the roof, his gloved hands held out in front of him. My frozen body numb, I stumbled clumsily after him. The view yawned wider and wider in front of me – the whole of western Nanking spread out: to our right the intermittent grey glitter of the Yangtze, the slim, dun beak of Baguazhou Island, to our left the brown factory chimneys of Xiaguan. And in the centre, about half a
li
away, dominating everything around it, the dreadful corpse mountain, rising up from the earth.

We put our hands on the crumbling wall and, very slowly, hardly breathing, dared to put our noses over the top. The ground between the house and the mountain, which was open scrubland with neither streets nor buildings, was swarming with people. Thick on the ground they moved in a single tide, some carrying possessions, bedrolls, cooking pots, small sacks of rice as if they anticipated only a few days’ absence from home, some supporting others, jostling and tripping. Dotted among them were the distinctive mustard-brown caps of Japanese officers, their heads switching back and forward like oiled machinery. These were prisoners being rounded up. The backs of their heads were lit by the rising sun, and although we couldn’t see their faces, we knew what was happening from the low murmur that rose from them as they recognized the true nature of the mountain ahead. It was the sound of a thousand voices whispering their fear.

They were all men, but they weren’t all soldiers. This soon became clear. I could see grey heads among them. ‘They’re civilians,’ I hissed to Liu. ‘Can you see?’

He put his hand on my arm. ‘Dear Shi Chongming,’ he whispered sorrowfully, ‘I have no words for this. There was nothing in Shanghai to compare with this.’

As we watched, those at the head of the crowd must have grasped that they were being led to their death because panic broke out. Shouts went up and a wave of bodies bucked, backing away from their fate, trying desperately to reverse. Instead they collided with the prisoners behind, creating a pleat of mayhem, all fighting to run in different directions. Seeing the chaos, the Japanese officers, working with mystic, silent communication, formed themselves into a horseshoe round the prisoners, limiting and confining the crowd, raising their rifles. As the prisoners on the outskirts spotted the rifles and terrified skirmishes broke out, belongings were held up in defence: anything – a cap, a tin cup, or a shoe – would do. The sounds of the first shot rang across the heads of the crowd.

The effect was astonishing. It was as if we were watching a single living entity, water maybe, or something more viscid, moving as a single organism. A wave started. The force of bodies held the injured and dying erect, while in the centre of the crowd a pucker appeared, a protrusion where the bodies pressing forward were causing some in the crowd to clamber on to each other. More shots rang out. Even above the shouts I could hear the metallic shunt of the rifles being reloaded, and the small raised bud in the centre began to grow and grow, people climbing over each other to escape, until in front of my eyes it evolved into a terrible human column, slowly, slowly stretching skywards like a tremulous finger.

The screams came to us and, next to me, Liu dropped his face into his hands, beginning to shudder. I didn’t put out a hand to him, I was so horribly riveted by that wavering finger. The human spirit is so strong, I thought distantly, maybe it can climb all the way to the sky without anything to hold on to. Maybe it can climb on air. But after a few minutes, when the column seemed impossibly high – maybe twenty feet – something in its structure collapsed, and it dissolved, tumbling outwards, crushing everyone beneath it. Within seconds the tower was re-forming in a different part of the crowd, the little liquid beginnings of a finger pointing inquisitively out of a lake, then rising and rising until, before long, it was pointing rigidly at the sky, screaming out with accusation, ‘Will
you
allow this to happen?’

Just then a flurry of activity erupted close to the house where we were sheltering – someone had broken loose from the crowd and was racing towards us, pursued by another figure. I grabbed Liu’s arm. ‘Look.’

He dropped his hands and raised fearful eyes to the gap. As the men drew near we saw a young Japanese soldier, bareheaded, his face grim and determined, chased by three older men, senior officers, I guessed, from their uniforms. Swords bounced at their sides, hampering their progress, but they were strong and tall and they closed quickly on the fleeing man, one lunging forward and catching his sleeve, sending him whirling round, his free arm flying out.

Liu and I pressed ourselves even lower into the crumbling roof. The men were only a few yards away. We could have leaned over and spat on them.

The fugitive stumbled on for a few steps, moving in a circle, windmilling his arm, only just managing to regain his balance. He came to a halt, his hands on his knees, breathing hard. The officer released him and took a step back. ‘Stand up,’ he barked. ‘Stand up, you pig.’

Reluctantly the man straightened. He pulled back his shoulders and faced the men, his chest rising and falling. His uniform was torn and pulled out of shape, and I was so close that I could see white ringworm circles on his cropped scalp.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ one of the officers demanded. ‘You broke ranks.’

The soldier started to say something, but he was trembling so hard that he couldn’t speak. He turned mutely and looked back at the scene from hell, at the human column, men being dropped like crows from the sky. When he turned back to the officers he wore an expression of such pain that I felt a moment of pity for him. There were tears on his cheeks and this seemed to infuriate the officers. They gathered round him, their faces rigid. One was moving his jaw, as if grinding his teeth. Without a word he unbuckled his sword. The young soldier took a step back.

‘Change your mind,’ ordered the officer, advancing on him. ‘Go back.’

The soldier took another step backwards.

‘Change your mind and go back.’

‘
What are they saying?
’ hissed Liu at my side.

‘
He doesn’t want to shoot the prisoners
.’

‘Go back now!’

The soldier shook his head. This angered the officer even more. He grabbed the soldier by both ears and swung him round, twisting him bodily, dropping him on to the ground. ‘Change your mind.’ He pressed the sole of his hobnailed marching boot against the soft side of the soldier’s face and put some weight behind it. The other officers gathered even closer. ‘Pig.’ He put more pressure on the boot and the skin on the junior’s face pulled forward until a big soft part of his cheek was hanging across his mouth and he couldn’t stop his own saliva spilling out. His flesh would tear soon, I thought. ‘One more chance –
CHANGE YOUR MIND
.’

‘No,’ he stammered. ‘No.’

The officer took a step back, raised the sword above his head. The soldier half raised his hand and tried to say something, but the officer had his momentum now and stepped forward. The sword slammed down, the shadow whipping across the ground, the blade glinting and whistling in the morning sun. It made contact and the soldier jolted once, then rolled forward, his hands over his face, his eyes closed.

‘No. Heavens, no,’ Liu whispered, covering his eyes. ‘Tell me, what do you see? He’s dead?’

‘No.’

The soldier was rolling and squirming on the ground. The officer had only slapped him with the side of the blade, but it had almost destroyed him. As he tried to get to his feet he lost his footing, his legs treadmilling in the snow. He collapsed to his knees and one of the other officers took the opportunity to swipe at him with his gloved fist, sending him backwards, blood spurting from his mouth. I clenched my teeth. I would have liked to leap over the wall and grab that officer.

At last the soldier made a concerted effort and got himself upright. He was in a pitiful state, twitching and staggering, blood covering his chin. He muttered something under his breath, held up a hand to the captain, and stumbled back in the direction of the massacre. He stopped to pick up his rifle, lifted it to his shoulder and continued on in zigzags as if he were drunk, aiming haphazardly into the crowd, letting loose a volley of shots. One or two of the junior soldiers at the edge of the crowd looked at him, but on seeing the three officers standing silent and stony-faced, they hurriedly turned their eyes back to the panicking prisoners.

The officers watched this retreat, absolutely motionless, only their shadows diminishing as the sun crested the top of the house. None of them moved a muscle, not one spoke or even looked at his colleagues. It was only when the soldier showed no signs of running again that they moved. One swiped a hand across his brow, one wiped his sword and returned it to the sheath, and the third spat in the snow, pulling violently at his mouth as if he couldn’t bear the taste a moment longer. Then, one after another, they straightened their caps, and walked back to the massacre, large spaces between them, their arms loose and drooping, their swords and shadows dragging wearily along the ground next to them.

‘You seem very different.’ Shi Chongming was studying me from where he sat on the steamer chair. His coat was wrapped tightly round him, his white hair had been brushed and maybe oiled so that it lay long and straight over his ears, and the pink skin was showing through, like the skin of an albino rat. ‘You’re shivering.’

I looked down at my hands. He was right. They were shaking. That was from a lack of food. Yesterday morning, as the sun was coming up, Jason and I had made breakfast from the convenience-store snacks. And that was the last thing I could remember eating in almost thirty hours.

‘I think you’ve changed.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had allowed a day and a half to go by, and it was only when he’d called me that I mentioned I’d been at Fuyuki’s. Shi Chongming had wanted to come over straight away – he was ‘astonished’, ‘disappointed’ that I hadn’t called earlier. I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t describe what he couldn’t see – that in just one day something hard and sweet and old had spread out under my ribs, like a kiss, and that somehow things that had once seemed urgent didn’t sting any more. ‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I suppose I have.’

He waited as if he expected me to say something else. Then, when he saw I wasn’t going to, he sighed. He opened his hands and looked round the garden. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ he said. ‘
Niwa
, they call the garden, the pure place. Not like your corruptible Edens in the West. To the Japanese a garden is the place where harmony reigns. A perfect beauty.’

I looked at the garden. It had changed since I was last out here. The subtle varnish of autumn was on it: the maple was a deep butterscotch colour and the ginkgo had dropped some of its leaves. The tangled undergrowth was bare, like a collection of dried bird bones. But I could see what he meant. There was something beautiful about it. Maybe, I thought, you have to work to experience beauty. ‘I suppose it is rather.’

‘You suppose it is rather what? Rather beautiful?’

I looked carefully at the long line of white Hansel-and-Gretel stones leading past the do-not-go-here stone and into the undergrowth. ‘Yes. That is what I mean. It’s very beautiful.’

He tapped his fingers on the chair arm and smiled thoughtfully at me. ‘You can see a beauty in this country that you’re living in? At last?’

‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to adjust?’

Shi Chongming made a small sound of amusement in his throat. ‘Ah, yes. I see you are suddenly very, very wise.’

I adjusted the coat across my legs, moving subtly on the chair. I hadn’t bathed, and the smallest movement released the trapped smell of Jason. Under my coat I wore a black camisole I’d bought weeks ago in Omotesando. Tight-fitting and ribbed with tiny silk flowers stitched on the neckline, it stretched all the way down over my stomach, clinging tightly to my hips. I still hadn’t had the courage to show Jason my wounds, and he hadn’t pushed me. He was so confident that one day I’d reveal everything. He said I should realize that for every person on the planet there was another who would understand them perfectly. It was like being two pieces in a huge metaphysical jigsaw puzzle.