The Devil of Nanking (46 page)

‘No?’

‘No, it’s something Fuyuki’s had for a long time. Maybe for years.’ My voice grew quieter and quieter. ‘It’s a baby. A mummified baby.’

Shi Chongming fell silent. He turned his head to the side and, for a moment, his mouth moved up and down as if he was reciting a mantra. At last he coughed and put away his glasses in a battered blue case. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, I know. It’s my daughter.’

And it is unbearable now to think of it: to think of that one moment of clear peace, of clear hope. How very still everything was in those few seconds before Shujin’s screams echoed through the forest.

I looked round vaguely, as if someone had casually mentioned my name, frowning into the air, as if I didn’t know what I’d heard. Then she screamed again, a short yelp, like a dog being beaten.

‘Shujin?’ I turned in a trance, pushing aside the branches and moving back through the trees. Maybe the birth was closer than I’d expected. ‘Shujin?’

No reply. I began to walk. I crested a slope and picked up speed, breaking into a numb trot back to the place I had been sitting. ‘Shujin?’ Silence. ‘Shujin?’ My voice was louder now, a note of panic creeping in. ‘Shujin. Answer me.’

There was no reply, and now real fear hit me. I broke into a run, leaping up the slope. ‘Shujin!’ My feet slid, pine trees dropped their soft snow loads on to me. ‘
Shujin!
’

At the base of the tree the handcart had been set upright, our blankets and belongings scattered around it. A set of muffled tracks led away into the trees. I swerved into them, my eyes watering, ducking as the bare branches whipped against my face. The track led on for a few more yards, then changed. I skidded to a halt in a flurry of snow, breathing hard, my heart racing. The tracks had become wider here. An area of disturbed snow stretched around me for several feet, as if she had fallen to the ground in pain. Or as if there had been a struggle. Something lay half buried at my feet. I fell to a crouch and snatched it up, turning it over in my hands. A thin piece of tape, frayed and torn. My thoughts slowed, a terrible dread creeping over me. Attached to the tape were two Imperial Japanese Army dogtags.

‘
Shujin!
’ I leaped up. ‘
SHU
-
JIN
?’

I waited. Nothing came back to me. I was alone in the trees with just the sound of my panting and my pulse. ‘
SHUJIN!
’ The word reverberated into the trees and slowly folded away into the forests. I spun round, searching for a clue. They were out there somewhere, the Japanese, holding Shujin, crouching and sharpening their bayonets, framing me with their blood-filled eyes, somewhere, behind one of those trees . . .

Very close behind me someone released their breath into the silence.

I whipped round in a crouch, my hands out, ready to leap. But there was nothing, only the trees, black and mossy, icicles dripping in the branches. I breathed in and out through my nose, my ears straining for any sound. Someone was there. Very near. I heard a whisper of dry leaf, a rustle from about ten feet away where the ground dipped, then the crack of a branch, a sudden, mechanical sound, and a Japanese soldier stepped out from behind a tree.

He wasn’t dressed for combat – his webbed steel helmet hung on his belt with the ammunition pouches, and his badges of rank were still in place. He held up not a rifle but a cine-camera, the lens pointed directly into my face. It was whirring, the crank handle whipping round and round. The Shanghai cameraman. I knew him instantly. The man who had filmed the soldiers’ exploits in Shanghai. He was filming me.

We stood for a few seconds in silence, me staring at him, the lens staring unflinchingly at me. Then I lunged forward. ‘
Where is she?
’ He took a step back, the camera steady on his shoulder, and at that moment, from further down the trail, I heard Shujin’s voice, as sweet and breakable as porcelain.

‘Chongming!’

Years and years from now I will recall that sound. I’ll dream about it, I’ll hear it in the cold white spaces of my future dreams.

‘Chongming!’

I stumbled away from the cameraman into the trees, the snow almost up to my knees now, blindly following her voice. ‘SHUJIN!’

I waded on, tears in my eyes, ready for a bullet to come whistling through the air. But death would have been easy when compared with what happened next. From ahead came the distinctive jangle of a bayonet frog in the frosty air. And then I saw them. They stood a hundred feet further down the goat track, two of them in their mustard greatcoats, their backs to me, looking at something on the ground. A motorcycle leaned against an old black pine tree. One of the men turned and glanced nervously at me. His hood was pulled over a field cap: he, too, was not dressed for battle, and yet his bayonet was slotted into his rifle. There was a line of blood on his face, as if Shujin had scratched him during the struggle. As I stared at him he lowered his eyes with shame. I had a brief flash of what he was, not much more than a teenager kept awake on amphetamines, worn down to nothing but skeins of naked nerves. He didn’t want to be there.

But then there was the other man. At first he didn’t turn. Beyond him, against a tree, Shujin lay on her back in the snow. One of her shoes had come loose, the naked foot blue against the snow. She was clutching a small, lacquer-handled knife against her breast. It was a sharp little fruit knife for dicing mango, and she was holding it in both hands, pointing up at the men.

‘Leave her,’ I shouted. ‘Stand back.’

At my voice the other man became very still. His back appeared to grow – to gain in stature. Very slowly he turned to face me. He wasn’t tall, only my height, but his eyes seemed to me very terrible. I slowed to a trot and then to a walk. The single gilt star on his cap flashed in the sun, his fur-collared greatcoat was open, his shirt ripped, and now I saw that it must have been his dogtags I’d found. He was close enough for me to smell last night’s sweet
sake
in his sweat and the odour of something trapped and old coming from his clothing. His face was damp, a sick, sweaty grey.

And in that moment I knew all about him. All about the stained bottles lined up in the silk factory. The pestle, the mortar, the endless search . . . For a cure. This was the sick man who couldn’t be cured by army-issue medicine, the sick man who was desperate enough to try anything – even cannibalism. The
yanwangye
of Nanking.

The baby hadn’t been very old when she’d died. She still had a centimetre of umbilical cord attached to her. Dried and brown and mummified, she was so light that I held her easily, across the palms of my hand, light as a bird. She was tiny. Pitifully undersized. A crumpled, brown newborn’s face. Her hands were frozen – stretched out above her head as if she had been reaching for someone at the moment her world halted.

Her legs had gone and so had most of her lower half. What remained had been cut at, hacked and scraped at by Fuyuki and his Nurse. Most of her had been worn away because a wealthy old man insisted on his fantasy of immortality. She couldn’t choose who looked at her or handled her. She couldn’t stop herself being kept in a tank, facing a blank wall, helpless to move and waiting . . . for what? For someone to come and turn her to face the light?

If I hadn’t found her the garden might have been the place she’d stayed for ever, alone in the dark, with only the rats and the changing leaf cover for company, frozen in eternity – reaching in the wrong direction. She’d have disappeared under the demolished house, and a skyscraper would have grown over her instead of a tree, and it would have been her final grave. The moment I unwrapped the carrier-bag and opened the parcel, I learned for sure that Shi Chongming was right: the past is an explosive, and once its splinters are in you they will always, always work their way to the surface.

I sat in his office with my mouth open, and stared at a point just above his head. The air in the room seemed stale and dead. ‘Your
daughter
?’

‘Taken by him in the war. In Nanking.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Who do you think is shown on the film if not Junzo Fuyuki and my wife?’

‘Your wife?’

‘Of course.’

‘Fuyuki? He was
there
? He was in Nanking?’

Shi Chongming opened his desk drawer and threw something on to the table. Two flat engraved tags, fastened on an ageing, yellowing strip of tailor’s tape. Because they weren’t on a chain it took me a moment or two to recognize them as soldier’s dogtags. I picked them up and rubbed the surface under my thumb. The
kanji
was clear. Winter and a tree. I looked up at him. ‘Junzo Fuyuki.’

Shi Chongming didn’t answer. He opened the cupboards that ran across the walls and pointed at them. Every shelf was crammed with stacks and stacks of paper, yellowing, torn and wedged together, secured with ribbon, string, tape and paperclips. ‘My life’s work. My only preoccupation for the last fifty years. On the outside I am a professor of sociology. On the inside I work only to find my daughter.’

‘You didn’t forget,’ I murmured, gazing at the piles of paper. ‘You never did forget Nanking.’

‘Never. Why do you suppose I speak English so well, if not to find my daughter and one day tell the world?’ He pulled out a stack of papers and dropped it with a thud on the table. ‘Can you imagine the convolutions I have been through, the time it took me to track Fuyuki down? Think of the thousands of old men in Japan named Junzo Fuyuki. Here I stand, a little man, respected internationally for my work in a field that holds no interest for me, none whatsoever, a field that has only the distinction of being the one area that would adequately cover my true purpose and allow me access to these records.’ He handed the top paper to me. A photocopy stamped by the National Defence Agency’s war history library. Now I recalled seeing the logo stamped on some of the papers in his portfolio weeks ago. ‘Imperial Army unit records. Copies. The originals – at least, those that survived transfer between here and the United States during the occupation – are very well protected. But I was lucky – after years of appeals I was at last granted access to the records, and then I found what I needed.’ He nodded. ‘Yes. There was only one Lieutenant Junzo Fuyuki in Nanking in 1937. Only one. The
yanwangye
of Nanking. The devil – the guardian of hell. The man who hunted for human flesh to cure himself.’ He rubbed his forehead, corrugating his skin. ‘Like all the other soldiers, like almost every Japanese citizen who returned from China after the war, Fuyuki brought with him a box.’ Shi Chongming held out his hands to indicate the shape and the size. ‘Hanging round his neck.’

‘Yes,’ I said faintly. I remembered it. A white ceremonial box, lit and displayed in the corridor of the apartment next to Tokyo Tower. It should have brought back to Japan the ashes of a fellow soldier, but Fuyuki’s had been used for something else.

‘And with that baby he brought something else.’ Shi Chongming gazed sadly at the reams and reams of paper. ‘He brought the grief of a parent. He dragged with him a line . . . a line from here,’ he put his hand on his heart, ‘from this place to eternity. A line that could never be cut or shaken off. Never.’

We were both silent for a long time. The only sounds were of the trees outside the window, moving in the wind, occasionally bending to run their fingers lightly across the glass pane. At length Shi Chongming wiped his eyes and got to his feet, moving slowly, slightly bent, across the familiar spaces, the well-worn paths between the few pieces of furniture. He wheeled the film projector into the centre of the room, plugged it in and crossed awkwardly, without his stick, to where a small portable screen stood near the window. He rolled it down and secured it to the base of the stand. ‘Here it is,’ he said, as he unlocked a lower drawer and took out a rusting film can. He eased it open. ‘The first time anyone has seen it. I am sure to this day that the man who filmed this was repentant. I am sure that he would have distributed this on his return to Japan – even if it meant his death. And yet he is dead and here is the film. Protected to this day by me.’ He shook his head and smiled wryly. ‘Such irony.’

When I didn’t speak he stepped forward and held out the canister for me to look inside.

‘You’re going to show it to me,’ I whispered, staring at the film. This was it: the manifestation of the words in the orange book, the testimony I’d been looking for all these years, the proof that I hadn’t invented something – hadn’t invented one detail, one exquisitely important detail.

‘Yes. You think you know what you’re going to feel about this film, don’t you? You’ve researched Nanking for years, and you’ve read every account of it. You’ve played this film in your head a hundred times. You think you know what you’re going to see and you think that will be horror enough. Don’t you?’

I nodded numbly.

‘Well, you’re wrong. You’re going to see something more than that.’ He put on his glasses and laced the film into the projector, bending close to the machine to inch the film through its complex gears. ‘You’re going to see that
and
more. As ugly as you imagine that act, as ugly as the
yanwangye
of Nanking is, someone on this film is more ugly still.’