The Flowers of War (15 page)

‘Come out, George,’ Father Engelmann said.

Fabio had told George to stick to English and had rehearsed what he was to say. But when George slowly crawled out from under the old Ford, he had completely forgotten his lines. His oil-streaked face was filled with panic.

‘Who are you?’ asked the Japanese officer.

‘He’s the cook and handyman,’ said Father Engelmann, placing himself between George and the officer.

The officer turned to Father Engelmann. ‘We need to borrow the car.’

‘This is not my private property,’ the priest answered. ‘It’s not mine to lend you. It belongs to the mission.’ He was well aware that there was no point arguing: the car was lost. But he thought that if he prevaricated, he could persuade the Japanese that the church held nothing else of value. ‘So perhaps you could ask your commanding officer for a receipt for the loan which I can pass to the finance department of the church mission.’

The officer looked at him as if to say,
And are you living on the moon? Don’t you know anything about war?
But instead
he said in English: ‘We’ll get you a receipt as soon as we get to the occupying forces HQ.’

As Father Engelmann and Fabio continued to protest that the car was not theirs to lend, the soldiers ignored them and pushed the Ford out of its garage. The officer sat in the driver’s seat and pumped the throttle a few times, pondered a moment, then started the engine. His men whooped with joy at having landed such valuable booty. Hollering like tribesmen, they ran after it out of the church compound.

Fabio and Father Engelmann breathed audible sighs of relief. George stared after them. He hardly dared believe that the war had really come to the church, brushed past him and left.

‘They think they’ve taken our most valuable possession,’ said Father Engelmann. ‘We should be safer now.’

Shujuan and the other girls had no idea what had been going on. After the priest had shouted, ‘You’re not to make a sound or to come down,’ they had not let out a whisper. They had not even crowded around the windows as they had done on previous days. Where the blackout curtains joined, they could see torches flicking back and forth like small searchlights. But they lay motionless on their beds.

It was only when they heard the Ford start up that some of the bolder girls crept to the window and peered through the gaps in the curtains. They could not see much but they could hear a chorus of shouts. In Japanese.

Then there were cheers.

The Japanese Army had finally arrived, and then had driven away with the Ford which Father Engelmann had had for ten years. These were the only two facts that were clear to them.

The girls sat up, wrapped in their quilts, and debated what would happen next time the Japanese came, who they would shoot and what else they would do. Shujuan remembered what she had overheard when she was standing above the cellar holding the shovel, embers glinting in the hot ash.

‘They say that when the Japanese soldiers march into the Safety Zone, what they’re looking for are young girls,’ she said.

‘How do they know? They’re in hiding here!’ said Sophie.

‘The Japanese are on the hunt for any females – old women, little girls of seven or eight, anyone!’ Shujuan said.

‘You’re just spreading rumours!’ said Xiaoyu.

‘Ask Father Engelmann if you think I’m spreading rumours!’ retorted Shujuan. ‘He has seen it happen.’

‘Just rumours!’ shouted Xiaoyu. She had a way of shouting down news that she did not want to hear.

Shujuan said nothing. She knew her friendship with Xiaoyu was over. This was the final break. Nanking was
filled with misery, the dead and the living were all miserable, but she was young enough to feel this widespread misery was vague and insubstantial. Losing her best friend, on the other hand, was real misery. Xiaoyu was heartless. All pretty girls were heartless, just like that pretty woman down in the cellar, Yumo.

The other girls went to sleep. Xiaoyu moved herself away from Shujuan and squeezed in next to Anna. Shujuan lay there for a while, then got up and dressed. But just as she was opening the trapdoor, she heard Xiaoyu say: ‘What are you doing, Shujuan?’

‘Nothing to do with you,’ said Shujuan. She had her pride, and she wanted the other girls to understand that what she was really saying was:
If you don’t want to be my friend any more, Xiaoyu, then that’s fine. I couldn’t care less. I don’t want you for a friend either. You think you can buy our friendship with that rubbish about your father coming to rescue you? Well, where’s he been all this time then? Even if he’s as clever at rescuing people as you say, thanks, but I don’t care!

‘Don’t go down, Shujuan!’ a couple of the girls said.

‘Just ignore her!’ said Xiaoyu angrily.

The other two girls obediently ignored Shujuan.

Shujuan felt as if she had been exiled. But at least that
left her free to do what she wanted. Down in the courtyard, she pottered around until she got to the kitchen door. Maybe she could find something to eat. Maybe the charcoal embers would still have some life in them and she could put them in a warming pan and warm up her frozen feet. They had not had any hot water to wash their feet for days. As she got to the kitchen door, she heard a man and a woman talking in low tones. The man was George, she could tell straight away.

‘I can’t, really I can’t. If I do some for you, Father Engelmann will kick me out.’

‘Just cook me a couple of potatoes! He won’t know …’ said the woman.

‘I’ll have to beg for a living if he kicks me out!’

‘I’ll keep you.’

It was Hongling, Shujuan could hear.

‘Just five …!’

‘No!’

‘Three!’

‘Shut up or I’ll throttle you!’

‘And I’ll bite you!’

The voices were replaced by some sort of snuffling noises and Shujuan beat a hasty retreat. These sluts couldn’t sell
their rotten bodies for money here, so they were selling them for potatoes instead. When she had moved back half a dozen paces, she found herself between two of the ventilation shafts. Down in the cellar, she could hear someone crying. She sat cross-legged and looked down one of them.

It was not just one woman – Nani and two others were weeping, the stupid way people did when they had been drinking. Yumo was drunk too. A bowl of wine in one hand, she was trying to console the three other women. They were clearly wreaking havoc on the church’s wine stores.

‘I saw those Japanese soldiers!’ Nani was wailing. ‘They were ferocious! They’d fuck you to death!’

‘You can’t have seen them, only their feet!’ Yumo teased her.

‘I did!’

‘All right, all right, you saw them …’

‘I want to get out, I want to go. I don’t want to stay in this fucking hole waiting for them to come and fuck me!’ Nani was getting maudlin.

Sergeant Major Li’s voice came from a corner Shujuan could not see. ‘This dressing’s fucking useless!’

‘Show it to me.’ Major Dai’s voice sounded weak and weary.

She shifted to the other shaft and, when she looked down it, saw Cardamom kneeling beside the boy soldier, Wang Pusheng. He was bare-chested, with a woman’s padded jacket around his shoulders. His face looked different, his features ominously swollen out of all recognition.

‘What’s he saying?’ Sergeant Major Li asked Cardamom.

‘He says it hurts.’

‘It stinks. The dressing needs to be changed. It’ll be painful but he’ll just have to put up with it!’ said Li.

Cardamom stood up, snatched the bowl from Li and took a sip of wine. Then she knelt down again and squirted the mouthful into the boy’s mouth.

‘Drink some wine and it won’t hurt,’ she said. Then, little by little, sipping and squirting the liquid into his mouth, she made him drink the rest of the bowlful. There was silence in the room, as if everyone was suffering along with Wang Pusheng. From Shujuan’s vantage point, she could see the boy struggling feebly, either because he did not like the unaccustomed taste of the wine or because he was trying to evade Cardamom’s lips. He may have been at death’s door, but he could still feel embarrassment.

Caradamom dressed his wound, and then fetched her
pipa
. It only had one string left, the thickest one which gave a
deep bass note. Cardamom plucked it and hummed a tune. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked Wang Pusheng.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’ll play for you every day.’

‘Thank you …’

‘Don’t thank me, marry me,’ said Cardamom.

This time no one mocked her.

‘I’ll go home with you and work in the fields,’ Cardamom said, as if she were a child playing at happy families.

‘We don’t have any fields,’ said Wang Pusheng with a smile.

‘Well, what have you got then?’

‘We don’t have anything.’

‘Then I’ll play the
pipa
for you every day. I’ll play and you’ll walk with a stick and beg for food, and we’ll give it to your mum,’ said Cardamom, full of happy daydreams.

‘I haven’t got a mother.’

Cardamom was startled. She put her arms around Wang Pusheng and they saw her shoulders jerking. For the first time, Cardamom was crying a woman’s tears.

Nani, no longer maudlin, wept quietly along with several of the other women.

After a while, Cardamom stopped, picked up the
pipa
and flung it away. ‘It’s useless! It’s made everyone cry! With only one string it sounds worse than plucking cotton wool!’

Shujuan noticed a change in the women. They knew now that nowhere was safe, nowhere was off-limits to the occupying troops. They had imagined this was a secret corner that the war had, by some lucky fluke, overlooked. But the arrival of the Japanese soldiers this evening had disabused them of that idea. Three hundred thousand soldiers had seeped into every corner of Nanking, every alleyway, every home, and every nook and cranny.

Shujuan got up to go, and found her eyes were wet with tears too. She had actually let those women make her cry!

It might have been the dying boy soldier, or perhaps it was Cardamom’s childish marriage proposal that got to her. Or maybe it was the tune that Cardamom was strumming on the single
pipa
string, a familiar one south of the Yangtze River, called ‘Picking Tea’. Now that southern China had fallen, all that was left of it was ‘Picking Tea’, played on a single string.