The Flowers of War (22 page)

Shujuan would never forget those last, awful hours in the compound of St Mary Magdalene. No one could speak to or look at anyone else. Fabio gave the girls a hasty dinner of potato soup and then hurried off to the Safety Zone.

The girls sat in the cellar in silence. ‘Let us fill our bellies, don’t let those prostitutes take our food away,’ was the prayer they had been muttering for days. Now they had finally got what they wanted. They had never expected, however, that their prayer would be answered in such a cruel way. As she ate her soup, Shujuan glanced surreptitiously at Sophie, who sat opposite her. Sophie’s face was covered in long scratches made by the other girl’s nails
during the scrum. The marks were the only signs of life on her otherwise subdued face. No one said with regretful sighs: ‘Those women saved our lives!’ or ‘I wonder if they’ll survive …’ But Shujuan knew that all of them, like her, felt pangs of remorse.

When Fabio arrived back, after midnight, it was with a tall Western woman. The girls recognised her as Miss Vautrin. She had brought a barber with her and he shaved the girls’ heads. Two hours later, the little band of schoolgirls had been transformed into a band of schoolboys. Miss Vautrin had come in an ambulance and, just before dawn, the ambulance drove away from the church full of sickly young patients, wan and dull-eyed, each one dressed in striped hospital pyjamas which flapped so loosely on their skinny frames that it looked as if there was nothing underneath.

The ‘boy’ patients spent two days hidden in the sickroom at the Jin Ling Medical Institute. Then they were smuggled out to a place in the nearby countryside, from where they were put onto a boat downriver to Wuhu and then onto another boat to Hankou. Fabio escorted them all the way, in the guise of their doctor.

*     *     *

In the years that followed, China underwent many changes, but Shujuan never changed as much as she did in those few days in December 1937.

Finally reunited with her family, she learned the agony her parents had gone through when they heard the news from China. The moment her father came back from the college where he worked he would sit hunched silently over the wireless, desperate to find out what was happening. There were no telephone and cable links to Nanking. Her father had managed to contact someone in the Chinese consulate, but the answer he got was confused. The situation in Nanking was catastrophic but not a single fact could be verified. He then managed to get through to a friend in Shanghai on the telephone, to be told that some rumours had filtered through to the concessions there: the Japanese Army had carried out a massacre, and some photographs of civilians who had been gunned down had been brought out of Nanking by journalists. As Shujuan lay huddled next to her sobbing friend, imagining her parents enjoying bacon and eggs, they were in fact consumed with anguished remorse, and trying to get boat tickets back to China. They believed, as the Chinese do, that ‘if one in the family was to die, then they should all perish together’.

Shujuan kept in touch with Deacon Fabio Adornato. Like her, he had been profoundly changed by his experiences. He left the Church and began to teach world history and the history of religion. He spoke often of Father Engelmann and the inspiration the priest had been to him. Both he and Shujuan shared the faint hope that they might track down one or two of the women who had so bravely gone with the soldiers. At the very least, if they could find out what had happened to them, it would set their minds at rest.

Shujuan was in her twenties when the Japanese War Crimes Tribunal was held in Nanking in 1946. The entire population of Nanking braved the stifling August heat, and descended on the courtroom to witness the public disgrace of the people who had brutally mistreated them for eight years. Milling crowds packed the courtroom; those who could not get in stood in the surrounding streets. Shujuan was outside, one of the crowd listening through the loudspeakers which were strung from telegraph poles. Suddenly she heard a voice she recognised. A woman was in the witness box testifying to the mass rapes planned and carried out by the Japanese military top brass. Although she was using a different name, Shujuan was sure it was Yumo.

It took Shujuan an hour to push her way through the
crowd and get into the courtroom. Once inside, she recognised the woman immediately, even though her back was turned. From behind, she looked as beautiful as ever, in spite of all she had endured. Shujuan squeezed her way through from the edge of the throng, getting soaked in other people’s sweat as she did so, and came up behind the woman who had possessed the most famously elegant shoulders in 1930s Nanking. She reached out and tapped one of those shoulders. But the face which turned to hers was not as Shujuan remembered it. Something looked wrong. It was as if, Shujuan felt afterwards, its natural beauty had been destroyed and then clumsily reconstructed by a plastic surgeon.

‘Zhao Yumo!’ exclaimed Shujuan in low tones. But the woman peered at her in apparent confusion. ‘I’m Meng Shujuan!’ Shujuan went on.

The woman shook her head. ‘You’ve got the wrong person.’ Yet the voice was Zhao Yumo’s, the same slightly off-key voice which had so captivated the Nanking playboys of the 1930s when she sang.

Shujuan did not give up. She pushed her way to her side and said, ‘I was one of the group of schoolgirls you and the other sisters saved!’

But it was no good. Zhao Yumo kept denying she knew
her. Yet she gave Shujuan a sidelong glance just as Zhao Yumo used to, elegantly lifting the chin which had survived the ravages done to the rest of her face, and spoke in Zhao Yumo’s Suzhou-accented Nanking dialect. ‘Who is Zhao Yumo?’ she asked.

Then she stood up, edged along the rows of seats past people’s knees, and left. No one grumbled. How could they when that beautiful chin expressed such exquisite regret at the inconvenience she was causing?

It was, of course, impossible for Shujuan to follow her. No one was going to make way for her. She had no option but to go back the way she had come in. By the time she got outside, there was no sign of Zhao Yumo.

She wrote to Fabio Adornato, who was then in America, and told him that Zhao Yumo was still alive. Fabio’s grandmother had died in October 1945, leaving her house to him, and Fabio had gone back to sell it. Shujuan told him in her letter how the woman had denied that she was Zhao Yumo. In his reply, which arrived a month later, he said that perhaps it was only by changing her identity that she could go on living. He urged Shujuan to try to put the past behind her now and get on with her life.

Ever headstrong, Shujuan resolved never to give up her
search for the stories of the Qin Huai women. If she didn’t remember them, who would? Some information came to her from Japanese journalists’ notes and some she got by chatting to Japanese veteran soldiers. But most was elicited from the Chinese she met as she travelled through the provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui and Zhejiang, which surround Nanking.

When Zhao Yumo had given her testimony to the War Crimes Tribunal, she had talked about how, when they were first taken, two of the women had tried to resist with knives taken from the St Mary Magdalene kitchen. They were killed on the spot. The other eleven, when the officers had had enough of them, were deposited in a newly established comfort station. Over the next couple of years, they died one by one; some were executed for trying to escape, others died from disease, and a few even committed suicide. The fact that Zhao Yumo was fortunate enough to survive was probably down to her looks and her style, which meant that she was used by middle-ranking and junior officers. They gradually relaxed their vigilance and eventually she made her escape. That was after about four years of being a ‘comfort woman’.

It was only many years later that Shujuan found out what had happened to Cardamom. In an archive she came across
a photograph that had been recovered after the war in the notebook of a Japanese POW. In it, a girl was bound to an old-fashioned wooden chair, her legs forced apart and her private parts exposed to the camera lens. The girl’s face was out of focus, probably because she was struggling so hard and would not keep still, but Shujuan was convinced it was Cardamom. The Japanese soldiers had not only violated her and condemned her to a lingering death, they had immortalised her humiliation in a picture. The notebook also contained a description of what had happened.

Shujuan closed her eyes and tried to imagine the last moments of the girl who had been barely older than she was. Out in the streets at dawn, alone and drunk, Cardamom would have had difficulty getting her bearings. She had been shut up in the brothel since early childhood, no better than a slave. It was even harder for her to find her way now that the invasion had ravaged Nanking, leaving its houses in ruins or burned out, its streets blocked with overturned carts and the shops emptied of people and goods. She must have wandered about, increasingly confused. Then the Japanese soldiers came.

Shujuan knew what happened next from the soldier’s account. They chased after her but Cardamom threw off her pursuers by slipping down a narrow alleyway. That was
when she stumbled over a mound of something soft, the spilled entrails of a dead woman. With a shriek of horror, she stood frozen to the spot, trying to shake the ice-cold sticky mess from her hands. It was her undoing. The soldiers had given up the chase but now they were on her. They were joined by a platoon of cavalry camped nearby who had been alerted by the girl’s cries.

In a looted shop, a large crowd of Japanese soldiers formed an orderly queue in front of a heavy old wooden chair which they were using as an instrument of torture. Cardamom was tied to it and the soldiers, wearing only loincloths, waited their turn to enjoy her. Cardamom’s arms and legs were bound to the chair rests, her legs stretched wide. She swore and spat until the Japanese boxed her ears to shut her up. Then she quieted down, not because she was ready to capitulate but because she suddenly thought of Wang Pusheng. Only the night before she had promised to spend the rest of her life with him. As soon as she finally had four strings for her
pipa
, she had whispered to him, she would play him sonatas, like ‘River on a Spring Night’ and ‘Three Variations on Plum Blossom Melodies’. ‘I can sing you Suzhou folk tunes too,’ she had told him. But now she never would.

Shujuan remembered listening to Cardamom playing ‘Picking Tea’ on her one-stringed
pipa
. At the time it had sounded to her like a dirge. Now she thought of it as the most beautiful music she had ever heard.