Nanjing Requiem (14 page)

“That’s because they were ignorant of the truth.” She’d also heard about the celebrations all over Japan, and that was why she couldn’t stop imagining ways to deflate their jubilation. She had once suggested to the Safety Zone Committee that they rent a plane and drop a ton of truth-bearing pamphlets over Japan. That had brought out peals of laughter from the other foreigners. Lewis even joked that if Minnie could find a plane in Nanjing, he’d fly the mission, and Searle volunteered to be an airborne leafleter.

We stood for a while on the hill slope. From there we could see the Yangtze glittering like lava in the northwest, against the crimson sunset. On the waterway a handful of sampans were sailing upstream almost motionlessly.

15

F
OR A WEEK
Minnie had been working on a report to Jinling’s board of founders in New York. She was required to keep an official diary that would be mailed to our headquarters in New York at the end of each semester. In addition, she needed to send in a monthly report, so toward the end of each month she would work on the lengthy piece of writing. I wouldn’t trade places with her even if they paid me twice her salary, though I could write and even kept a personal diary. In recent weeks Minnie often showed me her writings, and I could see that she couldn’t be completely candid about what was happening. Besides the politics within our college, the Japanese monitored the international mail. She knew that other eyes, some hostile, would read the pages.

She used carbon paper to make an extra copy of the report for Dr. Wu, though without her address we didn’t know where to send it yet. Minnie reviewed the major happenings before and after the fall of the city, including our efforts to help the refugees, the measures we’d taken to protect the school’s properties, the conditions of the neighborhood, and the systematic destruction of lives and homes by the Japanese. She listed some arrests, rapes, robberies, and instances of arson—but they were too numerous to include all of them. Besides, she couldn’t mention too many atrocities in case the Japanese confiscated the letter. She included the abduction of the twelve girls on December 17, but emphasized that six of them had come back unharmed the next morning. She wrote: “We deem that this miracle was wrought by our prayers.”

I thought about telling her my doubts about the six girls’ claim that the Japanese had not molested them, but I had no evidence to back up my conjecture, so I refrained.

Minnie talked with me about the twenty-one “prostitutes.” Should we report that as well? If we did, what should we say? Would the board members in New York understand the situation? I could tell that Minnie was worried about Mrs. Dennison, because the old woman was in New York at the moment, fund-raising for our college, and she had always kept a close watch on Jinling. Mrs. Dennison might make a big fuss about this incident and even publicize it as a scandal, as we could not describe the circumstances in detail without putting ourselves at greater risk with the Japanese authorities.

After we had deliberated, Minnie said to me, “If it’s a mistake on my part, I’ll bear the guilt alone and do more good deeds to atone for it. God is greater than our hearts and knows everything.”

I didn’t fully understand her last sentence and asked, “You mean your conscience is clear?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. But for now I prefer to keep this matter between God and me.”

“If you’re at fault, I’m part of it too. Don’t worry about it. Nobody will say you’re responsible for losing those women. We all know that the Japanese would have seized them one way or another that day.”

Somehow we both felt that some of the abducted women might come back, that it might be too early to fully gauge the weight of the incident. What’s more, we were certain that among the twenty-one women there’d been at least two or three former prostitutes. Deep down, though, we both knew that most of the women were unmarried and innocent. If only we had some information on them. If only we could find a way to bring some of them back. Those young lives had been ruined. No matter how we tried to reason away our responsibility, we were somewhat implicated, since by now everyone knew that Minnie had granted the Japanese permission. I made a mental note to write to Dr. Wu about this incident once I heard from her.

The more Minnie ruminated on this, the more remorseful and distressed she became. I urged her to stop thinking about it. There was so much to worry about at the moment that we mustn’t let our sense of guilt paralyze us.

We decided to focus on the first eleven days of the Japanese occupation, up to December 23, so that Minnie wouldn’t have to mention what had transpired on the twenty-fourth. When the next report was due, she could start from Christmas. Besides her inability to clearly explain her responsibility for the abduction, she was afraid of giving Mrs. Dennison a weapon to use against her. We knew that the only person who cared to scrutinize her report was the old woman, who seemed to hover over Minnie’s shoulder all the time. To appease Mrs. Dennison, Minnie stressed that the refugee camp here was only temporary, that we would try to reinstate the college as soon as possible after the refugees left.

Having written about a few more rape cases and several such attempts that had been stopped in time, Minnie concluded: “I wish we could have prevented all the tragedies, but compared to most of the other camps, our record is exceedingly good.” That was true, yet it didn’t ease her mind.

One of the accomplishments she wrote about was teaching the refugees to line up for food. For weeks the women and girls had crowded the porridge stands, jostling to reach the cauldrons. The lawn had been trampled into puddles of mud, and even the cypress hedges were crushed in places. How marvelous it was to see the women standing in orderly lines at mealtimes now. Minnie also reported that many refugees complained that the porridge was too watery. Obviously there was theft going on in the porridge plant, but as yet we hadn’t been able to find out where. The graft angered Minnie, and she assigned Luhai to keep a close watch on the cooks, but he couldn’t detect the cause. Minnie vowed to get to the bottom of it and questioned the headman of the kitchen personally. The pockmarked man named Boom Chen hemmed and hawed, saying he’d do everything in his power to thicken the porridge, but so far nothing had changed and the refugees kept griping.

Several times our college had offered to run the porridge plant ourselves, yet the local Red Cross people would not let us. Minnie couldn’t understand why they still had profit in mind under such circumstances. If only there was a way to nab the crooks.

The report was at last completed. How should she send it? Minnie said she would ask a fellow missionary going to Shanghai to mail it from there.

16

T
HE JAPANESE TROOPS
grew less violent after the New Year, and some refugees felt things were stable enough that they no longer needed to stay in our camp. By mid-January, we still had seven thousand refugees. Many women believed that only through Minnie’s intervention could they get their menfolk back, so they stuck with us. In late January Minnie and Big Liu presented the petition to the Japanese embassy, where an attaché named Fukuda accepted it and said that some office would give it full consideration. At the same time the puppet municipality, the so-called Autonomous City Government, composed of some bureaucrats and local gentry who had Japanese connections, ordered that all the refugee camps close down by February 9, which in a way eased Minnie’s mind a little because she knew that Mrs. Dennison would hate to see the college remain a refugee camp.

We began persuading the older women among the refugees to go home. Some left, but they came back within two or three days. Many of the refugees had no place to live anymore, for nothing was left of their homes. One woman in her early forties was dragged away by four soldiers; they molested her for a whole night and did not release her until the next afternoon. She came back and begged Minnie never to make her go home again. A woman of sixty-three went back and was caught by two soldiers. She told them she must be as old as their grandmothers; all the same, they knocked her down, raped her, and stomped on her bound feet. She limped back to Jinling the next day, still shaken, and couldn’t stop her tears. Some of the women, shocked and humiliated, wouldn’t speak to anyone after they were back in our camp.

Their stories upset us, and we realized that we could not close the camp in a hurry. Even if we tried hard, there was no way to meet the deadline, which was just a week away. One thing we were clear about now—no matter what, we must never force any woman to leave. We ignored the deadline, giving the excuse that most of the refugees were homeless.

THE DEADLINE
had passed, but not a single camp closed down. John Rabe insisted to the officials that there was no way to send the women home without exposing them to molestation by the soldiers, so the matter was dropped. Meanwhile, the Autonomous City Government had been registering all the citizens and refugees, and declared that anyone older than fifteen without an ID certificate would be arrested and jailed. Frightened, people lined up at various camps to go through the registration process. Some living outside the Safety Zone even came a day before and, bundled in overcoats or wrapped in blankets, waited a whole night to get registered. A lot of men feared that this might be another ruse to ensnare the so-called former soldiers and have more of them “mopped up.” Indeed, in the past three weeks the Japanese had seized more than twenty thousand men from various registration sites. Promised leniency and well-paid jobs, those men had stepped out, hoping to make some money for their families, but the Japanese apprehended them all. About three thousand of them were forced into convict labor while the rest were led to execution grounds.

Hundreds of men were coming to our camp, wanting to get registered here, because if they were accused of being former soldiers, some brave women, as instructed by me, would step forward and vouch for them, saying that the men were their husbands or sons. As a result, the officials would be likely to let them pass and give them the ID papers, a one-page document, five by three inches, folded down the middle, stamped with a scarlet seal, and printed with the characters
Good Citizen Certificate
. On the inside was information about the carrier and also his or her mug shot. The Japanese had been in charge of the registration originally, but it got more and more confusing, and it was hard, almost impossible, for them to tell who was a former soldier, so they left the whole matter in their puppets’ hands. The Safety Zone Committee urged all the refugee camps to participate in the registration as a gesture of “cooperation” with the new municipality. In addition, John Rabe and his colleagues all believed that it would be safer for the refugees to register in the foreigners’ presence, and therefore they told people to get the ID papers now.

Siemens had decided to close its Nanjing office by the end of February, so Rabe would be returning to Germany. His imminent departure caused quite a stir among the camps. He had been nicknamed the Living Buddha and was revered by the refugees. Some people called him Mayor Rabe, but he forbade them to do that, not wanting to antagonize the Autonomous City Government, which was eager to replace both the Safety Zone Committee and the International Red Cross Committee. For days Minnie and I had been thinking about giving him a farewell dinner, but it was impossible to get fresh meat and fish, so we decided to give a tea party instead.

It was like spring on February 17, balmy and cloudless. The refugees at Jinling hung their bedding in the sun while some girls mopped the floors and wiped the windows and doors of the buildings. The whole campus looked lively and colorful—laundered clothes and diapers were spread on evergreen hedges, making the place resemble a thickly settled village. The unkempt sight made me wonder how long the refugee camp would last. If Mrs. Dennison saw this, she might have a stroke.

I made a kind of fruitcake, using minced candied fruit, for the tea party in Rabe’s honor. We also opened the last box of chocolates in our pantry and placed it next to a tray of peeled tangerines and a bowl of canned pineapple. Rabe brought along two stout sausages, which we cut and placed next to a platter of cured duck. In addition to three German businessmen and eight American missionaries, John Allison, the second secretary at the reopened U.S. embassy, attended too. He’d done diplomatic service for five years in Tokyo and Kobe and spoke Japanese. Allison now functioned as the top American diplomat in Nanjing. Oddly, today he was escorted by a Japanese guard, a hulk of a soldier, as if he were under arrest. This was probably because a sentry had manhandled him a fortnight before and several newspapers in the West had reported the incident. Allison had returned to Nanjing six weeks earlier and was still shaken by the horrific condition of the city, particularly by the corpses scattered on the streets, some partly eaten by dogs and birds. He couldn’t understand why the Imperial Army, noted for its discipline, would kill so indiscriminately. The Germans in Nanjing—Rabe, Rosen, Sperling, and a few others—often made fun of his shock, calling him Allison in Wonderland.

On the round table sat a bowl of vegetable salad mixed with cellophane noodles and peanut butter, which all the guests liked. Most of them stood around chatting, with plates and forks in their hands. Big Liu proposed a toast, raising a cup of oolong tea and announcing with a smile: “Even if the Chinese are totally deprived, we still have fine tea.”

People raised their cups and drank to Rabe’s health and good fortune back in Germany. To my knowledge, Rabe wasn’t doing well in spite of his hardy appearance. He always carried a vial of insulin and a syringe in his pocket for his diabetes. Because he often had to climb out of bed in the dead of night to repel soldiers who attempted to break into his home or into the small compound of the German school, he’d feel sleepy during the day and nod off at times. Rabe was going to Shanghai first and from there sailing to Genoa, which would take more than four weeks; then he’d head to Berlin by rail. He had no idea what was in store for him back home. He told Minnie and Holly, “I’ll collapse by the time I join my children.”