Shanghai (97 page)

The Chinese crowd couldn't believe it. A missionary fighting on the filthy pavement of a Julu Lu alley. From the dozens of windows facing the alley, most obscured by laundry satayed on long bamboo poles, came shouts of “
Hoa!
” and other more raucous encouragements to violence. With his limited Mandarin, Maximilian was not able to guess the exact nature of these shouts, but he was sure they were all urging him to kill the Japanese soldier.

And he really wanted to kill the man, but he stopped himself. He knew in his heart that he was no killer. He stood, the skin of his fists split and bleeding, his knuckles swollen, his black clerical shirt sticky from the soldier's blood, but his eyes still afire. Cheers rained down on him from the windows above, shaking the strung sheets and shirts as if they, too, applauded his work. Maximilian smiled. His large, white teeth momentarily reflected the brilliant noonday sun. And he found himself somehow more alive than he had ever been—and somehow finally completely home.

The first bullet went straight through his shoulder, and then a rifle butt crashed into the side of his head just below his ear. He whirled and threw the soldier with the rifle against the alley wall. The man bounced off and landed on his beaten comrade. Sirens sounded and whistles blew—and then there were six Japanese soldiers, their drawn bayonets only inches from his heart.

Maximilian didn't move. His shoulder throbbed and his head leaked, but he didn't move. He was aware of the faces in the alley windows above retreating to the safety of their squalid rooms. He heard shutters snapping to and noticed that even the satayed laundry retreated to inertness.

Then a sharp pain. Something or someone had hit him square in the face and blackness encircled him, slowly blotting out the harsh sun. The last thought he remembered was a reminder to himself—one his mother had repeated endlessly—
Your skin is very fair, stay out of the sun
.

—

He awoke two days later.

The first thing that occurred to him was that he was somehow both cold and hot at the same time. He went to pull his long, red hair out of his face but found that his hands were chained to a post stuck into the ground. When he moved, shards of pain shot through him. Hot pain. It was night, and he was chained to a pole—that he understood. He thought,
So the night air is the cold. And my skin—my sunburned skin—is the hot
.

He took a moment and realized that he was sunburned because he was naked. He could hear the sound of water
lapping against a dock to his left. The night was moonless. He was desperately thirsty. Naked and thirsty—and, to his mind, doing God's work.

—

The History Teller had been watching the naked missionary on and off for the past two days. He had cancelled rehearsals, something he had never done before. Rumours that he was terminally ill spread quickly. They made him smile, but he refused to deny the stories. He spent more and more time in the presence of the naked, starving man: he sensed that something important was happening. Something worthy—something that could inspire art. And as he watched the naked man from across the wide street, over and over again phrases and pieces of phrases fell into his mind—words as colours and music. Combinations of words that he had never used before—combinations that no one had ever used before. Then new words themselves—words formalized from slang—words crystallized and split and reformed in new patterns, not only in his head but in his heart. He felt full of fire, and he noticed out of the side of his eyes that people had moved away from him. In Shanghai, where a person never had much space to himself, the History Teller stood—in the midst of a large crowd—completely alone. But he knew he was not alone. He was communing. Communing with the naked white man chained to the pole, who, clearly, the Japanese were going to allow to starve to death in public as an example to the population at the Bend in the River of what would happen to anyone who interfered with the actions of a Japanese soldier.

And each day the Chinese gathered to watch—and were confused by what they saw. The Japanese were the enemy. Well, so were the
Fan Kuei
. But hadn't the naked
Fan Kuei
tried to save a Chinese woman? What most confused them was the naked
Fan Kuei
's refusal to beg.

Then, near the end of the third day, the naked
Fan Kuei
did the unthinkable.

He managed to get to his feet—and began to peel long strips of his brutally sunburned skin from his body, to entertain the Chinese children who cheered and ducked past the Japanese guards to grab the missionary's strange offerings.

—

Maximilian smiled as the young boy's hand touched his just before he grabbed the piece of sunburned skin. The boy, for an instant, stopped and stared into his eyes. Maximilian tried to speak. He wanted to say, “Don't be afraid. Don't fear to do what is right. Don't be afraid.” But his tongue had swollen in his mouth, and he realized that if he didn't get water into his system soon his tongue might well bloat to such a size that it would cover his windpipe. Would Saint Peter laugh if he arrived naked, striped, and his mouth full of his tongue? He didn't know.

—

Another man observed the scene—and this one had a very different reaction to that of either the children or the History Teller. This man recognized the power inherent in such a public display of resistance. The
Assassin knew a rallying cry when he saw one. And Maximilian's public pain and his refusal to cringe or whimper or plead was just such a clarion call. He watched the brave man, willing to die bravely, and thought,
There are better uses for a man's courage than a public death.
He watched a second boy dodge by the bored guard and grab a strip of skin from the man's outstretched hand. It was the missionary's third day without food or water—he would perhaps last another day—perhaps not.

One of the guards yawned openly.

Watching a man starve to death is a slow and boring process—especially if the prisoner refuses to beg.

The Assassin tilted his head slightly in the direction of three young men across the way. One of the three placed his hand over his heart and splayed his fingers, keeping his ring and baby finger together. The Assassin returned the hand signal with his middle and index finger touching—yes, there would be death today. He felt his swalto blade, like something alive, shift in his inner pocket, as if it ached to find its way to his hand.

And it did, late that very night, as the Assassin led a simple but daring raid on the Japanese guards who kept watch on the starving, naked man. The Japanese were overconfident in their power and so were unprepared as he silently slipped back the sewer cover behind them and castrated the nearest guard with a single slice of his blade. Then he and the three young assassins were everywhere—everywhere the Japanese weren't looking—and before a rifle trigger could be pulled or breath forced through an alarm whistle, the naked man was lifted and carried away.

—

He'd heard the voice first when he was a child. At his mother's grave, the old men mumbling prayers, he'd heard a gentle laugh. Then a strange, somehow foreign voice spoke: “Step forward and say goodbye to your mother.”

He'd been frightened to say a word. Frightened because his mother had taken ill and died so quickly. Frightened because his father was not there, summer storms delaying his ship's return. Frightened by all the old men with beards and black coats. And him just standing there—and people looking at him.

“But I'm just a boy,” he'd whispered to the voice.

“Yes, but she was your mother, and you'll never see her again.”

“I will in Heaven.”

The voice laughed again. It was a gentle laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. Maximilian liked the sound of the laugh. And wished he could laugh too. That the laughter would stay with him. Hoping to please the laughing voice he surprised everyone by pushing his way past the old men in front of him and approaching his mother's grave. The pastor stopped his mumbled reading and looked up.

“Step back, boy.”

But Maximilian didn't step back. He stepped forward, then knelt beside his mother's grave. He stared at the simple pine box deep in the hole. Then he said, “Goodbye, Mother. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye …”

He waited for the laughter to warm him, but none came.

Maximilian took a handful of wet earth and threw it at the pine box.

The muck hit the coffin lid with a loud thud that echoed in his ears. He wanted to hear the laughter again. For it to tell him what to do. But the only voice
he heard belonged to the old pastor, who said, “Stand up, boy.” And somehow he did, and returned to the assembled mourners—where the laughter greeted him with the simple words “Be brave, boy.”

He thought he had heard that gentle laughter other times in his life, but he wasn't sure. Even at the seminary he'd never admitted to anyone that he had what he thought of as a laughing guardian.

Then, on the evening of his third night, naked and scorched and tied to the post on the Bund, he heard the voice again. “Wake up, Max. We're not going to die roped to some post like a dog. Time to do a bit of magic.” Then that laugh.

He opened his eyes and was amazed to see one Japanese guard fall, then another, and then the third. Hands were on him, a knife blade glinted in the moonlight, and the rope that bound him slithered to the ground, then strong arms were holding him and guiding him gently, head first, down a manhole into Shanghai's sewer system.

The very night the Assassin and his Guild members freed Maximilian, the History Teller walked home from his theatre on Beijing Lu through what the Chinese called Shanghai's No-man's Land. The evening's performance had been a lesson in failure. Somehow the pain of the sunburned man had thrown everything he had done in his new opera into a paltry light, virtually a shadow. He had always been aware that this piece was not his best work, but that evening he found himself wincing at what he saw around him on the stage—whining instead of pathos; cleverness replacing thought; and, worst of all, his actors pretending, everywhere faking feeling and intent. He couldn't wait for the evening to be over, and he felt oddly joyful as he posted a notice that there would be no performance for the next three weeks. “How can we perform
nonsense while a naked man bravely starves to death on a street of our city?” he demanded of the shocked company.

As he left the theatre he felt a gnawing deep in his gut. He smelled the deep, acrid air of change, and he knew that things were in motion—and that the naked man had something to do with that.

He turned a corner and was ordered to stop by a Japanese patrol. He produced his identification documents and his permission to be out after curfew. The leader of the patrol took his time reading the documents, then ordered him to get home quickly. The History Teller nodded, careful not to bow to the occupier, and headed down the street. He crossed through a small park with a bronze statue of a
Fan Kuei
boy at play. Long ago the etched plate on the statue's base had been filed down. So now the
Fan Kuei
child played in total anonymity.

He exited the park, turned another corner, then another, and was surprised to hear Japanese voices calling from the darkness of an alley for him to stop.

“Coolie! Stop right there, coolie.”

He stood very still and allowed the men to approach him, in much the way one does crossing a bicycle-filled Shanghai street. Three dishevelled Japanese soldiers came out of the alleyway. He wondered if they had been to the famous brothel down there.

“Coolie!” one of them shouted again as they emerged from the shadows into the brightness of the street. In the harsh sodium light, any thought that they were simply soldiers on patrol evaporated. These were three drunken Japanese soldiers, no doubt from the Japanese countryside. Just spear-carriers and cannon-fodder in the Japanese Imperial Army. But to put peasants like these in charge of a sophisticated city like Shanghai sent a shiver of fear down the History Teller's spine.

One of them opened his mouth to speak. The History Teller could smell the disagreeable entwining of meat fragments and vomit on the man's breath. A lingering whiff of cheap alcohol hung on the still night air.

“Coolie, papers!”

For an instant he thought of complaining that he had just been stopped a few blocks before, but he decided against using logic with drunken peasants. Before he could pull his papers from an inner pocket, though, one of them threw him to the cracked pavement and began shouting at him. Then the soldiers encircled him and began to kick dirt at him as they laughed for no discernible reason. One spat on him—their laughter grew—while another fumbled with the buttons of his flies. The History Teller rolled just in time to distract the man's aim and the drunken man urinated on the feet of his compatriot. The wetted man let out a scream while the other two laughed as if this were the most extraordinarily clever thing that anyone, anywhere, had ever managed. The one with his penis still in his hand turned back to the History Teller but was surprised to find the man was no longer on the ground. He let out a grunt. The History Teller shouted in furious Mandarin mixed with just enough Japanese, “That's the ugliest one I've ever seen. Does it do anything but piss? I wouldn't imagine something that ugly has ever entered a jade gate.” The Japanese were startled by the History Teller's words and were about to respond when a dark, female voice interrupted them in furious Japanese.

“Is this how you would act if you were in the presence of a great
shirabyashi?
Don't you dare look around.

You will not look directly at me or my kind. If we were in Kyoto I would have you whipped. Now go.”

The soldiers bowed low and grovelled their way back into the alley.

The History Teller waited until the soldiers were gone, then turned to his rescuer—and was astonished to see the young and already famous Jiang. He bowed quickly and said, “I am in your debt.”