The Devil of Nanking (14 page)

As I sit writing at the window, the lattice shutters open, I am looking directly down into the street, and what can I see? A woman wheeling a handcart in the direction of the Shangyuan gate. It is piled with mattresses and furniture and soybean sacks. On top of the bundle is strapped a dead man, quite naked. Her husband maybe, or a relative who has been waiting for the money for a funeral. Look at that sight! Have we become insane? Are we so eager to abandon our city that we can’t even bury our dead here?

At my elbow lie two small cards. Refugee certificates. One for Shujin, one for me. If the day comes when the Japanese arrive we will wear them pinned to our clothing. I collected them this morning at the Red Swastika Society. When the sun came out as I was walking home, I took off my cap. One of the lecturers had told me to do this. He has decided not to stay in Nanking: he’s going to head for the river, hoping to break through somewhere upstream of Xiaguan and make for Chongqing. As we said goodbye he looked at me carefully and said, ‘If you are outside in the sun today take off your cap. Get a tan on your forehead. I heard they’ll tear off a civilian’s cap and if he’s pale on the forehead they take him for military.’

‘But we’re civilians,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking at me with something like pity in his eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘We’re civilians,’ I repeated, as he walked away. I had to raise my voice. ‘And if it comes to it the Japanese will know us as such and leave us in peace.’

I stood for a while, my heart beating angrily as he disappeared down the corridor. It was a long time before I made my way out on to the street. I walked for a short way, then glanced over my shoulder. I was out of sight of the campus, so I snatched off the cap quickly, shovelled it into my pocket and walked the rest of the way home with my head back, my face turned up to the sun, the words my mother said on her deathbed running through my head: ‘Turn your face to the sun, my boy. Remember that life is short. Always turn your face to the sun when you have the chance.’

Snow came in the night. All night long I listened to the muffled silence, Shujin completely quiet next to me. She has to lie on her side now because she is getting big, and I can feel her feet, the tips of her fingers cold on the occasions they brush my skin. She is so quiet, these days, that she seems almost transparent, as if one day she might just dissolve away leaving a baby in her place. So contained. Maybe she thinks that these are the crucial days, when our baby is exposed to primal human forces – love, truth, compassion and justice – and maybe she needs to keep quiet and concentrate so that these elements will come in their purest form. She rarely mentions leaving any more. From time to time she asks me, ‘Chongming, what’s happening? What’s happening in the east?’ And each time I have no words for her, only lies: ‘Nothing. Nothing. All is as it should be. General Tang is in control.’

When we drew back the bed-curtains this morning condensation had gathered on the glass in the windows, and outside the snow was deep on the ground. Usually by midday it has been turned to slush by the carts, but today Nanking is eerily silent. Only the army vehicles move through the streets and when I went to a market near the Ming Palace ruins to buy locks for the doors, nails to barricade the house, I was surprised to see that only a handful of traders was setting up stall, the snowflakes hissing on their red charcoal-burners. I bought padlocks from a vendor who charged ten times the normal amount. They are almost certainly stolen, but he seemed to have no difficulty selling them.

‘Mr Shi!’

I turned from the stall and was surprised to see, of all people, a professor of literature from Shanghai University, Liu Runde. I have met him only once before and I couldn’t immediately fathom what he was doing in a Nanking market.

I cupped my gloved hands, lifted them above my face and bowed to him. ‘How odd to see you,’ I said, lowering my hands, ‘here in Nanking.’

‘How odd to see you, Mr Shi.’ He was wearing a traditional man’s gown, his hands folded around a hand brazier inside his copious sleeves, and, incongruously, a western hat with a wide grey band. He removed his brazier from inside the folds of his gown, stooping to place it on the ground, so he could return the bow. ‘How odd to see anyone. I imagined the entire staff of Jinling University had fled the city.’

‘Oh no. No, no. Not me.’ I tightened my jacket at the throat and tried to sound casual, just as if staying here had always been my intention. ‘My wife is expecting a baby, you know. She needs to be near the hospitals, the city health centre. A fine institute, some of the very latest technology.’ I stamped my feet a few times, as if I was not nervous but merely trying to keep out the cold. When he didn’t say anything else I looked around the deserted street then leaned nearer to him, saying in a low whisper, ‘Why? Do you think I’m unwise?’

‘Unwise?’ He looked ruminatively along the street, over my shoulder, out across the galvanized roofs, in the direction of the east, a thoughtful, pinched expression on his face. After a while his expression cleared, a little colour came to his cheeks, and he looked back down at me with a warm smile. ‘No. Not unwise at all. Quite the contrary.’

I blinked at him, my heart rising. ‘The contrary?’

‘Yes. Oh, let’s not doubt there are those who have no faith in our president – sometimes it seems as if the whole of China has lost trust in him and is fleeing to the interior. But as for me? I have made up my mind. I fled Shanghai, I admit that, but my days of flight are over.’

‘There are those who say Tang is weak, not committed. What do you think of those opinions? Some people say the Japanese will walk all over him. Some people say they’ll come into the city and kill us in our homes.’

‘Pah! Some people are too afraid of change, if you ask me. It takes men like us, like you and me, Master Shi, to stand firm. To forget the cowardly, backward nation we have left behind us – to show faith in our city, in our president’s choice of general. Otherwise what do we amount to? A gaggle of whey-faced cowards, that’s what. Besides, the Nationalist forces have every trick up their sleeves. Just look out there, beyond the eastern walls. Can you see the smoke?’

‘Yes.’

‘Buildings burning outside the eastern walls. Burned by our men. To those who say Chiang Kai-shek has no military policy, give them this: scorched earth. The policy of scorched earth. Let the Japanese find nothing, nothing to subsist on as they march. That’ll finish them in no time.’

The relief I felt was indescribable. Suddenly, after all this anxiety, I am vindicated, reassured that I am not alone. Standing there, all at once it seemed as if I was with a very dear old friend. We talked and talked, the snow falling on our shoulders, and when, in the course of our conversation, we discovered that he and his family are living, coincidentally, less than half a
li
away from Shujin and myself, we decided to continue the conversation at his house. We walked amicably, arm in arm, back to his house, a one-storey adobe shack with a
kaoling
thatch, no courtyard and no electricity, in which live old Liu, his wife and their teenage son, a dark little thing who appears to my eyes to have been rubbed in dirt.

Liu has brought many things from Shanghai, foreign luxuries: cans of condensed milk and French cigarettes, which we smoked while we talked, like a pair of fashionable Parisian intellectuals. Earlier this summer, it transpires, old Liu locked up his house near Shanghai’s Bund and sent his wife and son ahead of him, here, to Nanking, while he stayed on at the university, sleeping in a lecture hall and holding out in his job for as long as was possible. When eventually the city was overrun he evaded capture by hiding in a waste barrel in the university kitchen, and had reached Nanking with a great tide of peasants, just ahead of the Japanese Army, everywhere seeing flatboats and sampans crammed with evacuees cowering under the reeds.

‘When I got to Suzhou I saw the Japanese soldiers first hand. I saw them jumping across the canals. Leaping across the water like demons,
arisakas
jangling on their backs. They are so nimble nothing can stop them. The
riben guizi
.’

Hearing this I felt a vague unease. Here, in the privacy of his house, Liu Runde seemed less brave and zealous than he had out on the street – from time to time he would rub his nose or glance nervously in the direction of the windows. It crossed my mind then that in spite of his big words he might be as anxious as I was.

‘Do you know,’ he said, raising his eyebrows and leaning in to me, giving me a dry smile, ‘I even saw Shanghai, the whole city of Shanghai, floating inland across the plains?’

‘Shanghai? How can that be?’

‘Yes. You think I’m crazy. Or dreaming. But it’s true. I stood on an escarpment and saw Shanghai drifting inland.’

I frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

He laughed. ‘Yes! That look! That is exactly the same look I had on my face when I saw it. It took some time for me to believe I wasn’t going mad. Do you know what I was really seeing?’

‘No.’

‘I was seeing the panic of the Shanghai residents. They’ve dismantled whole buildings. Whole factories. Can you imagine it? They’re moving them inland on junks and steamers, south-west to Chongqing. I saw turbines floating down the Yangtze, an entire plant, a textile mill . . .’ He held out his hand and mimicked the gay bobbing motion of a boat on a horizon. ‘All of Shanghai sailing upstream to Chongqing.’

He smiled at me, encouraging a response, but I was silent. Something here was wrong. Earlier Liu’s wife had placed a pie of grated chestnut on the table. It was decorated with the character for good luck in egg white, and now my eye was drawn to that familiar character. I raised my eyes to the corridor, to where she had retired, then dropped them back to the pie. I considered her earlier demeanour – oddly withdrawn – and suddenly the picture became clear.

Of course. Of course. I saw it now. I looked up at Old Liu, with his pinched face and greying hair, and understood. He was fighting the same battle with his wife as I was with Shujin. There is no doubt he fears the Japanese, but he fears years of superstition and backward beliefs more. We are in the same bed, Liu and I, and, unlike the old saying, we are dreaming exactly the same dream.

‘Old Liu.’ I leaned a little closer, and spoke in a low whisper: ‘Forgive me.’ I swallowed and tapped my fingers on the table. This was an awkward thing to say. ‘Forgive me if I haven’t understood you. I believe that earlier you said there was nothing to fear from the Japanese.’

At that Liu’s face changed. He became very red and he rubbed his nose compulsively, as if he was trying not to sneeze. He straightened in his chair and cast a glance in the direction his wife had retreated. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said bluffly. ‘Yes, that is exactly what I said.’ He held up a reproving finger. ‘We must be at pains to remember this: those who doubt the Kuomintang will always look to us, searching for faith in our eyes. Keep the faith, Master Shi, keep the faith. We
are
doing the right thing.’

As I walked home through the snow, I tried to keep my head high.
Keep the faith. We are doing the right thing
. But I was remembering something else about our meeting that had made me uneasy. As we were talking in the market I had noticed that the women of Nanking were hiding. I was watching them during the conversation, glancing over the professor’s shoulder, and I had quite forgotten about it until now. They had come to the market as usual, but they all wore shawls over their heads and their faces were blackened with charcoal. They walked almost bent double like old crones, although I knew many of them were young.

I felt suddenly angry. I knew what they are afraid of at the hands of the Japanese. I knew they were hiding, turning inwards like hibernating animals, disappearing inside themselves. But must this happen? Must the colour in our country change? We, the Chinese, a whole people, a whole cowardly, backward nation, we are disappearing into our landscape. Running and hiding. Chameleonizing ourselves into a million outlines scratched into the dry rock and stone of the Gobi desert. We’d rather disappear and sink into our land than stand up straight and look the Japanese in the eye.

Jason said the house had belonged to the landlord’s mother, that she had become very ill, maybe crazy, and the lower levels had fallen into such disrepair that they had become uninhabitable. Clouds of mosquitoes always hung around the closed-up windows and Svetlana said there were ghosts down there. She told us that the Japanese believed in a strange creature: a winged goblin, a feathered mountain man – Tengu, they called him – an abductor of human beings, who could flit as easily as a moth. Svetlana swore she’d heard a rustling in the garden and seen something heavy picking its way through the persimmon trees. ‘Sssh!’ she’d say, breaking off dramatically in the middle of a story, her finger to her lips. ‘Did you hear that? From downstairs?’