The Devil of Nanking (25 page)

‘Look,’ I murmured. ‘Look at this, old Liu.’ It was dawning on me how foolish I had been to imagine the Japanese to be somehow a little like us, to imagine we might even be safe with them. These men were not like us. I sank down behind the small parapet and put my head in my hands. ‘What a mistake we’ve made. What a terrible mistake.’

Liu moved to sit next to me, his big hand gently on my back. I am glad he didn’t speak to me. I am glad, because if I had opened my mouth to reply I might have said these words:
Maybe not now, maybe not tonight, but soon the end will come. Trust me, old Liu, our wives have been right all along. Soon we are going to die
.

In the taxi on the way home Jason and I sat in silence, not speaking. Irina and Svetlana giggled and smoked and lapsed in and out of Russian, but I didn’t hear a word. I was conscious of every inch of my skin, itchy like an animal whose fur has been stroked against the grain. I kept shuffling and moving my bottom around on the seat until Irina got irritated and nudged me. ‘Stop it. Stop fuckink wiggling like a worm. You gone crazy?’ On the other side of her, next to the window, sitting in profile, Jason shook his head in secret amusement. He lowered his face and put a finger to the tip of his nose and nodded, as if someone invisible had just whispered a question in his ear.

Back at the house the Russians went straight to bed and I pulled off my coat, hung it next to Jason’s holdall on the peg at the top of the stairs and walked, without a word, down the corridor to my room. He followed me. When he stepped inside he could see I was jittery. ‘I know you’re scared.’

‘No.’ I rubbed my arms. ‘No. I’m not scared.’

He must have been wondering what was making me so flustered – maybe he had thoughts about assault, child abuse, rape. I was trembling so hard I had to take deep breaths every time he touched me. I tried to keep calm and visualize something serene, something dark and weighty sitting just under my ribs, so I didn’t collapse. But Jason didn’t seem to notice anything until he’d got me backed up to the dressing-table, and was standing between my open legs, my dress pushed up above my waist. He stared down at the flushed tops of my thighs, hypnotized by the place where we were going to be locked together. Where the thin skin on my inner thighs touched his, I could feel his heart beating in the big vessels going to his groin. ‘These,’ he said, putting his fingers inside the elastic of my knickers. ‘Take them off.’

‘No.’ I grabbed at them. ‘Please.’

‘Ah,’ he said, in a low, fascinated voice, looking curiously into my face. ‘Is this it? Have I found it?’ He hooked his fingers into the waistband again. ‘Is this what you’re hiding—’

‘No!’ I shot backwards, scattering things on the dressing-table, making them smash on the floor. ‘Please don’t. Please!’

‘Christ,’ he said, taking a sudden breath, almost as if I’d hurt him. ‘Easy, easy.’ He took a few surprised steps sideways, putting his hands on the dressing-table to get his balance. ‘Fuck, weirdo. Easy.’

I sank back, dropping my legs, my hands over my eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘I’m sorry. Please. Don’t take them off.’

He didn’t answer at first, and for a long time there was nothing, only the shocked silence and the sound of my heartbeat. I wished I could tell him. I wished I could. I wished that everything was different. Eventually he brought his lips near my neck and breathed lightly on it. I froze, afraid of what he was going to say.

‘Know something, weirdo? You just cannot imagine how alike we are, you and me. I know exactly what’s going on in your head.’

‘Please don’t take them off.’

‘I’m not going to. Not now. But let me tell you what’s going to happen. One day, one day soon, you’ll tell me what it is. And you know what?’

I dropped my hands and looked at him. ‘What?’

‘It won’t even be a big deal. Because . . .’ He looked up at the walls, at the mural of Tokyo, at the paintings of Nanking pinned on the walls. His eyes gleamed in the half-light. ‘. . . because you and me are – we’re the same. Did you know that?’

I shook my head, wiped my face with my hands and pushed the hair out of my eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, in a tight voice. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘You don’t need to be.’ He kissed my neck, licking me with the flat of his tongue, just below my ear, waiting a moment for me to soften and absorb him. ‘You don’t need to be. The only problem is . . .’

‘Mmmm?’

‘If you keep those panties on, how’m I going to fuck you?’

I took a deep breath. I pushed him away and bunched my skirt up round my waist. Then I put my index finger into the crotch and pulled it aside. It only took him a moment to see how the magic knickers worked.

And after that the whole thing was so perfect – it was just as if the loose atoms and membranes in me all stretched up at once and leaped free of me, whirling among the stars and the planets. Afterwards I could hardly speak. Jason pulled on his jeans, took one of my cigarettes, put it in his mouth and lit it, tilting his chin back so the cigarette looked as if it was doing a handstand. He folded his arms across his chest, his hands tucked into his armpits, and looked sideways through the smoke at the flowers on my knickers, as if he suspected I was playing some sort of joke on him.

‘What?’ I said nervously, smoothing my knickers across my stomach, checking nothing was showing. ‘What?’

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and laughed. ‘Nothing.’ He flicked the ash into the air with a flourish, like a conjuror. Then he went to the door and stepped outside without a word. I heard him at the end of the corridor, getting his keys, putting on his shoes, and clattering down the steps. Then the house was silent. And I was sitting on my own, on the dressing-table, naked except for my magic knickers.

I slid off the table with a thump and went to the window. The alley was empty – Jason was nowhere to be seen. He really had gone. I turned my face baldly up to Mickey Rourke, meeting his eyes. He was smiling as if nothing had happened. There was the smallest, sweetest breeze coming in from the Tokyo bay, making the bamboo move, and on the breeze I thought I could smell south-sea islands and shrimp frying on distant lighted junks. The only sounds were the rustling of the wind in the bamboo, the faraway rumble of traffic.

What did this mean? Had he left me, just like the boys in the van? Had I got it all wrong? I sat down on the floor, rubbing my stomach over and over again. My heart was hammering in my chest. I should never have let it go this far – I should have left everything just as it was. I looked at the condom he’d left in the bin, and the same blank feeling I’d had watching the van’s lights disappear came over me again, like nausea.
Didn’t you learn your lesson, then?

Eventually I picked up my dress and pulled it on. I went to the bin, lifted the condom on my fingernail and carried it down the corridor in the dark. I dropped it into the scooped-out Japanese-style toilet bowl, stared at it for a few moments then flushed. The water rushed in, silvery in the moonlight, making the condom spin a few times. Then it was sucked away and I was looking at nothing.

At the far end of the house the front door slammed and I heard footsteps on the stairs.

‘Grey?’

He was back. I pushed myself away from the wall, stepped into the corridor and there he was, his arms full of bags from the all-night convenience store. It sounds silly now, but at the time, knowing he’d come back, he really looked to me like an angel. I could see
sake
bottles and a huge bag of dried cuttlefish sticking out of the tops of the bags.

‘We need fuel.’ He pulled out a packet of
sembei
to show me. ‘We need energy so we can do it again.’

I closed my eyes, and let my hands drop.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, a stupid, involuntary smile spreading across my face. ‘Nothing.’

After the vehicles, after the shattering roar and flash of lights, came the soldiers. They ran through the streets like the devils Liu had described in Suzhou. Every time the road had been silent for a while, and we began to hope it was safe to venture out, we’d hear the sinister jangle of a bayonet frog, the slap-slap of pigskin boots, and three or four more IJA soldiers,
arisaka
rifles at the ready, would come. The patrolman at the head of the street had found a packing crate and was sitting on it, smoking cigarettes, waving his comrades through. Eventually, exhausted and freezing, Liu and I curled up next to each other for warmth, our backs to the wall, his arm round my shoulders, like an older brother.

When we’d been there for more than two hours the moon, which was a solid silver disc, so breathlessly clear that we could see the cups and crenations in its surface, slid another degree down the western sky and suddenly illuminated a deformed black anomaly in the horizon, gently sloped and blocking the sky. For a while we looked at it in silence.

‘What’s that?’ Liu murmured.

‘Tiger Mountain?’

They say that only in some parts of Nanking can the tiger’s head in Tiger Mountain be seen properly. It has to be viewed from the correct direction. From this angle it was unrecognizable as the mountain I knew – an altogether different shape, and oddly small, as if dreadfully diminished by the invasion. ‘It can only be Tiger Mountain.’

‘I had no idea we were so close.’

‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘It means we’re nearer the walls than I thought.’

A cloud crossed the moon, a silver and red scrap of lace, and the shadows on our roof seemed to shift and flutter. I closed my eyes and huddled closer to Liu. Behind us in the street we could still hear the Japanese troops. Suddenly all the tiredness in the world came to me: I knew we were going to have to sleep there on the roof. Liu pulled his jacket tight round him and began to talk very quietly. He told me about the day his son was born, in Shanghai, in a house not far from the fabulous Bund, about how all the family had come to the
man yue
when the boy was a month old, bringing him coins in envelopes, playing with him, making him kick and laugh and squirm so that the little gold bells on his ankles and wrists jingled. Liu could hardly believe that now he was living in a one-storey hut in an alley, scurrying through the streets hunting sick dogs for food.

While he talked I tucked my sleeves into my gloves and arranged my tunic so that it covered as much of me as possible. Liu’s words flowed over me, and my mind drifted out, past Tiger Mountain and along up the Yangtze, stretching away from Nanking: across the salty alluvial plains stretching eastwards to Shanghai over miles of countryside, wayside shrines littered with incense ash, graves dug on the slivers of ground next to the railways, the clatter of ducks being driven to market, dwellings carved into the yellow stone – unbearably hot in the summer, insulated and safe in the winter. I thought of all the families across China, waiting patiently under teak trees in villages, of all the smallholdings where people are honest and nothing is wasted – straw and grass are burned for fuel, and children’s balloons are made from nothing more than pig bladders. I tried – I tried hard not to imagine Japanese tanks rumbling through it all. I tried hard not to picture them crushing the countryside under their treads, the rising-sun flags fluttering as the entire continent quaked.

Eventually my eyes grew heavy, and before long old Liu’s words became quieter. They faded with my thoughts into the night, and I fell into a light sleep.

‘Wake up.’

I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw, very close to me, was Liu Runde’s face, wet and pink, his eyelashes covered in snow. ‘Wake up and look.’

It was early morning and he was pointing out over the roof, an uneasy expression on his face. I jerked up, startled. I had forgotten where I was. The roof was covered with snow and the dawn was sidelighting everything a weak, supernatural pink.