The Devil of Nanking (27 page)

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Shi Chongming said.

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

I fumbled out a cigarette and lit it, blowing the smoke up into the cloudless sky. ‘I – I don’t know. I’m not sure.’

‘When you were at Fuyuki’s did you see anything?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

He sat forward and lowered his voice. ‘You did? You saw something?’

‘Only a glimpse.’

‘A glimpse of what?’

‘I’m not certain – a sort of glass box.’

‘A tank, you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ I blew a lungful of smoke into the thin air. The clouds, I noticed, were reflected in the windows of the gallery. Jason was asleep in my room, lying on his back on the futon. I could see the layout of his body in my head, I could hold all the details of it – the way his arm would be curled across his chest, the sound his breath would make coming in and out of his nose.

‘What about at a zoo?’

I looked sideways at him. ‘A zoo?’

‘Yes,’ Shi Chongming said. ‘Have you seen anything like it at a zoo? I mean, the sort of tank that could be climate-controlled, maybe.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were there gauges? The sort that would monitor the air inside? Or thermometers, humidity monitors?’

‘I don’t know. It was . . .’

‘Yes?’ Shi Chongming was sitting forward in his seat, looking at me intently. ‘It was what? You said you saw something in the tank.’

I blinked at him. He was wrong. I hadn’t said that.

‘Maybe something . . .’ he held out his hands to represent something the size of a small cat ‘. . . about this big.’

‘No. I didn’t see anything.’

Shi Chongming closed his mouth tightly and looked at me for a long time, his face perfectly still. I could see sweat breaking out on his forehead. Then he pulled a handkerchief from his coat and quickly mopped his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, returning the handkerchief and sitting back in his seat with a long exhalation. ‘I see you’ve changed your mind. Haven’t you?’

I tapped the ash from my cigarette and frowned at him.

‘I have invested an enormous amount of time in you and now you’ve changed your mind.’

He left by the big gates, and when he’d gone I went upstairs. The Russians were wandering around the house, cooking and squabbling, and while I’d been in the garden Jason had been to the One Stop Best Friend Bento Bar and brought back rice, fish and pickled
daikon
. He’d put it all on the dresser with a bottle of plum liquor and two beautiful pale-violet glasses, and was lying on the futon when I came in. I locked the door behind me and walked straight past the food to the futon, pulling off my coat as I went.

‘So? Who was the old guy?’

I knelt astride Jason, facing him. I wasn’t wearing knickers, just the camisole. He pushed my knees further apart and ran his hands up my legs. We both looked down at the long expanse of cool flesh he was unpeeling. It seemed to me dense, very unmodern flesh. I still found it amazing that Jason liked it so much.

‘Who was the guy in the garden?’

‘Something to do with my university.’

‘He was looking at you like you were saying the most incredible thing in the world.’

‘Not really,’ I murmured. ‘We were talking about his research. You wouldn’t call it incredible at all.’

‘Good. I don’t like you saying incredible things to anyone else. You spend too much time with him.’

‘Too much time?’

‘Yes.’ He flipped out his palm, holding it up to me. ‘See?’

‘See what?’

The dim light glinted on his broken nails as he dabbled his fingertips in his palm, slowly at first: tiny, tiny movements. I stared at his fingers, transfixed. They lifted from his palm, flew up swiftly into the air, coming to rest at eye-level, flapping slowly like a bird’s wings, yawing and dipping on an air current. It was Shi Chongming’s magic crane. The crane of the past.

‘You were watching us,’ I said, my eyes fixed on his hand. ‘Last time.’

He smiled and made the bird do a slow, graceful dive. It twisted elegantly, swooped back up again, dived. He dipped and rolled his hand, humming under his breath. Suddenly it turned and came at me, his fingers flying forward, the bird-hand flapping crazily at my face. I flinched away, half up to my feet, breathing fast.

‘Don’t do that!’ I said. ‘Don’t.’

He was laughing. He sat up and grabbed my wrists, pulling me back towards him. ‘Did you like that?’

‘You’re teasing me.’

‘Teasing you? No. Not teasing you. I wouldn’t tease you. I know what it’s like to be searching.’

‘No.’ I resisted his pull. ‘I don’t understand you.’

He laughed. ‘You won’t get anywhere.’ He pulled me gently backwards, dropping his head back on to the futon, putting my hands to his mouth: licking my palm, chewing gently at my flesh. ‘You won’t get anywhere pretending to me.’

I watched his teeth, clean and white, fascinated by the healthy glint of dentine and red membrane. ‘I’m not pretending,’ I murmured vaguely.

‘You almost forgot, didn’t you?’ He slid his hands between my thighs, tangling his fingers in my pubic hair, his eyes on my face. I let my fingers stay on his lips as he spoke. ‘You almost forgot that I only have to look at you and I know everything,
everything
that goes on inside your head.’

Many centuries ago, when the great bronze azimuth was moved from Linfen to the Purple Mountain, it suddenly, inexplicably, became crucially misaligned. No matter what engineers did, it had made up its mind not to function. A few moments ago I peeped out of the shutters at that great chronicler of the heavens and wondered whether maybe, when it settled on the cold mountainside, it had looked up into the cold stars and seen what Shujin had seen. The future of Nanking. It had seen the city’s future and had given up caring.

Enough. I must stop thinking like this – of spirits and soothsayers and clairvoyants. I know it is a kind of insanity and yet even here, safe in my study, I cannot help a shiver when I think how Shujin foresaw all of this in her dream. The radio says that last night, while Liu and I were on the roof, several buildings near the refugee centre caught fire. The Nanking city health centre was one of those burned, so where will the injured and the sick go? Our baby would have been born at the health centre. Now there is nowhere for us.

Liu and I still haven’t discussed these doubts, even after what we saw this morning. We still haven’t said the words, ‘Maybe we were wrong.’ When we got out of the house in the late afternoon, when the troops had gone and the streets had been quiet for some time, we didn’t speak. We ran, crouched, bolting from door to door, terrified. I ran faster than I have ever run before, and all the time I was thinking,
Civilians, civilians, civilians. They are killing civilians
. Everything I have imagined, everything I have promised myself, all that I have forced Shujin to believe, it has all been wrong. The Japanese are not civilized. They are slaughtering civilians. There were no women in that crowd, true, but even that is a poor relief.
No women
. I repeated the words over and over again as we flew back to our houses:
No women
.

When I burst through the door, panting and wild-eyed, my clothes covered in sweat, Shujin jumped up in shock, spilling her cup of tea on the table. ‘Oh!’ She had been crying. Her cheeks were stained. ‘I thought you were dead,’ she said, taking a few steps towards me. Then she saw my expression and stopped in her tracks. She put her hand up to my face. ‘Chongming? What is it?’

‘Nothing.’ I closed the door and stood for a while, leaning against it for support, catching my breath.

‘I did. I thought you were dead.’

I shook my head. She looked very pale, very fragile. Her stomach was big but her limbs were thin and breakable. How vulnerable instincts make us, I thought vaguely, looking down openly at the place our son lies. Soon she will be two and there will be twice the fear and twice the danger and twice the pain. Twice the amount to protect.

‘Chongming? What happened?’

I looked up at her, licking my lips.

‘What? For heaven’s sake, tell me, Chongming.’

‘There’s no food,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t find any food.’

‘You ran back here like the wind to give me the news that there’s no food?’

‘I am sorry. I am so sorry.’

‘No,’ she said, coming nearer, her eyes on my face. ‘No, it’s more than that. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen all my premonitions, haven’t you?’

I sat down in my chair with a long exhalation of breath. I am the tiredest man in the world. ‘Please eat the
man yue
eggs,’ I said wearily. ‘Please. Do it for me. Do it for our moon soul.’

And to my astonishment she listened. As if she sensed my despair. It wasn’t the eggs she ate, nevertheless she did something that came some way towards me. Instead of flying into a superstitious rage, she ate the beans from the pillow that she’d made especially for the baby. She brought it from upstairs, slit it open, emptied the beans into the wok, and cooked them. She offered some to me but I refused, and instead sat and watched her putting the food into her mouth, not a hint of expression on her face.

My stomach aches unbearably: it is like having a living sore, the size of a gourd, under my ribs. This is what it is like to starve, and yet it is only three days that I have been without food. But, and this is surely the worst thing, later, when we were preparing for bed, through the closed shutters the smell came back. That delicious, maddening smell of meat cooking. It drove me to insanity. It sent me on to my feet, ready to rush out into the street, careless of the dangers that lie out there. It was only when I remembered the Japanese officers – when I remembered tanks rumbling down the street, the sound of rifles reloading – that I sank back on to the bed, knowing that I had to find a better way.

We slept fitfully, in our shoes just as before. A little before dawn we were woken by a series of tremendous screams. It seemed to be coming from only a few streets away and it was distinctly a woman’s voice. I looked across at Shujin. She lay absolutely rigid, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, her head resting on the wooden pillow. The screaming continued for about five minutes, getting more desperate and more horrible, until at last it faded to indistinct sobs, and finally silence. Then the noise of a motorcycle on the main street thundered down the alley, shaking the shutters and making the bowl of tea on the bed-stand rock.

Neither Shujin nor I moved as we watched red shadows flicker on the ceiling. There had been a report earlier that the Japanese were burning houses near the Xuanwu lakes – surely those weren’t the flames I could see moving on the ceiling. After a long time Shujin got up from the bed and went to where the kitchen range had died down to ashes. I followed her and watched as, without a word, she crouched, took up a handful of the soot and rubbed it into her face until I couldn’t recognize her. She rubbed it all over her arms and into her hair, even into her ears. Then she went into the other room and came back with a pair of scissors. She sat in the corner of the room, her face expressionless, took a lock of her hair and began to hack at it.

For a long time after the screaming stopped, even when the city was silent again, I couldn’t settle. Here I am at my desk, the window open a chink, not knowing what to do. We could try to escape now, but I am sure it is too late – the city is completely cut off. It is dawn and outside the sun filters through a yellow miasma that hovers above Nanking. Where has that fog come from? It is not smoke from the Xiaguan chimneys mingling with river mist because all the plants there have come to a halt. Shujin would say it is something else: a pall that contains all the deeds of this war. She would say that it is unburied souls and guilt, rising and mingling in the heat above this cursed place, the sky teeming with wandering spirits. She would say that the clouds must have become poisonous, that it is an unspeakable, fatal blow dealt to nature, having so many troubled souls crushed into one earthly location. And who would I be to contradict her? History has shown me that, in spite of what I have long suspected, I am neither brave nor wise.