The Devil of Nanking (42 page)

I stood for a moment, looking at the wardrobe door, my heart racing. Then I turned and stared back down the corridor. Most of the doors were closed. It was still littered with broken glass and fabric from the walls. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’ I put out my hands blindly in front of me, moving the fingers, as if the air texture would hold the answer. ‘I’m going to find it. I don’t need you. You brought it back last night and it’s still here somewhere.’

‘
Just shut up and switch the fucking lights off!
’

My trance cleared. A sweat broke across the back of my neck. I pulled the roll of money from my right pocket and threw it into Jason’s room. It broke and notes floated down in the semi-darkness. ‘There,’ I said. ‘Strawberry sent you some money. And, Jason—’

‘
What?
’

‘Good luck.’

One morning, a few days before the Nurse had come to the house, I’d woken, pulled back the window and there, standing in the alley below, dressed in a hard hat and a suit, clipboard in hand, had been a surveyor, or an engineer, looking up at the house. It had made me so sad to think of the house, after war and earthquake and famine, after everything, giving in to the property developers. Its paper-slim walls and wooden structure were designed to fall in a quake, to fall like matchsticks so that the occupants had a chance to escape. When the men came to pull it down, when they wrapped a thin blue cover round it and took their demolition ball to it, it would go without a whisper, taking with it all its memories and trapped secrets.

The surveyor and I had regarded each other for a long time – he in the cold, me standing warm and wrapped in my duvet – until eventually my hands grew cold, my cheeks red, and I closed the window. At the time I had thought vaguely that his presence meant the end of our lives in the house was near. It hadn’t occurred to me that the end might come in a different, totally unexpected way.

I grabbed a torch from the kitchen and went silently down the corridor, switching off all the lights as I went. One or two doors were open and there were no shutters or curtains at most of the windows – from the street the Mickey Rourke light illuminated everything that happened in those soft, silent rooms. Someone watching from outside would see everything, so I moved swiftly, bent into a crouch. In my room I crept to the side window and leaned out as far as I dared, until I could crane my neck round and see through the gap into the alleyway. It was deserted, the snow falling silently, no sounds of cars or voices. The tyre tracks and my footprints had already disappeared under the new snow. I grabbed the money from my coat pocket and threw it on top of the bag. It landed with a silent flutter and a puff of snow. I turned and changed hurriedly, fumbling in the dark, throwing off my club dress and pulling on trousers, flat shoes, a sweater, a jacket zipped up to the neck.

I crouched in the doorway, clutching the torch, my teeth chattering. From his room I could hear a series of muffled thumps – I didn’t want to imagine the secret, painful manoeuvre he was going through.
But no. It’s not in your room – Jason, that would be too easy
. The torchbeam played over the other silent doors. I let it rest on the store room next to mine. Even when you haven’t got a map, when you haven’t got a clue, you have to start somewhere. Stooped awkwardly, I crept to the door, sliding it back in fractions, careful not to make a noise. I peered inside. The room was in chaos. The Nurse and the
chimpira
had gone into everything, into all the decomposing futons, the fragmenting piles of ageing, insect-chewed silks, a case of framed photos, posed black-and-white portraits of an elderly woman in a formal kimono under splintered glass. I squatted in the middle of the room and began to tear at things, a rice-cooker, a box of yellowing paperbacks, here was a silk
obi
, once silver and blue, now stained brown in places and riddled with moth holes. When I touched it, it crumbled in my hand and iridescent flakes of silk, like butterfly scales, moved in a cloud, upwards through the cold air.

I went through everything, my panic building, sweat dampening my clothes. I had almost worked across the entire room when something made me stop and raise my eyes. Headlights were sweeping across the ceiling.

Fear lit up across my skin. I clicked off the torch and put it into my pocket, resting my fingers on the floor in a runner’s crouch, every muscle twitching. My ears crawled out of the room, out into the alley, trying to guess what was happening out there. The beams ran down the wall, then moved quickly in a straight line, sideways like lights from a spaceship. From the alleyway came a long silence. Then, just as I thought I would stop breathing, I heard the car change gear and move off. Brake lights appeared, reflected in the window, an orange indicator flashed. The car had stopped in the snow, waiting to turn left on to Waseda. I closed my eyes and sank to my haunches against the wall. ‘My God, Jason,’ I murmured, my fingers to my forehead. ‘This is going to kill me.’

It was pointless searching blindly like this. The Nurse had been through these rooms and hadn’t found anything. Why would I be able to do any better? But I was clever and I was determined. I was going to think my way through the walls, the ceilings and the fabric of the house. I was going to look where she hadn’t.
Try
, I thought, putting my fingers to my eyelids,
try to picture this house through different eyes
. Picture it through Jason’s eyes last night. Picture its skeleton. What had he been thinking? What had been the first thing he looked at when he came home last night?

The image of the house rotated in my mind. I saw through its skin, I saw beams and joinery, a timber frame laced with wires. I saw the windows.
The windows.
The windows in the gallery were saying something important. They were saying –
think carefully now
– they were saying:
Remember Jason last night
.
Remember him outside your room
. We are having an argument. Then what? He walks away. He’s furious and he’s still drunk, and he’s banging on all the shutters. He stops for a while looking out at the garden – one of the windows had been open when I came out of my room – he stands there, smoking a cigarette. Then he turns and he’s going to his room and starting to pack . . .

I opened my eyes. Through the opened shutter, snow was blizzarding in the garden, frosting and glittering as far as I could see, making a white topiary of the haphazard shapes. The plastic bag hanging in the branches was frosted almost solid. I backed up a little in my thoughts and came at it again. Jason had stood at the window, holding what he’d stolen and . . .

I saw him clearly now – opening the window, reaching his hand back and throwing a plastic bag into the stormy night. It flew out above the branches, spinning and pirouetting in the wind, and landed where it hung now, twisted and frozen.
Oh, Jason
, I thought, tipping forward on to my knees, staring up at the bag.
Of course
. I know where it is. It’s in that bag.

I got to my feet and stepped to the window, putting my numb hands against the pane, my skin pricking up in wonder, just as, from the staircase, came the discreet but distinctive popping sound of the front door being forced open.

In Nanking nothing is moving except the snowclouds – everything, every stream, every mountain, every tree, is exhausted by this Japanese winter and lies limp and uncomprehending. Even the coiled dragon Yangtze river is stalled, stagnant and motionless, clogged behind a hundred thousand bodies. And yet here it is, the entry I thought I would never make. Made on a bright afternoon in the peace of my house, when everything is over. Really it is a miracle to see it being made, my hand brown and strong, the thin line of paling ink flowing from the ends of my fingers. It is a miracle to put my hand inside my jacket and find that my heart is still beating.

In our cargo Shujin included a folded cloth that she had packed with cutlery: chopsticks, a few spoons, one or two knives. She placed it in a small sandalwood money chest and added a black baby’s bracelet, with an image of Buddha dangling on it. I had to dissuade her from putting in the red-painted eggs. ‘Shujin,’ I told her, trying to be gentle, ‘there won’t be
zuoyuezi
or
man yue
.’

She didn’t answer. But she did take the eggs out of the bags and into our bedroom, where she arranged the quilts round them, so they lay in a little nest on the bed, waiting for the day when we would come home.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked, looking anxiously at her white face when she came downstairs. ‘Do you feel well?’

She nodded silently, and pulled on a pair of gloves. She was wearing several layers of clothing: two ordinary cheongsams, a pair of my woollen pants underneath and fur-lined boots. Our faces were blackened, our refugee certificates pinned to our clothing. At the door we stopped and stared at each other. We looked like strangers. At length I took a deep breath and said, ‘Come on, then. It’s time.’

‘Yes,’ she replied soberly. ‘It’s time.’

Outside a light snow was falling, but the moon was bright, shining through the flakes so that they appeared to dance merrily. We got as far as Zhongyang Road and stopped. Without Liu Runde, the old horse who knew its way, I was unsure. About a hundred yards away I could see a dog, lying on its back in the snow, bloated so that its four legs were forced open as wide as could be, like an overturned stool. One or two of the houses had been burned since I was last here, but there were no tracks in the snow and the street was deserted. I had no idea how Liu had planned to break through the Taiping gate, no instinctive compass or intuition of what had been in his head. The lock of his hair was inside my glove. It lay against the burn on my palm and I tightened my hand on it. ‘Yes,’ I said steadily, pulling the collar of my jacket up round my ears to keep out the whirling snow. ‘Yes, this way. This is the right way.’

We walked in silence, Purple Mountain rising ahead of us, terrible and beautiful against the stars. The streets were deserted, nevertheless every new corner deserved our suspicion. We went slowly, keeping near the walls, ready to abandon the cart and shrink into the gaps between the buildings. Shujin was absolutely silent, and for a long time all I could hear were our footsteps and my heart pounding. Once in the distance I heard the rumble of a truck going past on Zhongshan Road, but it wasn’t until we had passed the Xuanwu area that we saw our first human being: a bent old man, struggling towards us out of the snow, carrying two heavy baskets on a bamboo yoke. He seemed to be headed in the direction we’d come, and in each of his baskets was a child, asleep, arms collapsed and dangling out of the basket, snow settling on their sleeping heads. He didn’t appear to register us at all, he didn’t blink or nod or focus on us, he only kept coming towards us. When he got very near we saw he was crying.

Shujin stopped in her tracks as he approached.

‘Hello, sir,’ she whispered, as he drew parallel with us. ‘Are you well?’

He didn’t answer. He didn’t slow down or look at her.

‘Hello?’ she repeated. ‘Are your children well?’

It was as if she hadn’t spoken. The old man continued limping down the street, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance.

‘Hello!’ she said loudly. ‘Did you hear me? Are the children well?’

‘Sssssh!’ I touched her arm and pulled her to the side of the road, afraid that she had spoken too loudly. ‘Come away.’

The old man was shuffling away into the snow flurries. We stood, pressed into a doorway, watching him stagger along under his cargo, a spectre in an old coat.

‘I wanted to know if the little ones were well,’ she murmured.

‘I know, I know.’

We both stood in silence then, not meeting each other’s eyes, because from behind, the answer to the question was clear. One of the children was asleep, but the other, a boy, slumped in the right-hand basket, was not asleep at all. He had been dead for some time. You could tell that from just one look.

Midnight found us creeping through the alleys near the military academy. I knew the area well. I used to go through it as a student on my way to view the Xuanwu lakes and I knew how close to the wall we were. In an abandoned house I discovered a scorched rosewood clothes trunk, and found that if I climbed up on it and peered through the gaps in the burned houses, I could just glimpse the Taiping gate.

I put my finger to my lips and leaned forward a little further, until I could see a two-hundred-yard stretch of the wall. Liu had been right. The wall had been shelled and broken in several places and in both directions I could see piles of bricks and rubble stretching off into the night. Where the gate had been, two sentries in khaki caps stood erect, lit only by army lamps balanced on piled-up sandbags. Beyond them, outside the wall, a Japanese tank was parked among the rubble, its flag dirty with ash.