The Devil of Nanking (47 page)

‘Who?’ I said faintly. ‘Who is worse?’

‘I am. Me. You will see me, uglier by far than Fuyuki.’ He cleared his throat, crossed to the wall and switched off the lights. In the darkness I heard him fumble for the projector. ‘This is one of the true reasons no one has ever seen this film. Because an old man who has spoken a thousand wise words about facing the past cannot,
cannot
, accept his own.’

The mechanism trundled into life, and the room was filled with the
flik flik flik flik
of the film rattling through the gate.

Shi Chongming had known how to store his film: there was no decomposition, no peeling and liquefying of polymers. No shadow and swirl on the image to hide your eyes behind.

The first frames came through, the screen cleared and a man appeared: thin, scared-looking, standing in the middle of a snowy forest. He was half bent, staring into the camera with wild eyes as if he would leap at it. The hairs went up on my neck. This was Shi Chongming. Shi Chongming as a young man. A world away. He took a step towards the camera and shouted soundlessly at the lens. He seemed about to leap forward, when something off-screen distracted him. He turned and ran in the opposite direction. The camera followed, jolting silently down a path, Shi Chongming’s arms flailing as he leaped over branches and gullies. He was so thin, I saw now, a stick-like man, no bigger than a maquette in his baggy, quilted clothes. Ahead of him, at the bottom of the path, two blurred figures appeared, muffled in fur-lined greatcoats, their backs to the camera. They were standing quite close together, looking down at a shape on the ground.

The projector rattled noisily, and, as the camera drew closer to the figure, the picture jolting, one of the men looked round in surprise. With pinched, expressionless eyes he took in, first, the tiny Chinese man running to him with his arms out, then the camera. Shi Chongming slowed and the cameraman must have lowered the camera as he ran because for the next few frames I saw only snow and leaves and feet.

Above the clattering of the projector I could imagine the noise on the mountainside, the panting, the rattling of equipment, the snapping of branches underfoot. Then the camera was raised again and this time it was closer. It was only a foot or so behind the second man. There was a pause, a distinct hesitation. The camera inched challengingly forwards, creeping up on him and suddenly he turned, horribly swiftly, and stared directly into the lens. A star on his cap caught the sun and flared briefly.

I held my breath. It was so easy to recognize a person across more than fifty years. A youthful face, cut out of wood, it seemed, and ill, very ill. Grey and sweating. But the eyes were the same. The eyes, and the miniature cat’s teeth when he grimaced.

The camera crank mechanism must have wound to a halt then, because the picture disappeared, a jumpy join in the film rattled through the projector like a train on the brink of derailment, and suddenly we were at a different angle, looking at Fuyuki who stood, sweating, breathing hard, little puffs of steam issuing from him. He was a little bent, and when the camera drew back I could see that he was fitting a bayonet into his rifle. At his feet a woman lay on her back, her
qipao
pulled up above her waist, her trousers torn away to show the dark slant of her stomach.

‘My wife,’ Shi Chongming said quietly, his eyes locked on the film as if he was watching a dream. ‘That was my wife.’

Fuyuki was shouting something at the camera. He waved and grinned, revealing his cat’s teeth. The camera seemed to sag, as if wilting under his gaze. It backed slowly away, and the screen yawned wider, taking in the slope of the ground, more trees, a motorbike propped against one. In the corner of the frame I saw the second soldier. He had taken off his coat and his big arms were wrapped round Shi Chongming, whose mouth was open in a silent, anguished howl. He twisted and fought, but the soldier held him firm. No one was interested in his pleading. Everyone was watching Fuyuki.

What happened next had been living inside me for years. It had started as just a sentence on a page in my parents’ house, but now I was seeing the reality. The thing everyone said was in my imagination was now a grainy truth crawling across the screen in flecks of black and white. It was all so different from the way I’d pictured it: in my version the edges had been clear-cut, the figures weren’t blurred and jumpy, bleeding into the scenery behind them. In my version the act itself had been swift and ornate – a
samurai
dance: a trademark flick of the sword afterwards to clean it of blood. A dark, peacock tail splatter on the snow.

But this was something different. This was ungainly and fumbled. This was Fuyuki’s bayonet locked and twisted into his rifle; he was holding the weapon in two hands like a spade, elbows seesawing up behind his body, thick and black against the snow, and this was him, the man trained in bayoneting since boyhood, plunging it into the woman’s unprotected stomach with all his strength.

It took two vigorous movements. She jerked the first time, lifting her arms in a strange, casual way, the way a woman sometimes moves her arms to ease a tight shoulder muscle, dropping the knife she was holding into the snow. With the second thrust she seemed to sit up, her arms out in front of her like a puppet. But before she could raise herself completely her strength left and she fell back abruptly, rolling slightly to the side. Then she was still, the only movement a darkening stain spreading its wings round her like an angel.

It was so sudden, so unexpectedly cruel, that I could feel the shock that descended on the forest even fifty-three years later. The second soldier’s face became slack, and the cameraman must have fallen to his knees, because the picture jolted. When he regained control and managed to straighten, Lieutenant Fuyuki was reaching into the messy hole he’d made. He tugged out an arm, then the whole baby, slipping it out intact, steaming, a bloated clot of placenta coming with it. He dropped it a few feet away in the snow, and stood over the mother’s body, poking his bayonet idly into her empty stomach, biting his lip thoughtfully as if there might be something else in there. The junior soldier had had enough, he put his hands to his throat and stumbled away, releasing Shi Chongming, who shot forward, throwing himself into the blackening snow. He dropped down on to all fours, grabbed his daughter into his quilted jacket and crawled clumsily to his wife. He was inches from her, shouting into her face, into her lifeless eyes. Then the cameraman moved a little, sideways, revealing Fuyuki standing above Shi Chongming, holding a small handgun, a ‘baby
nambu
’, pointed directly at his head.

It took a moment or two for Shi Chongming to realize what was happening. When he felt the shadow fall on him he looked up in slow, creaky stages. Fuyuki released the revolver’s safety catch and extended his free hand in a simple gesture known across the globe.
Give me
.

Give me.

Shi Chongming struggled to his knees, the baby clasped to his chest, never taking his eyes off that extended hand. Slowly, slowly, Fuyuki cocked the
nambu
, and squeezed the trigger. Shi Chongming flinched, his body sagged, and two feet behind him the snow leaped once. He wasn’t hit, it was only a warning, but his knees buckled – he began to shake visibly. Fuyuki took a step forward, putting the muzzle of the gun against his head. Trembling, weeping, Shi Chongming looked up at his captor’s face. Everything was there in his eyes, everything was there among the reflection of the trees, the long twisting story of his wife and their baby, the question ‘Why us, why now, why here?’ His history stringing back into the past.

Somehow I knew what was going to happen next. I felt it all about to accelerate. Suddenly I understood why Shi Chongming had kept this film secret for so many years. What I was watching, I realized, was him measuring and weighing his life against the value of the baby in his arms.

He stared at the hand for so long that the camera wound down, another film join went through, and when the picture came back he was still staring. A tear ran down his face. I put my fingers to my forehead, hardly daring to breathe, conscious of the old Shi Chongming sitting in silence behind me. With a single sentence that seemed to mean nothing to anyone but himself, Shi Chongming raised the baby and rested it gently across Fuyuki’s arms. He bowed his head, then struggled to his feet and walked wearily into the trees. No one stopped him. He walked slowly, limping slightly, every few paces his hand going up to steady himself against a tree.

No one moved. The second soldier stood a few yards away in the snow, his head bowed, his face in his hands. Even Fuyuki was motionless. Then he turned, said something to the camera, and picked up the baby by a foot – holding her for inspection like a skinned rabbit.

I didn’t breathe. This was it. This was the crucial moment. Fuyuki looked at the baby, with a strange, intense expression, as if she held the answer to an important question. Then, with his free hand, he pulled out his rubber belt and knotted it round her ankles, lashing her tightly round his waist, letting her swing down, hanging upside-down, facing his leg. She twisted there for a few moments. Then her hands flexed.

I sat forward, gripping the chair arms. Yes. I had been right. Her hands were moving. Her mouth opened a few times, her chest rose and fell and her face crumpled in a wail. She was alive. She twisted and reached out blindly, instinctively trying to grasp Fuyuki’s leg. When he turned she lost her grip and flared in an arc from his waist like a dancer’s skirt. He did it once, twice, showing off for the camera, letting her weight bump against his uniformed thigh, smiling and saying something. When he stopped and let the baby come to a rest, her instinctive grasping resumed.

The film ran through its guides and at last sputtered out, I felt as if the breath had been punched out of me. I fell forward, on to my knees like a supplicant. The screen was empty, only a few amoebic squiggles and hairs left in the gate. Shi Chongming reached over, switched off the projector and stood looking down at me on the floor. The only sound in the office was the dull
thock thock thock
of the clumsy old timepiece on the mantelpiece.

‘Is it what you expected?’

I wiped my face with my sleeve. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She lived. It’s what the book said. The babies were living when they came out.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Shi Chongming, in a hushed voice. ‘Yes, she was alive.’

‘For years . . .’ I lifted my arm to wipe my eyes ‘. . . for years I thought I’d – I’d imagined that part. Everyone said I was insane, that I’d made it up, that no baby could live through – through that.’ I dug in my pocket for a tissue, balled it up and dabbed at my eyes. ‘I know now I didn’t imagine it. It was all I wanted to know.’

I heard him sit down at the desk. When I looked up he was staring at the window. Outside the snowflakes seemed suddenly bright, as if lit from below. I remember thinking that they looked like tiny angels falling to earth.

‘I’ll never be sure how long she survived,’ he said. ‘I pray it wasn’t long.’ He rubbed his forehead and shrugged, looking blankly around the office as if searching for something safe to rest his eyes on. ‘I am told that Fuyuki became well after this. He killed my daughter and I am told that, shortly afterwards, his symptoms disappeared. It was a placebo effect, quite coincidental. The malaria would have left him eventually, and over the years the attacks would have lessened whether or not he had my . . .’

His eyes stopped roving and met mine, and we looked at each other for a long time. There and then, as I was, prone on the floor of Shi Chongming’s office, something terrible and inescapable stood up in me: the knowledge that there wasn’t going to be a quiet escape. Alive or dead, our children would hold us. Just like Shi Chongming I was going to be eternally connected to my dead baby girl. Shi Chongming was in his seventies, I was in my twenties. She would be with me for ever.

I got to my feet and picked up the holdall. I put it on the desk in front of him and stood with my hands resting on it, my head lowered. ‘My little girl died too,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s why I’m here. Did you know?’

Slowly Shi Chongming took his eyes off the holdall and raised them to me. ‘I have never known why you came to me.’

‘Because I did it, you see. It was me.’ I pushed at the tears with the heel of my hand. ‘I killed her myself – my little girl – with a knife.’

Shi Chongming didn’t speak. An awful puzzlement crept into his eyes.

I nodded. ‘I know. It’s terrible, and I’ve got no excuse for – for crying about it. I know that. But I didn’t mean to – to kill her. I thought she would live. I’d read about the Nanking babies, in the orange book, and I – I don’t know why, but I thought maybe my baby would live, too, and so I—’ I sank into the chair, staring down at my shaky hands. ‘I thought she’d be okay and they’d take her away and hide her somewhere, somewhere my . . . my parents couldn’t find her.’

Shi Chongming shuffled round the table and put his hands on my back. After a long time he sighed and said, ‘Do you know something? I consider myself a man who knows sadness very well. But I – I have no words for this. No words.’

‘Don’t worry. You were kind, you were so kind because you kept telling me ignorance wasn’t the same as evil, but I know.’ I wiped my eyes and tried to smile up at him. ‘I know. You can’t ever really forgive someone like me.’

How can you measure the power that the mind exerts over the body? Fuyuki would never have believed that the tiny mummified corpse of Shi Chongming’s baby didn’t hold the secret of immortality. He would never have believed that what he had carefully saved and protected over the years, slowly nibbling away at, was only a placebo, and that what had really kept him alive was his own powerful belief. Those who surrounded him believed it too. When he died in his sleep, only two weeks after the theft of Shi Chongming’s baby, they believed wholeheartedly that it was because he’d lost his secret elixir. But there were others, the sceptics, who wondered secretly whether Fuyuki’s death was brought on by the strain of the sudden interest paid him by a working group based within the USA Department of Justice.