‘Yes. In the summer. I was hoping to see you again.’
He paused for a moment, then said, ‘Is that so? Is that so?’ When he spoke, his eyes and his odd little nose didn’t move, but the skin on his upper lip adhered to his teeth and lifted to reveal strange pointed canines in the top corners of his mouth, just like a cat’s. I stared at those teeth. ‘I’d like to see your apartment,’ I said quietly.
‘You can see it from here.’ He felt in his pocket and pulled out a cigar, which he unwrapped, clipped with a discreet silver tool taken from his breast pocket, and inspected, turning it this way and that, picking flakes of tobacco off it.
‘I’d like to look around. I’d like to . . .’ I hesitated. I gestured to the room where the prints were hung and said, in a low voice, ‘To see the prints. I’ve read about shunga. The ones you’ve got are very rare.’
He lit the cigar and yawned. ‘They were bringed to Japan by me,’ he said, switching to clumsy English. ‘Back to homeland. My hobby is to – Eigo deha nanto iu no desuka? Kaimodosu kotowa – Nihon no bijutsuhinwo Kaimodosu no desuyo.’
‘Repatriate,’ I said. ‘Repatriate Japanese art.’
‘So, so. Yes. Re-pa-tri-ate Japan art.’
‘Would you like to show them to me?’
‘No.’ He let his eyes close slowly, like a very old reptile at leisure, vaguely resting his hand across them, as if that was enough conversation for now. ‘Thank you, not now.’
‘Are you sure?’
He opened one eye and regarded me suspiciously. I started to speak, but something in his look made me think better of it. I dropped my hands into my lap. He must never know, Shi Chongming had said. Never suspect.
‘Yes.’ I cleared my throat and fiddled with the napkin. ‘Of course. Now is the wrong time. Quite the wrong time.’ I lit a cigarette and smoked, turning the lighter over and over in my hands, as if it was utterly fascinating. Fuyuki watched me for a few more seconds. Then, seeming satisfied, he closed his eyes again.
After that I didn’t speak to him much. He dozed for a few minutes, and when he woke up the Japanese girl on his right took over from me, telling him a long story about an American girl who went out jogging braless, which made him laugh and shake his head enthusiastically. I sat in silence, smoking cigarette after cigarette, thinking, What next, what next, what next? I had the distinct idea I was getting near, that I was circling something closely. I drank two glasses of champagne very quickly, stubbed out my cigarette, and took a deep breath, leaning towards him. ‘Fuyuki-san?’ I murmured. ‘I need the bathroom.’
‘Hi hi,’ he said distractedly. The hostess on his right was demonstrating a trick with a book of matches. He waved a hand vaguely behind him to a double glass door. ‘Through there.’
I stared at him. I’d expected more. Some resistance. I pushed back my chair and stood, looking down at his small brown skull, expecting him to move. But he didn’t. No one at the table even glanced up, they were all too absorbed in their conversations. I crossed the patio, got through the glass doors, and closed them quickly, standing for a moment, my hands flat on the glass, looking back. No one had noticed me leave. At a table near the far end of the pool I could see the back of Jason’s head between two hostesses and nearer me was Fuyuki, exactly as I’d left him, the back of his thin shoulders moving as he laughed. The hostess had set light to the match book and was standing, holding it above the table like a beacon, waving it to a round of applause from the other guests.
I turned away from the door. I was standing in a panelled corridor, the mirror image of the one we’d entered earlier, full of more lighted glass cabinets – I could see a Noh actor’s costume, samurai armour glinting in the low lights. Countless doors stretched into the distance. I took a deep breath and started to walk.
The carpet muffled my footfalls; the noise of the air-conditioning made me think of the enclosed, capsular atmosphere of an aeroplane. I sniffed – what was I expecting to smell? Don’t eat the meat … There should be more stairs on this side of the apartment. I passed doorway after doorway, but no staircase. At the end of the corridor I turned smartly at right angles into another corridor, and my pulse quickened. There it was, up on the right: the staircase, heavy double doors standing open, hooked back to the wall.
I was about ten yards away from it when a long way up ahead, at the next corner, a shadow appeared at the foot of the wall.
I froze. The Nurse. It could only be her, approaching from the next corridor. She must have been walking quickly because the shadow was getting bigger, climbing rapidly up the wall until it almost met the ceiling. I stood, paralysed, my heart thumping furiously. Any minute now she’d reach the corner and see me. Now I could hear her shoe leather squeaking efficiently. I groped blindly at the nearest door. It opened. Inside a light came on automatically and, just as the shadow dropped to the floor and shot sideways along the wall towards me, I stepped in, closing the door behind me with a discreet click.
It was a bathroom, a windowless room all in a fabulous blood red marble, veined like fat in beef with a hot tub surrounded by mirrors and a stack of immaculate starched towels on a ledge. I stood for a few moments, shaking uncontrollably, my ear pressed against the door, listening to the corridor. If she had seen me I would say what I’d said to Fuyuki: I was looking for the bathroom. I breathed cautiously, trying to pick up a sound from outside. But minutes passed and I could hear nothing. Maybe she had gone into a different room. I clicked the lock, and then, because my legs were weak, sank on to the toilet lid. This was impossible, impossible. How did Shi Chongming expect me to deal with this? What did he think I was?
After several minutes, when nothing had happened, no sound, no breath, I pulled a cigarette from my bag and lit it. I smoked silently, biting my nails and staring at the door. I checked my watch, wondering how long I’d been in there, whether she’d still be out there. Slowly, slowly, the trembling subsided. I finished the cigarette, dropped it into the toilet and lit another, smoking it slowly. Then I stood and ran my fingers up and down the edge of the mirrors, wondering if there was room behind them to hide a surveillance camera. I opened drawers and rummaged through stacks of soap and little complimentary toiletry sets embossed with JAL and Singapore Airlines logos. When an age seemed to have passed, I flushed the toilet, took a deep breath, clicked the door open and put my head out. The corridor was empty. The Nurse was gone and the double doors to the staircase had been closed. When I crept across the passage and tried the handle, I found they’d been locked.
Outside the sky was clear, just a shred of cloud lit pink from beneath by city lights moved silently over the stars, like a giant’s breath on a cold day. While I’d been in the corridor the guests had left their places and were perched on striped recliners, starting mah-jongg games on foldaway tables. The waiters cleared away the plates. Nobody noticed me come back and sit, still jittery, on a seat near the pool.
Fuyuki had been moved to a far corner of the courtyard and the Nurse was with him, bent over, busily tucking a fur throw over his legs. She was dressed in a very tight skirt, a high-collared jacket and her usual high heels. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, revealing her white, oddly pitted cheek. She’d painted her lips in a deep red – on her tight mouth it looked almost bluish. The men nearby sat with their backs turned pointedly to her, concentrating on their conversations, pretending not to be aware of her presence.
She didn’t look up at me. She had probably intended to lock those doors anyway, I thought. There was no reason to think she’d known I was there. Fuyuki muttered something to her, his frail hand groping for her sleeve. She lowered her head to his mouth, and I held my breath, staring at her nails, each oval painted a careful matt red. The nail on her smallest finger had been grown long and curved, the way Chinese merchants traditionally grew them to show they didn’t do manual labour. I wondered if Fuyuki was telling her about my insistence that he show me the apartment, but after a few moments she straightened and, instead of looking at me, slipp
ed silently away past the pool, through the opposite doors.
I sat forward, tense, my hands grasping the chair, my attention going with her, following her every inch of the way along the corridors, maybe down the stairs. I knew what she was going to do. I knew it instinctively. The noise of the party faded into the background and all I could hear was the pulse of the night, the lapping of water against the pool filter. My ears expanded with my heart, until all the small sounds seemed amplified a thousand times and I thought I could hear the apartment shifting and murmuring around me. I could hear someone washing dishes in the kitchen. I could hear the Nurse’s soft footfalls moving down the stairs. I was sure I could hear padlocks rattling, iron doors creaking open. She was going to get Fuyuki’s medicine.
And then something happened. In the pool, at a depth of about eight feet, there were two underwater windows covered by slatted blinds. I hadn’t noticed them before because they had been in darkness. But a light had just come on in the room, sending vertical yellow stripes into the water. Quickly I fished inside my handbag, lit a cigarette and got up, moving past the crowd and going casually to the pool edge. I stood, one hand in the small of my back, taking a few draws on the cigarette to calm myself. Then, when I was sure no one was watching me, I peered down into the water. A guest nearby began to sing a loud enka song, and one of the hostesses was giggling loudly, but I was barely aware of it. I closed off my mind until all there was in the world were me and those stripes of light in the water.
I was sure, without knowing how, that just beyond those blinds was the room where Fuyuki’s medicine was kept. The slats were open far enough to show part of the floor and I could see the Nurse’s shadow moving around in there. From time to time she came sufficiently close to the window for me to see her feet in their hard, shiny stilettos. My attention narrowed. There was something else in the room with the Nurse. Something made of glass. Something square, like a case or a—
‘What are you doing?’
I jumped. Jason was standing next to me, holding his drink and looking down into the water. Suddenly all the noise started again and the colour came back into the world. The singing guest was grinding out the last few bars of his song, and the waiters were opening bottles of brandy, distributing glasses among the guests.
‘What’re you staring at?’
‘Nothing.’ I shot a look back down into the pool. The light had gone out. The pool was dark again. ‘I mean, I was looking at the water. It’s so – so clear.’
‘Be careful,’ Jason murmured. ‘Be very careful.’
‘Yes,’ I said, stepping away from the pool. ‘Of course.’
‘You’re here for something, aren’t you?’
I met his eyes. ‘What?’
‘You’re looking for something.’
‘No. I mean – no, of course I’m . . . What a funny thing to say.’
He gave a short, dry laugh. ‘You forget, I can tell when you’re lying.’ He looked at my face, then at my hair and my neck, as if they had just asked him a complex question. He touched my shoulder lightly and a bolt of static made my hair leap up at him, wrapping itself round his fingers. He looked down at it with a long, slow smile. ‘I’m going to get all the way inside you,’ he said quietly. ‘All the way. But don’t be scared, I’m going to do it very, very slowly.’
29
Nanking, 18 December 1937, eight o’clock (the sixteenth day of the eleventh month)
At last I can write. At last I have some peace. I have been gone from home for more than a day. When, in the late afternoon, I made up my mind to leave the house, nothing could have stopped me. I pinned my refugee certificate to my jacket and slipped out into the alleyway, dragged onwards by the smell. It was the first time I had been outside in daylight since the thirteenth. The air seemed heavy and cold, the snow stale. I went quietly, using alleys and climbing over gates to get to Liu’s house. His front door was open and he was sitting just inside, almost as if he hadn’t moved since I left him. He was smoking a pipe, a desultory look on his face.
‘Liu Runde,’ I said, stepping into the receiving room, ‘can you smell it? Can you smell the meat cooking?’
He bent forward and put his nose out into the cold air, tilting his head and looking up thoughtfully at the sky.
‘It could be the food they stole from us,’ I said. ‘Maybe they’ve got the gall to cook it.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m going to search. Out on the streets. Shujin needs food.’
‘Are you sure? What about the Japanese?’
I didn’t answer. I was recalling with some embarrassment his insistence that we would be safe, I thought of the example we were to be setting. After a long silence I gathered myself and patted my refugee certificate. ‘Haven’t you – haven’t you got one of these, old man?’
He shrugged and got to his feet, putting down the pipe. ‘Wait there,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get it.’
He had a hurried, whispered conversation with his wife. I could see them in the dimly lit room at the back of the house, facing each other, just her faded blue silk sleeve visible in the doorway, moving every now and then as she raised her hand to make an earnest point. Shortly he came outside to meet me, closing the door carefully behind him and glancing up and down the alley. He had his certificate pinned to his jacket and an anxious, drawn look on his face. ‘I never expected it would come to this,’ he whispered, turning up his collar against the cold. ‘I never would have imagined. Sometimes I wonder who is the foolish one in my marriage . . .’
We crept to the head of the alley and peered along the deserted street. There wasn’t a sound or a movement anywhere. Not even a dog. Only rows and rows of shuttered houses, blackened with soot, an abandoned handcart up-ended against the front of a house. Small fires burned on the roadside, and in the direction of the river the sky was red with flames. I sniffed the air. That incredible tantalizing smell seemed stronger. Almost as if we could expect at any moment to hear the sizzle and pop of frying coming from one of the houses.
We crept up the road like a pair of starving cats, hovering in the shadows, scurrying from doorway to doorway, all the time working towards the Zhongyang gate in the north, the direction the thieves had run. From time to time we happened on bundles of possessions, the owner nowhere to be seen, and we would drag them into the nearest doorway, rummaging desperately through them, hoping for food. Every rickety house we saw we pushed our noses against the doors, whispering through the knotholes, ‘Who’s cooking? Who’s cooking?’ A fist of hunger was working its way through my body, so intense I found it difficult to stand up straight. I could see from the look on Liu’s face that he felt the same. ‘Come out,’ we hissed into the houses. ‘Show us – show us what you are cooking.’
In winter, darkness comes early to us in the east of China, and before long the sun had gone and we were picking our way through the streets using just the light from the fires to guide us. We were exhausted. We seemed to have walked several li – I felt as if I had walked all the way to Pagoda Bridge Road – yet we still hadn’t passed through the city wall. The only other living creature we had seen was a lean and hungry-looking dog, wild and covered with such terrible sores that part of its backbone was exposed. It followed us for a while, and although it was horribly diseased we tried half-heartedly to entice it to us: it was big enough to feed both our families. But it was nervous and barked loudly when we got near it, the sound echoing dangerously through the silent streets. Eventually we abandoned the pursuit.
‘It’s late,’ I said, stopping somewhere near the gate. The smell of cooking had been replaced by something else, the stench of polluted drains. Our spirits were failing. I looked at the rickety buildings lining the street. ‘I’m not so hungry any more, old man. I’m not.’
‘You’re tired. Only tired.’
I was about to answer when something over Liu’s shoulder caught my eye. ‘Be quite still,’ I hissed, gripping his arm. ‘Don’t speak.’
He whipped
round. At the end of the road, in the distance, his face lit from underneath by a small lantern placed on a water barrel, a Japanese soldier had appeared, his rifle hooked on his shoulder. Only five minutes ago we had been standing exactly where he stood now.
We darted quickly into the nearest doorway, breathing hard, pressing ourselves back and shooting looks at each other.
‘He wasn’t there a minute ago,’ Liu hissed. ‘Did you see him?’
‘No.’
‘How in heaven’s name are we going to get home now?’
We stood there for a long time, our eyes locked, our hearts thudding in our chests, both hoping the other would decide what to do. I knew this road ran in a straight line with no gaps in the houses for a long way – we would have to cover a lot of ground in full view of the soldier before we found a side road to disappear into. I took a deep breath, pulled my cap down low on my brow, and risked putting my head out into the street, just for a second, just long enough to see the soldier. I shot back, flat against the wall, breathing hard.
‘What?’ hissed Liu. ‘What can you see?’
‘He’s waiting for something.’
‘Waiting? Waiting for—’
But before he could complete the question the answer came to us: a familiar sound rolling menacingly out of the distance, a low, dreadful rumbling that made the houses around us shudder. We both knew what that sound was. Tanks.
Instinctively we pushed away from the street, inwards, throwing our weight at the wooden door, trusting that the noise of the tanks would drown our efforts. We were ready to climb the side of the house barehanded if necessary, but the door crumpled with an appalling splintering, just as the noise of the tanks grew louder behind us – they must have turned a corner into the street. The door fell inwards with a sudden rush of stale air, and we tumbled inside, a mess of sweat and fear and heavy clothing, tripping and stumbling into the darkness.
It was pitch black, only a faint wash of moonlight creeping in from a hole in the roof.