And in that moment I knew all about him. All about the stained bottles lined up in the silk factory. The pestle, the mortar, the endless search . . . For a cure. This was the sick man who couldn’t be cured by army-issue medicine, the sick man who was desperate enough to try anything – even cannibalism. The yanwangye of Nanking.
62
The baby hadn’t been very old when she’d died. She still had a centimetre of umbilical cord attached to her. Dried and brown and mummified, she was so light that I held her easily, across the palms of my hand, light as a bird. She was tiny. Pitifully undersized. A crumpled, brown newborn’s face. Her hands were frozen – stretched out above her head as if she had been reaching for someone at the moment her world halted.
Her legs had gone and so had most of her lower half. What remained had been cut at, hacked and scraped at by Fuyuki and his Nurse. Most of her had been worn away because a wealthy old man insisted on his fantasy of immortality. She couldn’t choose who looked at her or handled her. She couldn’t stop herself being kept in a tank, facing a blank wall, helpless to move and waiting . . . for what? For someone to come and turn her to face the light?
If I hadn’t found her the garden might have been the place she’d stayed for ever, alone in the dark, with only the rats and the changing leaf cover for company, frozen in eternity – reaching in the wrong direction. She’d have disappeared under the demolished house, and a skyscraper would have grown over her instead of a tree, and it would have been her final grave. The moment I unwrapped the carrier-bag and opened the parcel, I learned for sure that Shi Chongming was right: the past is an explosive, and once its splinters are in you they will always, always work their way to the surface.
*
I sat in his office with my mouth open, and stared at a point just above his head. The air in the room seemed stale and dead. ‘Your daughter?’
‘Taken by him in the war. In Nanking.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Who do you think is shown on the film if not Junzo Fuyuki and my wife?’
‘Your wife?’
‘Of course.’
‘Fuyuki? He was there? He was in Nanking?’
Shi Chongming opened his desk drawer and threw something on to the table. Two flat engraved tags, fastened on an ageing, yellowing strip of tailor’s tape. Because they weren’t on a chain it took me a moment or two to recognize them as soldier’s dogtags. I picked them up and rubbed the surface under my thumb. The kanji was clear. Winter and a tree. I looked up at him. ‘Junzo Fuyuki.’
Shi Chongming didn’t answer. He opened the cupboards that ran across the walls and pointed at them. Every shelf was crammed with stacks and stacks of paper, yellowing, torn and wedged together, secured with ribbon, string, tape and paperclips. ‘My life’s work. My only preoccupation for the last fifty years. On the outside I am a professor of sociology. On the inside I work only to find my daughter.’
‘You didn’t forget,’ I murmured, gazing at the piles of paper. ‘You never did forget Nanking.’
‘Never. Why do you suppose I speak English so well, if not to find my daughter and one day tell the world?’ He pulled out a stack of papers and dropped it with a thud on the table. ‘Can you imagine the convolutions I have been through, the time it took me to track Fuyuki down? Think of the thousands of old men in Japan named Junzo Fuyuki. Here I stand, a little man, respected internationally for my work in a field that holds no interest for me, none whatsoever, a field that has only the distinction of being the one area that would adequately cover my true purpose and allow me access to these records.’ He handed the top paper to me. A photocopy stamped by the National Defence Agency’s war history library. Now I recalled seeing the logo stamped on some of the papers in his portfolio weeks ago. ‘Imperial Army unit records. Copies. The originals – at least, those that survived transfer between here and the United States during the occupation – are very well protected. But I was lucky – after years of appeals I was at last granted access to the records, and then I found what I needed.’ He nodded. ‘Yes. There was only one Lieutenant Junzo Fuyuki in Nanking in 1937. Only one. The yanwangye of Nanking. The devil – the guardian of hell. The man who hunted for human flesh to cure himself.’ He rubbed his forehead, corrugating his skin. ‘Like all the other soldiers, like almost every Japanese citizen who returned from China after the war, Fuyuki brought with him a box.’ Shi Chongming held out his hands to indicate the shape and the size. ‘Hanging round his neck.’
‘Yes,’ I said faintly. I remembered it. A white ceremonial box, lit and displayed in the corridor of the apartment next to Tokyo Tower. It should have brought back to Japan the ashes of a fellow soldier, but Fuyuki’s had been used for something else.
‘And with that baby he brought something else.’ Shi Chongming gazed sadly at the reams and reams of paper. ‘He brought the grief of a parent. He dragged with him a line . . . a line from here,’ he put his hand on his heart, ‘from this place to eternity. A line that could never be cut or shaken off. Never.’
We were both silent for a long time. The only sounds were of the trees outside the window, moving in the wind, occasionally bending to run their fingers lightly across the glass pane. At length Shi Chongming wiped his eyes and got to his feet, moving slowly, slightly bent, across the familiar spaces, the well-worn paths between the few pieces of furniture. He wheeled the film projector into the centre of the room, plugged it in and crossed awkwardly, without his stick, to where a small portable screen stood near the window. He rolled it down and secured it to the base of the stand. ‘Here it is,’ he said, as he unlocked a lower drawer and took out a rusting film can. He eased it open. ‘The first time anyone has seen it. I am sure to this day that the man who filmed this was repentant. I am sure that he would have distributed this on his return to Japan – even if it meant his death. And yet he is dead and here is the film. Protected to this day by me.’ He shook his head and smiled wryly. ‘Such irony.’
When I didn’t speak he stepped forward and held out the canister for me to look inside.
‘You’re going to show it to me,’ I whispered, staring at the film. This was it: the manifestation of the words in the orange book, the testimony I’d been looking for all these years, the proof that I hadn’t invented something – hadn’t invented one detail, one exquisitely important detail.
‘Yes. You think you know what you’re going to feel about this film, don’t you? You’ve researched Nanking for years, and you’ve read every account of it. You’ve played this film in your head a hundred times. You think you know what you’re going to see and you think that will be horror enough. Don’t you?’
I nodded numbly.
‘Well, you’re wrong. You’re going to see something more than that.’ He put on his glasses and laced the film into the projector, bending close to the machine to inch the film through its complex gears. ‘You’re going to see that and more. As ugly as you imagine that act, as ugly as the yanwangye of Nanking is, someone on this film is more ugly still.’
‘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 ste
p towards the camera and shouted soundlessly at the lens. He seemed about to leap forward, when something offscreen 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 pistol’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 w
ail. 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 . . .’