It’s funny how people can plant ideas in your head. Much, much later that night, I looked down at my legs, crossed neatly under the table. I was quite drunk, and I remember seeing them, crossed primly at the ankles, and thinking, What do nice legs look like? I smoothed down my tights and moved my knees apart a little, so that I could see my thighs a little more clearly. I turned them so I could see the calf and the little tautness when I flexed my feet. I wondered if ‘nice legs’ looked anything like my legs.
10
Nanking, 4 April 1937, the Festival of the Clear and Bright
My mother must be laughing now – she must be looking at me and laughing at all my reservations and my cold impatience over this marriage. Because, it seems, Shujin and I are going to have a child! A child! Imagine that. Shi Chongming, the ugly little toad, a father! Here, at last, is something to celebrate. A child to bring order to the laws of physics and love, a child to reveal reason behind the subtle codes of society. A child to help me embrace the future wholeheartedly.
Shujin, naturally, has been thrown into a frenzy of superstition. There are so many important things to consider. I watch her in bemusement, trying to take it all in, trying to treat it all with the deepest seriousness. First, this morning, came a long list of forbidden food – she will no longer allow squid and octopus and pineapple into the house, and I am to make a daily trip to the market to buy black boned chicken, liver, plum, lotus seed and balls of congealed duck blood. And from today it is my responsibility to kill the chickens that come squawking home from market, for if Shujin kills any animal, even an animal for food, it appears that our baby will take on the beast’s shape and she will give birth to a chicken or a duck!
But, and this is the most important of all, we must not refer to our son (she is sure we will have a son) as ‘baby’ or ‘child’, because the bad spirits might hear us and try to steal him at birth. Instead she has given him a name to confuse the spirits, a ‘milkname’, she calls it. From herein ‘moon’ is how we must refer to our child whenever we speak. ‘You cannot imagine the manner of evil beings who would snatch away a newborn. Our moon soul would be the most precious prize a demon could ever hope for. And,’ here she held up her hand to stave off my interruption, ‘never forget – our little moon is very fragile. Please don’t shout or be argumentative around me. We must not disturb his soul.’
‘I see,’ I said, a small smile playing on my mouth, because I found the level of her ingenuity quite marvellous. ‘Well, in that case, moon soul it is. And from this moment on let only peace exist between these four walls.’
11
The Russians said it was no surprise that Jason was making jokes about the Nurse. They said they’d always known he was a strange one. They said that his walls were covered with horrible photographs, that he often received wrapped specialist magazines from mailing addresses in Thailand, and that sometimes odd things with no great value went missing around the house: Irina’s statuette of a fighting bear in real animal skin, a single wolf-fur glove, a photograph of the girls’ grandparents. Maybe, they speculated, he was a devil worshipper. ‘He watch sick stuff, sick till it make you to puke. His videos, always the videos with death.’
You could see the videos they were talking about displayed in the rental shops on Waseda Street. They all had titles like Faces of Death and Mortuary Madness and all the lettering seemed to be in lurid blood drips. Genuine autopsy footage! the covers boasted, and you’d have thought they were all about sex if you saw the crowds of adolescent boys that always seemed to be hanging around that corner of the shop. I’d never actually seen one of the videos in the house so I didn’t know if the Russians were telling the truth. But I had seen Jason’s photographs.
‘I’ve been in Asia for four years,’ he’d told me. ‘You can take your Taj Mahals and your Angkor Wats. I’m looking for something . . .’ he’d paused then and rubbed his fingers together, as if he was trying to mould the words from the air, ‘. . . I’m looking for something more – something different.’ Once I’d happened to pass his room when the door was open and the room was empty. I couldn’t help it, I had to step inside.
I saw what the Russians meant. There were photographs pinned to every inch of the wall and the images were as horrible as they’d said: here was a pitifully crippled man, naked except for a garland of marigolds, sitting dejectedly on the banks of what I decided must be the Ganges, there were young Filipino men nailed to crucifixes, vultures gathering for human flesh on the incredible Towers of Silence at a Parsi funeral. I even recognized the prayer flags and smouldering juniper of a sky-burial charnel ground outside Lhasa because I’d done Tibet in a module at university. But, I thought, looking at a photo of a wide plume of smoke shooting from an indistinct shape on a platform, the words ‘Varanasi funeral pyre’ scrawled below it, there was something oddly beautiful about all this, a sense in this room, like a scent, of a vivid curiosity. When at last, unnoticed, I stepped quietly out into the corridor, I had decided that the Russians were wrong. Jason wasn’t odd or morbid, he was fascinating.
He was supposed to be a waiter at the club, but all week I’d barely seen him lift a tray. Sometimes he’d stop at tables and chat amiably for some time with the customers, just as if he, not Strawberry, was the owner. ‘He’s waiter but he don’t do nuh-think,’ murmured Irina. ‘He don’t need to do no work because Mama Strawberry lurve him.’ She seemed to like the cachet that a gaijin waiter gave her. And then there were his looks. The Japanese hostesses all giggled and blushed when he walked by. Often he would sit at Strawberry’s desk, sipping champagne, with his waiter’s tuxedo all open and showing off his body, while she simpered and adjusted her dress straps, sometimes leaning back in her chair and running her hands down her body.
He didn’t spend much time in the house – and finding his room open like that was unusual. Ordinarily the door was shut, we all had locks on our bedroom doors, and often he’d lock up and leave early, before any of us woke, or he’d take a taxi from the club and not come home until the following night. Maybe he was out in the parks, looking for women asleep on benches. But there were impressions of him everywhere – a pair of moccasins lying on the staircase, lime-scented shaving cream drying in rings on the bathroom shelf, business cards in pale pink propped up against the kettle, with names like Yuko and Moe in feminine script.
I pretended not to be fazed by all this, but I was. Secretly I was completely dazzled by Jason.
I bought a diary from Kiddyland, a schoolgirl’s shop in Omotesando. It was pink, with a clear plastic cover containing a sparkling gel that moved round and round. I would hold it up to the window and marvel at the way the light caught the little specks of glitter. I had scratch’n’sniff cream-cake stickers, and every day that passed I placed a sticker over the space in my diary. Some days I took a train over to Hongo and sat in the Bambi restaurant, watching the sun playing on the big Akamon gate as the students came and went. But I didn’t see Shi Chongming. There were five days to go, four days, three days, two. He had said a week. That meant Sunday. But Sunday came, and he didn’t call.
I couldn’t believe it. He had broken his promise. I waited the whole day, sitting on the sofa in the living room, the shades all drawn against the heat, a pile of my books scattered around me. I stared and stared at the phone. But the only times it rang it was for Jason. I’d snatch it up and it would be a Japanese girl sighing plaintively down the line, refusing to believe it when I told her he was out.
That Sunday I took five messages for him, all from different girls. Most of them were sweet and sad, some were rude. One took a shocked breath when she heard my voice, and screamed at me in shrill Japanese, ‘Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing answering the phone? Put Jason on the fucking phone. NOW.’
I spent some time listing all the names. I doodled faces next to them, trying to imagine what they looked like. Then, when that got boring, I sat with my chin in my hands, staring glumly at the phone that didn’t ring for me all day and
night.
12
Nanking, 1 September 1937
Trouble is coming out of the east. It is just as I thought. The Japanese are in Shanghai and fighting for it street by street. Could it really be the Japanese, and not the Communists, who are the greatest threat to our stability? Could it even be that the Communists were correct to force this military unison on Chiang? Pu Yi, the Japanese puppet, has been on his borrowed throne in Manchuria for six years, no fault of our president, and five years ago the Japanese bombed Shanghai. But nobody has spoken about our safety in Nanking. Until now. Now, and only now, citizens are starting to take precautions. I spent this morning painting our blue-tiled roof black, to hide it from the Japanese bombers that we are warned will rise up one day from behind Purple Mountain, coming with the morning sun.
At about ten, when I’d finished half of the roof, something made me pause. I don’t know if it was a noise or a premonition, but as I stood on my ladder something made me turn to look out to the east. Dotted on the city skyline there were maybe twenty other men like me, high up on their ladders, spidery against the sky, their half-painted roofs glistening beneath them. And further, further beyond them, the spreading horizon. Purple Mountain. The red east.
Shujin has always said there is something bad in Nanking’s future. In her doomy prophetic way, she has always talked about it. She says she has known from the moment she stepped from the train a year ago that she was trapped here. She says that the weight of the sky dropped straight down on her and the air infected her lungs and the city’s future pressed against her so hard she had to fight to remain standing. Even the slick dark train she had just alighted from, boring its way out through the milky light, wasn’t an escape. At that moment, standing on the Nanking platform, she looked up at the ring of mountains, dark, like an opened ribcage set in the land, and knew they were a great danger. They would hold her like a claw, those poisonous mountains, and the trains would stop running while she was here. Then Nanking would have her and use its weak, acid air to dissolve her slowly into its heart.
I know something vital happened to her that day, when I escorted her back to Nanking from Poyang lake, because I remember one vivid grain of colour in the train journey. A cherry pink parasol. A girl in the rice fields had paused to wait for the goat she was leading to catch up. When the animal stopped stubbornly the girl tugged on the rope, half-heartedly, more concerned with the idleness of watching than with the animal coming towards her. We had come to a halt somewhere just south of Wuhu and everyone in the train stopped what they were doing and turned to the windows to watch the girl waiting for the goat. At last the animal relented and the girl continued, and soon there was nothing left but the emerald paddy-field. The other passengers turned away from the window and went back to their games, to their conversations, but Shujin remained motionless, still watching the patch of land where the girl had been.
I leaned over to her and whispered, ‘What are you looking at?’
‘What am I looking at?’ The question seemed to puzzle her. ‘What am I looking at?’ She repeated it several times – her hand on the window, still staring at the empty space left by the girl. ‘What am I looking at?’
It is only now, so many months later, that I understand exactly what Shujin was looking at. Gazing at the girl under the cherry pink parasol she was looking at herself. She was saying goodbye. The country girl in her was going. When we got to Nanking she lingered on for a while in some places – the tender lines on the backs of her knees, the dusting of colour on her arms and the steady non-lilting Jiangxi dialect so amusing to the Nanking citizens – but everywhere else the woman was coming through, unwillingly, emerging blinking and baffled in the huge city. The city that she believes will never let her leave.
13
I watched Shi Chongming arrive at Todai University at eight o’clock the following morning. I’d been there since six thirty, waiting first on the street corner, then in the Bambi café when it opened. I ordered a large breakfast – miso soup, tuna flakes on rice, green tea. Before the waitress placed my order in the kitchen she whispered the price to me. I looked up at her, not understanding. Then I realized: she didn’t want me to think I’d get it for free again. I took the chit to the counter and paid it. Then, when she brought the food, I gave her three thousand yen notes. She stared at the money in silence, then blushed and tucked it into her pie-crust frill apron.
It was a hot day, but Shi Chongming wore a blue cotton Mao-style shirt, odd little black rubber plimsolls, the elasticated sort that English schoolchildren used to wear for PE, and his strange fisherman’s hat. He walked very slowly and carefully, his eyes on the pavement. He didn’t notice me loitering at the gate until I had stepped out of the shaded trees and was standing right in front of him. He saw my feet and came to a halt, his cane outstretched, his head down.
‘You said you were going to phone.’
Slowly, very slowly, Shi Chongming raised his face. His eyes were dim, like cloudy marbles. ‘You’re here again,’ he said. ‘You said you weren’t going to come here again.’
‘You were supposed to call me. Yesterday.’
He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘You look different,’ he said. ‘Why do you look different?’
‘You didn’t call me.’
He looked at me for an instant more, taking this in, then made a noise in his throat, and began to walk away. ‘You’re very rude,’ he muttered. ‘Very rude.’
‘But I’ve waited a week,’ I said, catching up and walking alongside. ‘I didn’t call you, I didn’t come here, I did what I was supposed to do, but you, you forgot.’
‘I didn’t promise to call you—’
‘Yes, you—’
‘No. No.’ He stopped and held up his walking-stick, pointing at me. ‘I made no promises. I have a very good memory and I know I didn’t promise you anything.’
‘I can’t wait for ever.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Do you like wise old Chinese sayings? Would you like to hear a profound truth about a mulberry leaf? Would you? We say that patience turns a mulberry leaf into silk. Silk! Imagine that, from nothing but a dried-out old leaf. All it takes is patience.’
‘Well, that’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Worms turn it into silk.’
He closed his mouth and sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I don’t see a very long life for this friendship, do you?’
‘Not if you don’t call me when you promise. You’ve got to keep your promises.’
‘I haven’t got to do anything.’
‘But . . .’ my voice was rising and one or two of the passing students gave us curious looks ‘. . . I’m at work in the evenings. How do I know you won’t call me in the evenings? There’s no answerphone. How do I know you won’t call me one evening and then never again? If I miss your call it’ll all go wrong and then . . .’
‘Leave me now,’ he said. ‘You have said enough. Now please let me alone.’ And he hobbled away across the campus, leaving me standing in the shadows under a gingko tree.
‘Professor Shi,’ I called, after his retreating back. ‘Please. I didn’t mean to be rude. I didn’t mean it.’
But he kept walking, disappearing eventually beyond the dusty rotary hedge, into the shaded forest. At my feet the shadows of the gingko trees shifted. I turned and kicked the low fence at the edge of the path, then put my face in my hands and began to shiver.
I went home in a kind of trance, going straight to my room, not stopping to speak to the Russians, who were watching TV in the living room and who made a sarcastic oooohing noise to my retreating back. I slid the bedroom door closed with a bang and stood with my back to it, my eyes shut, listening to my heart beating.
When you know you’re right about something, the important thing is to keep going.
After a long time I opened my eyes and went to where I kept my paints stacked, against the wall in the alcove. I mixed some paint, set the brushes and the water in a jar near the wall and opened the window wide. It was a
lready getting dark, a burntfood smell was coming up from the streets, and Tokyo was lighting up for the night. The city stretched away into the distance like a small galaxy. I imagined it from outer space – buildings like mountains, streets glittering like Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s rivers of mercury.
How could this be? When the air raids ended, when the last American bomber retreated over the blue Pacific, there were over a hundred square miles of flattened streets in Tokyo. The city was unrecognizable. Cars couldn’t drive through it because no one knew where the streets ended and the buildings began. In the shanty-towns along the river, the tadon they burned, a foul-smelling, smoky combination of coal dust and tar, hung over the city like a cloud.
The silk walls of my room had been ripped down to waist height. Below that they were intact. I loaded the paintbrush with cobalt and began to paint. I painted broken rooftops and the spindly rafters of burned-away houses. I painted fires raging out of control and streets strewn in rubble. As I painted my mind drifted free. I was in such a daze that at seven o’clock the Russians had to come and knock on the door and ask me if I was thinking of going to work that evening.
‘Or you just gonna stay in there? Like a crab, hmm?’
I pulled back the door and looked out at them, brush in my hand, face smeared with paint.
‘My God! You coming like that?’
I blinked at them. I didn’t know it then, but I was lucky they had knocked on the door: if they hadn’t I might have missed one of the most important nights of my time in Tokyo.
14
Nanking, 12 November 1937 (the tenth day of the tenth month)