The Devil of Nanking

  Shanghai fell last week. The enormity of this news is still sinking in. Our president’s best troops were defending the city: we outnumbered the Japanese marines ten to one, and yet somehow the city fell. The streets are said to be deserted, only the empty vomit and blister-gas canisters of the Japanese scattered in the gutters, dead zoo animals rotting on the floors of their cages. News comes that the Imperial Japanese Army is fanning out across the delta and now it seems that an assault on Nanking is inevitable. Ten divisions are pushing inland towards us: walking, riding motorbikes and armoured cars. I can imagine them, their army-issue puttees soaked to the brims with yellow river mud, certain that if they can only take Nanking, our nation’s great capital, they will have the giant’s heart in their fists.

  But naturally it won’t happen. Our president will not allow harm to come to his city. And yet something has changed in the citizens, a wavering of faith. As I was walking home today after my morning class (only four students attended, what am I to make of that?), the fog that has been hanging over the city lifted and it became sunny, as if the sky had taken pity on Nanking. Yet I noticed that no laundry appeared on poles as it usually does at the first hint of sun. Then I noticed that the street sprinklers, the poor ragged coolies who clean our thoroughfares, hadn’t come through, and that people were scurrying from doorway to doorway, carrying more belongings than seemed necessary. It took me some time to realize what was happening and when I did my heart sank. People are fleeing. The city is closing down. I am ashamed to say that even some lecturers at the university were talking today about heading inland. Imagine that! Imagine such a lack of faith in our president. Imagine what he will think to see us fleeing his great city.

  Shujin seems almost gleeful that Shanghai has been taken. It seems to prove everything she has always claimed about the Nationalists. She, too, has been caught up in the frenzy to desert the capital. When I returned home today I found her packing belongings into a chest. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting. Now, please bring the cart from the courtyard.’

  ‘The cart?’

  ‘Yes! We’re leaving. We’re going back to Poyang.’ She folded a white swaddling cloth from her grandmother’s cui sheng parcel, and packed it into the chest. I noticed she had reserved the largest space for a tortoiseshell money case of my mother’s – a case I remembered to contain several I Ching passages, written in blood, and wrapped in cloth. My mother had put all her faith in those words, yet they had been unable to save her. ‘Oh, don’t look so anxious,’ said Shujin. ‘My almanac marks today as a perfectly auspicious day for travel.’

  ‘Now, look here, there’s no need to be hasty—’ I began.

  ‘Is there not?’ She rocked back on her heels and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘I think there is. Come with me.’ She got up and beckoned me to the window, opened it and pointed up to the Purple Mountain where Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum sits. ‘There,’ she said. It was getting late and behind the mountain the moon was already showing, low and orange. ‘Zijin.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Chongming, listen, please, my husband.’ Her voice became low and serious. ‘Last night I had a dream. I dreamed that Zijin was burning—’

  ‘Shujin,’ I began, ‘this is nonsense—’

  ‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘It is not nonsense. It is real. In my dream Purple Mountain was burning. And when I saw it I knew. I knew instantly that disaster was going to strike Nanking—’

  ‘Shujin, please—’

  ‘A disaster the like of which no one has seen before, not even during the Christian rebellion.’

  ‘Really! Tell me, are you as wise as the blind men at festivals, boasting they’ve smeared their eyelids with – with – I don’t know, the fluid from a dog’s eye or such nonsense? A soothsayer? Let’s put an end to this rubbish now. You cannot, cannot predict the future.’

  But she wasn’t to be shaken. She stood stiffly next to me, her eyes locked on Purple Mountain. ‘Yes, you can,’ she whispered. ‘You can predict the future. The future is an open window.’ She put her hand lightly on the shutters. ‘Just like this one. It is easy to look ahead because the future is the past. Everything in life revolves, and I have already seen exactly what will happen.’ She turned and looked at me with her yellow eyes, and for a moment it seemed she was staring steadily into my heart. ‘If we stay in Nanking we will die. You know it too. I can see it in your eyes – you know it very well. You know your precious president is too weak to save us. Nanking doesn’t stand a chance in his hands.’

  ‘I will not listen to another word,’ I said firmly. ‘I will not have the generalissimo spoken about like this. I forbid it. Absolutely forbid it. Chiang Kai-shek will save this city.’

  ‘That foreigner’s lapdog.’ She sniffed contemptuously. ‘First his own generals have to force him to fight and now he can’t even defeat the Japanese – the very same army that trained him!’

  ‘Enough!’ I was shaking with anger. ‘I have heard enough. Chiang Kai-shek will defend Nanking and we, yes, you and I, we will be here to see it.’ I took her by the wrist and led her back to the chest. ‘I’m your husband and you need to trust my judgement. Unpack this now. We’re going nowhere – certainly not back to Poyang. Poyang killed my mother and for once I am instructing you clearly, as befits a husband: you will put your faith in Chiang Kai-shek, the supreme arbiter, a man far greater, far stronger than all of your superstitions put together.’

  Nanking, 16 November 1937

  How I regret those words now. Now that I am here, alone in my study, the door locked, my ear pressed furtively to the radio, how I regret my proud stand. I am afraid to let Shujin hear the news the radio is delivering because she would crow with delight to hear today’s terrible report, so terrible that even I quake to write it down here. I will write it in small characters to make it easier to bear: Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang government have fled the city, leaving it in the hands of General Tang Shengzhi.

  Now I have written the appalling sentence what is there to do but stare at it, the blood rushing in my head. What shall I do? I can neither sit still, nor stand, nor think about anything else. Commander Chiang gone? General Tang in his place? Can we trust him? Am I to crawl to Shujin and tell her that I was wrong? Allow her to see me weakened in my resolve? I cannot. I cannot retreat. I am caught in a wretched web of my own making, but I must stand my ground, no matter how queasy it makes me. I will barricade the house and we shall wait out the arrival of the Imperial forces. Even if the unthinkable does happen, and our troops are defeated, I know the Japanese will treat us well. I visited Kyoto as a student and I speak the language well. They behave with infinite care and sophistication – one only has to study their deportment in the Russian war to know them as a civilized people. Shujin will be surprised to find that they even have things to teach us. We will prepare a sign in Japanese saying, ‘Welcome’, and we’ll be safe. Today I saw two families in an alley off the Hanzhong Road working on such a sign.

  But as I write, as night falls on Nanking outside the walls of the house, as the city descends into perfect silence, with only the occasional distant shudder of a Nationalist tank prowling Zhongshan Road, my heart is like ice. It is all I can do not to go downstairs and confess my fears to Shujin.

  She has hardened to me since I refused to return to Poyang. Daily I repeat my list of reasons for not fleeing, pretending not to know how hollow they sound: in the countryside there will be no medical care, no sophisticated methods for our child’s birth. I have tried to paint a picture of the disasters that would follow if we were stranded in the countryside, with only an old peasant woman to help Shujin in her confinement, but every time I say this she flies at me with fire in her eyes: ‘An old peasant woman? An old peasant woman? She would know better than your foreign doctors! Christians!’

  And maybe I have worn her down, because she has lapsed into silence. She has spent most of today sitting limply in her chair, her hands folded on her stomach. I can’t he
lp thinking about those hands, so small, so white. All day I was unable to stop staring at them. They must have drifted unconsciously to her stomach because she would never knowingly stroke her abdomen – she is certain that to do so would make the baby spoiled and demanding, the very words my mother used with me: ‘Really, I must have rubbed my stomach too often to produce such a proud and obstinate child.’

  When I consider the possibility that our child could be obstinate, or arrogant, or selfish, or any other undesirable characteristic, I could weep. Proud and inflexible or spoiled and demanding – all these things depend on one thing: on our child having life in the first place. It all depends on Shujin surviving the inevitable attack on Nanking.

  15

  Maybe the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose someone and not know where to look for them. The Japanese believe that on O-Bon night the dead come back to their loved ones. They swoop out of the ether, sucked out of their eternal doze by the call of their living descendants. I’d always imagined O-Bon night as dreadfully chaotic, with spirits zipping around the air, knocking people over because they were going so fast. Now that I was in Japan I wondered what happened to those who didn’t know where their dead lay. What happened if they had died in a different country? I wondered if spirits could cross continents. If they couldn’t, then how would they find their way back to their families?

  It was spirits I was thinking about that night, sitting in the gloom with my endless cigarettes, trying to decide how I was going to convince Shi Chongming to talk to me, when Junzo Fuyuki and his men came to the club for the second time.

  I was summoned by Strawberry to join them. They were seated at the usual long table – all except the Nurse, who was already sequestered in the dark alcove, the light malforming her shadow on the wall, horse-like, a chess-set knight, so tall that she almost appeared not to grow upwards from the floor but to be suspended by her shoulders from the ceiling. Fuyuki seemed to be in a good mood, and there was a new guest in the seat next to me, a huge man in a silver suit, with a congested face and hair so short that the fat ridges at the back of his skull were visible. He was already drunk – telling jokes, slamming his chair on the floor every time he got to the punchline, lifting his eyebrows comically and muttering something that made the men hoot with laughter. He spoke Japanese with an Osaka accent, the way I used to imagine all the yakuza did, but he wasn’t one of the gang. He was a friend of Fuyuki’s and the Japanese girls said he was famous – they were giggling at him, hands up to their mouths, sighing to each other over him.

  ‘My name is Baisho,’ he told the Russians, in stilted English, waving at them with his thick, gold-ringed fingers. ‘My friends call me Bai, because I have twice their money and I am twice’ – he waggled his eyebrows suggestively – ‘twice the man!’ I sat silently, painting the kanji for Bai in my head. Bai san was using it to mean double, but it had other meanings too – it could mean ‘plum’ if written with a tree combined with the symbol for ‘every’, or it could mean shellfish, or it could mean cultivation. But what Bai san really made me think of was the way his name sounded in English: Bison.

  ‘My job is singer. Me number-one Japanese singing boy.’ He waved his hand around the table at anyone who cared to listen to him. ‘And my new friend,’ he said, jabbing the cigar in the direction of the black spectre in the wheelchair, ‘Mr Fuyuki. He number-one man in Tokyo!’ He flexed his fist, curling it to make the muscles bulk out. ‘The oldest in Tokyo, but healthy and strong like his age is thirty years. Strong, very strong.’ He turned drunkenly to him and said in loud Japanese, as if the old man was deaf, ‘Fuyuki-san, You Are Very Strong. You are the greatest, the oldest man I know.’

  Fuyuki nodded. ‘I am. I am,’ he whispered. ‘I am stronger today than I was at twenty.’

  Bison raised his glass. ‘To the strongest man in Tokyo.’

  ‘The strongest man in Tokyo!’ everyone chorused.

  Sometimes it’s a mistake to show off – you can never know for sure when things are about to change, and you’re going to end up looking foolish. Less than half an hour after he’d been boasting about his health, Fuyuki began to look unwell. No one drew attention to it, but I could see – he was breathing hard, muttering something and groping for the arm of the ponytailed man, who leaned forward and listened carefully, his eyes expressionless. After a few moments he nodded, then stood, pulling himself up straight and smoothing down his sweater, pushing his chair sharply under the table. He went discreetly across the club to the alcove, hesitated then stepped inside.

  One of the other men sat a little closer to Fuyuki, watching him discreetly, but otherwise there seemed to be an effort at the table to pretend that nothing had happened, as if it might be disrespectful to draw attention to the old man’s discomfort. I was the only one following the ponytailed man with my eyes. I saw him sit where Jason had sat, the shadows deep on his face as he spoke to the Nurse. There was a moment’s pause, then the Nurse reached inside her jacket and fished out a pouch from which she retrieved what looked like a small phial. With her long white fingers held out delicately at an angle, she tapped something from the phial into a glass, filled it with water from a jug on the table, and handed it to the man, who covered it with a white napkin and came back silently to the table, handing the glass to Fuyuki. The old man took a trembling sip, then another. I noticed a residue of something coarse, something like nutmeg, clinging to the glass. In the alcove the Nurse returned the pouch to her jacket, pushing it deep inside the pocket. She smoothed down the wig with her big hands.

  At my side Bison made a small, fascinated noise in his throat, sitting forward with one elbow on the table, the cigar in his fingers heavy with ash. He watched, entranced, as Fuyuki downed the rest of the drink, dropped the glass on the table and sank back, both hands on the arms of the wheelchair, his head tipped back, breathing noisily through his tiny nose.

  Bison began to laugh. He shook his head and laughed until his whole body was shaking and his face was getting red. He leaned across me and spoke to Fuyuki in a loud, slurry voice. ‘Hey, oniisan,’ he said, indicating the drink with his cigar. ‘Haven’t you got some medicine for me too? Something to make me stand up proud, like I did when I was twenty?’ Fuyuki didn’t answer. He continued breathing laboriously. ‘You know what I mean, you old goat. A cure to keep you as strong as when you were twenty.’ Around the table one or two conversations stopped and people turned to look. Bison smacked his lips and waved a hand in the air. ‘Something to keep the ladies happy? Eh?’ He nudged me roughly. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? You’d like a twenty-year-old man, someone who could STAND UP.’ He leaped to his feet, stumbling against the table, sending a plate crashing to the floor. ‘This is what I want. I want to stand up like Mr Fuyuki! Like my onii-san, I want to live for ever!’

  His neighbour reached out to touch his sleeve; one of the other men rested a finger on his mouth. ‘I want to stand up stiff like I used to,’ Bison sang, in his crooner’s voice, his hands on his chest. ‘As stiff as I was at eighteen. Oh, tell me, kami sama, is that too much to ask?’

  When no one laughed he stopped in his tracks, the words drying in his mouth. Everyone had stopped talking, and the ponytailed man, in a small, barely perceptible gesture, not even raising his eyes, had pinched his lips together discreetly with his thumb and forefinger. Bison’s smile dissolved. He opened his hands in a mute gesture: What? What have I said? But the ponytailed man had already removed his fingers and was pretending to be interested in inspecting his nails, just as if nothing had happened. Someone else coughed, an embarrassed noise. Then, almost as if at a signal, all the conversations restarted at once. Bison looked round the table. ‘What?’ he said into the noise. ‘What?’ But no one paid him any attention. They had all turned in opposite directions, finding more interesting things to look at, more important things to talk about, swirling their drinks, clearing their throats, lighting cigars.

  After a long, puzzled hesitation, he sat down
very, very slowly. He picked up a hot towel, held it to his face and breathed in and out. ‘My God,’ he muttered, lowering the towel, and looking anxiously to where the Nurse’s shadow flickered on the wall. ‘It can’t be true . . .’

  ‘What he say?’ hissed Irina, leaning towards me. ‘What he say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I murmured, not looking at her. ‘I didn’t understand.’

  For some time after that the conversation at the table was conducted on a high, slightly forced note. Fuyuki gradually recovered. Eventually he wiped his mouth and folded the glass into the napkin, placed it inside his pocket, then tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling for a while. The men went on talking, the girls refilled their drinks and no one referred to the incident. Only Bison didn’t join in – he sat in a stunned silence, one moment staring glumly at the bulge in Fuyuki’s jacket where the glass was hidden, the next glancing across at the ominous shadow of the Nurse. His cheeks were damp, his eyes watered, and for the rest of the night his Adam’s apple worked painfully as if he might be sick.

  16

  Nanking, 9 December 1937 (by Shujin’s calendar the seventh day of the eleventh month)

  There is wholescale panic in the city. Last week Japanese forces took Suzhou, the Venice of China, and began to move north of the Tai Wu lake. They must have travelled quickly, going in an arc along the Yangtze and coming in from the north, because four days ago Zhejiang fell. General Tang has vowed to do his utmost to defend us, but nothing about him inspires confidence in the citizens, and now almost anyone who can afford to is leaving. ‘It will be like the Taiping invasion again,’ they whisper. The trucks are piled high, the poor and the desperate clinging to the sides, the vehicles swaying wide-bellied out into the tiny distance. I pray that the specks you can occasionally observe dropping from the sides of the trucks as they disappear towards the rail ferry at Xiaguan, the dark objects that once or twice fall away and drop in slow motion against the misty background, I pray they are belongings: baskets or chickens coming untethered. I pray they are not the children of the poor.