Authors: Mo Hayder
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A
24
Nanking, 14 December 1937, midday
The truth is emerging on the radio. It is not good. Yesterday, after the explosion of Zhongshan gate, it seems the IJA poured through two openings in the city wall. I was lucky to escape in time. During the afternoon they moved into the city, bringing their tanks, their flame-throwers, their howitzers. By nightfall the Japanese had captured every government building in Nanking.
When we heard this Shujin and I hung our heads. We didn’t speak for a long time. Eventually I got to my feet, switched off the radio and put my hands on her shoulders.
‘Don’t worry. It will all be over before our b—’ I hesitated, looking down at her head, at the thick dark hair, the vulnerable stripe of white skin along the parting. ‘It will be over before little moon arrives. We’ve enough food and water for more than two weeks. And besides,’ I took a breath and tried to sound reassuring and calm, ‘the Japanese are civilized. It won’t be very long before we are told it is safe to return to the streets.’
‘Our future is our past and our past is our future,’ she whispered. ‘We already know what will happen …’
We already know what will happen?
Maybe she is right. Maybe all truths are in us at birth. Maybe for years all we do is swim away from what we already know, and maybe only old age and death allow us to swim back, back to something that is pure, something unchanged by the act of surviving. What if she is right? What if everything is there already
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- our fate, and our loves, and our children to be? What if they are all in us from the day we are born? If that is so then I already know what is going to happen in Nanking. I just need to reach for that answer …
pt| Nanking, 15 December 1937, midnight (the thirteenth .^Xn*, day of the eleventh month)
Ha! Look at us now. Just one short day later and all my confidence is exhausted. Shujin, my clairvoyant, did not foresee this! The food is gone. At about one o’clock this morning we heard a sound in the front courtyard. When I crept to the shutters to look I saw two boys in shabby clothes dragging the sorghum sack and the strings of meat over the wall. They had thrown down a rope and were clambering up it. I shouted and ran down the stairs, grabbing up the iron bar and bellowing at them in rage, but by the time I had unbolted the door and raced out into the street, clattering among livestock braces and overturning old water barrels, they had disappeared.
‘What is it?’ Shujin appeared in the doorway, wearing a long nightgown. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and she was holding an oil lamp. ‘Chongming? What’s happened?’
‘Ssssh. Hand me my coat, then go back inside and lock the doors. Don’t open them until I return.’
I slipped between the abandoned houses and scrubland until I reached the Lius’ street. His was the only inhabited house in his alley, and as I turned the corner I saw the three of them outside the house, milling around in the watery moonlight. Liu’s wife was crying, and his son was standing at the head of the alley, facing out into the street, iron-legged, trembling with fury. He was holding a wooden cart shaft straight in front of him as if ready to strike someone. I knew even before I approached that the family had suffered the same fate as us.
They took me into the house. Liu and I lit a pipe and sat near the coal-burning stove to keep warm, with the door to the alley
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standing open because his son insisted on staying a few feet from it, in the street-squat position the young find so natural, with his knees near his shoulders like bony wings. The shaft lay at his feet, ready to be snatched up. His eyes were intent, as fierce as a tiger’s, fixed on the street at the top of the alley.
‘We should have left the city a long time ago,’ Liu’s wife said bitterly, turning away from us. ‘We’re all going to die here.’
We watched her retreat, and soon we could hear muffled weeping from a room at the back. I shot an embarrassed look at Liu, but he sat, expressionless, looking through the doorway over the roofs to where, in the distance, a grey pall of smoke blotted out the stars. It was only the flickering pulse in his neck that gave away his feelings.
‘What do you think?’ he said eventually, not turning to look at me. ‘We have food for two days, then we’ll starve. Do you think we should go out to look?’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said quietly, watching the flicker of red illuminate the underside of the billowing smoke. ‘The city has fallen. It won’t be long before it’s safe to leave our houses. Maybe two days, maybe less. Soon they’ll tell us that it’s safe to go out again.’
‘We should wait until then?’
‘Yes. I believe we should wait. It won’t be long.’
fH Nanking, 17 December 1937
We haven’t eaten for two days. I worry about how long Shujin can go on like this. It can’t be much longer before peace is restored. There are radio reports of attempts to set up a Self governing Committee for the city - they say it won’t be long before we can walk around openly and the Red Cross will be giving out free rice rations on the Shanghai road. But as yet there has been no announcement. We swept up the rice that had been spilled during the theft and mixed it with the remainder of the pickled vegetables that Shujin happened to have stored in the kitchen, and that lasted us for two meals; and because Liu’s wife
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is concerned about Shujin they distributed what little they had left. But now there is nothing. This is life laid bare to the bone. Shujin doesn’t complain, but I wonder about the baby. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I have an odd sensation that something in Shujin, something intangible, like an essence or a spirit, is stretching, and I can’t help imagining it’s our moon soul reaching out in hunger.
I leave the chores until after dark - taking out our soil pot and bringing in wood for the fire. I guard jealously the little oil I have for my lamp. It is bitterly cold and even in the daytime we wrap ourselves in quilts and coats. I am beginning to forget that there are good things in this world - books and beliefs, and mist above the Yangtze. This morning I found six boiled eggs that had been wrapped in a qipao and tucked into a chest at the foot of the bed. They were dyed red.
‘What are these?’ I asked, taking them downstairs to Shujin.
She didn’t look up. ‘Put them back where you found them.’
‘What are they for?’
‘You know the answer to that.’
‘For our moon soul’s man yuet Is that it?’
She didn’t answer.
I looked down at the eggs in my hands. It is surprising how changed only two days without food can make a person. My head became very light when I considered cracking the eggs and eating them. I set them hurriedly on the table in front of her and took a step back. ‘Eat,’ I said, pointing at them. ‘Quickly. Eat them now.’
She sat and stared at them, her coat wrapped tightly around her, a distant, blank look on her face.
‘I said eat. Eat them now.’
‘It would be bad luck for our moon soul.’
‘Bad luck? Don’t talk to me about bad luck. Do you think I don’t know the meaning of bad luck?’ I was beginning to shake. ‘eat!’
But she sat silent and obstinate, her face closed in on itself, while I paced round the room, my frustration wanting to burst out of me. How can she be so foolish - to put our baby’s health in jeopardy? Eventually, with a supreme struggle of will, I turned
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my back on the eggs, slammed the door and went into my study, where I have been sitting ever since, unable to concentrate on anything.
5Ł
Nanking, 17 December 1937, afternoon
As I was writing the last entry something happened. I had to stop and put my pen down and raise my head in wonder. A smell drifted through the shuttered windows. A smell both terrible and wonderful. The smell of meat cooking! Someone nearby is cooking meat. The smell shot me from my desk and sent me to the shutters, where I stood, trembling, my nose to the gaps, hungrily sucking in the air. I imagined a family - maybe only in the next alley - sitting round the table, looking at fluffy piles of rice, corn cakes, succulent pork. Could it be the thieves, cooking what they stole from us? If it is they’ve forgotten the legend of the beggar’s chicken, they’ve forgotten what every thief in Jiangsu should know - to cook stolen food underground and not in the open air, where the smell advertises itself to everyone.
I have to stop myself rising from the table, seduced by that aroma. It is so sweet, so pungent. It has decided me. If people feel safe enough to cook lunch so openly - to allow the smell to drift wantonly through the streets, then peace can only be hours away. It must be safe to go outside. I am going out now. I’m going to find food for Shujin.
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25
Not a plant. That was what Shi Chongming had said. Not a plant.
That morning I thought about this, poring over my textbooks sitting hunched on the steamer chair. I had been reading for almost an hour when something distracted me. Less than a foot away from my feet, a cicada nymph was dragging itself out of the ground, first a feeler, then a tiny face like a newborn dragon. I put down my book and watched it. It crept a short way up a piece of rotten wood and, after a few minutes of resting, began the laborious process of pulling its wings out of its shell, one at a time, painfully slowly, the casing flaking off in iridescent slivers. I’d read in one of the books that the wings of cicadas could be used in a traditional cure for earache. I thought of the dried powder clinging to the sides of Fuyuki’s glass. It’s not a plant you’re looking for. If not a plant then … ?
The beetle straightened, new and confused, its wings white webbed with birth, looking around itself. Why was it coming out now? All the cicadas had come and gone weeks ago.
‘What’re you dreaming about?’
I jumped. Jason had come through the wisteria tunnel and was standing a few feet away from me, holding a mug of coffee. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt; his face was clear and tanned. He was staring at my exposed legs and arms, a look on his face as if they reminded him of something.
Instinctively I folded my arms round my knees and bent
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forward a little, hunching over the book I’d been reading. ‘A cicada,’ I said. ‘See?’
He squatted down and looked, shielding his eyes with his hand. His arms were the colour of burnt butter and he must have had his hair cut that morning, because I could see the round shape of his head, and the nice slope of his neck where it met his shoulders. The haircut had revealed a small mole just below his ear.
‘I thought they should all be dead,’ I said. ‘I thought it was too cold.’
‘But it’s hot today,’ he said. ‘And, anyway, all manner of weird shit goes on in this garden, you know. Ask Svetlana. The rules are suspended.’
He came and settled down on the steamer chair next to me, the coffee cup resting on his thigh, his feet crossed. ‘The baba yagas’ve gone to Yoyogi Park to watch the rockabilly boys,’ he said. ‘We’re all alone.’
I didn’t answer. I bit my lip and stared at the gallery windows.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Well what?’
‘What were you thinking about?’
‘I wasn’t. I was thinking about… about nothing.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘Nothing,’ I repeated.
‘Yes. I heard.’ He finished his coffee, up-ended the cup so a few mud-brown drops fell on to the dry earth. Then he looked sideways at me and said, ‘Tell me something.’
‘Tell you what?’
‘Tell me - why do I keep staring at you?’
I dropped my eyes and fiddled with the book cover, pretending he hadn’t spoken.
‘I said, why do I want to stare at you? Why do I keep looking at you and thinking that you’re hiding something that I’d find really interesting?’ All of a sudden, in spite of the sun, my skin seemed cold. I blinked at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, in a voice that sounded small and distant. ‘What did you say?’
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‘You’re hiding something.’ He raised his arms and used the sleeves of his T-shirt to wipe his forehead. ‘It’s easy. I just look at you and I can see it. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ve got the - the instinct it’s something I’m going to like. See I’m a …’ he raised two fingers and lightly tapped his forehead ‘… I’m a visionary when it comes to women. I can feel it in the air. My God, my skin.’ He shivered and ran his hands down his arms. ‘My skin just about changes colour.’
‘You’re wrong.’ I wrapped my hands round my stomach. ‘I’m not hiding anything.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘I’m not.’
He looked at me in amusement. For a moment I thought he was going to laugh. Instead he sighed. He got to his feet and stood, stretching languidly, running his hands up and down his arms, ruffling his T-shirt, giving me glimpses of his flat abdomen. ‘No,’ he said, squinting thoughtfully up at the sky. ‘No.’ He dropped his hands and turned in the direction of the wisteria tunnel. ‘Of course you’re not.’
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26
I once read a story about a Japanese girl trapped in a garden when the cicadas came out of the ground. They all came at once. She looked up at one moment and there they were, everywhere, colonizing the air and the trees, so many that the branches were loaded and drooping. All around her the soil was pockmarked, a million maiden flights going up into the branches, the noise getting louder, echoing around the walls until it was almost deafening. Terrified, she ran for shelter, crushing cicadas, hopelessly fracturing their wings, cracking them out of their protective cases so they squealed and spun on the ground like broken Catherine wheels, round and round, a blur of brown and black wings. When at last she found a way out of the garden she ran straight into the arms of a boy, who caught her up and carried her to safety. She didn’t know it then but the cicadas had been a blessing. This was the boy she was destined to love. One day she’d become his wife.