China to Me (60 page)

“Ah yes, Miss Hahn,” he said, looking down at his own hands instead of at me. “It is a very small matter. Colonel Noma, you know, the chief of the gendarmerie — well, yesterday at the club he called me over and made inquiries about your case. He said he would like a little talk with you, just a little talk. There is no cause for alarm. You are to go over now to the gendarmerie — you know, the former Supreme Court Building. Wait; I will give you a card of introduction.”

So we trotted further, until we reached the pseudo-classic façade of the Supreme Court. There I timidly produced my new card and showed it to the sentries stationed at all the doors. Each one beckoned with his bayonet and waved us on to the next, until we reached a sort of arbitrary main entrance, and there we found a lot of sentries lolling about at a kitchen table, out under the veranda roof. That kitchen table is a regular thing among the Japs; they put one up at all important guard posts. Near by, leaning against one of the huge pillars, was a young Chinese, sallow and elegant in navy blue. He approached us and asked us what we wanted.

Irene replied in Chinese that I had been sent for. He stared at her and asked her if she wasn't Irene Gittins, who had formerly worked for a certain engineering firm in Canton. “Yes,” admitted Irene, “so what?”

“Don't you remember me, Miss Gittins? I was a clerk there.”

After a bit Reeny did recall him. His name was Kung. He said that he could speak Japanese, and so he was now working as interpreter here at the gendarmerie, and he offered to help us out. Reeny chattered with him eagerly, and he led us over to the sentry in charge and explained to this man in fluent Japanese why we had come. After the introduction the soldiers were friendly and offered us chairs while one of their number took my card of introduction inside, disappearing down the corridor. In the meantime Mr. Kung gave us costly gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes and listened sympathetically as Irene told him her troubles. Obviously he was a comparatively big shot here, at the holy of holies.

We waited about an hour on those kitchen chairs, smoking and wondering what was going to happen. I got a bad headache, a sure sign that I am scared. At last something did take place: there was a loud roar from indoors, and all the shambling, dirty little soldiers jumped to attention and saluted. Then there bounced from the doorway a stocky, hairy, thick little fellow, tough as redwood and about the same color. He shouted from a throat that needed clearing:

“What is this? Who you? Who tell you come here?”

We turned pale and jumped to our feet, and once again I made my explanation, as Reeny gestured helplessly toward me: “I didn't come here; I was sent for. A Mr. Cheng came to my house this morning and told me to go to Mr. Kimura.”

“Kimura? Don't know him.”

“Kimura of the Japanese consulate. And Mr. Kimura said that Mr-Noma wanted to see me.”

“Who you?” he growled at Irene.

“My friend,” I said. “She — uh — she came with me.”

“Pass!”

I gave him my passport. He grabbed Reeny's too, and studied them both as if he intended to eat them for breakfast. Then, with a sudden and bewildering moderation of his voice, he said:

“Okay, you come. You wait.”

Together he and I walked into die dread gendarmerie. We marched down the shining corridor, where so lately Charles and I had come to register Carola at the government office. We climbed a stair and came to halt at last outside a closed door. The little lion now talked quite gently.

“You American?”

“Yes, married to a Chinese.”

He looked at me piercingly. “You marry Chinese?” Then he chuckled, like thunder, and said warmly, “No! That's not good. Why marry a Chinese?” His voice was unbelievably contemptuous as he said, “Chinese.” But he was acting like a human being, and in a rush of relief I answered with assurance.

“Because he's good-looking. He's very nice. See?” I gave him Sinmay's photograph, and he studied it carefully.

“You like China?” he demanded.

“Very much,” I said firmly.

He looked at me curiously, half pleased, half not. Then a bell buzzed and he straightened up. “Mr. Noma see you now.”

He knocked on the door, and, inside, somebody grunted. We went in.

Chapter 48

I felt exactly as if I had been summoned by the dean for a scolding. Japanese procedure, coupled with the fact that most of the Japanese I dealt with speak broken English, had that effect on me permanently; I became a child with them, and as they treated us all like children anyway it was fortunate that I had made this adjustment. We always got on pretty smoothly in our later official interviews; I would stammer and blush, and they liked that: they were used to it in their own women. At first I would be furious with myself. I wanted to be fearless and defiant with the enemy. But after a while, when I saw fearless and defiant women being slapped around, I didn't regret my weakness. You may shake hands with me if you like; I am the woman who got through the occupation without being slapped. Except once, socially, and that scarcely counts. I'll tell about it later.

Noma, like the late lamented Mussolini, was sitting at a very big desk at the other end of a very long room. He looked like an extra-small goblin in khaki. My escort and I bowed from the waist and then stood there in military posture, our hands at our sides. Noma gabbled some words at the hairy guy — I shall call him by name hereafter; he was Yokayama — and indicated that we were to sit down at a Chinese arrangement of chairs around a table, down at our end of the room. We waited in stiff silence, while I swallowed and swallowed at a lump in my throat. Yet it wasn't so terrible waiting, after all. So much had happened already that all of a sudden I didn't give a damn.

Finally he stalked over to us and sat opposite me. Throughout the whole interview he kept looking at his own clasped hands. He addressed all his words to Yokayama, but in a short time I knew somehow that he could speak English and understand it better than the interpreter did. It was not obvious, but I could tell; it was something in the way he cut in ahead of Yokayama sometimes in the middle of a long speech, and once when he was interested he snapped out another question without waiting for my previous reply to be handed over in Japanese. I found out later that I was right; Noma was educated abroad.

The questions and answers are all between Yokayama and me.

“Why you come here?”

“A Mr. Cheng told me this morning, at Selwyn-Clarke's house, to go to see Mr. Kimura the consul at three o'clock. Mr. Kimura told me,” et cetera, et cetera.

“What time you come China?”

“Nineteen thirty-five.”

“You marry Chinese husband what year?”

“Nineteen thirty-seven.”

“You live Hong Kong?”

“Shanghai. I lived in Shanghai for five years and then went to Chungking.” I paused here, but nobody looked surprised, so I continued. “I spent a year in Chungking and then came to Hong Kong.”

Yokayama and Noma took me step by step, over and over, down to Hong Kong and then stopped. We went over this data about four or five times, checking and rechecking in a mechanical way. Both men looked bored. Then all of a sudden they shot at me:

“You know Boxer?”

This was silly, and I felt annoyed. “Certainly I know Boxer,” I said. “I'm his mistress. That's his baby I've got.”

Well, anyway, it stopped both of them for a minute; first blood to me. Noma rubbed his chin before he asked the next question.

“You love Boxer?”

“Look here,” I said to myself, “this isn't fair. You're supposed to grill me about my political affiliations. You may even, if you like, accuse me of living with Boxer for my own Mata Hari purposes. I expect that sort of thing in a third degree. I even expect a little modified torture, arm twisting and the like. But this? Sirs, this is a personal question. It isn't done. I refuse to answer.”

I refused to answer.

“You love Boxer?” asked Yokayama again, grinning. I giggled nervously and hung my head like one of those peasant girls from Central Europe.

“You love Boxer?”

“Uh …”

“You love Boxer?”

I was sweating. Why, damn it, Charles himself had never asked me that.

“You love Boxer?”

“Yes.”

Well, that was a relief. I sat back, trembling. At the same time I felt much better, as if I had had a glass of brandy. I don't know why. There came to me a miracle. It was as if I had said to myself with conviction, “I can manage these people.” That conviction was never to leave me again, all the time I was in Hong Kong, and it never let me down either.

The two men were talking in Japanese, and Yokayama turned to me again. Now his question made more sense. He wanted to know about Charles's movements since I had met him. When did he go where? When was he in Chungking, in Shanghai, in Singapore?

I hope I have made it clear to my public that Charles wasn't the kind of man to talk very much. I knew literally nothing about his work, which was fortunate, because the fact showed convincingly in my replies. Very patiently the men asked me things over and over and over again. I was patient too. I didn't care how long it went on. I was safe. It was good training for the phase I'm going through now with Carola: “Mommy, where's the train going?” “Going to New York, darling.” “Mommy, where's the train going? Where's the train going. Mommy?” “To New York.” “Mommy, where's the train going?” And so ad infinitum.

Not once did they ask any question about Candid Comment. Only once or twice did they ask me about Chungking and my book. I think now that I got in ahead of them on that by talking about it right away. They had read it — I found later that The Soong Sisters has been translated into Japanese and is pretty well known there — but they didn't ask much. I said that I liked Mme. Kung best, and they just grunted. As things turned out, I think that they never did get on to my Shanghai record simply because they never asked the Shanghai gendarmes for it. The more I saw of their methods the better I understood my luck. All Japanese seem to feel interdepartmental jealousy, and it is uppermost in the minds of the thugs who run things from the gendarmerie. They won't ever admit they don't already know everything. And then, too, they thought they must know all about me already, because they knew so much. When you come to think of it, there's an awful lot to know about me, if you take the trouble.

Also they were very busy people and couldn't think of everything. In their minds I was a prize only in that I was Charles's mistress, and they concentrated on that. They were after Papers. Their men were even then going over Charles's apartment for Papers, ungluing the chairs, taking up the floors, going page by page through all his precious books. They were questioning his servant, after taking more than a month to catch him. They are very proud of the fact that they have a dossier on everybody white in the Far East, and just then their pride was overweening. It wasn't only gendarmes, of course, who were proud of their Intelligence Service; every little man who had anything to do with it was chuckling, rubbing his hands over Japan's cleverness. So they looked at me brightly, in a good humor, and so I escaped unpleasantness of a more material sort.

Unaware of what could have taken place, I wasn't panicked, A few months later I heard of how they questioned other women and I went gray at the realization of what could have happened to me that day. And yet I may be doing them an injustice. There is no doubt that they liked Charles and respected him, and were probably determined to be decent to me if it remained possible. A long time afterward Yoshida, a gendarme you will meet in this book, said to me:

“Six months ago I in Canton. I hear Boxer had girl friend — you. Everybody say British bad, Boxer okay, girl friend okay. No proud.”

Maybe. I don't understand the Japanese, ever, and that afternoon I was cheerful toward the end, but tired and mystified. Between the questions that made sense they asked a lot of nonsensical stuff. I can't remember it all, but it was really silly. They asked all sorts of details about how I was living now, and what we ate, and what I was paying for milk, and how long I had nursed Carola at the breast, and what did I bring Charles to eat at hospital? Those questions certainly did obsess my mind, but why did the gendarmes care? Of course I realized that in a general way they were trying to figure out if I was getting money from Chungking, but that wouldn't account for all of it. Charles guessed, when we talked about it afterward, that they just fill in time, while they're thinking of important questions, with anything that pops into their heads. In a few minutes, however, they drew blood.

“Boxer good to you?”

“Why, yes …”

“How much rice he give you every month?”

My middle-class training now popped up in the most surprising way. I snapped back at Lieutenant Colonel Noma, chief of the gendarmes of the Captured Territory of Hong Kong. “He didn't give me rice!” I cried indignantly. (“Rice,” of course, was their word for payment, money, currency.) “He didn't have to. I earn my own living. I'm very well known. I'm a writer.”

“What's that?”

I leaned forward and spoke to Yokayama with kind patience, slowly, as if to a child. “I write. I write stories, poems, books, you understand? I send these to America and the publishers send me money. That way, I earn enough to live on. Nobody here has to give me rice.”

They chattered to each other for a long time over that. Then we started all over again. We took it all again, like a rehearsal, until I was groggy. At last even they were groggy, I guess. Yokayama took a deep breath and tried to sum it up.

“Now let's see. You come to Shanghai 1936 —— “

“No, 1935.”

“So des. You come to Shanghai and marry Chinese, Mr. Zau. Then you go to Hong Kong.”

“Chungking.”