The Devil of Nanking (18 page)

I had a lot of wage packets backed up, just sitting in a bag in the wardrobe doing nothing except making me jittery. Eventually I got up my courage and started shopping. I went to astonishing places in Ginza and Omotesando, caves crammed with sequined slippers, pink négligés, hats trimmed in purple marabou and rose pink velvet. There were cherry pink platform boots, and turquoise bags covered in hundreds of stick-on Elvis Presleys. The salesgirls with their bunches and ballerina skirts had no idea how to deal with me. They chewed their nails and watched me with their heads on one side as I trailed up and down the aisles in amazement, getting to know how people made themselves look sexy.

I began to buy things – I bought taffeta and velvet dresses, little shrug-on skirts in silk. And shoes, so many shoes: kitten heels, stilettos, court shoes, black-ribboned sandals. In a place called the Sweet Girls Emporium and Relax Centre, I bought a box of Stoppy hold-up stockings. I’d never worn stockings in my life. I dragged home piles of bags, weighed down like an ant.

But, of course, I didn’t have the courage to wear any of it. Everything stayed packed away in the wardrobe, day after day, all the dresses with red tissue paper taped round them. I thought about them, though, I thought about them a lot. Some nights I had a little ceremony that I kept absolutely secret. When the others were in bed, I would open the wardrobe and take out all the things I’d bought. I’d pour a glass of chilled plum liquor and drag the little dressing-table to a place under the light so that the mirror was properly illuminated. Then I’d go to the wardrobe and take a dress from its hanger.

It was horrible and exciting. Every time I saw myself in the mirror and reached automatically for the zip, ready to rip off the dress, I would think about Fuyuki sitting in his wheelchair, saying, ‘Are they all so pretty in England?’ Then I would stop, take a deep breath, slowly rezip the dress, and force myself to turn back and look, to study the white tops of my breasts, my legs in silk, dark, like inky water. I put on very high heels and painted my lips in a deep red, pure like heart-blood. I crayoned in eyebrows, and for a long time I practised lighting and smoking a cigarette. I tried to imagine myself, sitting formally in Fuyuki’s home, leaning towards him, cigarette smoke trailing across my painted lips. In my mind’s eye one of my hands was resting on a locked chest, the other was extended elegantly, palm up, to receive a large key that Fuyuki was passing to me.

After a long time I would open my eyes, go to the wardrobe and take everything out of its tissue paper, then arrange it in a ring round me. There were velvet strappy sandals, négligés in tangerine and cream, a crimson Ravage bra in the shape of a butterfly, still in its Cellophane. Things and things and more things, stretching out across the shadows. I’d lie down then, stretching out my bare arms, and roll over, mingling with my belongings, smelling the newness, letting them brush my skin. Sometimes I’d group them according to different rules: according to material, for example, black piqué crushing peach silk noil, or according to colour, saffron with copper, silver with teal, lilac and electric pink and grey. I held them up to my face and breathed in their expensive smells. And, because I must be a bit funny like that, the ritual always seemed to lead to one thing: my hands in my knickers.

The Takadanobaba house was big, but sound spread like water along the timbers and through the flimsy rice-paper screens. I had to be quiet. I thought I’d been careful until very late one night, when it was over, I slid back the door to go to the bathroom and found Jason a few feet away in the moonlit corridor, leaning out of the window, a cigarette between his fingers.

When he heard the door open he turned to me. He didn’t say anything. He looked lazily down at my bare feet, then up to the short
yukata
, to the flushed skin on my chest. He let the smoke curl up out of his mouth and smiled, raising an eyebrow, as if I was a huge and pleasant surprise to him.

‘Hello,’ he said.

I didn’t answer. I slid the door closed with a bang and locked it, sinking down with my back against it. Dressing like a sexy person – that was one thing. But Jason – well, Jason made me think things about sex that were much, much more frightening.

They are here. They are here. It is real.

I left the house at midday, and the streets seemed silent. I didn’t see another soul, only shuttered houses, the shops boarded – some with notices pasted on the doors giving details of the rural district where the owners could be found. I turned right on to Zhongyang Road and followed it past the railway where I took a short-cut through an alley to meet up with Zhongshan Road. There I saw three men running towards me as fast as they could. They were dressed as peasants and were blackened all over, as if from an explosion. When I looked up, in the distance over the houses in the area of the Shuixi gate, a pall of smoke was rising grey against the sky. The men continued away from me in the direction I’d come, running in silence, only the sound of their straw shoes slapping on the pavement. I stood on the street, staring after them, listening to the city around me. Now that I wasn’t moving I could hear the distant sound of car horns, mingling horribly with faint human cries. My heart sank. I continued south, expecting the worst as I crept through the streets, keeping close to the houses, ready to dash inside at any moment or prostrate myself and cry, ‘
Dongyang Xiansheng!
Eastern Masters!’

On the streets nearer the refugee centre one or two businesses had found the courage to open, the owners standing anxiously in the doorway, staring off down the street in the direction of the eastern gates.

I skipped between buildings, running low to the ground, switching and doubling back through the familiar streets, my heart racing. I could hear the low murmur of a crowd somewhere ahead, and at last I came to a side-street that led up to Zhongshan Road and there, at its head, a huge tide of people crushed against each other, straining in the direction of the Yijiang gate – the great ‘water’ gate that opens out of the city and on to the Yangtze – grim expressions on their faces. They all pulled handcarts loaded down with possessions. One or two glanced at me, curious to see someone making no attempt to flee, others ignored me, putting their heads down and leaning their weight into the handcart. Children watched me silently from their perches on top of the carts, bundled up against the cold in quilted jackets, their hands blunt in wool mittens. A wild dog ran among them, hoping to steal food.

‘Are they in the city?’ I asked a woman who had broken free of the crowd and was racing away down the alley I stood in. I stepped in front of her and stopped her in her tracks, my hands on her shoulders. ‘Have the Japanese taken the walls?’

‘Run!’ Her face was wild. The charcoal she’d used to cover her face was smeared with tears. ‘Run!’

She struggled out of my grasp and headed away, screaming something at the top of her voice. I watched her disappear as, behind me, the shouts of the crowd grew to a crescendo, running footsteps scattering into the alleys around me. Then slowly, slowly the footsteps died away, the crush on the road dwindled. At length I crept forward and peered out on to the main road. To my right, in the west, I could see the tail end of the crowd shuffling on towards the river, one or two stragglers, the elderly and sick, hurrying to catch up. The road to my left was empty, the ground churned into mud by hundreds of pairs of feet.

I stepped out cautiously and, my heart in my throat, turned in the direction they’d come. I walked in near silence. Outside the ruined Ming Palace, where yesterday I had chatted to the history professor, a few Nationalist tanks rumbled past, kicking up sprays of dirt, the soldiers shouting and waving at me to get off the streets. Then, slowly, silence came back to the city and I was alone, walking very quietly in the centre of the empty Zhongshan Road.

At last I came to a halt. Around me nothing was moving. Even the birds seemed to have been silenced on their perches. The pollarded trees on either side led the eye into the distance, straight down the churned-up road, absolutely still and empty and clear as far as the eye could see to where, about half a mile away, the winter sun shone down on the triple arches of the Zhongshan gate. I stood in the centre of the road, took a deep breath and slowly opened my hands, holding them up to the sky. My heart was thumping so loudly it seemed to be almost inside my head.

Was the ground beneath me shuddering, the way it would in a distant earthquake? I looked down at my feet and as I did, from the direction of the gate, there came an explosion that ripped through the silence, making the sycamores bend as if in a strong wind, the birds taking to the air with panicked speed. Flames shot into the sky and a cloud of smoke and dust erupted above the gate. I fell to a crouch, my hands over my head, as another explosion rocketed across the sky. Then came a sound like distant rain that grew and grew until it was a roar, and suddenly the sky was dark, and dust and masonry were falling on top of me and I could see, coming out of the dim horizon, ten or more tanks, their blank, fierce faces bearing down on Zhongshan Road, the terrible
hi no maru
flag fluttering behind them.

I jumped up and ran in the direction of my house, the sound of my breathing and my footsteps drowned by the rumble of tanks and the shrill peal of whistles coming from behind me. I ran and ran, my lungs screaming, my pulse thundering, on and on up Zhongshan Road, right on to Zhongyang Road, ducking into a side-street, then slipping behind the Liu house, and into the alley where at last the steady rain of dust and masonry dwindled. The house was silent. I battered on the door until the locks opened and Shujin was standing there, looking at me as if she was seeing a ghost.

‘They’re here,’ she said, when she saw my face, when she saw how out of breath I was. ‘Aren’t they?’

I didn’t answer. I came inside and locked the door carefully behind me, securing all the bolts and braces. Then, when my breathing had returned to normal, I went upstairs and sat on my day-bed, finding a place among the Japanese language books, and pulling a quilted throw over my feet.

And so – what can I write? Only that it has happened. And that it was straightforward. On this crisp afternoon, which should have been beautiful, they have taken Nanking as casually as a child reaches into the air and squashes a dragonfly. I am afraid to look out of the window – the Japanese flag must be flying all over the city.

In the night it snowed, and now, looming up beyond the city walls, Purple Mountain, Great Zijin, is not white, but red with fire. The flames bathe everything around it in the colour of blood, casting a terrible halo in the sky. Shujin spends a long time staring at it, standing at the opened door, silhouetted against the sky, the cold air coming in until the house is freezing and I can see my own breath.

‘See?’ she says, turning stiffly to look at me. Her hair is loose and straight down the back of her gown, and her triumphant eyes are filled with red light. ‘Zijin is burning. Isn’t it exactly as I said?’

‘Shujin,’ I say, ‘come away from the door. It’s not safe.’

She obeys, but it takes time. She closes the door and comes to sit in silence in the corner, clutching against her stomach the two ancestor scrolls she brought from Poyang, her cheeks red from the cold.

Most of this morning I have been sitting at the table with a pot of tea, the bolts shot on the door, the tea in the cup getting cold. Last night we got a few minutes of fitful sleep, both dressed and still wearing shoes in case we had to flee. From time to time one of us would sit up and stare at the closed shutters, but neither of us spoke much, and now, although it is a bright day, in here the rooms are dark, shuttered and silent. Every half an hour or so we switch on the radio. The reports are confused – an impossible mixture of propaganda and misinformation. Who knows what is true? We can only guess at what is happening. From time to time I recognize the rumble of tanks on Zhongshan Road, and occasional gunfire, but everything seems distant and punctuated by such long silences that sometimes my mind wanders, and I forget briefly that we are being invaded.