The Flowers of War

by Geling Yan

  The stout, dark-skinned woman shouted: ‘If you lose one piece, Cardamom, I’ll skin your arse alive!’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my arse, Jade!’ Cardamom shouted back. ‘I bet he’d like a bit of it too!’

  The schoolgirls exchanged amazed glances. Fancy a woman as dark-skinned as that having a name like Jade! As for the girl called Cardamom, she seemed barely older than they were.

  Fabio had let go of Cardamom but her words, together with the threat that she might be around to say more things like this, goaded him into grabbing her again and pushing her towards the exit.

  ‘Out! Get out! Ah Gu! Open the door for her!’ His winter-pale face shone, as if he might break out in a sweat at any moment.

  ‘Ai-ya! Master, you’re my fellow countryman!’ cried Cardamom. She stumbled and her voice became shrill. ‘I beg you, please don’t! I won’t do it again!’

  She had the face of a child, but her body was well developed and she simply bounced back every time he pushed her. ‘Please, master! Teach me good manners, I promise I’ll be good. I’m only fifteen years old! Sister Yumo! Put in a good word for me!’

  The woman with the beautiful back put her bags and valuables in a neat pile and walked over to Fabio and Cardamom who were still struggling. Suddenly Shujuan could see her face. She realised the woman had not a slack bone in her entire body. Every part of her could smile or complain, and was capable of a subtle sign language.

  ‘How many times have I told you to wash your mouth out, Cardamom?’ Yumo said with a smile. She placed herself between the two of them, and pushed Cardamom back towards Jade.

  Meanwhile, Ah Gu was cheerfully leading the women down into the cellar under the kitchen. The prostitutes, wide-eyed with curiosity, commented on everything as they pranced along behind him.

  Pressed up against the attic window Shujuan watched the women go, her hands massaging her belly to ease the pain.

  Two

  During prayers that morning, there was the sound of gunfire as if fighting had broken out again somewhere in the city, the salvos coming fast and furious. It lasted for about half an hour. Despite this, Fabio insisted on going to the Safety Zone to find out whether it might still be possible to take the ferry. He came back at midday bringing only bad news. The girls listened wide-eyed as he told Father Engelmann how the streets were lined with corpses, mostly civilians and including children and old people. According to the members of the International Commission in the Safety Zone, the Japanese were shooting anyone who did not understand commands bawled in Japanese, or who ran when they saw guns. They were using the bodies to fill in the holes gouged in the road surface by explosives. When Fabio had finished speaking, he forced a smile at the girls and then glanced back at Father Engelmann. The implication was that the Father had misjudged things. When there was carnage on this scale, how could order be restored within just a couple of days?

  This was at lunch. The sixteen girls sat squeezed down both sides of the refectory table normally used by the clergymen. Since their arrival at the church, Father Engelmann had ordered George to serve him his twice-daily meals of porridge or noodle soup in his room. He was a firm believer that dignity was preserved by maintaining one’s distance. He therefore put at least the patch of grass between himself and the schoolgirls. But as soon as he heard that Fabio was back from the Safety Zone, he had put down his bowl of porridge and hurried over.

  ‘So food and water are critical, now that we’ve just taken in another fourteen women,’ Fabio finished.

  ‘How much food have we got left, George?’ Father Engelmann asked.

  ‘Two buckets of flour, fifty kilos or so,’ said George, ‘but only a peck of rice. There’s no water but what’s in the cistern … oh, and two barrels of wine.’

  Fabio shot George a look. ‘We can’t possibly use wine to wash our faces or our clothes! You can’t make tea with wine or cook food with it. Don’t talk such rubbish!’

  George did not like being patronised. When the water gets low, you can drink wine instead, Deacon Adornato, since you drink it like water anyway! he thought to himself.

  ‘It’s better than I imagined,’ was Father Englemann’s unexpected reaction.

  ‘Fifty kilos of flour for so many people? We’ll be living on air in a couple of days!’ Fabio snapped at George. The cook was the only person he could vent his feelings on since he obviously had to speak civilly to Father Engelmann. George Chen, a twenty-year-old orphan with no family to protect him, was the frequent butt of other people’s bad temper. George was a beggar Father Engelmann had rescued from the streets as a child and sent to cookery school. After a few months, he had come back to the church as a cook, and had changed his name to the English ‘George’.

  George ignored him and addressed Father Engelmann. ‘There’s a bit of rancid butter as well. You told me to throw it away, Father, but I hung on to it. And there’s a jar of pickled vegetables. It’s gone a bit mouldy and it doesn’t smell so good, but it’s fine to eat!’ he announced triumphantly.

  Father Engelmann seemed cheered by George’s words. ‘In a couple of days, things are bound to have settled down, believe me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to Japan many times and they’re the most courteous and friendly people in the world. The Japanese never permit a leaf out of place in a garden.’

  The girls missed much of the substance of what Father Engelmann said, which they often did even though they had had English classes since they were small. But they were carried away by his infectious optimism and the exact words did not seem to matter.

  Just after the priest had left, there was the sound of a commotion in the kitchen.

  ‘What on earth…?’ exclaimed George and rushed off to investigate.

  A moment later, a woman’s voice asked: ‘Has all the food gone?’

  ‘There are still a few biscuits left,’ Shujuan heard George say.

  Instantly, the girls were on their feet and running in the direction of the voices. Shujuan got there first. George had betrayed them; he was selling off their meagre food supplies. They needed the biscuits to eat with their soup, which was so watery these days that on its own it did nothing to allay their hunger.

  Three or four of the prostitutes were already tucking into the biscuits. Shujuan recognised their ringleader as Hongling, a curvaceous young woman whose volatile temper was easily aroused. When that happened, her slender eyebrows drew together to form two straight lines, indicating that it would be dangerous to cross her.

  ‘George, how could you give away our biscuits to those women?’ protested Shujuan, pronouncing the words ‘those women’ as if they were a term of abuse.

  ‘But they came and took them!’

  ‘They asked you and you handed them over!’ Sophie exclaimed. Sophie was an orphan; her foreign name had been given to her by the mission schoolteachers.

  ‘Ai-ya! Hoarding food, are we?’ the dark-skinned prostitute called Jade said mockingly.

  ‘Let us borrow just a bit, then tomorrow when the wonton sellers are out in the streets, we’ll buy you dumplings in return, OK?’ said Hongling.

  ‘George, are you deaf?’ yelled Shujuan, suddenly goaded to fury. First her parents had abandoned her like a stray dog to starve in this tumbledown church, now she was being betrayed by the cook and bullied by a whore …

  ‘It was nothing to do with him. We found the biscuits ourselves,’ said Hongling, her slender eyebrows arched like crescent moons.

  ‘Was I talking to you?’ Shujuan said, raising a hand threateningly at her smiling adversary.

  Even her classmates were embarrassed at this. ‘Leave her alone!’ they muttered.

  Hongling frowned. ‘You little bitch! What you need is a good f—’ But just at that moment a hand came round from behind her and stopped her mouth.

  The hand belonged to Zhao Yumo. The row in the kitchen could clearly be heard in the cellar, and she had rushed up the ladder to put a stop to Hongling’s foul language. It was evident to the girls that th
is prostitute was the leader of the pack.

  * * *

  Long after the prostitutes had gone back to their lair and her classmates to their attic, Shujuan sat despondently in the kitchen. Her outburst had left her drained, but her head still whirled with the exquisitely wounding insults she could have heaped on the women. She hated herself for not having taken the chance. She could hear the women chatting and teasing each other in the cellar below. They were obviously used to indulging in provocative banter with their male clients; they simply carried on in the same vein when there were no men around.

  As she sat there in the gloom, Shujuan listened to the continuous rattle of gunfire. The damned Japs had fought their way into Nanking, cut her off from her grandparents, made her parents too afraid to come back to China, and let a bunch of whores invade Nanking’s ‘last island of green’. She was overwhelmed with anguish, and hatred for everything and everyone. She even began to hate herself, now it turned out she had the same body and organs as those women downstairs, and the same cramping pains expelling the same unclean blood from her body.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Father Engelmann ventured out. George Chen drove him in the battered old Ford that Father Engelmann had had for years, and which of all his few worldly possessions was one of his most cherished. They only went a couple of kilometres towards the centre of the city before they turned back. This was a Nanking they did not recognise; a Nanking with its buildings demolished and streets strewn with corpses. George got lost several times. In a narrow street near the Zhonghua Gate, they came across Japanese troops escorting five or six hundred Chinese soldiers in the direction of Rain Flower Terrace which lay just outside the gate. Father Engelmann told George to stop the car, gathered his courage and enquired politely of the Japanese officer where they were taking their captives. An interpreter translated his question and the officer told him that they were being taken to clear some waste ground ready for cultivation.

  When Father Engelmann arrived back at the church, he did not even touch his dinner but spent an hour sitting in the church. Then he called all the girls in and gave them a blunt description of what he had seen. He looked mildly at Fabio and admitted that his earlier judgement of the situation had been too optimistic. The biggest responsibility he now faced was to ensure that the thirty-odd people in his care did not starve before they found new supplies of food and water. He told George to search the compound from top to bottom, to see if anything had been missed, no matter if it was mouldy.

  Before he had finished speaking, some of the prostitutes burst in through a side door. They stood in a huddle, curious to see what was going on in the church and whether it could be of any benefit to them. One look at the pupils’ downcast faces told them there was nothing to be had and they turned to leave. But Fabio stopped them.

  ‘Please keep to the cellar in future and don’t come upstairs,’ he said. ‘Especially don’t come here.’

  ‘What do you mean by “here”?’ asked one of the women flippantly.

  ‘Wherever the schoolgirls are.’

  Then Father Engelmann said suddenly, ‘The Yong Jia soap factory must be on fire. The tallow they use to make soap must be burning, otherwise the fire wouldn’t be so big.’

  They followed his gaze. Through the open church door they could see that the early-evening darkness was ablaze. The fire lit up the surviving stained-glass windows of the church, making the bright colours of the Virgin and Child sparkle like jewels. The girls stared transfixed in terror at the magnificent sight. The flames illuminated the inside of the church with extraordinary clarity, throwing every surface and angle into sharp relief.

  Ah Gu and George Chen agreed with Father Engelmann that the fire must come from the Yong Jia soap factory in Outer Fifth Street. Fabio told the girls to go back up to the attic. Anything might happen this evening.

  * * *

  Later, as Fabio was walking towards the workshop building to check the trapdoor was closed, he was surprised to find the prostitute called Hongling in the doorway, a cigarette hanging from her lips.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked sharply.

  Hongling was peering intently at the ground. Startled, she dropped the cigarette, then bent down for it, sticking her ample buttocks in the air.

  She giggled. ‘Are you telling me I can’t look for something I’ve lost?’

  ‘Back to the cellar!’ ordered Fabio, abruptly cutting her off. ‘I’ll kick you out if you don’t obey the rules.’

  ‘They call you Yangzhou Fabio, don’t they?’ she said, still with a smile on her face. ‘Ah Gu’s talked about you.’

  ‘Did you hear what I said? Back to the cellar with you!’ Fabio pointed in the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘Help me look and then I’ll go back. For a foreign gentleman, you don’t half sound like a Yangzhou peasant!’ She gave a laugh which made her quiver from head to toe. ‘Anyway, you haven’t asked me what I’m looking for,’ she said with a pout.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ he asked grudgingly.

  ‘Mah-jong tiles. They fell out somewhere round here. Do you remember where they went? When I picked them up and counted them, there were five missing!’

  ‘The nation’s capital has fallen and you still want to play mah-jong?’

  ‘It didn’t fall because we were playing,’ she protested. ‘Anyway, what else do you want us to do here? Die of boredom?’

  Fabio heard giggling above his head and looked up to see the schoolgirls peering through the attic windows.

  Aware that the girls were watching, Hongling immediately started putting on even more of an act. She was no longer the bedraggled figure she had been when she arrived. Her hair was carefully combed and fastened with a turquoise satin ribbon.

  She shouted up to the girls: ‘If you’ve got those five tiles, you can’t play, and we can’t play without them.’ The girls looked at each other, and then one, bolder than the rest, mimicked her Yangzhou accent back at her and they burst out laughing.

  Fabio berated them: ‘Whoever took her tiles, give them back!’

  There was a chorus of voices from upstairs: ‘Why would we want her tiles? We might catch nasty diseases from them!’

  Hongling was furious. ‘That’s right!’ she yelled back. ‘I’ve got boils all over me, and the tiles were covered in the pus. Anyone who touches my tiles will catch my boils!’

  The girls made hawking sounds and two of them spat through a window, just missing their target.

  At that moment Zhao Yumo appeared, having discovered Hongling’s absence.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted. ‘Give you an inch and you take a mile. Get back to the cellar!’ Her shouts seemed to cost her some effort, as if disciplinary language like this did not come naturally to her.

  Yumo frogmarched Hongling off towards the kitchen. As they walked past George, who was standing watching on the sidelines, Hongling pointed at Yumo and complained, ‘we’re in her clutches!’ as if George could offer her protection.

  Ignoring Fabio’s injunctions to go to bed immediately, the girls shouted belligerently at the retreating figures of the prostitutes: ‘Come back! We’ll give you the tiles!’

  Hongling ran back. She craned her neck up at the attic windows, crammed with identical childish faces and reached out cupped hands. ‘Give me them!’

  Yumo could tell the girls were baiting Hongling and shouted at her: ‘Have some pride, can’t you!’ But it was too late. Some bone tiles were hurled through the windows so hard they bounced on the ground. One of them hit Hongling on the cheek.

  ‘Who did that?’ Fabio yelled up at them. ‘Xiaoyu! You were one of them!’

  Hongling’s face was red with anger. She wanted to climb the ladder to the attic and take her revenge.

  ‘Forget it,’ Yumo said. ‘Let it go.’

  ‘Why should I let it go?’ Hongling protested.

  Her accent—she was from a poor province north-west of Nanki
ng—was very pronounced.

  ‘Because these people have allowed us to stay in this rathole. Because they’re prepared to put up with us. Because we’ve got no face to lose. Because when we’re alive, we’re less than human, and when we die, we’re less than demons. Because we can be beaten and humiliated by anyone at will,’ said Yumo.

  Three

  At night, the light from the fires was brighter than ever and the girls could not sleep. Xiaoyu had the bed next to Shujuan. Xiaoyu’s father was one of the wealthiest men in the south, with businesses extending from Amoy to Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. When a boycott of Japanese goods was introduced in Nanking, her father had changed the labels on all his Japanese goods and sold them as if they were manufactured in China. He did not lose a cent on the deal. He traded with Portuguese wine merchants and bought gallons of red and white wine at a bargain price or in exchange for raw silk. The red wine used by the church at Mass was also all supplied by him.

  The relationship between Shujuan and Xiaoyu was fragile. Xiaoyu was pretty, and seemed not to understand that pretty girls could easily wound those who most admired them and longed to be their friends. Shujuan was just such a girl. The reason why Shujuan was easily hurt by Xiaoyu was that she was secretly unwilling to submit to her friend. Shujuan got top marks, and she was pretty too, but with Xiaoyu around, Shujuan could never shine. Between a pair like Xiaoyu and Shujuan, there was always an element of cruelty. And the one who was cruel and the one who was the victim of cruelty frequently swapped places.

  Xiaoyu reached over to Shujuan to see if she was asleep. Shujuan felt it was beneath her dignity to respond straight away because yesterday Xiaoyu had been best friends with Sophie. Her lack of response seemed to make Xiaoyu more eager. She pressed harder with her arm and whispered in Shujuan’s ear: ‘Are you awake?’