Nanjing Requiem

by Ha Jin

  Several times Minnie had asked the Red Swastika men to bury the dead at the pond west of our campus, but they said they were too busy picking up corpses in the city and at the major execution sites to worry about those scattered in the suburbs. Two weeks ago they’d been given permission to inter twenty thousand bodies in Hsia Gwan, and that job alone would take them more than a month, since they could bury at most seven hundred a day, bringing the corpses together and laying them away in mass graves. So not until late April did a group of workers go to the pond in the valley, collect the dead, fish some bodies out of the water, and clear that area.

  At Jinling some of the young women refugees were also busy burying, not human remains but human feces—they’d been gathering all the excrement, putting it in ditches and pits, and covering it with lime. I could detect the decrease of the foul odor in the air, and the camp felt cleaner every day. I was very pleased about their work. One bright morning toward the end of April, when I ran into the leader of the feces-collecting team, a tall twentyish woman with a pair of long braids, I told her, “Take it easy. As long as you girls can bury everything in two weeks, it will be fine.”

  “We want our campus to be clean and beautiful,” she replied in a clear voice.

  I appreciated the possessive adjective she used—“our”—and said to her, “At the end of the day, all the girls on your team can take a shower.”

  “That’s great. Thank you, Mrs. Gao.” Her eyes gleamed.

  We had just put up a shower house for the refugees, who hadn’t washed for months. It was Minnie who had insisted on installing these facilities despite some opposition among the staffers. The women and girls here loved the shack, in which there were twenty-six spray nozzles along the walls. Some of them were amazed that they could adjust the temperature of the water by themselves. Yet due to the large number of refugees, one could use the facility only once every other week.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER Boom Chen, the headman of the porridge plant, was killed by bandits. His extravagant lifestyle must have convinced them that he’d stolen a large amount of the refugees’ rations, so they demanded that he share his goods with them. He denied that he had appropriated any rice and offered to help them steal our car instead. But when they snuck onto campus at night and got into the rattletrap, they couldn’t start the thing however hard they tried. They smashed the windshield and called Boom Chen names, saying he’d pay for this. They broke into his home and searched around for rice, but didn’t find any. They tied him to a chair and grilled him. He confessed he’d just sold his cache and remitted the money to his parents in Tianjin City. He promised to get two thousand pounds of rice for the bandits in the near future, but they ran out of patience and one of them plunged a knife into his chest.

  That was what his wife had told us. The woman was somewhat silly and let the whole thing slip.

  The camp had just received some wheat and barley, so the rice porridge, mixed with beans and the other grains, was finally thick enough for a pair of chopsticks to stand in a bowl of it, which was the conventional standard of quality porridge. Nobody griped about the meals anymore. Luhai swore up and down that it was the hand of Providence that had helped us get rid of the big rat, but for Minnie the denouement had come too late. She also said that the penalty was way too severe, because she didn’t believe in capital punishment.

  In mid-May the Autonomous City Government ordered that all the refugee camps close down by the end of the month. At the same time, the Japanese embassy invited the foreigners working in the camps to dinner. At first Minnie was reluctant to go, but on second thought, she felt it might be an opportunity to exchange views with the officials and earn their sympathy. She brought a copy of the petition to the dinner in hopes of presenting it to the top diplomat there.

  Consul-General Okazaki didn’t show up at the banquet, which was hosted by Tanaka and Fukuda and attended by John Allison and some American missionaries, including Minnie and Holly. Tanaka spoke about the necessity of shutting down the camps and praised the foreigners for what they’d been doing for the refugees. Minnie presented the petition to the vice-consul, who riffled through the paperwork and agreed to look into the matter. His promise was welcomed by a round of loud applause from the guests. All the camp workers among them agreed to close down the refugee camps. Minnie was grateful for her colleagues’ support, which could be viewed as a favor in return for Tanaka’s promise.

  Three days later we heard from Tanaka. He said that Sufen’s son and four of the eight men identified by the women would be released from jail within a week, but the other four men, according to the prison’s files, were associated with the Chinese army and had to remain in prison. Minnie countered, “Look, our information shows that those men are completely innocent.”

  “Miss Vautrin,” Tanaka said, “I’ve done my best. The prison agreed to let your women come and see whether their husbands and sons are there. I believe that more of them will be liberated.”

  Minnie didn’t press him further and instead fixed a time for the women to visit the prison. Hanging up, she looked elated. I was delighted too. We hugged for half a minute.

  After five months’ struggle, at last there was some progress. We hoped this might lead to the release of hundreds of men and boys. Minnie looked into Big Liu’s office to tell him the good news, but he was not there. Together we went out and strolled around campus for a while.

  When we returned half an hour later, we found Big Liu smoking in the hallway. He told us, “Someone from the Quaker Mission came and said there was a mad girl in their hospital. He said she was from our college.”

  “What’s her name?” asked Minnie.

  “No idea.”

  “What should we do?” she asked me.

  “Maybe we should go have a look,” I said.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  The two of us hailed a rickshaw and set out for the small hospital in the south, outside the former Safety Zone, which had been terminated a fortnight before. As we rode along Paolou Lane, four Chinese planes suddenly appeared, flying east to bomb the airfield near Jurong. Immediately antiaircraft guns started shooting at them, drawing blazing arcs. The Japanese flak artillery was weaker than our army’s, though their planes were much more effective at intercepting Chinese bombers. This was the third time our planes had flown over Nanjing since last December. Some people watched them glide away with beaming faces, but no one made any celebratory sounds.

  “Hope they’ll destroy some Japanese aircraft,” I said.

  “I only hope they’ll return to base safely after their mission,” responded Minnie.

  Our air force, small though it was, must have been emboldened by the recent success in the Xuzhou area, where our army had thwarted the Imperial Army’s offensive and forced it to retreat. Newspapers in Nanjing had reported the regional defeat as “a regrouping” of the troops, but we had learned the facts from the radio—the Chinese army had sent sixty-four divisions into battle, too large a force for the Japanese to fight.

  The Quaker Mission’s hospital was in an abandoned school building, which looked boxy but neat, giving an impression of being half deserted. On arrival, we were taken to the second floor. The deranged woman, wearing a flannel shirt and a black silk skirt, was kept in a small room with a south-facing window. She was skinny and in her early twenties, with bedraggled hair, a wide forehead, and a thin-lipped mouth. At the sight of us, she rolled her elongated eyes and chanted, “Here come the American spies.”

  “What’s her name?” Minnie whispered to a nurse.

  “She told us different names—sometimes she’s Aiyu Tan and sometimes she’s Manyu Fu. Last week she said she was from Manchuria, but this week she claims to be a local girl.”

  “Then how could you believe she was from our school?” I asked.

  “She often mentions Principal Vautrin.”

  “What did she say about me?” asked Minnie.

  “You don’t want to hear it.” The nurse shook her grayin
g head.

  “She looks familiar, though,” I said.

  “She does,” Minnie agreed. “I think I’ve met her. She might have been one of the twelve girls taken by the soldiers last December.”

  “Yes, I remember her,” I said. “But I don’t think she was one of the six who came back. She must be from this area—her accent shows. Miss Lou introduced her to me, and I saw her making origami creatures. She was good at it. Her name is something like Yulan.”

  At that, the madwoman stopped mumbling, then snickered and touched her small chin with her fingertips. She cried out, “I’m not Yulan. Yulan’s dead, sold by the American missionaries and murdered by the officers.”

  “What officers are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Japanese colonels.”

  The madwoman went on muttering something unintelligible. What should we do? Should we bring her back to Jinling? Minnie and I stepped aside and talked it over. We decided to wait and contact Miss Lou; we should identify the demented woman first and then see what to do. Nowadays there were so many unhinged people that you couldn’t possibly take care of every one of them.

  We told the nurse to keep a good watch on Yulan and that we would return to see her soon.

  MISS LOU CAME the next evening and confirmed that Yulan was from a local neighborhood. Her father, a widower, had been an electrician and had joined the group assembled by John Rabe five months ago to restore the city’s power service; later, when the job was done, the Japanese shot the man together with forty-two others. A few days before the arrival of the Japanese, at a neighbor’s suggestion, Yulan’s father had sent her to our camp and even dropped off a bag of rice—fifty pounds—and a jar of fish paste as rations for the girl. Miss Lou was certain that Yulan had been taken on December 24 last year, among the twenty-one “prostitutes.” The young woman had been helping a refugee family wad a quilt with used cotton in the Arts Building when the soldiers burst in and grabbed her.

  Astonished, we regretted not having brought the madwoman back. The following afternoon Minnie and I went to the Quaker Mission’s hospital again, but to our dismay, Yulan was no longer there. The medical personnel said she’d snuck out but left word with a patient that she was going to see her cousins in Wuhu. That didn’t make much sense, because that city was already occupied by the Japanese and her relatives might no longer be there.

  “Please notify us if she surfaces again. She’s from our school,” Minnie said to the gray-haired nurse.

  “We’ll do that, Principal Vautrin.”

  “By the way, she called me names, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say? Tell me. I won’t mind.”

  “She said you’d sold her to the Japanese for two hundred yuan. Don’t take it to heart. We all know that was drivel.”

  Minnie’s face stiffened and she didn’t utter another word. I said to the nurse, “Let us know if you hear anything about her.”

  Without further delay we left the hospital. Minnie kept quiet the whole way as if lost in thought.

  DURING THE FOLLOWING DAYS we were occupied with disbanding the camp and persuading the refugees to go home. Many women, especially those with small children, had left. On the other hand, owing to the disappearance of the other camps, some young girls came to our college begging to be admitted. We accepted them temporarily, so there were still more than one thousand refugees on campus. Many of those women expected their menfolk to return and so didn’t leave, and some went to the Model Prison every morning to plead with the officer in charge.

  One afternoon in late May, Mr. Tanaka came in person and told us that some thirty men and boys would be released from the prison. We were dubious because the four men and the boy he had promised would be released before were still in jail.

  “How can I believe you?” Minnie asked him. “The women are frustrated and angry. The boy’s mother comes to my office every day to see why he’s still there. I’m afraid some of the women might call me a liar behind my back.”

  “Why should I lie to you?” Tanaka said, his dyspeptic face puckering. “This time the prison will let them out. It’s final, period.”

  He sounded so sincere that we were convinced. Minnie thanked him, bowing a little. He added in a toneless voice that he wished there were more civilians qualified for release.

  We shared the good news with Big Liu, Holly, Rulian, and Miss Lou, and everybody was thrilled, although we didn’t spread the word further right away, not wanting to get the women’s hopes up again and because we had no list of the names. Minnie reminded us that we shouldn’t celebrate too soon. I exhaled a sigh of relief, saying, “Thirty lives saved is worth any effort. Minnie, you were right about the petition from the outset.”

  My tone of voice was so earnest that it cracked everybody up. Big Liu said, “Anling, you owe me a good dinner.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied.

  That night I mentioned Tanaka’s visit to Yaoping. My husband knew the vice-consul personally and said the man was reliable and would make good on his promise. In fact, we’d all heard that last December Tanaka was almost attacked by some Japanese soldiers who threatened to burn their embassy, because Tanaka had reported their brutalities to Tokyo.

  22

  IT WAS ALREADY beastly hot by the end of May, the air muggy and stagnant. The sun beat down on everything relentlessly, fueling the internal fire in every creature. Sometimes I saw the soldiers on the streets sweating so much that their uniforms were dappled with wet patches. Some of them, heat-raddled, would unconsciously scratch their throats as they walked, as if they were having difficulty breathing. I hoped it would get hotter and hotter so the semitropical heat Nanjing was famous for might drive them away. The Japanese didn’t know what they had bargained for and would have to live in this “furnace” for many years before they could acclimate themselves. I bet a lot of them would have heatstroke and sweat rash this summer. Surely the heat would get rid of some of them just as it had killed thousands of Mongols centuries before.

  The hot weather, however, made the children in our camp comfortable, especially small boys who scampered around barefoot—some didn’t have even a stitch on, not in the least bothered by the mosquitoes that were becoming ubiquitous. As Minnie and I were standing outside the Faculty House, a clamor went up on the side of the pond behind the Central Building. A naked boy, six or seven, had been caught by a group of women who were attempting to force him into a new pair of pants. “I won’t, I won’t!” he hollered, kicking and struggling to break loose. Around them, people were laughing, some whooping and clapping their hands. His mother yelled at him, “Don’t you feel ashamed? You’re too big to run around like a wild animal! If your dad were here, he’d spank the pee out of you.” But the boy kept bawling and resisting and finally managed to get away, still buck naked.

  “Goodness, that boy has lots of lung power,” a woman said.

  “He should join a church choir,” another told his mother.

  Minnie had just presented nine pairs of children’s shoes to some mothers who were about to leave the camp. They’d definitely have a hard time breaking their kids of going around barefoot. Or perhaps they shouldn’t trouble themselves about that at all. When the cold weather set in, the children would automatically wear shoes. I didn’t mind seeing the boys barefoot, but I thought they ought to wear something to cover up their weenies. I said to Minnie, “There should be a law forbidding anyone older than six to go naked in public.”

  Rulian, smiling and clucking her tongue, came and joined us, followed by a puff of midges that began circling around our heads. We talked about the men and boys promised to be released. Would Tanaka have lied to us? Minnie was certain that he’d been in earnest; otherwise he wouldn’t have come in person to deliver the news. We also discussed how to help those refugees who had no home anymore, and those who did but couldn’t support themselves and their children. Our college had received some small funds recently, and Minnie had been giving th
em away to a few women who didn’t have any means of livelihood. She gave each person five or six yuan with which they might start a small business, like a little laundry, or a tea stand, or a stall selling fans, soaps, incense, pencils, and candles.

  There was so much to talk about that we decided to go to the main office and resume conferring there. Seated at the president’s desk and on straight-back chairs, we began reviewing the cases of the women and girls in need of support. A few days earlier, Minnie had proposed to the International Relief Committee the plan for a summer school for one hundred “students,” a kind of professional training program, which would be called the Homecraft School, the same as the one we used to run for the local peasant girls whose parents were too poor to give them a formal education. Minnie had kept the proposal on a small scale because she didn’t want the campus to continue resembling a refugee camp, but now evidently there were many more who had nowhere to go and therefore our plan had to be expanded to include them. After considering some cases, we figured that there’d be more than two hundred refugees remaining here. For them, some educational program would have to be formed to justify their presence at Jinling.