Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Here it is. China at last has a chance of change. Something I had despaired of ever happening. And I could actually play a useful role in bringing about that change. It is my duty. My sacred duty. But I can’t, because… because… because I love my old mum. I love her beyond all reason. I love her because, from nothing, she created me. My whole family and I have already been through all this once, and have reached the same conclusion. We stay.

  I start to walk back. In the streets rubble is piling up where shells have hit buildings. There are fewer refugees and more soldiers, some of them obviously drunk. I avoid them. The Japanese can only be a few hours away. I spend my time pondering on what will happen when they arrive. They’ll break into my home, and I’ll, I suppose, be standing in front of my family to protect them, and I’ll walk forwards to try and explain that they should not kill us, and they’ll bayonet me. I’ll fall to the ground in such a way that I can see them as they bayonet and shoot my wife and children, and finally, just before I die, I’ll see my mother being macheted to bits on her bed.

  I walk through our courtyard door and see the soldier sitting on the ground under the red persimmon tree. He is eating one of its fruits as he plays games with my two young daughters and tells Little Yi about what it’s like to be a soldier. I start to tell him that he should tell his general that I will not be coming, but as I do I see my wife walking down the steps from our home. She is walking in a rather decisive manner. She is speaking to me in a tone of voice which she has never used before. She is speaking to me with authority.

  ‘Husband, I want to talk to you. Come inside. Tell the soldier to wait.’

  She walks back up the steps. I automatically follow her. We go into the cubbyhole. ‘Mind your head,’ she warns me. We sit down. She at my desk, me sort of crouching on the other side.

  ‘Husband, while you were away, I have been reading the letter from Feng.’

  ‘I have decided I am not going. We are staying.’

  ‘That is not what will happen,’ she says with authority.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Listen to me.’

  I listen to her.

  ‘All our lives we have been progressives. Every day we have worked, we have spoken, we have dedicated our lives to bringing reform, to bringing justice and equality, to this terrible, backwards, crumbling country of ours. It has been what all my painting has been about, your writing. Yet what happens when we reach the crunch, this moment of change? When we can actually do something to help change our beloved China? We give in. We run away.’

  I do not know in which direction to look. She holds me with this terrifying basilisk stare.

  ‘I am not going to allow this to happen. You are going to go to Wuhan. You are going to work for the new China. I will stay here and I will do my best to protect our children and your mother. As is my duty as a wife and dutiful daughter-in-law.’

  (She is actually out-Confucianizing me with that point!)

  ‘But the Japanese will be here at any moment, they’ll slaughter…’

  ‘This is a war,’ she grinds at me. ‘It is a war for the future of our country. In wars terrible sacrifices must be made. People, beloved ones, die. For the good of our country you must go to Wuhan and do work only you can do. I will do my very best to survive the Japanese. If they let us live I will find the money – I can sell my graphic designs as I already do, I can do secretarial work, I can teach – to support the family. And then, through God’s grace, let us survive until you and the forces of change return to free us. That is what you will do, husband, you will go to Wuhan. Go and tell the soldier our decision. Then we will pack your bags, you can say farewell to us, and you must go to the train station immediately.’

  My wife always wore a beautiful Indian silk scarf around her slender neck. It was a gift from Rabindranath Tagore, the illustrious Indian poet and anti-colonialist. When we were first married we had met him and some fellow Indians when they were doing a lecture tour of China. They spoke of socialism, freedom, and the solidarity of all peoples around the earth, especially China and India. He handed us this beautiful silk scarf as an example of exquisite Indian craftsmanship. We have treasured it ever since.

  Now she unwinds it from around her delicate neck and hands it to me.

  ‘Take this with you,’ she says. ‘I will pack it in your case. And when you think of me, take it out and hold it.’

  *

  I write a brief note to Feng saying I will come. I hand it to the soldier who thanks me and departs.

  To say farewell to everything you are is very difficult. It is as though I am among ghosts. I wander around the home. There are my wife’s paintings, paintings powerful and serene, paintings which have sold so well in Beijing and Shanghai. On the walls, attached with drawing pins, are my children’s imitations of their mother’s work, garish crayon gashes and vivid splodges of paint. Tiny stick figures seemingly trying to avoid enormous explosions.

  I start to feel horribly emotional, but I must calm myself down. The whole family sort of walks around each other, detached yet attached, avoiding each other, it is the only way to deal with such moments. But for one second I let myself go. And I have never forgiven myself for this. I am about to desert my family, I am probably never going to see them again. We are packing my suitcase, my wife folding each garment as she puts it inside, silk scarf and all. And there is this moment when she cannot quite press them in, and so Little Yi, my son, in his keenness to help, pushes in to press it and knocks an ornament off the table and I snap at him. Harshly. He bites his lip, desperate not to cry. I apologize to him, I apologize again, aghast. That at this moment…!

  My wife cuts across it all. ‘You must go. The last train is leaving Jinan Station at seven o’clock. Go.’

  We stumble outside. All except my mother, who is fast asleep. From the street outside come confused shouts and the sound of rifle shots. I look at them all.

  ‘How are we going to communicate? So I know you are all right?’

  ‘We probably won’t.’

  ‘You could write to me poste restante at the Wuhan Post Office – I’ll check every day.’

  ‘That would be too dangerous. You are a famous person. If I think it is safe to send a letter there I’ll address it to Wu Lei.’

  ‘Wu Lei?’

  ‘Wu Lei.’

  My wife picks a red persimmon fruit off the tree and hands it to me, I put it in an inside pocket. She opens the gate. I touch her arm. With my suitcase in one hand and my typewriter and the script of my patriotic novel under the other arm, I stumble out onto the streets of Jinan.

  6

  Millions of people, like a giant column of ants, slowly, painstakingly crawled their way across the face of a great unending yellow plain. Clouds of dust swirled about them. The autumn sun shone down relentless. Similar scenes were occurring all over China as Japanese armies advanced into Central China from the north and the east.

  Above the floods of fleeing civilians flew the Japanese air force, bombing and strafing and machine-gunning the refugees. From the rear of these hordes came the sounds of Japanese artillery and rifle fire driving them on, slaughtering or enslaving those they overtook.

  Within the wagon Wei’s wife groaned and convulsed in labour. Her husband slept beside her. Second Son lead the donkey and in his tiny head tried to work out what had been happening to him in the last day – the flight, the bodies in the stream, the madness of the midnight panic. And what strange thing was now happening to his mother? She was in pain. Was she dying? But not for one second did his eyes stop from looking all around him for more danger. His grandfather, with a conical straw hat on his head and a cloth tied across his mouth and nose to keep out the dust, walked on the other side of the donkey’s head. Worried and preoccupied, hunched like a dried-up old shrimp, he was trying to remember something. He had taken to wandering in random directions. Second Son kept an eye on him too.

  Behind the cart, sharpened spade in one hand, a two-year-old sleeping Baby Bo
y Wei in the other, walked Eldest Son. He’d not forgotten his shame of falling asleep on the night of the great stampede. He was looking all about him diligently, constantly. Twenty yards to his right plodded on foot a farming family all in red clothing. Eldest Son had never seen this before. Everyone in his village always wore blue. They spoke to each other in strange accents and were always arguing. Eldest Son smiled a lot to them. To his left were mostly small groups or individuals, continually overtaking or falling behind the Weis. A drunken man staggered towards him, but on seeing Eldest Son raising his spade, headed back into the horde.

  Since her father was asleep and her mother for some reason was ignoring her, little Cherry Blossom had climbed onto the rear tailgate of the cart and she and Baby Girl Wei were playing with her pet hedgehog. Baby Girl Wei, three years old, was less interested in the hedgehog and more in the delight she felt that Cherry Blossom was for once taking notice of her. She smiled beatifically at her sister.

  Over their heads flew a flight of Japanese bombers. They had dropped their bombs on the fleeing civilians further south and were now returning north to their airfield, machine-gunning the Chinese hordes in a random fashion. Quite close to the cart a random university professor, clutching valuable papers, was felled to the ground. His papers fluttered away in the wind.

  Spider Girl waddled behind the cart’s tailgate. Before he fell fast asleep her father had instructed her to prepare a honey concoction to strengthen her mother’s constitution and protect her against infection. He’d poured some of the wild pear juice from his bottle into a bowl, and now Spider Girl, ignoring her own pain as she walked, carefully held a honeycomb above the bowl and, having sliced the caps off some of the cells with her knife, bled the honey slowly into the bowl. When she had finished she broke off the corner of emptied cells and handed them to Baby Girl Wei and Cherry Blossom to suck. She had to police them to ensure Cherry Blossom didn’t take it all. She stirred the honey and the wild pear juice together. The honey taken from all the flowers and blossoms growing on their farm. The wild pear juice from the tiny pears that grew on the wild pear tree whose roots went first into the bones of the sister her father loved so much, then, further off, into the bones of all the generations of ancestors who had lived on and worked on the farm before them. All the love, all the strength of their entire family, as her father had intended, was present in this medicine for his wife. The family must survive. That was why Spider Girl loved her father so much. All the thought he put into everything, and all for the sake of the family.

  She fed it to her mother. Her mother took sips between contractions, all the time staring at Spider Girl with this black, bleak look, as though Spider Girl was a monster from hell.

  Spider Girl knew that her time with the family was not long. But she would serve them whole-heartedly until they cast her off.

  *

  A few hours later, as evening came on, Wei’s wife’s waters broke. She went into the second stage of labour, her body starting to push her unborn child out.

  Wei stopped the wagon. His wife’s breathing was complicated by all the dust in her lungs. Every time she breathed in hard to help her push, she coughed and spluttered pitifully. As Wei tied a cloth over her nose and mouth to ease her breathing – inwardly cursing himself for not having thought of this earlier – he ordered Second Son and Cherry Blossom to remove all the utensils and tools hanging under the cart and stacked them in the cart – in case they had to make a sudden getaway. He took the three wooden buckets – all empty – knocked the hoops off two of them and piled the staves for firewood in the cart. He put the iron hoops in as well for later barter. The third bucket he kept for the donkey to be watered from – provided they could spare the water.

  Meanwhile, Spider Girl had taken out some of the fabrics and was draping them around the outside of the wagon so the space beneath the wagon became a private area, hidden from the outside world. Wei’s wife, as emphatically as her raw lungs would allow her, told her husband she did not need any help at any time, she must be utterly by herself. She then crawled under the back of the wagon and her husband closed the curtain. She removed her clothes, piled them neatly in a corner, and squatted on her haunches. She was very thirsty but did not let it bother her. She spat out what phlegm she could. Rocking back and forth she started to moan and shudder.

  Wei stood on guard by the curtain. He prayed to the earth god Tudeh for his wife and his unborn child.

  Outside the first of their three water jars was unsealed. The family was fed by Spider Girl, who did it as quietly as possible so their mother, under the cart, did not hear and grow jealous and fractious that her daughter was usurping her role. And all the time the family eavesdropped for even the slightest sound coming from beneath the cart.

  Spider Girl handed out the remains of their salad leaves – wilted and dry but still nutritious – two cold dumplings, two raw carrots, three dried apricots and the carcases of the remaining two chickens which would go rotten if kept any longer. Spider Girl was scrupulously fair in every portion she handed out – and with the sips from the bowl of water – but when she was distracted by Baby Boy Wei falling over and having to be comforted, she handed Grandpa two senna pods instead of one.

  It was at this moment that Grandfather – who had been fretting about it ever since they left the farm – suddenly remembered the second piece of wisdom his grandfather had passed down to him so many years ago about how to survive a mass flight such as this. The first piece had been that water is always more vital to survival than food. This had been most useful and the extra water they had brought was already helping them. But the second piece of advice – which he had remembered the moment Spider Girl passed him the senna pods – was even stranger. ‘What my grandfather said,’ he announced to the family, ‘was to drink your own piss.’

  This suggestion was met with almost universal disgust. Cherry Blossom was loud in her horror. Baby Girl Wei also expressed her horror, because that was what Cherry Blossom was doing. Baby Boy Wei didn’t really have an opinion either way. Eldest Son giggled and looked embarrassed. And for Second Son this was yet another sign that the world he lived had gone terrifyingly crazy. Wei, however, noted the advice, saw its virtue, and started immediately practising it. So, of course, did Grandfather, who, following every future urination, loudly declared himself mightily refreshed. Spider Girl did it too, calculating, from the pure water she would save, that it would marginally increase her time with the family.

  Wei, seeing that a lot of urine would be going to waste, ordered everybody who wouldn’t drink their own to piss into the remaining bucket. Perhaps the donkey would drink it. If the donkey didn’t, maybe the goat would. Everyone knows goats are more intelligent than donkeys. But the canny little donkey drank it without a moment’s hesitation.

  *

  Grandfather and Baby Boy and Baby Girl Wei lay asleep in the cart. Eldest Son and Spider Girl lay asleep on the ground. Second Son lay beside them, desperately trying to understand this new world into which he had so suddenly been cast. Wei kept guard, pacing round and round the tiny circumference of his family. He checked the donkey had eaten the feed in his nosebag. He chased off a shadowy man trying to steal a pot tied to the side of the cart. He fed the goat. It was still producing some milk, which he fed to his wife and Baby Boy Wei, so he would wait til it dried up entirely before slaughtering it. He’d cut its throat into a bowl so they could make blood cakes from it, then barter some of its meat and the wax from the used honeycombs with a family that already had a fire lit. That way he would waste no firewood. In exchange the Weis would boil the rest of the goat’s meat and some beans on their fire and make blood cakes. If it could be arranged, both sides would gain.

  He looked around him constantly while concentrating his mind on the dark tent beneath the cart. The groans and mutterings were increasing. He woke Spider Girl to mix another concoction of honey and wild pear juice. When she had made it she passed it to him and he told her to go back to sleep. He squatt
ed by the curtain, opened it, and passed his wife the bowl.

  ‘How is it, dear wife?’

  ‘It is coming.’

  ‘Do you know how long it will be before you give birth?’

  She grimaced as her body tensed and convulsed again. She gave out a cry. When the contraction was over she asked:

  ‘Who made this restorative for me to drink?’

  ‘Your eldest daughter.’

  Her soul flooded with black anger. That she should dare to take over her duties in the family and usurp her. But she knew she could not speak out to her husband, who disapproved of such thoughts. She let out another cry as the next contraction came. When it was over Wei gently addressed her.

  ‘Dear wife. Please try to make less noise, if it is possible. I know you are in great pain but you are drawing attention to us among all the people around. They will realize our weakness, our vulnerability.’

  She agreed with him and nodded her understanding, then indicated he should leave. He carefully put the curtain back in place and stood up.