Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Indeed, among the crowds, in addition to the rumours of mass suicides, stories were spreading of blood drinking and cannibalism. Of women exchanging their babies and saying ‘Your family can eat mine. My family will eat yours.’ And some of them weren’t just rumours.

  Second Son, keeping a sharp eye out all the time, avoiding any person or groups looking in any way hostile, hurried among the crowds, shouting Spider Girl’s name, calling out to people whether they’d anywhere seen a fat girl with a bad limp and hair on her upper lip? Uniformly they said no. He asked a group of monks – they hadn’t seen her. A group of university students – no. But Second Son did not lose hope. He felt useful and because he felt useful he felt happy. He was serving his father. He was looking to try and rescue his eldest sister, whom he loved more than anyone else. She always was the one who had talked to him most and with whom he had the most fun. She made him laugh. But he could see her nowhere.

  With a sensible head on his young shoulders, Second Son returned to the cart after half an hour. Wei thanked him profoundly for trying to find her and reminded himself he must still speak to Second Son and try to soothe him when they were alone. But he was in agony about the loss of his daughter.

  For five minutes, so that no one would see him cry, he crawled under the cart and wept. Then he came out. He untied his wife’s hands and gag and lifted her down off the cart and their journey resumed.

  *

  The next morning the landscape they were crossing started to change. Low hills hemmed them in on either side, so the people on the march became more herded together, started to walk in closer proximity to each other.

  Wei was as usual pulling the right-hand side of the cart. His father, tressed to the cart, was sitting beside him, ignoring him, lost in his thoughts. His face and jaw were wriggling and grimacing. Suddenly he turned and looked straight at his son.

  ‘Explain this,’ he said in quite a hostile tone of voice.

  ‘Explain what, Father?’

  ‘Explain to me why the Mandate of Heaven has been revoked?’

  ‘I did not know it had been revoked, Father. Why do you say it has?’

  ‘It must have been. It is the only reason why all this can be happening. All this madness and confusion and suffering. It is the emperor.’

  ‘We do not have an emperor any longer, Father.’

  ‘We always have an emperor. And he is not ruling with justice or compassion. Instead there is anarchy. So, according to divine law and custom, the gods would have let the people overthrow him and put in his place an emperor who would rule with justice and compassion. That is what should have happened. Do you follow me?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Fool. It is the gods. Always in the past the gods have loved us human beings – rightly. The gods up there in the skies have watched out for evildoers and punished them, the gods in Heaven have loved all people equally so that we in turn would love all other human beings and treat them as our own brothers and sisters…’

  ‘Father…’

  His father continued, his voice rising shrilly. ‘The gods loved us. They ordered the sun and moon and stars to bring us light, guide us day and night. They gave us the four seasons and the snow and the frost and the rain and the dew so that the five grains and the flax and the silk would grow in the ground and on the trees so that we could use and enjoy them. But…’

  ‘Father,’ Wei broke in, becoming increasingly alarmed. ‘I do not understand. what are you saying?’

  ‘Fool! Halfwit! What I am saying is that the gods, up there in Heaven, who are meant to be grateful for our gifts and offerings, who are meant to listen to our prayers and protect us, have grown malicious and greedy and concerned only with their own pleasures. They have turned Heaven into a brothel, a place of lust and drink and murder. A pigsty. A stinking shithole!’

  ‘Father, I cannot listen to you any longer.’

  Straining at his bonds, his face rigid and livid, his father gazed right into his son’s helpless soul.

  ‘The gods are drunk! They are killing each other! They have deserted us, their people, abandoned us to the mercies of wild dogs and wolves!’

  Wei could not listen to his father’s thoughts any longer. They corresponded too closely to dark thoughts he himself had been harbouring over the last few days. He shouted out to Eldest Son on the other side of cart to change places with him so each could rest the arms and shoulders they had been pulling on. Eldest Son would not understand a word his grandfather was saying and just grin at him in his usual embarrassed way.

  His wife stopped the donkey. The two men exchanged places. They continued.

  Wei didn’t know where to look, what to think. It was as though his father had laid his soul bare. All the thoughts, all the anger he had been suppressing for days came welling up. All the lines which had once run directly from him, his family, directly north to the gods in Heaven, seemed to be twisting and jangling and splintering in disarray. Where there had once been calm and loving voices, now there was only screaming and obscenities and lunacy. And he suspected that the ancestors were themselves suffering a similar pandemonium and bewilderment.

  The hills on either side of them had come narrowed, squeezing all the refugees close up together as they passed though the gap. The Japanese spotter plane flew over them, dully, slowly.

  Wei stirred himself. He had to pay attention. Keep watch. He looked around his family. All except one were still there. Still trying to survive. Families lost members all the time but the family endures. It was his duty to make sure that it endured. Wei ate bitterness and endured.

  In the cart Grandfather’s mood changed. In his quickly fragmenting consciousness he suddenly saw his grandchildren and he loved them. These were difficult times. He would tell them a story that would soothe them, bring them cheer.

  ‘Do you want a story?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Baby Girl Wei and Baby Boy Wei chorused. Cherry Blossom clambered on board to listen. Second Son, who was walking behind the cart to keep guard, would have listened but was called forwards by Wei so he could lead the donkey while his wife fell back to keep guard.

  ‘The story I’m going to tell you is a very special one,’ said Grandfather. ‘It’s called “The Dragon’s Pearl”.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said everyone.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ said Grandfather, ‘there was a boy and his mother who lived close to the River Min. They were good people but very poor. The boy used to go out every day into the countryside and cut grass to sell at market, and by doing that they just managed to make a living.’

  Wei started to relax. A grandfather telling stories to his grandchildren, what could be more right.

  ‘But one year,’ Grandfather continued, ‘a terrible drought came on the land. Nothing anywhere would grow. The river dried up. And however far the boy would wander into the countryside, everywhere the plants and the grass had died. And every day the mother and her son grew thirstier and more hungry.’

  Baby Girl Wei was looking straight at her grandfather and sucking hard on her thumb.

  ‘But,’ continued Grandfather, ‘nothing would stop the little boy from walking out, further and further into the countryside, to try and find grass. And one day he was rewarded for all his effort. Because he came across a patch of the greenest, brightest grass he had ever seen, shining in the sunlight. He was so pleased. The little boy cut it immediately and took it back to the market and sold it for a great price and he and his mother were able to buy more than enough food and water.

  ‘The little boy kept on going back to the grass. Each day it was as green and plentiful as it had been the previous day.’

  Elder Son and Wei both listened to this story they knew so well. Second Son couldn’t hear because he was too far ahead. Cherry Blossom slipped off the cart to walk next to her mother, still listening hard. Even Wei’s wife, hostile as she might feel to Grandfather staying in the family, softened and listened to a story that had delighted her in childhood.
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br />   The crowds were starting to thicken as they pressed through the narrow valley between the hills. Grandfather continued with his story.

  ‘The little boy wondered how the green grass could keep growing every day. And then he had a thought. Dragons were said to be very kind-hearted and great givers of food and life. Perhaps they were causing the grass to grow.

  ‘And so that night the little boy stayed behind to see if a dragon would come. And sure enough, in the evening, over the horizon flew this beautiful dragon, all glowing with lights and glistening with colours.’

  ‘I love dragons,’ said Baby Girl Wei.

  ‘And,’ continued Grandfather, ‘The dragon flew down and landed just where all the grass was growing, and the little boy knew…’

  ‘Look, Grandfather.’ said Baby Boy Wei, pointing, ‘there’s a dragon?’

  He was pointing backwards, behind the cart, into the sky. There was indeed an object there, wobbling slightly up and down, quite close to the horizon. The sunlight flashed and reflected off it. Grandfather Wei looked but could see anything because his eyesight was so poor.

  ‘Yes,’ said Baby Girl Wei, ‘it could be a dragon. It has lovely colours and is making a dragon sort of roar.’

  The Japanese reconnaissance plane had waited until sufficient numbers of refugees had pushed into the narrow funnel of the valley before radioing. The pilot at the controls of the Nakajima Ki-27b fighter bomber he had vectored in jockeyed his plane into the best attack line on the crowds. He carried a single Type 94 fifty-kilo high-explosive bomb slung beneath his plane. He locked into his final line of attack, sped in on the starting-to-panic civilians, dipped his nose, and as the plane’s speed increased took aim at the centre of the target, releasing his bomb and simultaneously starting to fire his two machine guns. As the weight of the bomb fell away the nose of the plane rose too. Thus, although the machine gun bullets arrived first among the refugees, they went over the heads of the Wei family and sprayed and shattered the limbs and bodies and lives of people three or four hundred yards ahead of them. But the bomb, falling straight and true on the fighter bomber’s original trajectory, was making precisely for the Weis’ cart.

  Produced at the Tachikawa Hikoki K. K. factory at Tachikawa near Tokyo, the bomb sped through Cherry Blossom’s blue parasol, sliced straight through Grandfather and Baby Boy Wei – leaving Baby Girl Wei totally untouched – before passing through and smashing the wheat jars and the full water jar – the wood of the cart igniting through friction – then obliterating the donkey and decapitating a ducking Second Son, and continuing through the air for a further fifty yards, killing three adults, two children and a horse, before embedding itself finally and fatally into a cart full of young men which it slaughtered en masse. It had not exploded. The detonator, made by Korean slave Son Joon-Ho in the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries factory in Nagasaki, had failed to detonate.

  In the eighth month autumn’s high winds angrily howl,

  And sweep three layers of thatch from off my house.

  The straw flies over the river, where it scatters,

  Some is caught and hangs high up in the treetops,

  Some floats down and sinks into the ditch.

  The urchins from the southern village bully me, weak as I am;

  They’re cruel enough to rob me to my face,

  Openly, they carry the straw into the bamboo.

  My mouth and lips are dry from pointless calling,

  I lean again on my cane and heave a sigh.

  The wind soon calms, and the clouds turn the colour of ink;

  The autumn sky has turned completely black.

  My ancient cotton quilt is cold as iron,

  My darling children sleep badly, and kick it apart.

  The roof leaks over the bed- there’s nowhere dry,

  The rain falls thick as hemp, and without end.

  Lost amid disorder, I hardly sleep,

  Wet through, how can I last the long nights!

  If I could get a mansion with a thousand, ten thousand rooms,

  A great shelter for all the world’s scholars, together in joy,

  Solid as a mountain, the elements could not move it.

  Oh! If I could see this house before me,

  I’d happily freeze to death in my broken hut!

  Du Fu, eighth-century Chinese poet,

  ‘Song of My Cottage Unroofed by Autumn Gales’

  29 Brothers and sisters, this is what I mean. Our time is short. From this day on those who have wives should live as if they do not;

  30 Those who mourn should be happy, those who are happy should mourn. those who buy things should treat them as though they belong to all people;

  31 those who make use of material objects should not become them; for all around us this world in which we live is dying.

  1 Corinthians 7:29-31

  9

  The family gate slams shut behind me. ‘Lock it,’ I scream back over the gate, ‘pile everything you can find against it.’

  I turn towards the street. A drunken man lurches towards me, but he is so slow even I, with my case, typewriter and manuscript, can escape him, hobbling across the rubble and broken tiles. Hell and pandemonium. Everywhere the roar of flames, thick black oily coils of smoke belching like angry dragons. Telephone poles burn like fiery Ku Klux Klan crosses, fall across the streets, their wires lassoing wildly back and forth. Dear God. The Japanese are probably no more than half a mile behind me. Hushed stunned people stand quiescent in the streets and at corners, some holding their heads in their hands, eyes dead as fish on a market stall, some stare upward at the sky.

  God help my poor defenceless family.

  I make my way, ever so slowly, towards the railway station at the south end of the city.

  Meet my first Chinese soldiers. Drunk, so not very fast. They’re looting a shop that sells jewellery and watches. Its plate glass window is smashed, they’re helping themselves to its clocks and bracelets displayed in its showcases, laughing and singing and fighting among each other. Out of it staggers one soldier carrying an enormous grandfather clock. As he reels down the street its coiled steel innards gush out and catch and drag on the rubble like the bowels of a half-eviscerated man. The clock continues chiming like bells in a mad belfry. Explosions all around from exploding Japanese artillery shells and aerial bombs. Dust everywhere. Soldiers firing blindly into the skies. A shoe shop, all its shutters smashed, without a single shoe left in it, not even a child’s. A wealthy woman shrieking with all her fingers hacked off because the bandits could not pull off her many rings. Soldiers in uniform, some semi-naked, one totally naked playing a flute and dancing.

  Our glorious 3rd Route Army under the inspiring command of General Han Fuju.

  For some reason I seem to be, at least temporarily, invisible, as I slip through the streets. Perhaps I look too stringy or poor to rob. One of the few advantages of being a writer is that no one thinks you’re worth robbing!

  Expensively dressed women being raped against walls, many dead bodies, wealthy men with their throats cut, soldiers staggering along with enormous piles of loot perched on their shoulders.

  It’s not just our soldiers who are pillaging and stealing and murdering. Down narrow alleys and in dark gateways lurk the criminals and cut-throats of the city, not daring to come out openly onto the streets while the soldiers are still there, waiting patiently like crows round an eagle devouring its prey. It’s one of them who first spots me. There aren’t many soldiers around this area as three or four of the footpads emerge and start to lope after me. I start to run – or rather hobble over the rubble and debris. They pursue me, eyes hungry as wolves, gaining on me. I start to think about what I can throw away to distract them. I can’t discard my patriotic anti-Japanese novel, nor my case with my wife’s silk scarf in it. It must be my beloved Wanneng typewriter. I throw it callously aside. For a second they stop.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Junk.’

  ‘Just fit for scrap.’


  ‘Come on, we’re losing him.’

  One stays on – for the scrap – the other three start to chase me again, one with a sabre, one with a knife. What else can I throw overboard? Not my manuscript, not my case, perhaps they like red persimmon fruit? Then I realize – what about my overcoat? It has a wool lining. Good in winter. I stop a second, put down my case, hold my manuscript between my knees, strip off the coat, pick up my manuscript and case, and I’m away.

  This time two stop and start to fight over the coat. Winter is coming. I continue to hare, or at least hare as well as one can over sharp stones while wearing a thin pair of leather shoes. But the man with the knife continues to gain on me, obviously intent on my case and all valuables about my person. (My wife had sewn a few silver dollars into my trouser turn ups). Matters get worse. Three loafers by a looted vegetable stall – the owner sprawled dead over his produce – join in. My lungs are starting to collapse. Never ever smoke again, I shout at myself.

  They’re about to drag me down when I round a corner and come face to face with a police checkpoint. Official-looking policemen in smart uniforms under the command of an inspector in an immaculate uniform. Beside it a brazier glows to keep the late-autumn chill off. What could look more – normal? I skid to a halt. My wolves come round the corner, take one look, and evaporate. I breathe in. I breathe out. You cannot imagine my relief. I walk up to the checkpoint, trying to look intensely respectable.

  ‘Good afternoon, officer,’ I say, in an accent I hope comes across as High Mandarin. ‘I’ve been having a bit of trouble in the streets. Rough fellows. I just wonder if you could spare one of your men to accompany me to the railway station.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ asks the inspector in a far from friendly tone.