Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  God, I think, the train’s leaving.

  But that’s not it at all. Everyone who can get to it is leaning out of the window, but rather than seeing the locomotive pulling us away towards safety, instead they see that our locomotive has been detached from the train and is steaming away by itself.

  Pandemonium. ‘We’re being abandoned!’ Panic all around me. Don’t panic, I think! At least I have some time to finish my article. I take a vacated seat and start to think. The passenger returning from the window sees I have stolen his seat and scowls at me, but he’s not going to do anything because of the military escort I arrived with. I put my bag on my knee and rest the paper on it. I think of stirring images, daring events, heroic stands, blood spilling. But somehow it doesn’t feel right.

  This nation is in collapse, panic, despair. Writing cheap heroics like in a Hollywood film won’t fool anyone. But calmness, reason, and reassurance will hardly fool them either. And it’s my job as a propagandist to fool people. How?!?

  Shells are landing quite close to the station now. I can hear planes overhead.

  Then something else happens. The locomotive that left our train suddenly backs another train down the rails on the opposite side of our platform. A train completely different to ours. Our train is rough and shabby. It’s carried too many people on too many journeys over the last few months. This new train is immaculate. Every carriage has been highly polished. The interiors of every coach are luxurious. Right opposite us stops an armoured baggage coach. Immediately smartly uniformed soldiers form a line in front of it, and also line the platform facing our train, bayonets pointing at us. Under no circumstances are we to attempt to board the train opposite us with ‘our’ locomotive attached to the front of it.

  Well-dressed officers start to parade down the platform, talking languidly to each other. Following them are their wives and concubines and taxi girls in exotic, colourful clothing, chattering and giggling, twirling their parasols. The officers step into the various carriages, then their women. Then, with heavily armed guards, a large cart drawn by heavy draft horses comes down the platform and stops by the armoured coach. A steel door on the coach shoots up and coolies start loading heavy sacks into the carriage. One splits slightly and silver coins spill out.

  A sigh goes through our train. So this is where so much of our looted money has gone. The soldiers facing us tighten their grips on their rifles. Poltroons and thieves!

  A Japanese bomb hits the far end of the station and broken glass rains down on some empty track.

  And then, finally, walking very slowly, grandly down the platform, comes the Hero of Jinan. The man we have put so much trust in to defend us from the Japanese – General Han Fuju. As a grand and a mighty man, before him is borne his coffin, to bring him comfort in this his hour of tribulation. It is huge. Incredibly ornate. Made entirely of silver. Exactly the sort of vehicle you would require to make the grandest of entrances into the afterlife. General Fuju stands solemnly while it is loaded into the armoured coach.

  Forgive me for this. I am a literary person and therefore, like all literary people, susceptible to moments of wild and frenzied hatred, usually towards our fellow writers, but also on occasion to our fellow human beings. Well, now I am going to indulge this tendency just a little.

  The fact is the wretched Han Fuju is famous for only two things in China. First, until today, he was famous for being a brave and courageous general. A defender of the realm. Well, that’s fucked off pretty quickly. The second thing he is famed for – throughout China – is his appalling verse. His poems are renowned and reported around the country even more widely than his military heroics.

  In my extreme fury I will repeat only one to you. He wrote it while he was living in our midst in Jinan, defending us. He wrote it about one of my own deepest and most beloved literary inspirations. Daming Lake. The exquisite Bright Lake. Here it is:

  Daming Lake, great and bright,

  Covered with floating lotuses.

  On the lotuses sit toads.

  Prod them once and away they leap.

  That’s it.

  His coffin is finally fitted inside the armoured carriage. Han Fuju wipes a sentimental tear from his eye and steps into the next carriage. The soldiers quickly leap upon the train. There is a whistle and it slides swiftly out.

  I reflect. Is it any wonder that led by such a man, deserted by such a man, so many of his soldiers, in despair, in disgust, have descended into barbarism and nihilism and turned against the very people, us, they have sworn to protect?

  I am a propagandist. I have to write. I have to write in such a way that I do not tell the truth – because that would be censored – but I lie in such a way that readers can still draw the truth, can draw sustenance and hope, from my lies. I will not mention General Han Fuju. I will not mention the cowardice and the murderous behaviour of his troops.

  His troops were quartered for many months in our city. In that time, except at the end, they were well disciplined, cheerful and courteous. I spoke to them on many occasions when I was in town. And what did they say? They said they were totally confident that in hand-to-hand, close-quarter fighting with the Japanese – which the Japanese were not very fond of – they were their superiors. What they lacked were adequate weapons – modern tanks, artillery, aircraft, machine guns, gas masks. I can put that in. Because it is hardly a state secret. And, as I noted in the hotel, it’s exactly the sort of things that possible allies in the West should be reading.

  I write this. What should I say about the generals, about General Han Fuju? Nothing – I would be censored – but with most of our armies falling back people will already have reached their own conclusions about the mediocre generals put in charge of them. Where are our great heroic generals, like Feng Yuxiang, Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren?

  The truth is that our leader General Chiang Kai-shek will not allow one of them to lead, because our great leader is not fighting a war against the Japanese, he is still fighting a civil war, and is terrified that such gifted generals will take control from him. Of course I cannot write this. (I’ve already spent too much of my life enjoying the hospitality of his secret police.) And in war you cannot openly question your leader. The people must be united. So I do it this way. In my article I heap praise on our great leader Chiang Kai-shek. I report the soldiers I have spoken to praising him too – which quite a few of them actually did. But I do not mention by name any of the generals who are presently precipitously retreating in the face of the enemy. Astute people will, I hope, notice my silence.

  A bomb drops on a nearby platform. Some people are injured.

  With reference to Jinan I describe the brave patriotic students who worked with the fire brigades, who dug people out of rubble, who acted as stretcher bearers or treated the wounded in hospital, who published pamphlets and put on street plays attacking the Japanese, who volunteered directly to serve in the army.

  Above all I emphasize that this fight against the Japanese must be fought by the whole nation, a whole nation united.

  The train suddenly jolts. Again people rush to the window. Apparently a new locomotive has backed onto our train but people are outraged that, unlike the modern and powerful locomotive purloined by General Han, this one is ancient and decrepit.

  I finish writing. I start rereading it to edit. The train starts. Outside the window the messenger boy shouts to me. I finish correcting the final page – it will have to do. I dash to the window. He’s running, holding out a stick with a cleft in it. I stuff the article into the cleft, reach into my pocket, haul out a silver coin and toss it to him. He deftly catches it, gives me a grateful grin, and starts to make his way back towards the hotel. If anyone can make it to the Stein Hotel in the midst of this chaos it is a street urchin. I should know. I was once a street urchin.

  I turn from the window to see my seat has been retaken by the passenger I took it from. He scowls at me. I smile at him. For the first time today, and for many days, I am happy. I squat
back on the floor, take out my wife’s scarf, smell it, and start to cry.

  The solitary goose does not drink or eat,

  It flies about and calls, missing the flock.

  No one now remembers this one shadow,

  They’ve lost each other in the myriad layers of cloud.

  It looks into the distance: seems to see,

  It’s so distressed, it thinks that it can hear.

  Unconsciously, the wild ducks start to call,

  Cries of birds are everywhere confused.

  Du Fu, ‘The Solitary Goose’

  11

  Wei lay on his back, spreadeagled. He couldn’t move, his brain was blind and black, his body ancient. With great effort he shifted himself, he started to force himself upright, slow as a man climbing out of his grave. He stood, looked around. He saw the corpse of his headless Second Son lying on the ground, his body soaked in the blood of the dead donkey. Then the flames of the cart caught his attention. He turned to see it burning. His family’s cart. With all his family’s wealth, his family’s worth burning in it. He saw the pulp of blood and bone and bowel which had once been his father, the body of his youngest son, Baby Boy Wei, and then suddenly, in their midst, sitting astounded, bewildered, his youngest daughter Baby Girl Wei, her mouth open, her hair starting to flame. Something primaeval, something deep inside him lifted his body up, propelled it over the side of the cart, hoisted her up, and clambered back over the side of the cart, dousing her hair, depositing her on the safe ground, before his strength again deserted him and he collapsed back on the ground, an old man, exhaustion and despair eating every bone and fibre of his body.

  His wife by now had run forwards from behind the cart where she and Cherry Blossom had been walking. Cherry Blossom and Baby Girl Wei started screaming – Cherry Blossom because her pet hedgehog was in the cart and Baby Girl Wei because Cherry Blossom was screaming. Wei’s wife hit them both. As Eldest Son ran up with a bewildered look on his face she leapt into the cart and started picking water and food from the flames. Honey was bleeding everywhere. The large full jar of water had been shattered but the half empty one was still miraculously intact so she handed it carefully down to Eldest Son – then started throwing all the potatoes, carrots, and other unburning food down to him. Finally, as she jumped clear, she pulled off the two pieces of blue canvas they used as a roof for the cart and which had not yet caught fire.

  ‘Pile all the food we have on that canvas,’ she shouted at Eldest Son laying it out, ‘and guard it. Get Cherry Blossom and Baby Girl Wei to pick up any more they can find.’ Already people were flocking round to pick up fragments that the impact of the unexploded bomb had strewn around the cart.

  She herself, thin and strained, stalked forwards to the front of the cart, noted her dead second son and the donkey, then walked round the cart and saw her husband helpless on his back like an upended turtle. For a few moments she looked down at him, thinking intensely. Wei’s wife had been denying herself food and water for days now, giving it to Eldest Son. She gave what little urine she produced to him, too. Her body was dehydrated, exhausted, but the fanaticism in her mind to preserve above all her eldest son drove her and focused her with ferocious intensity.

  ‘If my husband is to do what must be done,’ she thought, ‘I must show him that I respect him – which I do. That I care for him – which I do. That I always have his and the family’s best interests at heart – which I do.’

  She leant down and gently spoke to him, as though she was addressing a child.

  ‘Dear husband, the remains of your beloved father and beloved sons are burning or are lying on the ground, carrion for the crows. You must get up, you must rescue their bodies, you must give them a proper and respectful burial in the earth. Get up from the ground.’

  And he rose. Like a dead man.

  ‘Get your father and Baby Boy Wei out of the cart, put their remains on this canvas. Put the body of our Second Son on it too. Then you and I will drag them on this canvas to a place where they can be respectfully buried. Do it.’

  And he did. Again what was automatic, what was instinctive in him took over. He pulled out the starting-to-burn body of his youngest son, placed it on the canvas, then stepped right into the flames and stooping managed to embrace then cradle the pulp of bones and flesh and viscera which had been his father and, stepping out, clothes smouldering, let them slop upon the canvas. Then he pulled out Cherry Blossom who was screaming about her hedgehog and trying to find it in the wreckage. Then he took the decapitated body of his Second Son drenched in the blood of the donkey and placed it gently on the canvas.

  His wife touched him quietly on the arm after he had done this and walked back to Eldest Son, Cherry Blossom and Baby Girl Wei, ordering them to follow her and Wei, dragging the canvas with the food and water on it behind them. They were to watch out for thieves. She walked back to her husband and they each took hold of one end of their canvas and started to drag it forwards, the remains of their family upon it.

  The family drew slowly away from their flaming wagon. Since she had lost her hedgehog, Cherry Blossom had decided to transfer all her affections and attentions to Baby Girl Wei. Baby Girl Wei was ecstatic. (A peasant from Shanxi Province later found the body of Cherry Blossom’s pet hedgehog and ate it. It saved his life.)

  As they slowly moved away they passed along the path of the bomb, the bodies and parts of bodies lying scattered on either side until they came to the cart where it had finally come to rest, slaughtering all the young men travelling in it. In the midst of the carnage stood a strange-looking man with a Western hairstyle, orange jacket and pencil moustache. He was looking upwards and cursing the heavens.

  They ignored him.

  Wei knew only one thing, that his wife was looking after him. That she was looking after the whole family. And he felt profoundly grateful and moved by this.

  *

  After a mile the valley widened and the stumbling crowds started to spread out. Wei’s wife steered them away from the main stream, but not far enough to be threatened by bandits. Wei just plodded on with his ghastly burden, doing what his wife instructed him to do. They came across a relatively quiet place, on a pleasant slope with a fine view. The dead would appreciate it. She stopped. They all stopped.

  ‘Dear husband,’ she addressed him, ‘I think it would be better, more reverent, if you dug the family grave, not Eldest Son, since you are head of our family.’

  ‘Yes,’ thought Wei, ‘she is right.’

  Eldest Son passed him the spade and he started to dig. Into the embrace of the earth. As he dug deeper he felt the earth calling him, wanting him. He remembered the stories of whole families of refugees committing suicide so they could stay together in the afterlife.

  ‘Get out of the earth, husband,’ his wife told him. ‘For you have dug deep enough.’

  He climbed out, walked over to the canvas. With care, with reverence, he placed the remains of half his family in the earth and looked down on them. His father, his second son, his baby boy.

  He stood alone, staring at them. Then a voice within him spoke.

  ‘Why have you gone against all decent behaviour, Wei, all fatherly duty? What happens when a father does not show paternal piety and duty towards his eldest son? The whole family falls to pieces. Like ours. A whole world falls to pieces. As ours is doing.’

  ‘With your unnatural love for your daughter rather than your eldest son. With your deliberate flouting of the laws of burial by putting your dead sister in a grave beside the bones of those who had rightly rejected her. In your keeping alive a daughter who was for so many years, and especially now, a great drain and burden upon her family. Who told us wicked lies which have led us into this destruction. Who malignly thrust herself between your eldest son and you. This is what has brought us to this.

  ‘You have acted directly against the wishes of all your ancestors, all your forefathers, you have directly killed your father, your second son, you baby son – every one
a man. Because of your favouring your daughters you have directly endangered your eldest son. You must act to right the evil you have caused.’

  His wife had been watching him intently all this time.

  ‘Fill in the grave, husband,’ she gently prompted him, ‘so we can be on our way.’

  Wei started to do so and then he had a sudden thought. The juice from the wild pear tree whose roots passed through the graves of all his ancestors was still in a small stone bottle he carried in his inner clothing. The other bottle he’d stored in the cart when they left home must have been destroyed in the fire. It would be fitting to pour some of it as a libation upon the grave, so that these family members who’d just died could be comforted by the spirits of their long-dead ancestors.

  He did this and then filled in the rest of the grave. Then they were on their way again. Eldest Son, Cherry Blossom and Baby Girl Wei out front, Eldest Son pulling the canvas, Wei and his wife behind them, Wei carrying the shovel.

  *

  Three or four miles further on the route passed through a large wood. There were bodies everywhere, but these were so commonplace now that no one noticed them. But what everyone stared at were the trees. The leaves which normally lie on the ground in autumn had all been removed, eaten by desperate travellers. What was even stranger were the trees. All their bark had been ripped off them by people ravenous to eat anything. Even the sacred trees with red rags tied about them were bare and stripped. Without bark, the wood resembled a ghostly white assembly of naked human beings, arms raised high in the air.

  It was Baby Girl Wei who first spotted them. Beyond the wood the route of the march crossed the bed of another stream, pulped by thousands of weary feet into a poisonous mash of mud and human faeces. As they trekked south the thousands had not noticed a patch of green-leaved dandelions sprouting under the northern bank. Baby Girl Wei did. She had always picked them when out for walks with Grandpa and she loved them. She pointed and waded towards them. Cherry Blossom snatched them out of her grasp and presented them to their mother.