Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘Don’t do it,’ I cry, ‘don’t jump!’

  Guo Morou is already having second thoughts about jumping. He’s forgotten his room is only on the first floor and, looking down, he sees below him a large and very thorny rose bush into which he is likely to plummet.

  I grab him round his legs in a sort of rugby tackle, which almost propels him out of the window. For a second we sway back and forth, he clinging on to my receding hair, before I manage to pull him back in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say to him, ‘I’m really sorry.’

  He looks at me. Hostility, malevolence starts to gleam in his eye. Someone has to be blamed for his humiliation of himself. For a story that is now likely to be repeated in every literary salon for the rest of time.

  ‘You worm. You interfering, snivelling little Manchu worm,’ he states, in his immaculate Han accent. ‘You couldn’t write a decent line of prose if you worked a thousand years at it. You’d have more chance of writing a truthful, socialistic jot of truth if you threw dice or coins in the air and wrote down the results. I’ve read your shitty books from cover to cover with their boring, mundane characters, their crude language, their low humour. You are a disgrace to the high and honourable art of literature. Fuck off out of my room!’

  Suddenly, completely unexpectedly, I find myself grasping his throat. I appear to have lost every semblance of civilization, reverting to my barbarian Manchu past. I drag him over to an armchair and slam him down in it. I rest the two arms of my large, non-athletic body on its two armrests and stare down into the quivering visage of my pot-bellied opponent. I draw my face extremely close to his.

  ‘Listen, you little cunt,’ I hiss, ‘I’m not some nancy-boy university-educated poseur, I’m a pimp. Your pimp. This is the deal. You want to fuck Yu Liqun? This is how. You work your fucking arse off on behalf of the government, you propagandize for them, you scream your head off for them at rallies, you scribble endless encomiums in praise of their greatness and the valour of the Chinese peoples, and, that done, I sign, seal and deliver to your bedroom one naked and willing, oh so willing, Yi Liqun. How about it?’

  For two seconds Guo Morou hesitates. Those two seconds are enough to tell me I’ve won. Thank God for my childhood in the rougher backstreets of Beijing. After two seconds Guo manages to reassemble himself and starts angrily protesting, but those two seconds are enough. I’ve hooked my fish. I grin and leave.

  I’m halfway down the stairs before it strikes me that I might have behaved in a slightly disgraceful manner. But mud wrestling with a moral dwarf like Guo Morou is hardly reprehensible. I realize the real moral squalor lies ahead.

  17

  Taierzhuang was a mass of ruin and rubble, choked with smoke and flame and clouds of dust, across and through which struggled and swirled huge torrents and gouts of humanity, shouting and screaming in slaughter and frenzy. Attack and counter-attack. Stab and backstab. Stagger and counter-stagger. Charging into curtains of machine gun fire, being cut down like corn. Two insatiable monsters feasting on each other.

  Similar skirmishes and manoeuvres were taking place simultaneously all across the wide plains and hills around Taierzhuang as the Japanese fought to maintain their supplies to their troops inside the city and the Chinese fought to choke off those supplies. The black granite farmhouses and fortalices on the plain, which the Chinese had held from the start, were now starting to fall. Invulnerable to aerial bombing, artillery shells, tanks, poison gas, the Japanese at last found the strongholds, with their supporting network of trenches and tunnels, were vulnerable to up-close attacks by suicide troops aiming flame throwers accurately into the gun slits and ports from which the Chinese fired. Many Japanese exploded in flame when Chinese counter-fire hit the fuel pack they carried on their backs, but those who got close enough could direct a dragon of fire through the opening which devoured all within. Slowly the Japanese spread out across the plain.

  Within the city the same pieces of land had been fought back and forth across so many times during the preceding three weeks that no one had been able to remove the bodies of the dead or dying. They just piled up, one on top of the next. Heaped bodies became barricades behind which the living could take cover, sneak up upon the enemy from behind. The smallest alleys and courtyards, even houses or single rooms within a house, were fought over ferociously time and again. They were choked with the dead. Mountains over which attacking and retreating troops must clamber. No one yielded an inch. New soldiers, arriving continuously to take the places of the dead, might recognize the uniforms and even faces of those on the topmost layer of a pile – their comrades who’d gone in immediately before them – but were they to delve deeper into the strata of the dead, even ignoring the Japanese ones, almost immediately they would find themselves among bodies and uniforms they knew nothing of, belonging to whole regiments and battalions long since slain. A whole archaeology of layered death lay all about them. Living soldiers hung clothing or their weapons upon the protruding arms and legs of the dead.

  Crows and kites and ravens feasted. Flies sucked. Rats gorged. The whole city stank.

  In some areas the dead paved the streets so thickly vehicles just drove over them; wheelbarrow-pushing coolies cursed them as they clogged up their wheels. Tanks crashed over them so flesh spurted out sideways from under their tracks like toothpaste from a tube. Whole families caught in the open by machine gun fire lay across the ground crusted in layers of dust and soot. As if they had lain there a thousand years. Flies feast, ants crawled in and out of snapped legs and opened brain pans, busy about their living. Beneath them black rafts of dried blood. An old woman went silently from body to body, peering intently at each. Their faces had been turned green by poison gas. She put out a hand to touch one, that she might see more clearly the face, and suddenly threw herself upon the ground beside it, kissing it in an abandonment of grief. ‘That’s enough now, grandmother, that’s enough,’ said a gentle soldier, trying to pull her to her feet, but the old woman cleaved to her daughter and he left her for more important matters. An old man had found his dead wife. He ran from soldier to soldier shouting, ‘My old woman’s dead, my old woman’s dead!’

  Taierzhuang entered its final week of battle.

  *

  Wei looked down on all this. Literally. As a sniper he spent his time finding vantage points, eyries, concealed positions from which he could scan the battlefield, pick his prey. But the battlefield was also, of course, scanned just as ardently by his enemies, their snipers. They looked for and picked off ordinary soldiers, but even more, they watched for enemy snipers. A sniper could spot preparations for a surprise attack, pick off senior officers from seven or eight hundred yards, cause madness in the minds of well-trained soldiers going about their daily routines. So snipers were prime targets for other snipers.

  Wei examined the battlefield minutely. He’d chosen the wreckage of a bombed-out factory for his lair, about a hundred yards behind the front line. Part of its third floor still stood, sagging and creaking but still upright. Wei had picked his position on it behind a partly demolished window. The glass had shattered and part of the sill had been blown away, so, rather than presenting a recognizable silhouette above a straight window ledge, he concealed his head within the cavity and, hopefully, was invisible to an enemy sniper. He did not hold his rifle at this stage – too recognizable a shape. Instead he detached its scope and scanned the battlefield through it. Fortunately his enemy was to the north of him. This meant there was no chance of a glint of sunlight reflecting off his scope – and he’d already rubbed mud all over his rifle so there was no reflection off that. But his enemies, driving south through the city, all faced south. He watched and watched. With infinite patience. Never for a second did he lose concentration. He welcomed thirst and cramp because they kept him awake.

  A gleam from atop some rubble 600 yards ahead of him suddenly momentarily winked at him. Extinguished almost immediately. As though the sniper was aware he’d revealed his position. Wei re
attached his scope to his Lee Enfield and concentrated entirely on that one spot. He did not immediately fire. He aimed, carefully calibrating his scope so that his victim’s most likely position was exactly within its crosshairs. He gently squeezed the trigger so it was within a hair’s breadth of firing. But still he did not fire. He knew that with no clear target he would probably miss. And to fire would almost certainly expose his position to the enemy’s snipers and call down artillery shells on his position within thirty seconds. A skilful sniper fires only when he is certain of a kill. And immediately after that skedaddles. So he waited.

  What made Wei such a good sniper were qualities he’d inherited from his life as a farmer. He possessed infinite patience. Patience that once meant he could wait and wait until a crop was precisely ripe before he harvested it. That meant in late spring he could wait and wait til the price of wheat finally rose to its highest point – after all his fellow farmers had panicked and sold theirs at lower prices – and then and only then sell. He possessed deep calmness. When a violent row broke out within his family and everyone shouted – including his ancestors – he listened calmly to all the different opinions, then privately made his own decision (sometimes this could take months, even years), before politely presenting his decision to the whole family and his ancestors. He would not be pushed.

  And finally – derived from his first two qualities – came his finest quality. His ability to concentrate on something. To control his mind so it did not wander. To control his body so that its pain and tiredness did not distract him. His ability to just watch and watch for hour after hour, holding his rifle totally still and on target, holding its trigger on a hair’s breadth.

  Suddenly movement. Almost simultaneously he fired. He’d seen through his sight a quick kerfuffle. His enemy convulsed, flopped, Wei withdrew his rifle, wriggled back across the floor, slithered down a heap of bricks, and was out through the back door of the factory as the first artillery shell landed on where he’d been.

  He reported all this to his company commander. Said he’d worked out two other positions from which he could snipe at the enemy. His company commander was not interested in this. There was a far more imminent threat. A large group of Japanese troops had been spotted behind some ruined buildings to the north-west. They were about to launch an attack. Wei was to stay undercover just behind the front line and pick off as many attackers as possible. If the position became desperate he was to fix his bayonet and join in the hand-to-hand fighting. As he spoke to Wei he was also busy sharpening his sword with a whetstone. A sergeant came in and the officer handed his sword to Wei to finish sharpening while he talked intensely with the sergeant. The conversation finished and the sergeant hurried away. Wei handed the sharpened sword to his commanding officer and the two men hasten towards the front line.

  Wei chose a line of rubble just behind and slightly above the Chinese lines. A friendly Japanese shell had blown a large hole in its crest which provided excellent cover. Wei quickly scrabbled together a screen of bricks and stone to protect him, and, looking out, immediately spotted the concentration of Japanese troops – only partly concealed by a semi-destroyed building – to the north-west. Their heads were bobbing up and down in an animated fashion, their officers obviously fomenting them into a fever for their charge. Wei removed his scope – they were too close for him to need it – and slipped it in his pocket. He immediately started firing at the sea of bobbing heads. Three popped – two certain hits because he saw their heads jerk or explode, the third uncertain – he might have tripped. They were charging.

  As they charged he continued to fire, almost certainly bringing down three or four more. The Chinese troops – an unmilitary-looking bunch of reservists, cooks and telegraph clerks – jogged off to meet the Japanese. Not the most ferocious looking bunch, reflected Wei, but then the Japanese themselves hardly looked imperial – he had witnessed far more terrifying, suicidal assaults only a few days ago.

  The charging Chinese finally hit their stride as they chanted their battle cry. ‘Hit it hard. Hit it hard! Hit it haaaarrrrdddd!!!’ Raised and energized, they struck the charging Japanese with strength and resolution. Hard and vicious fighting broke out, and Wei continued to pick off isolated and single Japanese in the melee. But the Chinese were starting to weaken, waver. Wei saw he should be joining them. He took his pig-sticker bayonet from his scabbard and rammed it into the iron clasps of his Lee Enfield. He rose and was about to charge when something astonishing happened.

  From nowhere suddenly appeared a swarm of angry children, Chinese children, armed with knives, homemade spears, hammers. They must have been hiding in a cellar or fox hole somewhere on the battlefield. They rose up like wasps from the ground, ferociously assaulting the charging Japanese. All the soldiers – from both sides – stopped in surprise. Taking advantage of this the children, dancing and weaving, emitting tiny screams, ran in, stabbing and slashing at the startled Japanese, fighting for the ground of what must once have been their homes and courtyards. The Japanese started to respond, but swift as horseflies the children ran in and out and around, stabbing, piercing. One ran between the legs of a slow-witted giant and stabbed upwards, ripping through his testicles and anus. He collapsed. Spears stuck into backs, hammers smashed kneecaps. Cheered by this, the Chinese charged again.

  The Japanese wavered.

  Retreated.

  The skirmish faded away.

  The feral children scurried back to their holes. The Chinese returned to their lines.

  *

  Wei lay stock still almost at the top of another pile of broken masonry and rubble. It was late afternoon but the sun was still hot. Wei had a thick layer of dust wedged in his throat and lungs but he did not cough or move. He was partly covered by some light-brown canvas for camouflage.

  He watched the ruins of a temple nearly half a mile away with his scope. He had seen movements within its burnt-out timber frame, but they had been too momentary and sporadic to risk a shot.

  He’d not slept for three days. During the day, as a sniper, he must not sleep. At night he joined the rest of his troop in harassing the enemy. They wriggled close to them, threw grenades, made short, sharp little forays into their trenches and dug-outs, shouted at them from their trenches and dug-outs, flung curses, sang songs (someone played a wind-up gramophone) – anything to keep the Japanese awake and terrified. They attacked them with knives, broadswords, entrenching spades – short, brutal scraps in almost complete darkness. One of the most effective ways to keep them nervous, fearful, was to loudly sharpen their knives and swords and spades with whetstones, scraping the stone back and forth across the blade, again and again, until it was razor sharp. The Japanese knew exactly what their enemy was doing.

  The Chinese even had a young student in the front line with them who spoke Japanese. He would sneak right up to their lines and listen intently to their conversations, then wriggle back and, from his own lines, start telling the Japanese that with a certain sergeant whose cruelty they had been complaining about, they should stab him in the back one night and dump his body away from the trench. If the body was found they could blame it on a sudden Chinese attack. After that the young student started to get more personal. He listened on the most intimate discussions soldiers tend to have late at night about their families and their loved ones. One Japanese soldier had praised the wife he’d left behind him in Japan, praised her chastity, her faithfulness, her exquisite pristine beauty. The student started to inform the husband, in the most raucous terms, of how he’d spent all last week fucking his wife seven ways til Sunday and supplying every detail. This enraged the husband, who burst out of the trench. On this occasion the student had unwisely not retreated far enough from the Japanese trench and the husband caught him in open ground and cut him to pieces with his sword, before a Chinese soldier decapitated the gulled husband with one swipe of his broadsword.

  So, as Wei lay out in his canvas-covered eyrie in the late afternoon sun, not having slept for
three days, he became drowsy. He had the discipline to keep this doziness at arm’s length for a while, but all the time it crept back on him, again and again, soothing him, crooning to him, trying to seduce him into its welcoming arms. He shook it off, readjusted his rifle scope, continued to scrutinize each detail of the wrecked wooden temple, but again it returned, a drowsy, a humming, bumbling sort of sound – ‘Come into my arms. Rest in my arms,’ it sang – again he jolted awake (a foolish thing for a sniper to do, had anyone seen his sudden movement?) but, strange thing, the buzzing sound had not ceased. It seemed to be all around him. What was it? Suddenly, a bee landed on his hand. Then another. Then they both took off. What was going on? He was not a flower. Bees only landed on flowers. Then he became aware of a more resonant sound, a high-pitched whine, gradually descending into a deep roar. What was it? A new Japanese weapon? He looked up out of his hiding hole. It had grown quite dark outside. A sort of cloud surrounded him. Not poison gas. Suddenly he saw what it was. Thousands and thousands of bees. Flying round him in a circle, a vortex. And immediately he knew what it was. A bee swarm. He was in the middle of a bee swarm. He grinned. He loved bees. But then he paused. A bee swarm in the middle of Taierzhuang? In the middle of a battle?!? The swarm was starting to settle on a lone post nearby, sticking up out of the rubble. Adhering, cohering together on top of it, forming a moving, flowing black ball, increasing in size and concentration all the time. The ordinary bees were flocking round the Emperor Bee to protect him from the world, forming chains and ropes of living bees around him for his defence. What were bees doing swarming here? In the midst of a battlefield? There must be a nest, a hive close by from which they had flown. But how were they still alive? This became a mystery to Wei. A fascinating mystery. But not one to be solved right now. Chiding himself for his indiscipline, Wei returned to his observation of the temple.