Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Freda muttered.

  ‘Poor Harold was so upset he ran out of the dining room and was sick in the toilet. Next day he was up in Leicester – his constituency – addressing a meeting in a working men’s club. And he told me his audience, the whole audience of working men, were boiling in fury at the impudence and treachery of Chamberlain, of appeasement. Shouting out and cheering every time he criticized the government. Provincial journalists I know say this is the norm throughout the country. Everywhere dissent and outrage, except London.

  ‘But they’re not allowed to report it. Chamberlain has the proprietors on his side and they control the editors, who censor the journalists. Journalists are writing articles describing the public’s feelings, refusing to alter them, and being sacked. The night Eden resigned huge crowds gathered outside his home cheering him on. Not a word in the papers or on the BBC. When Attlee was interviewed supporting Eden on a newsreel, all the copies of the newsreel were recalled and the interview cut out. Only the provincial papers like the Manchester Guardian and the Yorkshire Post and my Reynold’s News, are still standing up to Chamberlain. British newspapers make Pravda look honest.’

  Freda smiled at this. He’d criticized the Soviet Union. It made her feel safer. He continued.

  ‘It’s something when the most ordinary people in the provinces and dominions can understand the sheer stupidity of a policy, yet the elite continue to blindly bulldoze it through. And it’s wonderful that ordinary people, despite the unending propaganda and lies, see straight through them and know what has to be done. I tell you, somehow or other the English regions are going to engineer a revolt.’

  Freda felt very warmly towards Vernon. Whether it’s communist dictatorships you hate or a brutal capitalist oligarchy, it’s so good to hear a radical and a socialist standing out for the truth.

  At some time during the evening Vernon had briefly withdrawn to his bedroom and now wore a dressing gown rather than his clothes. He looked at her so gently.

  ‘And so…’ said Vernon. He stood up.

  There was only one thing Freda wanted to do. Amid all this chaos and hatred. She stood up. Vernon moved towards her and smiled. He gently removed her scarf, button after button he slowly undid her clothes button by button so in the end they fell from her rather than having to be removed. Finally he removed her glasses. Freda stood naked before him, dressed only in her make-up and perfume.

  And splendid was the night.

  15

  Tonight in Fuzhou the moon shines.

  In her chamber, my wife must watch alone.

  I pity my distant boy and girl

  who don’t know why she remembers Chang’an,

  her cloud-like hair coiled and fragrant with mist,

  jade-like arms cold in the moonlight.

  When shall we lean in the open window,

  together without tears in moonlight?

  Du Fu

  *

  Mournful moonlight, symbol of sorrow for a thousand years,

  venerable Du Fu’s sad thoughts, then and now we feel the same;

  jade-like arms shining bright, cloud-like hair coiled and fragrant with mist,

  heartless autumn moon, shining again on parting and upheaval.

  Lao She

  It is 10 October. The day of the Mid-Autumn Festival of the Moon. The day when families reunite (if any of us have any families left to reunite with) to celebrate the bringing home of the harvest and to thank the gods of the soil and vegetation for their generosity – provided they have been generous.

  It is the day, like every other day, that I visit the central post office to see if there is any letter for a Mr Wu Lei from my wife and family. There isn’t.

  But today, the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, is also the day, or rather the night, of the one and only performance of my Chiang Kai-shek-commanded extravaganza – Defend Wuhan. With an exclamation mark after it. ‘!’ That exclamation mark reminds us that we are all determined to stay in Wuhan and fight to the very last drop of our blood – even though the majority of us Wuhanites are all busy shutting up shop and getting ready to flee for the hills.

  I apologize if I have started this chapter sounding rather ill tempered, not to say cynical, but I will do my best as it proceeds to cheer you and myself up.

  All the frenzied business of script writing, of script rewriting, of meeting actors, of read-throughs and rehearsals and set building and lighting and choreography and everyone rushing around screaming at everyone else – with Yu Liqun reassuring me at all times that everything is going just fine – is at last over and complete, and now we face only one more cliff edge to fall over – the first (and last) night.

  I feel awful. My play is meant to rouse people’s patriotic and human spirits. Inspire and transform them. Will it?

  It is a calm beautiful night. On the waters of the Yangtze the moon’s reflection floats supreme. In the heavens above it sails majestic through silvery flakes of cloud like the scales of a fish. The crowds, chattering and relaxed, move towards the arena. There are drums and flutes and trumpets and marching bands. Amid the approaching crowds march schoolchildren with lanterns and torches. Scouts and Youth Corps members shout slogans – ‘Resist to the last! Defend Wuhan! Down with the invaders!’ Through the streets, along the Bund, they come in their thousands. The businesses, all the trade guilds of Wuhan – each brandishing the tools of their trade – come marching up the wide Kianghan thoroughfare – carpenters with their hammers and saws, masons with their chisels and trowels, merchants with their abaci. Everyone is cheering everyone else on, shouting their jokes back and forth.

  This is cheering me up.

  Just before it dies, Wuhan lives.

  We arrive at the amphitheatre. There are stands all around the arena, row after row of them, rising to the skies. The crowds start to seat themselves, though many stay on their feet to cheer and applaud. They have brought their food and drink with them. Tugboats and ferries hoot on the river. Insects and moths flutter all around the floodlights and stage lights like angels’ haloes. Children shout and scream and stagger around drunkenly on too much sugar.

  Into the arena, having been paraded through the streets, come enormous, illuminated floats of giant aeroplanes, powerful tanks, great battleships – but also goddesses of peace, gods and goddesses of harvest and plenty and wisdom and hope. And finally, and most triumphantly – victory.

  The audience roars and cheers. I wipe a tear from my eye. But now comes the bit I’ve been dreading. My play.

  We discover our young hero (played by my ageing friend Shanyaodan) in prison. Alone in chains. But he cries out his support, his love for the people of China in their united fight against the forces of darkness and degeneration. Then, to much booing, his Japanese guards run on stage and start beating him for his patriotic views. Somehow or other our hero – not unlike Zhang Fei on the bridge at Changban – manages to free himself from his chains and sets upon his torturers and kills them. Every single one of them. The audience roars. He escapes into the night.

  Then a clown comes on. And clowns a lot. Audiences – especially children – always love this sort of thing.

  Then there is some dancing by some pretty girls (including Yu Liqun). Audiences love this sort of thing too.

  The next time we see our hero, he is behind enemy lines, leading a cadre of young guerrillas against the enemy and encouraging the peasants to join in the fight. At first they are reluctant, but under blasts of our young hero’s patriotic rhetoric – which the audience loves – they are won over and bravely arming themselves they set off for a vital battle which they resoundingly win.

  (This is getting more and more like an early Tian Boqi play!)

  Meanwhile Yu Liqun and her troupe – whatever happened to all their modernistic dancing concrète? – have undergone a swift costume change. They now re-emerge as smartly dressed young soldiers strutting up and down in immaculate formations and manoeuvres, faces resolute and then smiling, resolute and then smil
ing – attracting quite a few ribald comments – before marching off with a final defiant, and rather sexy, kick.

  (Tian Boqi would never have done that!)

  But at the battle’s very final climax – at the very point of victory – with bangs and flashing lights and heroic gestures all around, our young hero is suddenly snatched away by Japanese desperadoes, who lead him off to torture and execution!

  The audience is in despair!

  More clowns.

  This is not, I admit, the Peking Opera. I see quite a few well-dressed, more refined members of the audience wincing as street patois and coarse jokes and hoary platitudes splatter the air. But the audience as a whole roars them on.

  General Chiang Kai-shek, sat on his special illuminated victory plinth on a high platform, looks down blankly and with complete indifference to all the proceedings. But Madame Chiang, by his side, watches everything with intense interest.

  (Interestingly, at the foot of their plinth, I see the two men who tortured me. The one with glasses, the one without glasses. They are not watching me, they are not watching the play. With avid interest they study every single expression and gesture of Chiang Kai-shek up above them, as if their lives depend on them. Which they probably do.)

  Anyhow, after some more dancing the arena darkens and we see our young (but balding) hero being led to the scaffold. His mother pleads with the officer in charge not to execute him. As he is led out onto the scaffold he shouts out patriotic slogans for China to fight on to final victory. He is forced down on his knees, his neck is stretched out, the executioner raises his sword…

  Suddenly there is a bang. The peasants, now fully armed and skilled guerrillas, rush on stage and free our hero and kill all the disgusting Japanese. Celebrations, explosions, rows of marching Boy Scouts and chorus girls and singing choirs, etc., etc. Victory! The whole audience starts chanting ‘Defend Wuhan! Defend China!’

  But the play is not over.

  Once again the stage darkens. The audience quietens. What is about to start is what I have been waiting for. Intelligent Whore and her son Little Aigou. What on earth are they going to do?

  Sombre music.

  Intelligent Whore enters with solemnity. Her apparel is both erotic and modest, her dancing both arousing and pure. There is great melancholy in her movement. For the dead. Her motions embody, sanctify, memorialize the dead of China. Everyone is entirely sunk in this melancholic moment.

  But suddenly, onto the stage, runs her son, Little Aigou, clutching a drawing book and some crayons.

  ‘Mum,’ he says, ‘I’m going to do some drawing!’

  Intelligent Whore has stopped her dancing entirely.

  ‘What are you going to draw?’ asks Intelligent Whore, in her normal voice.

  ‘I’m going to draw China,’ says Little Aigou.

  ‘Then go and draw China.’

  Little Aigou runs down the stage and throws himself on the ground. He starts to draw in his drawing book.

  Intelligent Whore smiles at him and then smiles at the audience. She starts to dance like a proud mum. With hope, with optimism about what her son will do, what he will become.

  All the time Little Aigou concentrates on his book, cramming in colour after colour, great blazes and zigzags of red and yellow and purple and green and blue.

  And as Little Aigou scribbles with his crayons all the different colours and shapes and visions and possibilities of the new China, so his mum’s dance becomes ever more vital and delightful and awe-inspiring, twisting and spiralling and weaving, lifting with her the entire audience who cheer and stamp and choke with emotion until Little Aigou suddenly jumps up and, with raised arms, displays his riotous colour-filled tapestry of the future of China to all the audience.

  Tumultuous, heartfelt, ecstatic applause.

  It is over.

  Intelligent Whore and Little Aigou do not bow and scrape before the audience. They look straight out at the audience and the audience looks straight back at them. They are one and the same.

  *

  Well, that didn’t turn out as bad as I thought it was going to. At least the audience haven’t lynched me. People are singing some of the songs out loud, little children are marching up and down like toy soldiers and shouting military orders to each other. Young men and women are eagerly arguing over how best to mobilize the peasantry.

  Amazing as it might seem quite a lot of people are actually coming up to me and congratulating me. I bow to them. I smile. This is all quite pleasant.

  The pale silvery clouds have entirely drifted away. The yellow moon lies huge and beneficent across the heavens.

  Young Hu Lan-shih arrives giggling and saying she was right to tell me Intelligent Whore would do us proud. She was very right, and I thank her for it. Beside her is that rather formidable young country girl with the peculiar walk who I met at our parliament’s grand opening. The one who brought a basket full of eggs. She tells me my play was quite good – but it would have been better if it had been done as a proper puppet play. She is entirely right. I thank her for her criticism. When I get to Chungking I must do precisely that.

  Yu Liqun – all these pretty girls! – comes and laughingly tells me that us two serious revolutionaries should never have allowed ourselves to get dragged into such bourgeois frivolities.

  (Thank God her husband Guo Morou isn’t here. He’s presently involved in a monster lecture tour of the entire Soviet Union. Had he attended I’d never have heard the last of it.)

  She asks me if I have heard from my wife. I say no. She squeezes my hand.

  I go up to Intelligent Whore and thank her and Little Aigou for their beautiful and profound contribution. I look at her. What a formidable woman! I tell her she was correct to criticize my short story ‘Crescent Moon’ – the story of the young woman driven to prostitution – for its sentimentality. She smiles.

  ‘I’m sure you have much better work inside you,’ she said. ‘You are a good writer. You listen.’

  As they walk away I see the many admiring looks being cast in her direction by prosperous-looking gentlemen. I smile. I’m sure that by the time she reaches Chungking she’ll have been the object of proposals from many wealthy men. She will doubtless marry a multi-millionaire. And as he gets poorer the number of hospitals in Chungking and its surrounding areas will increase.

  Then something completely unexpected happens. I suddenly see Madame Chiang Kai-shek sailing down on me with her husband in tow.

  ‘Mr Lao,’ she says, shaking my hand and holding on to it, ‘let me congratulate you on such an invigorating play. Both my sisters were here and all their friends and they all thought it was the best play they had ever seen!’

  One of the worst aspects of being involved in theatrical productions is having to endure the post-first night party, when unbelievable insincerities and untruths are pronounced by all and sundry with sickening gusto.

  But at the same time I remember that when everyone is in Chungking, myself and my fellow writers may be desperately in need of all the allies and supporters we can muster. I notice that just behind her and her husband, among their entourage, lurk the two men who tortured and beat me in prison. They are watching myself and General and Madame very closely.

  Suddenly, everything gets worse.

  The Generalissimo himself steps forwards and addresses me. For several minutes he speaks. I am unable to discern a single moment of meaning or coherence in his entire speech. Nothing! He rambles and rambles then finishes. I naturally reply in similar terms. His wife smiles at me – she is wearing a purple polka dot cardigan with pink dots – and they walk away.

  But the two torturers – the one with glasses, the one without glasses – stay. They are all over me. Congratulating. Oleaginous. Flattering. Obsequious. This is indeed the worst first night party I have ever attended! My gorge is rising unstoppably in my throat and is about to come projecting violently out of my mouth!

  But I stop myself.

  Tonight has shown my pow
er over them. They have seen my closeness to their capos – especially Madame Chiang. That will give me power in Chungking when the knockings on writers’ doors start to come again. It will give me a formidable card to play in defence of them. And myself.

  So instead I am incredibly nice – if a little condescending – to them. I oleagenate every bit as much as they oleagenate – though my oleagination is slightly more robust than theirs. We are old friends, comrades, the best of fellows, laughing and joking – with always that slight edge from me. That gleam in the eye. At last, sufficiently reassured, but still unsure, they skitter off after their fellow sycophants and courtiers.

  I am exhausted. I thank the director, the actors and dancers, the stagehands and technicians, then I catch the ferry home, collapse on my bed, fall into oblivion.18

  16

  Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia burst upon the Last Ditch Club mid-afternoon.

  They first heard it over a crackly shortwave radio where voices thousands of miles away randomly wobbled into earshot and equally randomly dissolved back into blizzards of electronic squeals and shrieks. The crowd packed densely round the radio with their ears pressed hard to the speaker managed to discern something about ‘peace for our time’.

  A universal groan arose. Big glasses containing beer and fashionable glasses containing cocktails were jettisoned. There was a sudden universal demand for small glasses holding very hard liquors. The White Russian barkeeper was besieged with orders.

  More detailed and reliable information hurried through on the wires. Of grim-faced dictators. Of Chamberlain and Daladier, the French prime minister, signing a document. Of President Beneš of Czechoslovakia, who commanded a modern and efficient army, being humiliatingly forced by Britain and France to cede his country’s Sudetenland. Of Chamberlain flying home to Heston Aerodrome and waving a small piece of paper around, cheerfully announcing ‘peace for our time’ and then driving ‘triumphantly’ through cheering London crowds all the way home to Downing Street.