Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘The democracies aren’t going to fight fascism. Chamberlain’s just signed his surrender to it.’

  ‘Chamberlain does not represent the people of the democracies. They will not allow fascism to triumph. The Soviet Union will not allow it. Chiang Kai-shek is waiting for them to enter the struggle, which will be worldwide, which the people will win. You read the papers? The Battle of Lake Khasan – back in August?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘For a second time the Japanese invade the Russians from Manchukuo, get utterly routed. They’re stuck here in China, can’t get out, even more desperate for raw materials than before they invaded. If they can’t plunder them from Russia – and they can’t – there’s only one way they can go, south – for Dutch oil in the East Indies and British rubber in Malaya.’

  ‘But Britain and France will drive them back.’

  ‘They won’t. By that time they’ll be engulfed in their own life-and-death struggle in Europe.’

  ‘So who…?’

  ‘To get to the East Indies and Malaysia they’ll have to go through the Philippines. The American Philippines. That means war. You do not take on the Russians AND the Americans. That will mean we survive. Terrible, disgusting war, I know – millions dead – but we will survive.’

  A silence. He smiles.

  ‘And how are you, dear friend?’

  I pause and then answer, more emotionally than I intended.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say. ‘Whether I should leave or not.’

  ‘Of course you must leave. The Japanese will be here today or at latest tomorrow.’

  ‘But my wife and I had an agreement that if she and the family were well she would write to me care of Wuhan Central Post Office. I have not yet heard from her, but I know it is very difficult to get a letter through, and if I am not here I may never hear from them, know that they still live.’

  ‘Your dear wife is a highly intelligent woman. She will know that Wuhan has fallen. It will be on every Japanese radio station and billboard. She will know to write to Chungking – the post office there.’

  ‘She could have already posted it – to Wuhan.’

  ‘Have you booked a berth on the steamer to Chungking yet?’

  ‘No. I want to keep checking. The last post arrives at nine this evening.’

  ‘The last boat leaves at midnight. You will be on it!’ His voice has risen. ‘I am your friend! Your wife is my friend! Your children are my friends! You pain me with your indecision!’

  ‘I want to know whether my family is alive or dead.’

  ‘You will be on that boat. Hu Jieqing could simply have decided not to write to you as it was too dangerous.’

  ‘I have to know!’

  Feng clicks his fingers. A young adjutant who’s been quietly reading a newspaper at the next table comes over immediately. I recognize him as the young soldier Feng sent to Jinan to give me the letter summoning me to Wuhan.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘It is good to see you.’ I remember him as a nice young man. He played with my children.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Lao,’ he says, clicking his heels. ‘It is an honour to meet you again.’

  ‘Yang,’ says Feng. ‘The last steamer to leave Wuhan is Prometheus – at midnight. I want you to write an executive order and take it to the captain immediately. He is to reserve a place for Mr Lao on it.’

  He turns to me. Continues in the clipped military manner.

  ‘When you arrive at the ship before midnight, you will not try to board at the passenger gangway, which will be jam-packed. You will go to the crew’s gangway and board there. They will be expecting you. You have already sent your writings and books ahead of you upstream to Chungking?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admit in a surly voice, as if my doing so indicates some weakness in my character.

  Feng sighs. He leans over and speaks gently.

  ‘Dear Lao, my dear, dear friend. You are a wise man. A good man. It is right that you are upset about your family. You are deeply worried about what might have happened to them. But you staying on here in Wuhan will not help them in any way. Say you stay here and a letter arrives from your wife. They open and read it. You go, from wherever you are hiding, and get it – and immediately the Japanese arrest you. The famous Lao She! And they shoot you. Which they will. How, if your family is still alive, does that help them? They have lost a husband and a father. Their protector. And worse, the Japanese will now know, by the postmark, that you have a family, and in what district they live. Please, please get on that boat. Prometheus. Midnight.’

  He gets up and he and his adjutant quietly leave.

  I have not been won over by his arguments – but he certainly knows how to argue.

  I set off for the post office. My letter might have arrived.

  *

  The ambulance dropped off Hu and Spider Girl at the hospital workshop. The workshop had been entirely cleared and all its valuable if antiquated engineering and welding equipment efficiently transported upstream. A single man awaited them, standing beside a donkey and a cart bearing a large iron lung. Spider Girl passed the man Bob McClure’s note. He read it and handed over responsibility for the cart and the iron lung to the two women. Wishing them luck, he hurried off. He had a family to save.

  ‘First we’ll go to the apartment,’ said Spider Girl, ‘pick up my father and The Drab and supplies.’

  Hu looked at her.

  ‘You know what you’re doing, Spider Girl?’

  ‘Not yet. But I will,’ said a now confident Spider Girl.

  Hu had been pulled from the collapsed air-raid shelter and her life had been saved because of Spider Girl’s cleverness. She trusted her now.

  They arrived at the apartment. With infinite care Hu and Spider Girl and The Drab lifted Wei, still sleeping, down the stairs and laid him on cushions in the cart beside the iron lung. Spider Girl and The Drab had pre-packed the food and supplies in baskets and they quickly loaded the cart. Following her previous experience of long marches, Spider Girl understood the importance of water. Several crates of bottles containing Freda’s fragrant bath water were hoisted onto the cart.

  ‘There’s posh,’ said Hu.

  They both laughed.

  Hu tethered The Drab to the rear of the cart so she wouldn’t wander. They set off, Hu leading the donkey and Spider Girl riding on the rear tailgate.

  Following Bob’s instructions Hu navigated their way to the warehouse for emergency freight. She showed the guard the letter from Bob McClure and he let them in.

  The foreman led them to a space on the floor and a team of coolies arrived, and, having gently rested a still sleeping Wei upon the floor, removed the iron lung and secured it to a pallet, they then gently lifted Wei back on the cart as carefully as if he had been exquisite porcelain. Spider Girl thanked them.

  Then something really bizarre happened.

  Suddenly round a stack of crates containing invaluable works of art and priceless ancient manuscripts, immaculate as a diamond hatpin, strode Madame Chiang.

  Not a perfectly painted eyelid batted as she saw them. With that flawless memory for names which so many influential people seem to possess, she immediately hailed them.

  ‘Ah, Hu Lan-shih and Wild Pear Blossom, it is so long since I saw you. How are you both?’

  Hu was a bit at sixes and sevens.

  ‘We are well, thank you,’ said Spider Girl.

  Madame Chiang held out her hand. Hu went forwards to shake it. Then Spider Girl moved forwards to shake it too. As she did so, Madame Ching studied her.

  ‘Excuse me for saying so, Wild Pear Blossom, but last time I saw you, I seem to remember you were suffering from rickets? You seem to be walking quite well now. What has happened?’

  Now it was Spider Girl’s turn to be a bit flummoxed. Hu leapt enthusiastically into the breach.

  ‘Oh, Madame Chiang,’ she said, ‘this wonderful surgeon I went to work for…’

  ‘Yes, I remember that,’ said Madame
Chiang, somewhat icily.

  ‘Well, using bicycle parts – and he uses bicycle parts in quite a lot of his operations, because there are so many bicycles in China – he used these bicycle forks to support Wild Pear Blossom’s legs so that she can now walk much more easily.’

  ‘What is this surgeon’s name?’ asked Madame Chiang.

  ‘Donald Hankey,’ said Hu. ‘He is very good.’

  ‘Walk up and down again, Wild Pear Blossom,’ instructed Madame Chiang.

  Spider Girl rankled slightly at this. Hu gave her a meaningful stare. Spider Girl walked up and down a bit.

  ‘Stand still,’ ordered Madame Chiang. ‘Bicycle parts he uses, you say?’

  Hu smiled broadly at this. Spider Girl even allowed herself a silent whoopee.

  But things took a turn for the worse.

  ‘Lift your skirts, Wild Pear Blossom,’ said Madame Chiang, ‘I wish to examine his work more closely.’

  What is it with upper-class women, thought Spider Girl, that they’re always wanting to stare at my private parts?

  She did not budge an inch.

  Hu gave her a meaningful glare. Spider Girl gave Hu a meaningful glare. Then Hu gave Spider Girl a really meaningful glare. Spider Girl sighed and raised her skirts.

  Madame Chiang croopied down and started thoroughly exploring all the various bicycle parts and leather strap parts festooning Spider Girl’s private parts. At one stage she poked Spider Girl rather too vigorously. Spider Girl swayed and stopped herself from falling forwards by resting her hands briefly on Madame Chiang’s back. She regained her equilibrium. Madame Chiang re-arose.

  ‘Hankey,’ she said. ‘Donald Hankey. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s just flown to Chungking, Madame Chiang.’

  ‘Just the sort of surgery this country needs. Cheap. Lots of easily available braces and supports. When I’m in Chungking I’ll look him up.’

  She looked at Hu.

  ‘I suppose you left working on my committee so you could work with him?’

  ‘Yes, Madame Chiang, that was the reason.’

  ‘Good for you. But if you ever want your old job back…’

  ‘Yes, Madame Chiang.’

  ‘And thank you too for introducing me to Intelligent Whore. It has transformed our nursing services.’

  ‘Madame.’

  ‘Good luck to both of you,’ said Madame Chiang, turning away. ‘I’ve got all these artistic relics to get together for Chungking.’

  And she strode briskly away.

  Spider Girl and Hu, leading the donkey, walked on out of the warehouse and onto the Bund, with Wei still asleep in the cart and The Drab tethered behind.

  ‘Spider Girl,’ asked Hu, ‘what are we going to do next?’

  ‘I want to buy a coffin for my father,’ said Spider Girl.

  ‘Do you think this is the time for that?’ asked Hu. ‘We should be getting out of Wuhan. Besides, we don’t have the money to buy one.’

  Spider Girl stopped the cart.

  ‘My father is going to have the very best coffin money can buy,’ she stated bluntly. ‘I’ve got my eye on a particular one.’

  ‘But we don’t have any money!’

  Spider Girl looked at her.

  ‘You didn’t see what happened back there, did you?’

  ‘What happened back there?’ said Hu, perplexed.

  ‘You are so innocent, Hu. We’ve got all the money we want.’

  ‘What are you saying, Spider Girl?’

  ‘You should have watched more carefully at the warehouse. Then you’d have seen me picking Madame Chiang’s purse.’

  ‘WHAT?!?’

  Hu stared at her.

  ‘While she was poking in her disgusting way around all my private parts, I fell forwards a bit. So I had to rest my hands on her.’

  ‘Yes…?’

  ‘That’s when I did it. Picked it.’

  ‘You can’t have picked Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s purse!?!’

  Spider Girl put her hand in her smock pocket and surreptitiously displayed some rather large silver coins to Hu.

  Hu stared at her. And stared at her. And then started to laugh. Laugh and laugh and laugh. People stopped and stared. Then Hu looked at Spider Girl, her eyes dancing.

  ‘You are a wicked woman!’

  ‘No, I am not. I am a practical woman. It would help you to be a practical woman too. That way you’d have got on that aeroplane and would now be helping Donald.’

  Hu stared at her some more.

  ‘But she’s the most powerful woman in China. When she finds out she’ll hunt us down.’

  ‘What, in all this chaos?’ asked Spider Girl, indicating the fleeing crowds all around them. ‘She probably won’t even look in her purse for a couple of weeks. Rich people never pay for anything. And even if when she finds out she decides it’s us I doubt she’ll do anything. Rich women like her quite like being stolen from.’

  Hu looked at Spider Girl steadily, then they resumed their passage along the Bund.

  The Bund was a sad sight.

  Fewer people, ever more frantic.

  The sounds of small arms fire could now be heard popping in the distance. Artillery shells were landing. The Japanese, against tooth and nail opposition from the Chinese Army, were grinding their way into the city’s eastern suburbs.

  Wuhan was falling.

  But some Chinese people were still entering the city. Poor farmers and smallholders were arriving in their thousands. All year in the countryside outside they had been tending and cultivating and nourishing their precious fruit trees and bushes, coddling them like newborn babes, unable in all that time to earn a raw penny from them, having to gamble their existence on these few short weeks when their trees stood ripe and bearing. Whatever the circumstances, whether they had to face plagues, floods, Japanese bayonets, they would still bring their crops to market to earn the only money they would make for the whole of that year.

  They came with their carts and fruit-laden baskets under their arms and slung from poles and bundled in blankets on their heads and they laid on the cobbles of the Bund their fruits in great long lines and piles and profusion. All of them crying out for custom.

  Hu and Spider Girl passed silently between lines of the most wondrous, ripened fruits spilling out across the cobbles.

  Every variety and size of grape – blue, green, black and purple – every kind and shape of pear, each variety of apple. Those beautiful, fragrant, sweet, crisp little pears; crab apples as big as harvest apples; and for fragrance only, the small apple-sized quinces; light orange-coloured, honey-flavoured Fuyu persimmons, heart-shaped Hachiya persimmons bitter in their taste, and the ancient red persimmons, heavy and succulent in flavour; enormous peaches with white flesh, tiny peaches with blood-red flesh; Beijing apples, covered with little gold stars, which decorated rooms and added fragrance to the air (how on earth had they got through the war zones?); tiny red dates with smiling faces; green apricots in little rush baskets the size of a fist which were sold with a dash of syrup to passing children; long apricots – half red, half green – others big and deep yellow, small and light yellow, or the tiny red ones; by themselves the famous white apricots. Fruit used in the worship of the moon – pillow-shaped watermelons decorated with strips of gold paper and displayed lying on red and yellow coxcomb blossoms. Chestnuts big and fat, being roasted over little sidewalk furnaces, drowned in molasses when eaten.22

  The fruits of Wuhan.

  The cries of the sellers, desperate that there were so few customers, went up to the skies, as all this abundance and fecundity lay ignored around them.

  On the stalls of the wine pedlars lay great earthen jars of wine beside soft slices of mutton amid snow-white onions. Fresh water crabs, fed and fattened on grain, hung in baskets of matting from poles. Honey from all over China was being sold.

  Hu and Spider Girl and The Drab stared open-mouthed at the profusion as they passed by. Even an awakened Wei struggled and raised himself to look o
ver the cart’s sides to gape at all the abundance. Spider Girl bought him a bag of Fuyu persimmons because they were his favourites, and two white-fleshed peaches. They might encourage him to eat.

  For the first and only time in her life Spider Girl, purchasing the market traders’ fruits and food, refused to haggle with the sellers and paid them whatever price they demanded. She also bought milk. There was a man who milked a cow on the Bund, milking it straight into his customers’ containers. Spider Girl thought about buying some for her father – cow’s milk is very nourishing – but he had never liked it as much as the thinner, less nutritious goat’s milk. Back home Eldest Son had milked the goat and then, in the evenings, when he had finished in the fields, her father would sit and drink some and then sing songs. It was a family custom that when the songs finished Grandfather would tell a story and then they would all go to bed except Wei, who stayed up to repair his machinery. Spider Girl found the stall which sold goat’s milk. Her father sipped and enjoyed it. He even smacked his lips.

  Spider Girl bought honey to restore her father and winter clothing as they would be travelling through December mountains. She also purchased incense and joss sticks, a sheaf of paper money and a spade.

  They passed through the flower markets. Although it was autumn there were camellias large as a girl’s face, cascades and fountains of anemones, asters, astilbes, early plum blossoms, peonies, lilies, roses, magnolias, and a few chrysanthemums.

  The blossoms of Wuhan.

  There were only a few chrysanthemums because the sellers knew that the chrysanthemum was for the Japanese the most dazzling and emotional of all blooms. They were, for the time being, concealing them so that when the Japanese arrived they could display them in all their glory and the Japanese would be so overcome with emotion and joy they would be unable to bayonet their creators. They prayed.

  Finally, at the far eastern end of the Bund, they entered coffin world. It had shrunk greatly since its days of pomp when coffins piled to the heavens and citizens colonized and plied their trades and slept within and between its wares. A huge row had broken out among the coffin-mongers. Most, calculating that the Japanese did not bother to put their victims in coffins but just left them where they killed them or rolled them into the Yangtze, had taken their coffins – piled high – upstream to Chungking, where people still respected the elaborate and profitable rituals of death.