by Shan Sa
Soon this nocturnal obsession grips the daytime: I have erections while we go for a run, my voice cracks when I give orders, and the hoarse break at the back of my throat conjures the pleasure that the Chinese girl would have given me. To feel the tightness of her sex around my member would have been the most violently ecstatic form of suffering I could ever experience.
One morning, unable to find any peace, I go to the Square of a Thousand Winds. It is five o’clock and the trees are whispering in a strong breeze, as if a thousand different drafts and breezes had agreed to meet there at the break of day.
The first player appears, with a birdcage in his hand. As he cleans the table and puts down the pots of stones, another man comes over to sit down opposite him.
My heart sinks.
That evening, after getting drunk with the Captain, I knock on Orchid’s door. She has already forgotten all her resentment and slips off her dress at once. It has been a long time since I have touched a woman. Seeing in her the Chinese girl’s nakedness, I discharge into her as violently as emptying the chamber of a gun.
As I wander the streets in the hope of seeing her, this tiny town suddenly seems vast. I try a different brothel, but none of the girls parading past moves me. Still, I go up to Peony’s room with her. Her smile reveals one golden tooth. Her body is fat and very white, and she cries out exuberantly.
At four in the morning a White Russian girl agrees to be slapped as I sit astride her. My belt leaves purple streaks across her skin.
Dawn is breaking, the new day just like any other. I shake a rickshaw boy awake and he takes me to the foot of the Hill of the Seven Ruins. Up the hill the tree under which she slept is clothed in rays of purple light, and it remains true to my memory, but the rest of the scene has lost all its poetry. In the middle of the clearing the grass has grown too high and is beginning to dry out.
Back at the barracks I have forgotten how to harangue my soldiers, how to stand up, even how to sit down. My mind is somewhere else, and nowhere.
That night I am woken by piercing whistles. I open my eyes. My deliverance is at hand.
The locomotive stands by the platform billowing columns of steam. I shove my men, barking at them to hurry, then I get in and pull the door closed behind me. I suddenly realize that I have forgotten to say good-bye to Captain Nakamura.
89
Peking, a city of dust.
Jing comes back with the newspapers under his arms, but every day his face is a little darker: negotiations with the Japanese army have broken down and war is very near. Chiang Kai-shek’s central government is calling upon the Chinese nation to resist the foreign invasion. In the streets the exodus has already started, thousands streaming towards the south with whatever can be carried.
Ever since we arrived in Peking, Jing has forbidden me to leave the hotel room. When he is here, I refuse to get up. He keeps blaming himself for dragging me nearer to danger and death, and guilt makes him irritable. He is becoming disgusting, uglier by the day. His hair has grown too long; he bites his fingernails and eats like an animal.
Lying in a sheet wound round me like a shroud, I argue with him over anything: the overly warm noodles, the bitter tea, the noise of the mosquitoes. The terrible heat eggs me on. Most of the time he responds with contemptuous silence, but sometimes a rage comes over his face, his whole body shakes and he lunges as if to strangle me.
“Go on, kill me!” I scream. “Just like you killed your friends!”
His face contorts into a snarl and I see Min’s ghost flit through his eyes.
I end up giving him my cousin’s address, and ask him to bring Lu to me. Jing is angry at first, but when I tell him that Lu is married he quite happily goes off to find him.
Once he has left I can breathe at last. Without Jing the room feels airy and full of light. I get up, wash my face and comb my hair by the open window.
Our hotel is a large single-story building with rooms arranged around a square courtyard in the middle of which a jujube tree is growing. On the other side of the wall, out in the street, there are children chattering in pure Pekingese. In their intonations I pick out the same accent as the man who played go. His was slightly different: instead of rolling his r’s, he pronounced them with his lips. My thoughts go back to the Hill of the Seven Ruins where he watched over me as I slept. On the Square of a Thousand Winds he would sometimes open out his fan, but not to cool himself, more so that the gentle breeze would waft onto my face. I feel my heart constrict at the memory. I still don’t understand why he said no. Why do we want to run away when we recognize our own happiness?
Planes are flying overhead. I hear wave after wave of thunderous explosions. People are screaming in the streets. The Japanese are threatening to flatten the whole city.
The air is drier in Peking than in our Manchurian towns. Everything gleams, shimmers and sparkles in the white sunlight before it is swallowed up into an ashen gray. I have only just got up, but I am already tired again. Peking, the city of my ancestors, is a dream from which I cannot wake up.
I go back to bed and slip in and out of sleep. I see my parents’ faces and feel overwhelmed by the sight of them. Then I make my way slowly to the Square of a Thousand Winds, towards the go table. I feel so happy when I pick up the icy stones. The Stranger is there, steady as a statue. Our game continues, evolving along its convoluted route towards the Land of Purity.
At night Jing listens to the tumult of successive skirmishes and falls asleep leaning against the wall. I am suddenly woken by his screams of horror. He has his hands to his head and is struggling like a man possessed. I get out of bed and hold him in my arms. How can I leave him?
At dawn he shakes me awake. He has made up his mind: it is better to head south and risk dying under the bombs than waiting to be massacred here. I regret following my impulses: I wanted freedom and now I am Jing’s prisoner.
“I must talk to my cousin, he’s my only relation here. Keep looking for him. Let’s find him and go with him.”
Jing’s expression darkens.
“I lied earlier when I said he had moved houses. I saw his wife and she’s gone almost mad. Lu’s abandoned her and signed up for the army. He may already be dead.”
“You’re lying! Give me my cousin’s address back.”
“Here, have it, you’ll see for yourself.”
I know that Jing is telling the truth and I cry out in despair.
“I want to go back to Manchuria. We’ve got to go our separate ways. I’m going home, I’m going back to my game of go.”
“It’s too late. There’s no more public transport. All the trains have been commandeered by the Japanese army. You don’t have a choice now, you’ll have to come with me.”
“You’re jealous of Min,” I spit at him. “You’ve taken me away from my town to erase him from my memory.”
“Min slept with you for pleasure. Don’t forget that Tang was everything to him, his big sister, his teacher and his wife!”
Jing thinks he can hurt me, but I burst out laughing.
“You’re wrong. Min’s over! I’ve dug a grave in my heart and buried him. I never loved him, anyway. We made a beautiful couple and that made me proud. I enjoyed making you both jealous. But now I see that it was just vanity, do you understand, the vanity of becoming a woman.”
Jing’s face darkens and he stares at me coldly.
“You may have played your games with my affection,” he says. “But your body is tainted now. No one will marry a girl who’s no longer a virgin. I’m the only man in this whole world who loves you, and I’m ready to take the woman who was defiled by my best friend! There’s no other choice for either of us.”
Min too said that my body belonged to him. As my eyes well up I blurt out: “There is someone else who loves me, and I’ve only just realized that I loved him without knowing it. He’s waiting for me in the town of A Thousand Winds.”
“Liar! Who is he? Where’s he from? Come on, if it’s true, tell me.”
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br /> I realize that I don’t even know his name. I know nothing about him except his soul. Seeing my hesitation, Jing calms down a little and takes me in his arms. I slap him, but he manages to kiss my forehead.
“Come with me,” he says, “don’t be a child. We’ll start a new life in Nanking.”
90
Clouds of flies hover in the air.
On the plain the shells have carved deep craters, the fields have been ravaged and bodies are everywhere. Those that still have their waxy faces lie with their mouths open. Others are just piles of mangled flesh hard to make out from the soil.
As our unit slowly crosses this vast cemetery, I realize that some of our soldiers, having fallen into an enemy trap, fought to the last man. In the sun I feel nauseated, and at that moment I understand that our fight against the terrorists in Manchuria was just a game of hide-and-seek. Only now does the enormity and horror of eagerly anticipated war make itself plain.
In the middle of a deserted village we are caught in a storm of explosions. I throw myself to the ground as the bullets rain down onto earth whitened by weeks of drought. After a brief exchange of fire, we conclude that the unit attacking us consists of just a few diehards who have stayed behind to hamper our progress. The bugle sounds the attack, and the Chinese scatter like rabbits in a shooting match. I aim at the fastest man, just as he is about to reach the edge of the woods. He crumples at the foot of a tree.
At midday a second violent attack; the Chinese are so drunk with despair that they have become ferocious. I lie full-length on a slope with the burning sun on my back, and I catch a waft of a sweet smell that reminds me of the girl who played go. In front of me a soldier hit in the back rolls on the ground screaming. I recognize him as one of my men—we have just celebrated his nineteenth birthday.
I wanted to bury the boy after the battle, but the order to march on is given and I must leave him to the attentions of the next regiment. Inequality continues beyond the grave. The luckiest are burned on the battlefield, while others are thrown into a ditch. But the most unfortunate are gathered up by the Chinese, who cut off their heads and parade them on stakes.
This first day of warfare feels like a long dream. Nothing touches me, neither the atrocities of the fighting, nor the exhausting march, nor the deaths of my soldiers. I wander through a padded world where life and death are equally meaningless. For the first time the military adventure has failed to inspire me: we go to our fates just as salmon struggle back upstream—there is no beauty or grandeur in it.
That evening the medical officer notices that I am sullen and withdrawn and he diagnoses sunstroke. I let my men wrap my head in a cool, damp towel and lie down on a bale of straw, staring at the dark ceiling of the cottage appropriated as my quarters for the night. I am disgusted with myself.
We are woken by whistling and explosions in the early morning. We respond with grenades, before both sides man the machine guns. In this cacophony we suddenly recognize the bugle sounding the attack.
The division attacking us is Japanese, a mistake that costs us several lives.
91
A campfire crackling, Jing dozes fitfully, and all around me hundreds of other refugees are sleeping. We are like herds of deer fleeing a drought, we are thin and sick, our sleep as heavy as our bundles.
I take a pair of scissors from my bag and cut my hair as short as the strength in my arms permits. I tie my two plaits together with a ribbon and lay them next to Jing, then I climb over ten sleeping bodies and disappear into the night.
In a wood I take off my dress and slip on the clothes I have stolen from Jing. Behind the trees the dawn casts its pale light over the Peking plain. I walk in the direction opposite the flow of the refugees who have been on the move since daybreak. The women, weighed down by their bundles, drag a child with one hand and a goat with the other. From time to time the unmistakable cry of a newborn rings out. There are men carrying an elderly parent on their backs; luckier ones draw the old folks in a rickshaw. A woman who seems to be a hundred clutches a chicken in her arms as she teeters forwards on her bound feet.
My heart has been torn by a succession of such scenes ever since we fled Peking. I don’t regret following Jing into this upheaval; thanks to him, I have witnessed the strength of our people driven from their own land. The tenacious march south is like a silent protest against death. In this tidal wave of men and women a hatred mingles with hope. And this furious force of will that has infected me too will carry me to the very end of my own lonely progress.
I am like them—I want life. I want to go back to Manchuria, to find my house and my go table. I will return to the Square of a Thousand Winds and wait for my Stranger. I know he will come . . . one afternoon . . . as he did that first time.
At midday I sit under a tree by the side of the road eating a three-day-old piece of bread one crumb at a time. The silent column advances steadily past, indifferent to the droning of the airplanes and the distant explosions.
Within that human river the first Chinese soldiers appear. In their blood-splattered uniforms, their faces darkened with smoke, they remind me of the soldiers who invaded our house in 1931 after fleeing the Japanese: their eyes betray their exhaustion and the peculiar coldness of those who have left their fellows to the slaughter.
“Peking has fallen! Hurry up, we must flee.”
“The Japanese are coming! The demons are coming!”
Amid an eruption of screaming and crying, I catch sight of Jing running with his halting limp against the flow of the refugees, and I hide behind a tree. He passes a stone’s throw from me and I hear him asking a woman whether she has seen a pale young girl with her hair cut short and dressed as a boy. His voice cracks and, holding my plaits in his hand, he spits on the ground and curses me as he calls my name.
His words cut through me but still I hide: “How could you make me suffer like this, I have been to hell and back already!”
Eventually he moves away.
An airplane that has been circling overhead for some time drops one bomb, and then another. The explosions knock me to the ground. When I come to, people are running in every direction like ants from a campfire.
When I get up I notice that my arm is bleeding. The roar of the engines in the sky grows louder and louder: more planes are coming! I take cover in a nearby field.
The Japanese bomb the road. I wander through the fields not knowing where to hide, my head is spinning and my injured arm dangles heavily by my side. When am I going to wake up from this nightmare?
Before nightfall I make out a village on the horizon and I hurry towards it. When I get there it is eerily silent. In the darkness I can just see the doors hanging open and broken pieces of furniture strewn across the streets. A little farther on I come across some bodies: four peasants skewered with bayonets. Inside the houses there is not one living thing, not one grain of rice, not one piece of straw to fuel an oven. After the massacre the Japanese army must have stripped everything.
I don’t have the strength to carry on any farther, so I go into one of the cottages. Remembering a remedy of my mother’s, I cover my wound with cold ashes before binding it with some cloth torn from my hem. I huddle against the cold, dark stove and burst into tears.
In the morning I am woken by a terrible racket, then I hear men shouting at each other in some incomprehensible language.
I open my eyes.
Soldiers have their guns trained at me.
92
Peking is conquered.
We have been sent orders to scour the countryside for spies and injured enemy soldiers. They must all be executed.
This morning my men came across a questionable individual; in oversize student’s clothes he obstinately stares at the ground, remaining insolently silent in the face of our interrogation.
The soldiers are loading their rifles. Lieutenant Hayashi, who is running the operation with me, draws his saber and says, “You have always boasted about your family saber, which dates back
to the sixteenth century. Mine was forged a hundred years later, but it was known at the time as the ‘Head-slicer.’ I’ll give you a demonstration.”
The soldiers are fired up at the thought of this display; they click their tongues and call to each other in anticipation.
Hayashi assumes the samurai stance from ancient engravings, spreading his feet as he flexes his knees and bringing the saber up over his head.
The prisoner looks up slowly.
I suddenly feel unsteady on my feet.
“Wait!” I cry, and I run over to the young man to wipe his face, which has been blackened by mud and smoke. I can make out the tear-shaped beauty marks.
“Don’t touch me,” she screams.
“A woman,” Hayashi cries, putting his saber back in its sheath. He pushes past me to knock down the prisoner and grope inside her trousers.
My heart turns to ice. What’s she doing here in this village? When did she leave Manchuria?
“A woman!” Hayashi confirms excitedly.
The young girl struggles, screaming shrilly. He slaps her twice, takes off her shoes and pulls down her trousers. He undoes his own belt and the soldiers, mesmerized, form a circle around him.
“Out of the way!” he orders them. “You’ll each have a turn!”
“You idiot!” I say, throwing myself at the Lieutenant. He turns to me furiously, but when he sees my pistol aimed at his forehead he starts to laugh good-naturedly.
“Okay,” he says, “you’d better have her first. After all, you found her.”
I say nothing. Thinking he understands why, he whispers, “It’s the first time, isn’t it? If you don’t want to do it in public, look, go over to the temple. I’ll keep watch by the door.”
