A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  ‘Let’s go,’ Donald said suddenly, rousing himself, coming back to the present and Nadya beside him. On Purple Mountain the birds still sang. His mind was suddenly full of discomforts.

  ‘Can you never sit still five minutes?’ Nadya complained, smoothing her clothes into place.

  She picked crumbled leaves from her hair. Her limbs were scratched from the rub of stones and twigs. In those moments when he filled her nothing mattered but the race of her body to its destination. There was a truth she knew then about herself that caused her some trepidation. There was nothing, she realised, she would not do for the slaking of this need in herself. It was as if an unknown woman controlled her. Where this woman led she would always follow, against judgement, to the basest of places. She bit her lips in self-censure. Donald seemed never to join her at those wanton limits, but stood back, as if watching her abandon. He left her always with an edge of shame. She had learned not to ask him for explanations. In the beginning she had remonstrated, and glimpsed within him at these times such a churning beneath the surface that she backed away.

  ‘I have to go to Shanghai where the action is. I should have been there on the first day,’ he told her at last. ‘I thought here, in the capital, I could watch developments, learn the political lay of the land. Mine was the first report to reach The Times about the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge. I met a chap from the Japanese Embassy who gave me that scoop. But that was all. Now I’ve got to get to Shanghai. For once I want to be in the right place at the right time. Come with me.’ He did not want to let her go, whatever the complexity of his feelings.

  ‘You know I’m going anyway in a few days, with those last pages of TECSAT,’ Nadya said, thankful the war pinned Donald to China.

  The afternoon was fading. She had not realised how long they had spent on Purple Mountain. They drove through the old town, Donald pressing the horn of the car continually. Everywhere was chaos. Families with bundles tied to their backs packed the streets, beginning the trek inland. In the dusk the first oil lamps were being lit. Before them the road opened suddenly into a square before a temple.

  ‘Professor Teng is on the other side of that temple,’ Nadya said in sudden recognition. ‘I’m supposed to pick up some papers from him.’ They left the car and entered the temple to walk across to Teng’s home.

  The graceful buildings and sweeping roofs were set about a series of courtyards. People walked slowly or sat upon the stone balustrades. There was a sense of vacancy. In spite of the crowds there was silence.

  ‘I never like this place. There are always so many people, all staring at nothing, nobody speaking.’ Nadya grimaced.

  ‘They’ve eaten “dream medicine”. Opium,’ Donald explained laughing at Nadya’s ignorance. He took her arm, guiding her through the somnolence.

  Amongst the passive crowd Donald suddenly noticed a man walking briskly towards them, his pace and smart Western-style clothes picking him out. He continually looked over his shoulder in a furtive way. As they neared him, the man stumbled against an old woman who lurched before him. He fell down a flight of steps while trying to avoid her, and winced in sudden pain. Donald hurried forward, bending to help him and saw it was the Japanese, Kenjiro Nozaki, who had confirmed the rumour about the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

  Kenjiro looked up, the fear in his expression changing to amazement at the sight of Donald. He gripped his arm, speaking quickly.

  ‘Mr Addison, please, if anyone approaches, I shall say you are writing an article on the advantage of the Japanese presence in China.’ There was something desperate in his face. His trouser leg was wet with blood.

  ‘We are going to a friend’s house, why don’t you walk with us. It will look more natural,’ Donald replied, as he helped him up. ‘You can’t walk far with that leg, it’s bleeding. We’ll get it cleaned up and then drive you back to the Embassy. What are you doing in a place like this?’

  ‘I have also been to visit a friend, and I may have been followed by our Japanese secret police; this town is full of spies. These are difficult days for us Japanese civilians.’ He spoke nervously.

  ‘You will be safe with Professor Teng,’ Nadya stepped forward, seeing the Japanese who had visited her at the university. ‘You told me he was a friend.’ Recognition suddenly filled Kenjiro’s face.

  ‘Of course, you are Bradley Reed’s assistant. I have just been visiting Professor Teng. Perhaps it is better if I just get myself home.’ Kenjiro was unwilling to risk another visit to Teng in the company of these foreigners. After all Fukutake had said, he should not have risked a further visit to Teng. He felt Donald grip his arm and steer him forward, ignoring his protests.

  Teng greeted them with amazement. He ordered the old servant to find some first aid and bring tea. After bandaging Kenjiro’s leg, he went to the desk for the papers Nadya needed.

  She looked curiously at Teng, wondering about his friendship with the Japanese as she pushed the documents into her bag. ‘The packing is finished and I will go now to Shanghai for final proofreading. Will you stay here?’ she asked.

  ‘Soon I’ll go inland,’ Teng replied, turning away from her. ‘There is a war to be fought. I must do my part. This is just the beginning.’ He sat down and lit a pipe, and the scent of tobacco filled the room.

  ‘Do you expect it to last some time?’ Donald enquired. He settled himself in a rickety cane chair. Something in Teng’s face drew his interest. Instinct told him this was a man to talk to.

  ‘The Japanese are going to take Shanghai and then Nanking and blockade the sea coast,’ Teng forecast. ‘There will be no stopping them. Then it all depends upon the morale of our people. If it breaks, China is finished. If not, the burden of war will fall upon the common people and they will have to endure great suffering.’ He spoke between puffs on his pipe.

  Nadya said nothing, unsettled by the discovery of this unfamiliar Teng, talking not of religion but war. She had looked upon the Professor as an unworldly scholar, poring over books.

  ‘How will you fight?’ she whispered. Agnes Smedley’s tales of frozen hands came back with force.

  ‘There will be many ways to fight this war. Some will fight with guns and others must help those who have no guns. Each man, woman and child will have their own way to fight. Already there are tales of barbaric brutality wherever the Japanese Army go.’ He looked straight at Kenjiro in a sudden, fierce condemnation.

  News of atrocities had come over the wires at the Embassy. Nobody believed they were anything but isolated and grossly exaggerated happenings. Kenjiro tried to explain.

  ‘Disorganised incidents, nothing more,’ he turned, appealing to them all.

  ‘There are only refugees and guerrillas inland,’ Nadya declared to Teng. ‘Is it not better for you to stay here?’

  ‘What is the difference?’ Teng replied, his voice sharpening suddenly. ‘Refugees and guerrillas are just people driven from their homes. If they can fight they are guerrillas, if not they are refugees. The whole country is already full of self-defence groups. Grandma Chao and the Eighth Route Army are amongst the best armed. Others are just peasants in their villages.’

  ‘And you think peasants can win a war against the Japanese Imperial Army, who are highly disciplined and committed?’ Donald asked. He found Teng more intriguing than anyone he had yet met. He wondered if the man might not be an underground Communist sympathiser.

  ‘You must understand the nature of this war. It is not a war in the usual sense, between two armies equally matched on a battlefield. It is going to be a war against an entire people,’ Teng replied.

  ‘What about Chiang Kai-shek . . . ?’ Nadya began. Teng turned upon her, his face contorted. Nadya drew back in her chair, alarmed by this side of the professor that she had never seen.

  ‘Nothing has unified this country as much as hatred of the Japanese,’ he thundered, pulling the pipe from his mouth. ‘And I don’t mind repeating it in front of my friend, even if he is a Japanese.’

 
‘What are you saying?’ Kenjiro felt his pulse quicken. He could not believe he was listening to Teng. Nor that Teng would humiliate him in this way before other people.

  ‘Believe me, Japanese soldiers will continue to be as brutal as they are now. Cities will be burned, peasants will leave their homes and cattle, people will become slaves, women will be raped, babies bayoneted, prisoners burned alive and all this on a scale rarely seen before. Mr Addison speaks of discipline, and I beg to differ. The Japanese Army has another side that only their defeated victims see. It is like an army of bandits, beside which military operations lose significance. Atrocities are happening wherever they go.’ Teng was beside himself. ‘Why do the Japanese people let their soldiers disgrace themselves if they want to conquer China?’

  ‘These things are only disorganised incidents,’ Kenjiro repeated helplessly. The blood surged round his body, as if his anger would burst a vein.

  Teng’s passion would not be expunged. ‘Atrocities are indeed happening, and will continue.’ Teng raised his voice, his face red with emotion, turning directly to Kenjiro. ‘My information is more exact than yours, it comes from the common people to whom all this is happening. Believe me, all you hear is true.’

  Kenjiro turned, feeling as he had not since Jacqueline’s death, ripped through by loss. He looked at Teng, now pouring tea from a vermilion pot, and saw only that they stood either side of a boundary. What he dreaded had happened at last.

  ‘Hatred can be forgotten, but not contempt,’ Teng’s voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘Once you lose respect for your enemy on the grand scale that is happening now, you lose it forever. Even in fifty or sixty years’ time, this war will not have been forgotten. It is not good for the Japanese.’

  The words followed Kenjiro out of Teng’s house. He knew the old world they had shared was gone and would never be re-entered. The loss filled Kenjiro anew.

  The railway line between Nanking and Shanghai was officially closed, but trains ran sporadically as far as they could. By the time they were ready to depart the line was bombed again.

  ‘Then we must go by road,’ said Nadya. ‘Many people are still journeying up and down. It is not yet too dangerous. Bombing is only about the towns. Madame Chiang Kai-shek is even planning to visit her dentist in Shanghai before the city falls. Besides, I have luggage. A car might be easier.’ Nadya looked at the box of proofs.

  In view of the circumstances the garage would not allow Donald to drive their car to Shanghai. As they searched for alternative transport it was rumoured another train might run; the line had been temporarily repaired. They left at once for the station.

  The train ran at night in blackout for safety, and was crowded with anxious people. Bundles of possessions, food and water, weighed everybody down, filling all corners of the train. It was uncertain how far they might be able to get. The terror of bombing permeated the packed, swaying carriages. Nadya sat squashed between Donald and an elderly woman who coughed excessively. No lights were allowed and no siren could warn of attack from the air. Nadya’s limbs were stiff with tension, the heat was oppressive. Babies cried, women moaned. The ripe smell of bodies was intense.

  The dim memory of another train, long ago, drifted before her each time she closed her eyes. She could have been no more than three or four years old on that long tense train journey from St Petersburg to Blagoveshchensk. Although they had travelled with dignity at the front of the train, a long line of rough trucks was coupled to the back within which were packed the convicts, bound for hard labour in Siberia. Somewhere, the train had stopped and a man escaped. There had been the crack of a gun. In her mind she saw a man falling, as if in slow motion, until he hit the ground. She remembered soldiers about him, pounding his body with their rifle butts in the way that workmen, on a building site near her home in St Petersburg, had pounded stones to break them. Then her mother pulled her close, so that she should see no more. She had pressed her face into the velvet of her mother’s skirt, breathing in the faint scent of mothballs.

  There was so little she remembered of her mother. The emerald pendant on a gold chain that Sergei had stolen, she saw again against a bed of lace upon her mother’s breast. She had also the obscure memory of a white mouse that had been kept in a Lalique glass bowl. She remembered the sea-green tint of the thick glass, foamy as a wave. She remembered the mouse, with black liquorice eyes, crouching in her mother’s hand. Of her death she remembered nothing. She recalled only the sound of weeping that had come each night from her father’s room. All her life she had wished for the balm of some further memory, but little arose to fill the emptiness. Later her father had married again, to Anna, a local woman in Blagoveshchensk.

  At times the train from Nanking to Shangahi stopped for unfathomable reasons, and then Donald climbed down, and sat beside the tracks. Nadya seemed able to snatch at sleep in a manner that evaded him. He stared out at the impenetrable blackness, smelling the odour of the land, ripe with fresh manure. At times the moon emerged and showed him a distant roof, or the outline of some trees. In the darkness the dislocations of his life seemed to grip him anew. Cordelia. At the thought of her a gust of hate rose up within him. He stared into the night about him, but the memories would not retreat.

  ‘Mmm,’ Cordelia had murmured on that first Sunday together, as he drove her down to Sussex to meet his father. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back. The window was open and the smell of the fields had filled the car. It was a hot and perfect day. Her hair blew about in the breeze. He could not wait for his father to see her. Even then he recognised the need to flaunt her before him. The adrenaline had raced through his body.

  John Addison sat on the lawn drinking gin and lemonade. His eyes were hooded, his paunch spilled over his shorts. Janice stopped mixing ice in the jug and stood up to kiss Donald. He was glad it was Janice who was there, and not somebody younger. Cordelia looked delectable against the foil of maturity.

  They ate cold ham and potato salad, washed down with spiced lemonade. Cordelia stretched out on the grass, leaning back upon her elbows. Her shoulders were bronzed by the sun, her neck arched, the long hair swung down her back. Beside her sat John, an expression on his face Donald recognised. At Donald’s side Janice chatted on about the horrors of vivisection. Against the sun he watched Cordelia in conversation with his father. Under half-closed lids his observation was intense. He knew then he would marry Cordelia. Nothing else would do. How could he then have known it would end with the bloodied mess of his father’s brains spread upon the wall.

  ‘I’ll kill him, Mama. I’ll kill him.’ His own voice echoed up from childhood. He had not been back long from India before John Addison committed suicide. Cordelia had encouraged him to go to India, although they had only been married a year.

  ‘Won’t you miss me?’ he had asked, uncertain even then of the ease with which she was letting him go. ‘I may be away some months.’

  ‘You must do this book,’ she insisted. ‘The Independence of India is an important matter. It is rarely tackled from the Indian perspective, especially by the British. It will cause a stir.’

  He wished now he had never gone. He had known at the time the decision was wrong. Why then had he deliberately set off, and stayed away so long? His constant, needless courting of fate was still a mystery to him.

  The book on India was published a year after his father’s death. The reviews were mixed, but Donald had by then lost interest in its reception. On the day of its publication his divorce from Cordelia came through. The newspapers no longer asked questions about the nature of his father’s suicide, but its residue afflicted Donald disastrously. He found himself prone to bouts of fury, followed by heroic drinking after which he was maudlin with guilt. He saw nothing of Cordelia, although on the Fleet Street grapevine he sometimes heard her name.

  He had gone to China to forget about his father, to forget Cordelia. He cursed them both loudly, as if the invocation would banish them from his mind. How far must he travel this pa
inful inner road before they would release him? He climbed back into the railway carriage and pushed his way back through the crowd to Nadya.

  Eventually the train stopped in the middle of fields, a distance from Shanghai. The track had been destroyed by a bomb, and repair was impossible. People left the train and melted into the night to walk the remaining distance. A truck passed and stopped. For a fee the driver agreed to take Nadya and Donald to the outskirts of town. They heaved their belongings on to the truck atop a pile of vegetables. The last pages of the TECSAT manuscript balanced on a mound of radishes.

  Above them the sky was lightening. As dawn broke over the fields about Shanghai the extent of the destruction was clear. In the distance was the sound of guns.

  8

  Shanghai

  October 1939

  Even as Donald reached Shanghai he had no sense of real direction. He had come to China to investigate the country, not to face a war. The unexpected scoop of Edgar Snow with Mao Tse-tung had forced him to face an unsavoury conflict to ensure professional survival. Now the battle took him unawares. It was one thing to follow distant bombers from Purple Mountain, another to enter the theatre of war itself. He was not a hard-bitten, battle-scarred correspondent. Nadya, however, knew nothing of this. She found Donald fractious and drinking more than usual, in the bar of the Metropole Hotel.

  In the haste to get to Shanghai the mundane details of war had been far from Donald’s mind. Now, he discovered the sound of gunfire reverberated unendingly in his head. Other guests at the Metropole seemed no longer to hear it. By evening all Donald wanted was to lose the sound in drink. In his dreams the guns condensed each night into the same one shot, over and over again. Each night he awoke in a sweat, to see his father’s body slumped over his desk. He was not made for war, he decided. Other reporters appeared honed from more seasoned wood, and were all about him now.