A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  The world’s press had descended upon Shanghai. Men who followed the trail of war from one country to another, political analysts, old China hands well known to Donald Addison, were staying at the Metropole. Nadya joined him there at the bar each evening, after work with Bradley Reed. The smell of beer and cigarette smoke hung thickly in the room. Donald pointed out faces, but the names meant little to Nadya.

  ‘That’s Hallett Abend of the New York Times, Harold J. Timperley of the Manchester Guardian, Ed Walden of the Daily Telegraph, Victor Keenan, Herald Tribune. That group is Reuters. There’s Associated Press drinking with United Press. Daily Mail, Chicago Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Daily Express. God, who isn’t here.’

  It was a strange war, undeclared, relegated to the terminology of incident rather than aggression. Strange also was its geography within Shanghai. It did not touch the International Settlement or the French Concession, full of foreign nationals under treaties of extra-territoriality. It raged in the China beyond this minute island. Sandbagged, but alert for accident and falling shrapnel, life went on almost as normal within the Settlement, intact in the midst of the smoking town.

  Nadya drank martinis and smoked Sobranies as she watched Donald circle the bar of the Metropole each evening. He returned to their table one evening with his arm about the shoulders of a balding man. Donald’s voice was slurred by drink.

  ‘This is Hugh Smollett. I haven’t seen him for years. We were at university together. He’s with Reuters now.’ Donald swayed slightly on his feet. In Nanking he had not been driven to this excess of drinking.

  Hugh Smollett sat down and began to complain about Japanese reporting. ‘Tokyo’s blaming Britain now, harking back to the Shanghai disturbances of ’27 and ’32 in which we were involved. That’s going to make for a lot of anti-Japanese feeling in the Settlement,’ Smollett leaned forward over the table to Nadya; there was whisky on his breath. ‘General Matsui, the Japanese Commander, thinks because he’s careful not to lob shells over the Settlement everyone will ignore what he’s doing around it.’

  ‘I’ve heard General Matsui is quite a favourite with Western newsmen and has been invited to dinner at some of the best foreign homes,’ Nadya replied. ‘They say he has even donated money to the Safety Zone.’

  Donald pulled out a paper from his pocket. ‘Matsui or not, those chaps from Domei, the official Japanese news agency, do nothing but write garbage. Perhaps Matsui should have a word with them. Here we sit, bombs falling about us, carrying on as best we can amidst the sandbags, tending the wounded, burying the dead, toning down our parties and all they do is write stuff like this: Japan has no territorial aspirations in China. Unfortunately foreigners do not sufficiently understand our purity of motive. It is up to the British residents here to make it clear abroad that we are only working for the salvation of China. Are we supposed to laugh or cry?’

  ‘The Domei lot are over there. I’ve a good mind to have a word with them,’ Smollett announced. He attempted to rise from his chair but losing his balance fell back, spilling his whisky. Donald laughed, not yet as drunk as Smollett.

  ‘If you want a fight go out to the front lines and watch one,’ Nadya raised her voice in exasperation. War was a stress Donald could not take. And yet he pitted himself against it.

  ‘I’m going out with Smollett tomorrow,’ Donald turned upon her. They seemed constantly to argue now. The incessant sound of shelling set her own nerves on edge.

  She watched Donald walk across the room with Smollett to the table of Japanese, and bow with mock deference. An exchange took place and then Donald guffawed and hit Smollett on the shoulder. Smollett returned the blow and, hardly able to stand, raised his fists to Donald in horseplay.

  Nadya was busy supervising the proofreading of the last two volumes of TECSAT coming off the press. It was stuffy in the office and fans were still needed. They had two rooms in the building of the China Weekly Review. Bradley’s office led to a larger one where Nadya worked with a group of editors and proofreaders. Once, the walls of this room, like the TECSAT department at the university in Nanking, had been padded with documents. Now shelves were bare, great boxes of papers already departed for safer destinations. Extra typesetters, employed in desperation by Bradley, had been squeezed into an additional space across the corridor. Each day further pages of TECSAT appeared from the great presses of the China Weekly Review. The race against time pressed upon them all, little chat was to be heard.

  The summer heat lingered, no longer humid, edged now by the odour of the burning land. Ash blew in through open windows, spreading a layer of grime on the freshly printed papers, on desks, typewriters and potted plants. A boy was employed just to dust away this residue of ash. Staff were diminishing daily as more and more people fled Shanghai. Nadya was forced to proofread for long hours herself, with little relief. Even Bradley now put aside other work to tackle this menial job. She looked down at the proofs before her. She was tired of the prolific number of Chinese ghosts.

  The dry atmosphere of Peking in winter is conducive to electric sparks when friction is applied to fur or hair. Spirits are scared by such illuminations, and can therefore be prevailed upon to depart by a strenuous rubbing of the scalp.

  Another ghostly manifestation is the Kuei Tang Ch’iang or Wall Building Ghost. This erects a wall around a traveller at night and follows his movements, never letting him escape . . .

  She sighed and leaned back in the chair. It was lunchtime but she was not hungry. Bradley was at a meeting. The room was empty, the others having gone for their meal. From the drawer of her desk she pulled out the binoculars Donald had used on Purple Mountain. As she often did now, she climbed the narrow staircase to the flat roof of the building. There was a view from there over the war lines. Even within the relative immunity of the Settlement, there were growing reminders of the true state of affairs. From her office window Nadya looked out to the Whangpoo River, clogged by a line of Japanese warships. The freighters of Jardine Matheson, Butterfield and Swire and the Mollar Line, sides painted with giant Union jacks, edged past the Japanese ships to bring the Settlement its supplies. For the Chinese beyond the Settlement boundary, only starvation and terror were in ample supply. Refugees crowded the foreign concessions, sleeping in doorways, begging at corners, dying on pavements of wounds or disease.

  She held the binoculars to her eyes. The plains about Shanghai stretched out, blackened and smoking to the horizon. Each day dark sulphurous clouds billowed from new areas. Through the glasses she surveyed the charred land. The battle had intensified to take the last stubbornly-held perimeters of greater Shanghai. The crumbled ruins of the Chinese areas of the city now proliferated with Japanese flags: poached eggs, as the foreign residents of Shanghai disrespectfully named them. They flapped starkly in the wind.

  In the distance was the sound of gunfire and the drone of planes once more. It was always Japanese planes by day, Chinese planes by night, as if a rule had been applied. Nadya swung the glasses up upon them. She watched as three Japanese aircraft circled in search of a target, then dived. Bombs dropped from the low flying planes and ploughed into an old building. A great cloud of dust mushroomed up. Across the creek she could see street fighting and naval shells crashing into the Chinese positions. She turned the glasses down again and saw ragged children still at play on the banks of corpse-ridden Soochow Creek.

  Suddenly, far away, still small even through binoculars, she made out a line of Chinese prisoners roped together, digging a trench. She could see the dark soil mounded beside the hole, and the rough gesturing of soldiers. As she watched the men were lined up beside the trench, as if for some drill. The soldiers stepped back and levelled their guns. The men fell neatly, one by one, into the open seam of ground. She tore the binoculars from her eyes. Then slowly, against her will, raised them again. There was nothing now to see but a brisk shovelling of earth by the soldiers into the hole. She stood with the wind in her face, viewing death as she would a film. The shame of such
omnipotence filled her.

  ‘I cannot forget it,’ she whispered to Donald, lying in bed late that afternoon in his room at the Metropole.

  ‘It was too far away for you to be sure of what you saw. Perhaps you were mistaken.’ He pulled away from her. He did not want to hear about it, did not want the weight of her revulsion added to his own.

  ‘I saw it clearly. They fell like ninepins. It was too far to hear the guns. It was like those bombs we watched drop on Nanking, while birds sang on Purple Mountain.’ She felt uncomfortable now when she recalled their cavalier attitude to those first bombs dropped upon Nanking. The sky outside the window reddened with the setting sun. A few miles away the sky for others was ruddy with flame. Something seemed terribly wrong. She lay here, languid, safe, her body replete with pleasuring, while only miles away others died, tormented. She remembered Professor Teng’s outburst in Nanking, and his tales of horror. She turned again to Donald, but he was not interested.

  ‘What does it matter, a few Chinese more or less who would anyway die of starvation or disease?’ Donald insisted. Each day it was as much as he could do to suppress his own confused emotions. She leaned over him and stroked his bare chest in an absent manner.

  ‘I felt paralysed. They were dying and I could not even hear the gun.’ She tried to analyse her reactions. ‘Perhaps if I could have heard the gun, I would not be able to turn my back so easily upon their death. I would have had to carry some echo of their terror within me. But there was only the sound of the breeze in my ears as they died. Nothing more. It was too distant for involvement.’ She searched for words to explain.

  ‘Sometimes you talk nonsense,’ Donald answered. The sound of constant gunfire affected him badly. Nightmares continued to wake him. He pulled himself above her, thrusting her limbs apart.

  ‘Again?’ She abandoned herself to the moment. He pushed himself deeper within her.

  Later they slept but when she awoke the thought was still lodged in her mind, like a stubborn seed between her teeth. ‘Why can I not forget it? Why do I wish I had heard that gun?’ She gripped his arm, looking up into his face.

  ‘I should be glad not to have heard it. Now forget it,’ Donald told her, struggling to sit up and pull on his clothes. He could take no more of her odyssey of guilt.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She groped for words, exploring the dilemma. ‘A cycle of conscience is somehow unfinished, because I heard no gun. It was the same on Purple Mountain. We stood outside experience. We trivialised death on Purple Mountain.’

  ‘What melodrama.’ He buttoned up his shirt. If he kept his mind on the work of factual reporting, he could function. If he attempted to expose his emotions, a nightmare at once began.

  ‘Let’s go down for a drink,’ he suggested.

  She sat cross-legged on the bed before him, her hair holding the sun beyond the window. The gold light settled on her bare shoulders, spreading a translucence over her breasts. The sheets creased about her. She had the look of a Renaissance painting. He knelt before her, cupping her breasts in his hands. He could never catch the mercurial light in her hair any more than he could, however many times he possessed her, be sure he held her secure. She seemed ready always to slip from him. It disturbed him to think their relationship insubstantial, and yet in himself he knew he erected barriers to its growth.

  ‘I cannot sit like this, an immortal on a mountain looking down untouched upon the world. I keep thinking of those things Professor Teng said.’ She swung herself slowly off the bed and continued.

  ‘What are you doing, what is your war effort?’ Nadya demanded, gathering her clothes from the floor where, in their haste for love, they had strewn them.

  ‘I’m reporting the horror to the world. War is war and a nasty business,’ Donald snapped. ‘I’m not required at this moment to do more than write it up as I see fit.’

  In the lift, on the way down to the bar, she continued to worry. ‘On a street along one side of the China Weekly Review, I counted sixty-three refugees. They were sleeping in alleyways, doorsteps and windowsills, anywhere they could find a ledge. The autumn is coming, last night it rained heavily and they have no blankets. Most of the babies were almost naked. All I could hear was the crying and coughing of sick children. These refugees are not beggar class, they’re peasants, driven from their homes by Japanese bombs or the fires set by Chinese troops to cover their retreat.’ Nadya sat up and looked out of the window at the distant haze of smoke.

  ‘At least they’re safe in the Settlement,’ Donald replied. He had reported these facts in his last cable to The Times. He did not want further involvement. Report the fact and move on to the next. Dwell upon nothing. These were the rules he had devised for himself. Keep moving as fast as possible. He steered her towards the open door of the bar, avid to begin the daily round of amnesia.

  ‘But the Settlement is already full, they’ve put up barbed wire to keep out more refugees. Father Jacquinot’s Safety Zone is now the best sanctuary,’ Nadya replied. She thought suddenly of Martha in Nanking and wondered if the preparations for a similar safety zone were also underway. Nadya walked before Donald into the bar and was dismayed to see Smollett waiting.

  In the countryside the battle escalated. Japanese planes carpet-bombed the Western districts of Shanghai. Ambulances and fire-engines screamed out to the suburbs. From the opposite direction, laden with bundles, new refugees trailed into town.

  Near Nadya’s flat a school had been turned into a hospital, as were cabarets, cinemas and brothels. Space was at a premium, funds to care for the refugees continually solicited. The expatriate community battled alongside the bombs with the usual round of parties, but the Settlement acquired a beleaguered air. It had become a city of bachelors and grass widowers. The majority of expatriate wives had been evacuated to Hong Kong or elsewhere by official order. Lonely and curfewed, the remaining male residents lived ever more furiously. Nightclubs, cabarets and dance palaces now persuaded customers to stay for breakfast. Shanghai lived feverishly, lost to the erotic and the exotic beneath searchlights and tracer shells. All the while the Settlement bulged with the destitute Chinese population of the outlying areas. No road was now without its pavement population, filthy, hungry, ill.

  As the summer heat cooled the incidence of cholera lessened. Tuberculosis now became the main fear for the refugees. The Whangpoo was awash with bodies. Officials reassured the Settlement that drinking water drawn from this source was adequately filtered and disinfected. Amongst the cattle herded into the Settlement, Foot and Mouth disease broke out. The food situation was deteriorating; fewer ships were allowed up the Whangpoo. The intersecting creeks flowing out of Shanghai into the Yangtze valley still managed to supply most produce. Junks and sampans glided in on the wind carrying eggs, chickens, vegetables, coal, fish, pigs and bamboo. Under the bombs peasants risked their lives in the fields, and risked them again on the way to market.

  Slowly the Japanese advanced. Their flag flew over North Station. The areas beyond Soochow Creek were methodically bombed. The retreating Chinese Army blew up the main bridge behind them. Everywhere there was burning. Yet the buildings of the Foreign Concession rose almost untouched in the smoking, flattened plain. Through the railings surrounding the Concession, Chinese destitutes observed the expatriates drinking coffee in cafes.

  Most days Nadya went out to Father Jacquinot’ s Safety Zone or to one of the dozens of refugee camps that now littered Shanghai, and were supported mainly by European money. She had joined the National Child Welfare Association in a voluntary capacity. Above all, it was the children who affected her. She had learned to look at many things, but the small stiff corpses gathered on carts for cremation, the stacks of tiny coffins in Dr Fu’s children’s hospital where she worked, the bloodied, shattered infant limbs and the staring orphans, touched her at a different level.

  Dr Fu’s hospital helped to provide the refugee children with nutrition. The hospital made its own soya bean milk with primitive equipment.
Beneath the usual hospital smells the odour of cooking soya beans pervaded, rising up from the basement kitchens. Each day from Bradley Reed’s office or from the China Weekly Review, Nadya went straight to the hospital, grateful for Martha’s training. Sometimes she drove the van with its vat of milk out to Father Jacquinot’s Safety Zone.

  Father Jacquinot had persuaded the Japanese army authorities of the need for a safety zone for Chinese refugees. Part of the old walled city of Nantao, adjacent to the French Concession, was ringed with white flags for this purpose. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand Chinese refugees were now living in the area. The winter was ahead and apart from food the need for thick clothing was urgent.

  White-bearded Father Jacquinot, in black cassock and beret, dared bring down his artificial wooden arm upon the heads of Japanese soldiers who refused to respect his Safety Zone. The headquarters of the committee was in the premises of an old fire station. When Nadya arrived with the soya milk, Jacquinot was on the phone berating the Red Cross for delivering less than four hundred thousand buns.

  She delivered the milk and drove back down the boundary road separating Japanese-occupied territory from the Safety Zone. Soon, she approached the barbed wire barricades of the Settlement, guarded by police. These gates were now closed as the Settlement could take no more refugees. Yet the destitute still picked their way over the remains of the mined bridge towards them. Women with children slung on their backs or filling their arms crowded before the barricades. The International Police pushed back the crowds and Nadya showed her Red Cross pass.

  ‘Drive through, lady.’ The police officer, a Scotsman, ordered the barrier rolled back for the jeep. A detachment of volunteers from the Settlement controlled the crowd as she drove through. She looked straight ahead so as not to see the women holding their children up, imploring her to help. Against the pressure of bodies, the barricade was closed again.