A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  Donald stared up, as if through a thick green grille, hardly breathing. Once more the planes would dive down, and bullets strike him at last. Suddenly he felt calmer. Either he would die, or he would not. He prayed only to die outright, not to be ripped apart like Mariani. That seemed all that mattered now, quick death. He was to go with a bullet, like his father, like Smollett, he realised. Was this retribution? He looked up at the sky and swore, whether at God or at the planes, he was no longer sure.

  The aircraft still circled overhead, wings agleam in a shaft of sun, like the fins of sharks. Their shadow passed over the reed beds. He ducked down beside Mariani, waiting. The drone of the engines grew louder, then retreated into the distance. Donald sat up in surprise.

  Instead of swooping low, the planes sped on across the river towards the Standard Oil and Asiatic Petroleum vessels, anchored near the opposite shore. A shower of black pellets detached themselves from the aircraft and hurtled downwards. The boats burst suddenly into flame with a massive explosion. The vibration of the blast shook the reed beds. High above, the planes jumped away from the wall of flame spurting up uncontrollably. A thick black bellow of smoke curled into the sky.

  In midstream the Panay now lay at an odd angle, the American flag still flying from the after mast. A chugging sound carried over the water. Donald saw a Japanese military craft heading for the Panay. It threw out a volley of warning shots as it approached the gunboat. Japanese soldiers boarded the Panay and in a few moments, finding it deserted and near its end, returned to their own craft and quickly steamed away. Almost immediately, the Panay turned on her side and vanished beneath the water. She went under with a great sucking sound, like water down a drain. Suddenly, there was silence.

  When it was clear the attack was over, Donald stood up. The reeds closed above his head. His knees hurt and he realised now the blood on his leg was not Mariani’s but a scratch from a bullet that had entered the lifeboat. In the mud, at his feet, Mariani groaned. Donald could hear shouts ahead, but the tall mass of rushes hampered his view. He took hold of Mariani again and staggered forward in the direction of these sounds. The reeds were rough and cut his arms and face. Eventually, Donald stumbled onto a dry patch of land in the midst of the reed bed jungle. The first man he saw was Dr Grazier, who came forward to help with Mariani.

  Most of the survivors were already assembled in the clearing. Flames from the Standard Oil vessels lit the growing darkness. A derelict motor launch, abandoned by its Chinese crew, had been found. It was decided the worst of the wounded should be placed aboard and floated down river. The Panay’s crew knew of a hamlet some distance along the shore. Five more miles inland lay the walled town of Hohsien.

  ‘The Magistrate there should know we are coming,’ Dr Grazier informed Donald, bending over Mariani. ‘Johnson of the American Embassy has already gone on ahead to warn them. If the town has not already been attacked by the Japanese, we can get news to the world of what has happened. Hohsien has a hospital.’

  The sky was aflame with the light of the blazing ships on the further shore. Occasionally, a new explosion roared out of the bowels of the oil vessels, sending up fresh sheets of flame. Fragments of hot metal dropped out of the sky, hissing and smoking in the icy water. Evening was setting in and the December cold, lifting off the river, froze the thick skin of mud that caked them all. The motor launch now holding the worst casualties from the Panay, was silently tracked down river until the hamlet was reached. The village was no more than a few mud-walled houses and a well. The ragged population ran out to meet them, their broad, anxious faces lit by the flares they carried. Stretchers were improvised for the worst of the wounded from the doors of pig pens, and coolies engaged for the long walk to Hohsien.

  Mariani was by now delirious. The morphine had worn off and no more was to be had. Donald walked beside the makeshift stretcher carried by two emaciated Chinese. A blanket had been found to wrap about the Italian, who shivered violently. The trek to Hohsien was along the banks of a creek. Frost covered the short grass and crunched underfoot. The pain in his leg from the bullet scratch now caused Donald to limp. The sky hung above, secret, black and cavernous. Stars sparked like flints in its frozen depth. The Standard Oil’s inferno still lit the night for miles behind them in a ruddy artificial sunset. Once, an alarm was raised as two junks were sighted and everyone climbed down into the safety of the reeds again. Crouched in a tight ball, knees beneath his chin, it seemed suddenly to Donald that this position, taken so instinctively, was not only that of pre-birth but also of primitive burials. He stared up again into the impenetrable night. Mariani continued to jabber incoherently, tossing beneath his blanket on the strip of wood.

  ‘Addison,’ he whispered, trying unexpectedly to sit up. Donald put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Lie down. I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘I feel my skin has scales all over, like an alligator or a snake.’ His voice was suddenly strangely clear, as if more morphine had been administered.

  ‘It is the mud. We’re all covered in it,’ Donald replied.

  ‘I feel also a grime on my inside,’ Mariani whispered.

  ‘You’re wounded, you’ve a fever. Tomorrow you’ll feel better, after we get to Hohsien. There is a hospital there,’ Donald reassured. Mariani shook his head.

  ‘It is this war, all this horror and killing, these bands of men trained to exterminate each other. It is this talk about the enemy, as if they were a species different from ourselves. Men are persuaded so easily to act against their better selves. It is like training rats in a laboratory.’

  ‘It is the mud,’ Donald repeated, unwilling to hear more.

  Mariani shook his head. ‘I see it as the Devil. Yesterday I did not believe in such nonsense, but now I see the Devil everywhere. I close my eyes and I see monsters. They rise up before me and fill the sky. I assure you, I would prefer instead to see God at this time, but he refuses to come near me. I cannot blame him.’

  ‘You are hallucinating,’ Donald replied. Mariani’s delirium seemed to rise again. He began to pant, pushing words through his lips with difficulty.

  ‘Evil contaminates, creeps into us unawares, cell by cell, getting us used to its inhumanities, until we are caught and can look the monstrous in the face. Until, like myself, I can turn my camera upon anything without discomfort. Until I can be selective about my corpses, demanding evidence of unusual gore or torture before I waste my film upon it. All this is not to shock the world, to warn it of man’s capacity for barbarity. If this was so then I might be forgiven. It is the seeking merely of perfection in my work. All my life with my camera I have trailed death. If there is no war, then death by violence or the bizarre; New York murders, Mafioso killings. Mariani, he is always the first to be there. Now, sometimes, the Mafioso, they call me. They tell me where to find some new, important body. They want me to be the one to photograph it. They know I am the best. And I am proud of this morbid reputation. I see all this too late.’

  ‘You are talking nonsense. Don’t exhaust yourself like this.’ Donald patted Mariani’s arm.

  ‘But I may not have much time. Maybe this next minute, I close my eyes and pwuff, I am dead. And I understand as yet nothing of my life. It now looks like a piece of knitting unravelling before me. All this pride in my work I now know is only a way for the evil trapped in me to find its way out. The worst thing about the Devil is that he seems so ordinary, so plausible a fellow. His schemes and reasoning are so persuasive. He makes upright men seem like liars.’

  ‘We all have a stage manager hidden within us, policing our actions, pulling our strings until we dance like marionettes,’ Donald gave a short laugh.

  ‘We live with illusion, deluding ourselves about who we are or what we are. I am no better than those Japanese out there who kill and bayonet. And as they kill what do you think they feel? Why, only that they are doing a good day’s work for their Emperor. Are they not deluded creatures? I thought I was a passive observer, recording for the world. I
too am deluded. Why do I choose to observe only atrocity and death?’ Mariani grabbed Donald’s sleeve and held it fast, an expression of terror on his face.

  Donald searched for words to reassure the Italian. ‘When I was a child I used to wait for those moments I could see my shadow following me in the sun. When I couldn’t see it, I imagined it tucked away inside me, a twin self into which was stuffed all the dark emotions I could never show the world: my hate for my father and every other despicable thought. That way I could show a clean face to the world, free of my real feelings. Sometimes, I would think of killing my father, and it was always my shadow that did the deed. I used to feel sorry for my shadow, weighed down with all these heavy feelings. I wished I could let it out more often into the sun. I felt the more it could show itself the lighter its burden might become; the less it would have to hide. I remember running outside whenever I saw the sun, to let the poor thing out of myself.’ Donald laughed. Until now he had forgotten that childhood relationship with his shadow. He saw it suddenly in a new perspective.

  Mariani gritted his teeth and groaned. ‘Just hang on,’ Donald urged. ‘I can see Hohsien ahead.’ Lights flickered in the distance.

  The Italian shook his head. ‘If I had the time, all my photographs now would be for a new purpose. I am famous only as a sensationalist, a corpse eater. Maybe I could change this, but now it is too late.’

  ‘Stop talking,’ Donald ordered. Mariani lay back with a sob.

  ‘See, the gates of the town are opening for us. They’ll patch you up as good as new.’ Donald looked down at Mariani’s ashen face.

  Hohsien had been attacked three times by Japanese bombers. The remains of the hospital were perched on a hill, the debris of bombing raids littering its interior. Its doctors had fled to cramped but safer premises. The wounded were now carried to the hospital’s ruined rooms. Dr Grazier inspected the battered operating theatre and found it usable. Soon medicines and instruments were brought up from the town.

  ‘I can’t promise a thing,’ Dr Grazier said, looking down at Mariani. His voice was grim with exhaustion. He had operated without a break for several hours. Already the dawn was breaking. Mariani had lain semiconscious from the time they entered Hohsien, his breath faint.

  ‘Go back into town. Get some rest, I’ll do what I can for him here,’ the doctor advised. Donald shook his head and sat down on the floor outside the operating theatre.

  The door had been blasted out in an air-raid and a sheet hung across the entrance. Below it Donald could see Dr Grazier’s legs and those of the nurses he had found in the town, clustered about the operating table. He heard the clink of instruments, and wondered at Dr Grazier’s methods of sterilisation in these primitive conditions. A ripe smell of putrefaction overcame him. The world seemed steeped in this smell. The need to shut his eyes seemed to obliterate every other sensation. He lay down against the wall, pillowing his head on an arm. Dried mud from his shoes crumbled about his feet and had left a filthy trail behind him down the corridor. Perhaps the trail of his own life, like that of a slug, might appear like this to whatever God looked down upon them.

  He awoke to the blood-splattered front of the doctor. He wondered first if the blood was Mariani’s or the wounded man’s before him, or a mixture of everyone’s pain. The doctor shook his head. ‘He went before I finished. There was nothing we could do.’

  Donald nodded and with an effort stood up. He walked back down the corridor, kicking aside the fragments of mud that had earlier fallen from his caked feet. Outside, he sat on the steps and watched the winter morning creep over the battered, sleeping town and thought about Mariani. It was strange to feel tied to a man he barely knew. This time the day before, Mariani was still snapping corpses. Come for a beer. Why do you spend so much time at the rail? He heard the Italian’s voice again, urging him out of reverie. Before this war is finished, I may also die. Mariani had chuckled, not expecting the event so immediately. Who could say what was ahead or how soon? The unfinished quality of Mariani’s going was what disturbed Donald most. Old men had had their chances, and seemed less deserving of sympathy at death than Mariani in the prime of life.

  The sun rose slowly, staining the sky with pink light. In the distance the Yangtze was caught by the day. He saw then that the pink glow in the sky came not from the dawn but from the remains of the Standard Oil vessels, smouldering still at their moorings. The horror of the night came upon him again. Why was he whole and Mariani dead? Had fate kept him for a worse ordeal? He thought again of the strange conversation with the dying man. Below, in the town, he watched a child lead a water buffalo to a pond. A man collected barrels of night soil placed outside each house. Each did what they had always done to tranquillise the terror.

  Donald stood up. The steps fell away before him. A bush of winter jasmine cascaded over a wall, the wind blowing petals onto the huddled roofs below. The yellow tiles of a temple gleamed in the morning. He thought again of the conversation with Mariani and of that childhood relationship with his shadow. He knew nothing of that sad, angry man he kept hidden in himself. Yet, the words spoken the night before, coming from he knew not where, had given it life once more. It swelled within him again. He could not die like Mariani, before his time, knowing nothing of this other man.

  Hohsien was not safe. The Panay survivors voted to push on inland, carrying their wounded with them once more. They would journey in open junks twenty miles along canals to Hanshan, outside the area of hostilities. From there they might get to Shanghai.

  The decision came to Donald suddenly. He must return to Nanking, into the face of aggression, into the evil itself. A certainty filled him. Beyond the darkness, if only he could stay the path, might lie wholeness of some unknown kind.

  He made his way down the steps, pitted by blasts and gunfire. Slowly the town rose up about him, its pathetic reality forcing away the brave abstract thought that came upon mountaintops. Fear grew in him again.

  12

  The Rape Begins

  International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone

  5 Ninghai Road

  Nanking

  14th December 1937

  Mr Kenjiro Nozaki

  Cultural Attaché to the Japanese Embassy

  Nanking

  Dear Sir

  We petition you in the name of humanity that the following steps be taken for the welfare of 200,000 civilians in Nanking.

  1. That the burning of large sections of the city be stopped and what remains of the city be spared from either reckless or systematic burning.

  2. That the disorderly conduct of Japanese troops in the city, that has caused so much suffering to the civilian population, be stopped immediately.

  3. In view of the fact that the looting and burning have brought the business life of the city to a standstill and consequently reduced the whole civilian population to one vast refuge camp, and in view of the fact that the International Committee of the Safety Zone do not have unlimited supplies of food to feed these 200,000 people, we most earnestly beg you to take immediate steps to restore normal conditions to civilian life in order that the fuel and food supply of the city may be replenished.

  We plead for the bare essentials of normal life: housing, security, food.

  Most respectfully submitted

  The International Committee for Nanking Safety Zone

  International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone

  5 Ninghai Road

  Nanking

  17th December 1937

  Mr Kenjiro Nozaki

  Cultural Attaché to the Japanese Embassy

  Nanking

  Dear Sir

  We are sorry to trouble you again but the sufferings and needs of the 200,000 civilians, for whom we are trying to care, make it urgent that we try to secure action from your military authorities to stop the present disorder of Japanese soldiers wandering through the Safety Zone.

  There is no space here to go into the cases that are pouring in faster than we can
type them out. But last night Mr Norris of our Committee went to the University of Nanking dormitories to sleep, in order to protect the one thousand women who fled there yesterday because of attacks in their homes. He found none of your gendarmerie on guard there as requested, for the protection of the women in our Zone from your soldiers.

  At 8 p.m. Mr Strang and Mr Reeves took Rev. Moeran to Ginling Women’s College, next to your Embassy, to sleep in a house near the gate, as one of us men has been doing each night, in order to protect the three thousand women and children who are there in one of the buildings. They were roughly seized by a searching squad of soldiers and detained for over an hour. Miss Nadya Komosky and Dr Janet Allen, who were in charge of Ginling College, were lined up at the gate and kept there in the cold and roughly pushed about. The officer insisted there were Chinese soldiers in the compound and he wanted to find them and shoot them. Finally we were allowed to go home, but Rev. Moeran was not allowed to stay, so we do not know what exactly happened after we left. We heard only that there were many vicious rapes by gangs of your soldiers, and many more women were taken away.

  With the panic that has been created amongst the women, from terrorisation and rape by your soldiers, growing numbers are flocking to our camps, leaving more and more men alone. The public institutional buildings that originally were listed to accommodate 35,000 must now accommodate 50,000. Already two more public buildings, the Ministry of Justice and the Supreme Court, have been emptied of men to accommodate the growing number of terrified women. Each night brings more and more to us.

  If the panic continues not only will our housing problem become more serious but also the food problem, and the question of finding workers will also increase. This morning one of your Embassy staff, Mr Fukutake was at our office asking for Chinese workers for the electric light plant. We had to reply that we could not even get our own workers out to do anything. We are only able to keep rice and coal supplied to the large concentrations of people by Western members of our Committee and staff driving trucks of rice and coal. Our Chinese food Commissioner has not dared leave his house for two days. The second Chinese man in our Housing Commission had to see two women of his family raped last night at supper time by Japanese soldiers. Our Associate Food Commissioner, Mr Havers (a Theological Professor) has had to convey trucks with rice, and leave the 2,500 families in his Nanking Theological Seminary to look out for themselves. Yesterday in broad daylight, several women at the Seminary were raped shamelessly and publicly by your soldiers in the middle of a large room filled by men, women and children.