by Meira Chand
At one point on the journey home Kenjiro found himself near the moat of the Imperial Palace, ringed by the flames of the city. A hysterical mob fought to jump to safety in the water. The crowd surged against police lines. A man clambered onto a fallen tree and shouted, ‘Remember Russia!’ Kenjiro hurried on.
Later he heard about the man, an anarchist named Osugi. He was tracked down by the secret police and arrested. Taken with him was his wife and seven-year-old nephew, all later murdered in their cells. After this the secret police, anxious for a scapegoat, put about a rumour that the catfish had turned for exceptional reasons. Koreans and Socialists had offended the Sun Goddess. It was announced they took advantage of the disaster by setting fires and looting shops. The secret police, aided by vigilantes of the Military Sports Club and thugs of the Black Dragon Society, hunted down individuals with Socialist leanings and Orientals who spoke Japanese with an accent. Four thousand Koreans from the slums were given mock trials or linguistic tests and beheaded in the street. One such man had died before Kenjiro. Even now he could not forget.
He heard again the fellow’s blubbering and saw the sudden spurt of blood. The man had looked like a rickshaw puller. His boney rib cage was painfully visible on his half-naked torso, but his calves were developed, veins knotted like blue rope. A soldier berated him in the street as a crowd of silent people watched. The armed man roared and strutted, power swilling through him. His sword moved like a tail at his side. Then it streaked with a flash through the air, taking Kenjiro unawares. One moment the rickshaw man jigged about yelling, the next blood fountained from a stump. In the dust his head rolled and grimaced, words stopped upon its tongue. It fell from his body with a thud, like a turnip from a table. The soldier wiped his sword on a paper and sheathed it smartly again. At Kenjiro’s feet blood spilt as if from an uncorked bottle out of the headless body. The crowd cringed and backed away.
Kenjiro had stared in disbelief at the two parts before him that had once made a man. All he absurdly registered was that they could not be rejoined. Sensation, he found, only followed an event. It took many hours for emotion to surface. His thoughts awoke later as the shock leaked out. For days, if he shut his eyes, he saw again that spurt of blood and the collapsing body. If he turned his head, the hiss of the sword, breaking space, stopping time, travelled again by his ear. And if all these memories were obliterated one image he knew would stay forever. More than death or its violence, the executioner’s eyes remained with him. Even now he remembered the soldier cleaning his sword, expression absent from his face. Each time the same sick feeling filled Kenjiro. Killing was as nothing.
He willed the long ago memory away and turned to the window of his office. Almost immediately, the image of the Russian woman was before him again.
13
Caught in the Storm
Flora thought of her father each night. In the past he had not materialised with regularity. Now he seemed constantly beside her. She told Lily tales of his bravery, heard from Martha, and also the exploits of Dr Keswick, their grandfather. China was a country where it was necessary to nurture the mettle in one’s character. The things their mother had endured sounded like pure fiction.
‘We’re being tested,’ Flora decided, prodding Lily’s spine as they lay side by side on Flora’s bed. ‘When this war is finished we too will have tales to tell.’
Lily lowered her book and looked over her shoulder. ‘I already have tales to tell. I was put out to die, don’t forget. I just missed being eaten by dogs.’
‘Why don’t you stop dwelling on that?’ Flora frowned. Whenever she could now Lily brought up the subject.
Lily pouted and returned to her book, filled with anger at Flora. There were things about herself, Lily saw now, that she had completely misjudged. For the first time she perceived the originality of her jigsaw self. Sandwiched between Flora and Martha she had suffered from a smallness of bones, a narrowness of eyes, the way people looked at her, especially at school. She realised now, she was a mirror to no one. This time last year she detested herself. Now everything seemed changed.
‘I know this war means nothing to you. But it’s not like that for me. I am Chinese. This is my country.’ Lily slammed shut her book and turned on her back.
‘For goodness’ sakes, I was born here, so was Mama. This is our country too. Why are you making yourself out to be different? Your name is also Clayton.’ Flora sighed in exasperation.
Lily no longer slept in her own bed, but without a word had moved into Flora’s. To voice fear was to invite it into the room and allow it to order all movement. Nothing was said between them. No reason was given for the sudden nightly telling of Flora’s brave tales. Lily listened in silence; even when the culprits were Chinese she did not interrupt. Afterwards, in the dark, they listened to sounds of the city’s terror before they fell asleep. Lily’s hand moved into Flora’s. She clung to her when dreams became strident. Flora, waking in solitary panic, lay rigid until her heart stopped pumplng, making no sound or movement.
They had not been allowed beyond the hospital compound since the fall of the city. It was enough to see the bandaged, bleeding bodies in the hospital and the hysterical women, to imagine what went on. Within this enclosure Flora was pushed into another world. Within herself also some line had been crossed. A strange inner landscape stretched bleakly before her. This was adult land, upon which men and women carved pieces for themselves, bounded by deceit. She had not known what it was men did to women to produce a child. Now, day after day, there were whispers amongst the nurses of things that made her sick. She had learned the word rape, and it chilled her. Terror fizzled in the air.
From the windows of the hospital each day she watched the demolition of the city. The banks of green that once clouded Nanking had vanished. Trees stood charred by bombs or felled by soldiers for firewood. Why could they not have gone away before it all began? People were shocked to hear they were staying and begged to be allowed to take them to Shanghai, Hankow, Chungking or wherever it was they fled. Martha stood firm and shook her head.
‘Should we not go?’ Flora whispered once, secretly crossing her fingers for her mother to agree.
‘Are you afraid?’ Martha asked. ‘The worst is almost over. Once the occupation begins everything will quieten down. I faced dangers as a child that far exceeded this. We are foreigners, not part of this war. We have little to fear from the Japanese.’
She did not speak coldly but with concern. Flora was ashamed to fear a war through which it appeared they walked inviolable. There was also an intensity in her mother’s eyes that she knew too well. No words were needed to explain the fear Martha had of separation. It had followed Flora through her childhood. She knew how her father had died, and understood she must give no more pain to her mother. The rules were firm between them.
Only Lily was free of this responsibility, being a daughter of circumstance, not of blood. Lily, Flora realised now, must always have felt outside the core of Martha’s love. Flora remembered the sense of triumph she had often felt over Lily as a child, and of which she was now ashamed. Like their mother, Lily had suffered enough. She too must have no more pain. A sudden weariness overwhelmed Flora. It was exhausting to stand forever between these two, absorbing sorrow for them.
Since the occupation began Lily and Flora saw less than ever of Martha. The old Amah slept in their room each night, as she had when they were small. Martha hurried in distractedly for meals, between endless operations. Whatever the sights in the hospital, she remained calm and brisk. So used was Martha to the results of strife, to mangled, pain-filled bodies, that she minimised the effect such images might have upon her daughters. She demanded a war effort that shirked no task. They were ordered to work under Nadya, and each night reported to Martha on the hours of rolling bandages, stacking or changing babies’ nappies, taking temperatures, comforting the sick. Flora remembered a child who had died that day, its belly ripped open by a bayonet. Who could do such a thing, she wondere
d? Each day threw her further into that dark terrain of terror she had so abruptly entered.
Martha glanced out of the window of the operating theatre. Across the compound the lights were out in Flora’s room. She had not expected the occupation to be like this. An orderly transition of power was what everyone had expected. She should not have let the girls stay in Nanking. Why had she not sent them away? She returned her attention to the man stretched out on the operating table. It was another of the interminable cases of bayonet wounds. She inserted thread into the needle and nodded to the anaesthetist, Dr Chen. There was the faint hum of the generator, pushing light into the room. That morning Japanese soldiers had tried to steal the ambulance. The rubber bladder of oxygen inflated and deflated at the end of the table.
The noise of breaking glass and distant shouting came suddenly. She looked up and knew she had been waiting for this moment. Other hospitals in Nanking had already been entered and terrorised. Even as she stitched up the flesh of the man before her, she listened to the wild sounds. They seemed sickeningly familiar, echoing back over the years. She remembered again the Boxer Uprising, and the death of her two brothers. Each part of her life seemed hinged together by the same chilling chorus of brutality.
About her the nurses shifted nervously and murmured amongst themselves. The noise continued, growing nearer. Martha did not move but continued to suture the unconscious man on the table. The wound was cruel about his neck, severing vital muscle. She had been told he was taken by the Japanese from the Safety Zone to carry ammunition to Hsiakwan with a band of other men. When they deposited their loads, they were bayoneted. He survived and dragged himself to a hospital. Many cases with such tales to tell were arriving now, as were great numbers of maimed women.
She motioned for a swab. The heavy scuffle of boots, and the screams of nurses were almost upon them. Martha knotted the thread upon the wound, pulling the flesh together. Some junior staff had already fled the theatre. Martha continued to sew. There were further sounds of smashing windows. She knotted the last thread and turned to Dr Chen to indicate she was finished. Then she scrubbed her hands unhurriedly before marching into the corridor. No one must know how she trembled. Until this moment she had held everything in place. Even now, to her medical staff, she appeared to stride forward, unafraid. She stood outside the operating theatre, feet planted apart to steady herself.
A mass of men swelled the corridor. A river of khaki bilge seemed to roll towards her. She saw faces now, and reddened cheeks, heard the guffaw of lewd laughter. She saw their eyes were glazed, skating on power, touched only by dark instinct.
‘This is a hospital. Remove yourselves,’ Martha shouted.
Their faces pushed closer. The rough cloth of their uniforms touched her skin. Her heart pumped in her chest. A soldier took hold of her arm and ripped her watch from her wrist. The Chinese staff were cut off against the wall. Someone pulled at the chain around her neck, drawing it up, warm from her breasts. She saw fingers close about her locket with Bill’s photograph. Bill.
Fury spat from her in such a wave they stopped their drunken caterwauling. Their eyes focused for a moment. For the first time it seemed they saw she was not Chinese. For the first time she saw they were not a sea, but only six or eight young men. They began to back away.
‘Your mothers would be ashamed of you,’ Martha yelled. Suddenly now there was Nadya behind her. Confronted by a second foreign woman, the men appeared confused. They looked down the corridor for a way out.
‘They’re everywhere,’ Nadya announced. ‘All the staff have been robbed. And they’ve taken some nurses.’
‘Go to Lily. For God’s sake, go to Lily,’ Martha cried. Nadya ran down the back stairs.
Martha turned again to the soldiers, eyes blazing. ‘I have seen the desperation of starving peasants, settling on towns like locusts to devour and loot, to kill and ransom, to keep alive their own families. I have seen the frenzy of the Boxers who came to murder me, like the children you kill and rape. I saw the hate in their eyes for us foreigners. And I could understand that, insinuating ourselves into their country, why should they not wish to kill us? But what I see in your eyes is only drunken arrogance, the mindlessness of power. Get out of my hospital. Get out.’ They backed away before her down the corridor, her anger communicating itself above incomprehensible words. She followed them down the stairs, anger palpitating in her chest, and slammed the door behind them.
There must be other soldiers still about in the hospital, and those nurses already dragged from the building might never return. Her thoughts returned to Lily and then to those nurses who must still be upstairs in the dormitory. The Chinese staff had vanished. Only Dr Chen followed her as she climbed the stairs. At last she reached the top floor of the hospital, expecting every shadow to release a khaki figure. The door of the dormitory was open. No lights were on in the corridor, but the moon reflected in the glass of pictures upon the wall. There were sounds, like geese when a wolf prowls near, escaping the room ahead. She knew what she would find.
One man held the gun, swinging it back and forth before his body in impatience. In the half-light the other two men appeared like crooked-legged satyrs, half-dressed above and naked below. Their testicles hung like dried fruit. It was clear they had already begun their devilry. The women huddled together before the swinging gun. Martha stepped into the room, her anger destroying all fear. The man with the gun looked at her aghast, too surprised to react. She wrenched the weapon from him. He stepped forward in fury, but she levelled it at his head and, muttering curses, he backed away. Dr Chen snapped on the light, breaking the spell of the gun.
‘Get out,’ Martha directed the women. The half-naked men turned, angry as lions denied their meat, as the women scattered before them. They pulled on their breeches. For the first time Martha realised the power she held, quite literally, in her foreign-made bones. She saw the men out of the hospital, pushing them forward with their own gun.
Glass splintered beneath her feet, and the moon glowed icily through smashed windows. She leaned against a wall to catch her breath; she must get Lily. She began to run again. At last she reached the door of the house and found it already open. Her heart lurched in new terror.
‘The girls are all right,’ said Nadya, appearing suddenly, taking her by the arm. ‘Nobody came.’
Martha pushed her aside and ran up the stairs to Flora and Lily’s room. They were asleep, unaware of what had happened in the hospital. In the corner, on her mattress, the old Amah stirred.
‘Nobody came?’ Martha shook Flora awake.
Even as she stared into the sleepy faces of her daughters, Martha remembered that time in the loft during the Boxer Uprising. She remembered her father’s prayers and her life welled up in her throat.
‘Who would come, Mama?’ Flora asked, sitting up, terrified at the distraught appearance of her mother.
‘What has happened to you?’ Lily pouted. ‘We can look after ourselves.’ It frightened her to see her mother like this, eyes ablaze, hair disturbed, coolness cracked open like a walnut, to show its strange inside.
‘Look after yourselves? What are you saying? Do you know what is happening in this town? No woman is safe.’ New frenzy glowed in Martha’s face.
‘Calm down. They’re all right. You are frightening them.’ Nadya attempted to pull Martha away from the bed.
‘Why should we not be safe?’ Lily was insistent, in spite of the pinch Flora landed on her wrist.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ Martha hissed, her face thin and white, the hair falling from her bun, pins scattering the floor. She took Lily’s arm and pushed her face close, fear and rage locked into her bones. ‘Because you are Chinese.’
‘My name is Clayton,’ Lily said, drawing back in the bed. ‘I am American, not Chinese.’ There was no movement in her face.
‘Mother!’ Flora looked in horror at them both.
Suddenly Martha let go of Lily and sank down on the floor beside the bed. She began to
sob uncontrollably. Her hair spilt down her back.
‘Soldiers came into the hospital. They have done much damage. She was afraid they might have come here too, and harmed you.’ Nadya stepped forward. ‘It is all over now. It has upset her. Nothing more.’ She spoke to calm the children, bending to pick up the scattered hairpins, handing them to Martha as she helped her up. Standing again beside the bed, Martha now turned upon Flora.
‘Keep near Lily. Don’t let her out of your sight. Do you hear?’ Her voice was unrecognisable. Flora nodded, pushing back against the pillows to distance herself. Nothing yet had been as bad as this fractured vision of her mother.
Suddenly it seemed finished. Martha smoothed down her skirt. She rewound her hair and secured it anew with the hairpins. ‘Stay here. I am going back to the hospital to look over the damage. Try and get to sleep.’ Martha turned abruptly. Her back straightened, her face closed, her voice returned to its familiar expression. She walked unsteadily from the room. Lily and Flora observed her in silence.
Lily spoke first, her fear spilling into anger. ‘What does she mean, calling me Chinese when she has always told me I’m an American, a Clayton?’
‘A few hours ago you were disowning all Claytons. She means no Chinese-looking person is safe,’ Flora replied.
The fear was now a dense mass in Flora’s body. It was not just the sight of her mother’s panic. It was all to do with that one word she could not even speak: rape. Nothing had the power to chill her more than that silent word. Was this word at the bottom of her mother’s panic? Was that the damage in the hospital? A few soldiers and some broken glass would not drive her mother insane.
‘Are the nurses all right?’ she enquired of Nadya while Lily’s attention was diverted.
Nadya shook her head. Truth was best, Flora was no child. The communication passed between them unseen by Lily. ‘I’ll get you both some hot milk,’ Nadya said.
