A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  Darkness encompassed everything. Kenjiro had taken the risk of bringing a car, careful nobody saw him. He was unsure if any part of the plan would work. How would Teng find him in the dark? He dare not put on the headlights. Every once in a while he flicked on the pilot lights as a signal to Teng. The moon slipped in and out of cloud. It was impossible to tell how long he must wait. Or if Teng could even escape at all. Maybe he would be too weak to saw through the bars, or to haul himself out.

  Kenjiro shivered in the dark. He was filled with reckless energy. Every part of him seemed exposed to hazard. His life could end at any moment. The balance of everything seemed suddenly changed. With the decision to help Teng he need now only obey those inner forces propelling him, without the fettering of obligation. Such freedom left him feeling unbalanced. He had stepped beyond every rule. He thought of the Russian woman but instead Jacqueline’s face came into his mind.

  Against the car windows the night pressed blackly. Far away across the field beyond the car, the lights of Military Headquarters blazed out, showing Kenjiro the faint outline of an irrigation trench and the rubble of bombed huts. The cold numbed his feet and fingers. He leaned back in the icy leather seat, and fought for a moment against fatigue before closing his eyes.

  He awoke with a start and realised some time had passed. Teng might have failed to find him in the dark. He flashed on the pilot lights again. Within a few minutes there was a scrabbling at the window. He opened the door and Teng climbed in.

  ‘I knew it would be you who was here,’ Teng sank back on the seat, exhausted. Kenjiro started the car and drove forward.

  ‘You must get across the river,’ he urged. ‘I have packed a bag of clothes and food. I will get you to the wall. There is a place where it has been badly destroyed, some distance from the River Gate. It is away from the centre of things. I don’t think many soldiers will be about.’

  ‘The bars were thin. The place was not built as a cell. It won’t take them long to know I’m gone. They wanted me to talk about you. But I told them nothing. Nothing,’ Teng explained.

  Soon they approached the wall. Kenjiro slowed down and drove without headlights. The moon broke free of the clouds and showed them the great shadow of the fortifications, breached deeply in places.

  ‘You can get through there and then down to the river. After that it’s up to you. I can’t do any more. If there are soldiers, I’ll distract them long enough for you to slip through. Be careful.’

  ‘Be careful yourself, my friend. And thank you. When this war is over, I’ll look for you.’ Teng slipped silently from the car.

  Kenjiro turned on the headlights and drove forward. A handful of soldiers slept near the wall. Others patrolled, pacing up and down. Kenjiro pulled over to the side of the road. They had only to turn to see Teng.

  ‘Have you seen anyone here trying to escape?’ he called out. They lowered their guns immediately hearing their own language.

  He got out of the car, and the soldiers came towards him. For some moments he held them in conversation, until he saw Teng’s shadowy form climb stealthily over the rubble and disappear. Then Kenjiro returned to his car and drove briskly away. He was filled with elation.

  It was not yet so late. If he stopped by the hospital it would arouse no suspicion. He went there often enough to meet members of the International Committee. He wanted to tell her. The recklessness in him overpowered all other feelings.

  Nadya opened the door herself. He had not expected to see her so suddenly before him.

  ‘He is safe,’ Kenjiro whispered.

  ‘How? Where is he?’ she insisted.

  ‘I cannot say anything, but he is safe.’ He turned back towards the door.

  ‘And you?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. You and I, we must wait and see.’

  You and I. He had said the words unintentionally but they hung in the air between them. She stared up at him, not showing anything in her expression. At last he let himself out the door.

  16

  The River Gate

  Besides Donald, there were still two other journalists left in Nanking. When the remaining newsmen boarded the Panay, Art Morton and Rod Smythe had stayed in the town. Donald was as anxious to get rid of them as they were now to leave.

  ‘It was foolish to even think we could get to Shanghai by road. We’re going now on a Japanese ship.’ Smythe tilted his hat to the back of his head and lit another cigarette.

  ‘You were damn lucky to get off the Panay,’ Morton told Donald from where he sat in a rattan chair, his shoulders hunched stiffly. Martha’s sitting room where they now sat seemed removed from reality outside. Morton gazed at the leafy plants banked in glazed pots before a window. Beside him Smythe stubbed out a cigarette.

  Donald suggested a beer. He knew Morton wanted him to talk about the Panay. The thought of it made him tired. And he had no intention either of giving Smythe or Morton flesh for the bones of their next reports.

  ‘After all the efforts of the Japanese to get us aboard the Panay, it’s ironical that the ship was bombed while we were safe in Nanking. God, how I want to leave this town. I’ve seen enough. A Japanese ship has been sent from Shanghai with messages of apology for the Panay’s loss, and to evacuate the last foreigners,’ Morton informed them. ‘We’re going back to Shanghai aboard it.’

  ‘The ship sails this afternoon.’ Smythe raised an eyebrow in query to Donald. ‘Coming with us? Your report will cause a sensation. Eyewitness Account of Panay Bombing. You’ll be a bloody hero again.’ Donald shook his head, and gazed at the bottom of his empty beer glass.

  ‘Don’t know why you won’t go. Nothing more can happen here,’ Morton said.

  ‘Don’t know myself,’ smiled Donald.

  He always lived by instinct, obeying those currents twisting him like a compass in each new direction. It was enough that he felt he should stay. Since losing the story of the Communists to Edgar Snow, he intended to lose nothing more. This war was for his convenience. It had come to him, unasked. He got out of the chair and went to find another beer. He returned to the room and held a bottle up to Smythe, who declined.

  ‘Find it difficult to eat or drink with all these things happening about me. The old ulcer is playing up.’ Smythe looked at Donald with some disapproval.

  ‘There’s great disappointment on the part of the Japanese that the International Committee of the Safety Zone are not rushing to get on the ship,’ Donald announced as he threw back the beer, wiping the foam from his lips on his hand. The Japanese wanted no observers. Whatever it was they did not want observed, thought Donald, he was here to report in detail. He said nothing to Smythe or Morton that might whet their appetite to stay.

  ‘I’ll drive you down to the ship,’ he offered.

  ‘This is not a Sunday afternoon outing, you know,’ Smythe retorted, annoyed by the flippancy of Donald’s tone.

  ‘I came off the Panay, don’t forget,’ Donald replied, without looking up from his beer.

  It was not as Smythe thought. Donald contemplated the drive to the River Gate with dread. He had heard it was still impassable. He had offered because there was nobody else, and, he realised now, to test himself. He wished he could stop his self-flagellation. What did it matter how much he could face? What did it matter if Morton or Smythe walked down to the river?

  ‘We’ll get our bags then.’ Smythe threw him a strange look.

  Within an hour they set off in Martha’s old Austin. It was the first time Donald had been beyond the hospital compound since his return to Nanking, his first look at the town since the occupation. In places the devastation was great. Donald remembered driving this road before, between soaring masonry, or near Western residences open to view, and enigmatic walled Chinese enclaves. He remembered a patch of long grass blown sideways in the wind. Washing lines. A window-box of petunia. The long pink tongue of a water buffalo lowering its head to drink and the bowling wheels of rickshaws. Now, there was nothing but this crumbled tow
n locked into winter and grief. Streets were bare. People huddled in their homes, heads down before the wind of terror. Beyond the centre of town direction became uncertain; many of the old landmarks had been destroyed and vanished. Life was uncharted and unchartable.

  And he too, since the Panay, was changed. He could look at corpses now. He did not jump at gunshot. Nothing seemed to touch him. He had found a way to survive. Except for the dreams. These still came at him aggressively. Either he died, blasted apart by grenades or was eaten by vicious creatures. Or he fell into madness, swirling down chutes like sewage pipes into cells of bedlam. Each night he tried to put off sleeping, dreading his entry into this world the moment he shut his eyes.

  There had been a brief burst of sun in the morning but now the clouds returned. A breeze had got up and cut about his neck. He took the usual route to the River Gate, along wide boulevards, which had once been shaded by a canopy of foliage. Now the road was denuded, the trees felled by the army for fuel. They looked at the streaked and shrapnel-pitted surfaces of Chiang Kai-shek’s great buildings. Most of these municipal structures still stood.

  ‘Can’t blame the Japanese for that one,’ Morton said as they passed the gutted Ministry of Communications, Nanking’s most ornate building. ‘Retreating Chinese troops set it on fire. It was filled with munitions. Those explosions set up such a racket it added to the panic at the River Gate. The Chinese thought the Japanese had already entered the city and were firing at them. Bloody well hope that Red Swastika Society have cleared the bodies at the gate. Did you come back into Nanking by the River Gate, Addison? How did they let you in?’

  ‘Climbed the wall.’ Donald’s tone shut off their further questions. He saw Smythe and Morton exchange a glance.

  A sudden cold sweat broke out on his brow. Donald did not want more probing. He had survived. Mariani’s body, along with all the other bodies, must by now be in Shanghai, their coffins carried down the Yangtze on ships with flags at half-mast. Already there were holes in his memory. He recalled as if in a dream the nights spent on wet grass, exposed and cold, the pocketful of cooked rice, eked out for two days, mouthful by mouthful, sour and mixed with weevils. He had survived on trapped rainwater wherever he found it. Fear had flattened him to the earth each time a plane flew overhead. He remembered only running. Running. Always beside the river. Twice he drank from that foul water but as he swallowed the memory of half-submerged bodies rose. Fever had gripped him, thumping in his head. The dark mounds of moving crows or the heaving backs of dogs showed him where bodies lay unburied. Once he stumbled on a rotted head. Above him was always the arch of the sky. Endless and unconcerned. There were also things he could not remember. Without memory he was safe.

  Donald drove on. As they drew near the Ministry of War they were flagged down. Trucks blocked the middle of the road. A soldier pointed a bayonet at them. The strap of his helmet cut into his chin, the metal dented on one side. He stared at them with puffy, bloodshot eyes, shouting incomprehensibly. It was clear they were not to continue.

  ‘Back. Back.’ He yelled suddenly in English, as if remembering a schoolroom phrase. ‘Here no.’

  ‘Why?’ Donald asked smoothly.

  ‘Don’t annoy him, Addison.’ There was fear in Morton’s voice. He jumped visibly at the sudden crack of guns a short distance away.

  ‘Get out of here, Addison,’ Smythe hissed.

  The shots grew into a deafening crescendo. They burst like a long tail of firecrackers at Chinese New Year. On and on. Beyond the trees they could see an army of Chinese prisoners, crushed body to body in the Ministry compound. They were trussed, hands behind backs, in batches of ten or twenty. They were shot in groups, each line falling like skittles upon the line before.

  ‘They’re shooting the poor bastards like a herd of swine,’ Morton’s voice cracked. He twisted to look from the window. Donald backed the car, turning with a screech of brakes.

  ‘Slowly, Addison, no need for panic. We don’t want to overturn.’ Smythe sounded breathless. Behind them was a sudden silence. Then the firecracker noise began again. In the car nobody spoke.

  ‘I know some back roads to the River Gate,’ Donald said at last.

  Morton and Smythe sat in silence as Donald drove on. As they approached the river the stench that hung in a permanent miasma over the city grew even stronger.

  ‘Tie a handkerchief over your nose,’ Donald said, pulling one from his pocket. He tried not to breathe.

  They were stopped again, a considerable distance before the River Gate but could see little except the walls ahead. Again the soldier spoke no English and waved his bayonet. He wore a muslin surgical mask.

  ‘H.I.J.M.S. Seta. Seta,’ yelled Smythe, pointing wildly towards the river.

  The man went away to talk to others who also wore white masks. The great wall towered grimly in the distance, its shadow darkening the road. A pale winter sun glinted through the arches of the River Gate. Eventually the soldier returned to the car and they were allowed to pass. They jolted forward and turned a bend. Behind him Donald heard Morton gasp as he swerved to avoid the wreck of a tank. For a moment the car came to halt and they stared at the scene before them.

  It was as if they had stumbled suddenly into an immense metal scrapyard through which an alley had been cleared towards the River Gate. The carcasses of trucks, cars and tanks, burned to their iron bones, stood about overturned or piled one upon another. They resembled, thought Donald, the skeletons of mammoths who had died upon their feet.

  It took some seconds to realise that amongst the twisted mounds of metal was debris of another kind. The dead were everywhere. An army had died at this gate. Some bodies were roasted to blackened sticks. Some had been layered up by the sides of the road like stiff brushwood, limbs protruding awkwardly. Other corpses crouched upright, or seemed to kneel in supplication, while yet others writhed in agony. Now, it appeared they had stumbled into a diabolical stonecutters’ yard, with figures tossed in careless mounds before the gates. It was a compost heap of rotting human waste, forked up in piles and covered by straw matting. They drew shallow breaths, as if afraid the thick and rotted air would contaminate the living fibre of their bodies.

  Donald saw then that they drove on a road of straw, uneven, and ascending like a springy ramp between the arches of the gate. Beneath the straw was a turf of bodies, layers deep beneath the car. He drove on, keeping his gaze on the shining opal sky through the arches of the gate. Beneath him the road had the feel of sponge. His fear was that the car would stall upon this avenue of stacked corpses, and he would be forced to walk upon it to crank the engine up again. At last the great stone arches of the gate closed over them, echoing and damp. Donald fixed his gaze once more on the distant sky at the end of the tunnel of stone.

  Beyond the gate the road broadened suddenly and was clear of bodies. Now they saw thousands of ropes hung over the top of the wall, on the riverside, flung down by those Chinese soldiers who had tried to escape in the hysteria of retreat. The great wall resembled a giant unstrung loom, thick with mismatched threads. Puttees and jackets were knotted together, twisted lengths of sheets were tied to shirts and vests, or rope to leather straps. They draped the wall and blew like streamers in the wind at some drab village fair. Few soldiers had managed to escape this way. The dead were piled up in a thick plinth at the base of the wall, as they had fallen.

  At last they reached the jetty. The Seta was moored in midstream. The Rising Sun flag flew from her mast. Morton and Smythe stumbled from the car and stood staring numbly at the water. There were several Japanese from the Embassy waiting at the jetty to board the ferry going out to the Seta. Kenjiro Nozaki was with them. Donald greeted him with a nod. After the experience of the Panay he felt he had nothing to say to the man. But Nozaki was courteous as ever. It was difficult to pin a nation’s blame upon him. He turned to speak to Donald.

  ‘I’m not leaving Nanking. I drove down here to help these Embassy colleagues embark. Many of our staff have alr
eady gone. Now there’s no petrol left in my car. It stopped just beyond the gate. If I walk back to get petrol the car won’t be here when I return. The army will take it. We’ve very few vehicles left at the Embassy.’ Kenjiro looked regretfully at the car.

  ‘I’ll give you a lift back,’ Donald offered, watching Smythe and Morton sail away.

  ‘You should have gone too,’ Kenjiro said. ‘That was the last launch. The Seta will sail soon.’

  ‘I never make good decisions,’ Donald replied. The thought of the return journey made him feel ill. ‘Did you drive through that gate?’ he asked.

  ‘Is there another way?’ Kenjiro answered and got into the car beside Donald. His face had a clenched, set look.

  At the gate they were stopped. The stench blew in upon them again. The guard began to speak to Kenjiro through the lowered window.

  ‘He says I can go, but you cannot. No foreigners are to enter Nanking,’ Kenjiro told Donald.

  ‘But I have just come from there,’ Donald exploded.

  ‘Keep calm. These are military men,’ Kenjiro advised in a low voice.

  He began to speak in Japanese. The soldier lowered his head to stare through the window at Donald, went away to confer at the gate, then with others. Several soldiers approached the car with him. Their white masks obliterated all expression. Kenjiro got out of the car and began to argue with them. He appeared ineffectual, his civilian clothes effete before powerful overcoats, iron helmets, and the spikes of guns. Soon he returned to the car.

  ‘They refuse to listen to reason. I suggest you wait here, in my stalled car. I’ll drive your car to military headquarters and get a special pass for you. I’ll bring back some petrol too for my own car.’ Kenjiro seemed pleased by the thought of this arrangement which ensured the safety of his vehicle.