A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  When they were gone he turned to look around. Below him bodies lay strewn about. Monks appeared and began to carry the victims up into the temple. Silence settled upon the ravine. The crying of a child or the moan of a woman floated up to Akira. The trail of people began to move again, up towards the temple.

  Akira looked into the peasant faces climbing towards him and saw the stoic acceptance, the same capacity for endurance that he saw in the expressions of his own village. It was the look of people who lived with little. He sensed the unspoken rage in the country filling the valley now. For the first time it struck him that the silent rage of four hundred and fifty million people must be a force to reckon with. He knew then that these people would never be broken as the Japanese military wished to break them. They would endure whatever they must, as for centuries they had endured death from flood or famine, or wars against tyrants of their own. He would have stepped forward then, to help the monks.

  ‘We must go on our way. We can do nothing here.’ Teng took his arm and led him away.

  Eventually they reached Hankow, now the temporary wartime capital. The city seethed with people and activity. There was no sense of a vanquished spirit here. The cry of hawkers, the frantic honking of cars and trucks surrounded them. A woman with a basket of chickens stumbled into Akira. The chickens broke free, clucking and squawking. He ran after them with her, and came back with one. She thanked him and gave him an apple. It was here, after entering the town, that he heard news of the Japanese Army. War posters were everywhere, war talk spilt from every mouth. Chinese troops and supplies were the biggest traffic in the town. Instead of Hankow it appeared the Japanese Army had decided next to attack Hsuchow, a railway junction.

  ‘Your army will have lost six months with this blunder and we have gained valuable time,’ Teng told him, dropping back to walk beside him. ‘Our Communist guerrillas and the regular army in Shansi have prevented your soldiers from crossing the Yellow River. Your government should not dream of a short war or underestimate China’s resistance. For the moment, for us, a crisis has passed.’

  It had been difficult to come across such wide-angled news while fighting at the front. Now, slowly, Akira gained another perspective. He pushed on beside Teng and the others through the crowded streets of Hankow. He was hungry. It seemed Teng read his mind.

  ‘Fried peppers and steamed turtle are Hankow’s specialities, but where we are going we will not be served turtle,’ Teng warned.

  He suspected then it was to another temple that Teng would lead them. It was difficult to know exactly what Teng was: guerrilla, religious man, or something of both. They crossed the river and climbed through narrow cobbled streets to the Buddhist Red Cross War Relief Headquarters near the top of a hill. Two monks came out to greet them. It was obvious to Akira that Teng was a man of weight, with connections everywhere. Akira waited with the other refugees. He knew the conversation centred upon them for the monks shook their heads and gave apathetic sighs. A long argument ensued. Eventually, it seemed something was settled.

  ‘They are turning refugees away, but I have persuaded them to house our small band. They know me well. Everything is in short supply here: hands, money, medicine. I can arrange a little of these things for them. And I have promised them you will work alongside me. I have not told them who you are,’ Teng added, seeing the alarm on Akira’s face.

  He was to share a room with Teng, in a small house connected to the temple by a back door. Two thin rolls of bedding were brought in for them. The room was bare, but to Akira it seemed more than a sanctuary. Outside the temple halls and courtyards were crowded with people. Many were wounded soldiers. Children played everywhere. The Buddhas in their wall niches looked down upon the rows of destitutes. Teng bent to speak to people, to crack a joke or tease a child. He looked into the saucepan of a woman cooking on an earthen stove, three children at her side. He asked if she had rice enough, and promised bean curd for the children on the following day.

  ‘From where will you get bean curd?’ asked Akira.

  ‘I will get it,’ Teng replied.

  ‘There are wounded Chinese soldiers here,’ Akira whispered, more to himself than to Teng.

  ‘All people are one to the Buddha, and the Buddha is in all. You need think of nothing more. If you help one man you help the world,’ Teng replied in the tone of a schoolmaster.

  Later Akira found himself alone. He sat on a low wall surrounding a courtyard. Below him the hill descended steeply to the river. Across the water lay the bustle of Hankow, above him the sky was bruised, inky with the coming night. Behind him in the courtyard lay wounded Chinese soldiers. From tomorrow he must bring them food and water, he must tend their bleeding limbs. A sudden revulsion gripped him.

  He remembered his time in the military hospital in Tokyo. From the window he had watched trucks of new recruits going off to war, accompanied by supporters. He remembered the expressions on the faces of the men and the easy cheers of those who saw them off, and would never go to war. That war-intoxicated mob of supporters had frightened him. Some of those men sent off to fight may have already been killed by the soldiers he must now nurse.

  Thoughts jangled about in his head. He must not forget he was dead now forever to his own world. Of no more substance than a ghost. He would never see his mother again. After being discharged from the military hospital in Tokyo, he had been allowed a brief visit home, before returning to China. It had been night when he reached his village. There was a long walk from the station across the paddies. The rasp of crickets and the croak of frogs was thick against the starry sky. Soon he saw the kilns, in long runnels up the hillside. His hands had ached to touch some clay again, to scorch his face near a firing. He made his way through the village with its heavy tiled roofs. Before most doors he saw a small Rising Sun flag, indicating someone from the house had gone to the war. Before his own home there was also a flag. He saw a light in the house and pushed back the door, calling out that he was back.

  His mother came running, wiping her hands on her apron. She collapsed on her knees in shock. Her hair escaped from its knot, her spine was bent from years of planting rice with the weight of a child upon her back. She wore the same threadbare kimono as the day he left. She tried to compose herself, but her face was wet with tears as she led him in to see his father. He looked already dead, stretched out beneath a quilt. He had wasted away, his skin translucent, his breath had rasped like a cricket. Only his elder club-footed brother, Yukio, was at home, useless to the military. Jiro, too young for the army, was conscripted to a factory. The three of them knelt in silence. The paper windows were torn and the thatch in need of repair. He could already hear the wind howling in winter, and feel the chill there would be in the room.

  He woke at dawn the next morning and went out to the workshed in the backyard under an old sycamore tree. Shelves of unfired rice bowls still stood along one wall. Rejected pickle jars filled a corner. Most of the clay had dried up, but he scraped together a malleable lump from the bottom of a bin. He sat before the wheel, revolving it with his feet, feeling again the clay in his hand, bending it to his will. All that mattered was the clay. It was as if time stood still. A strange energy consumed him. Sometimes, as he worked, he saw his life running out, pulled slowly towards those white boxes of ashes he had seen everywhere on the train. At other moments horrific images of China returned. Even now the smell of death refused to clear from his head. In the clay then he searched for something he could not describe, a nameless thing to end the images, to return the dead to life.

  It was two days before his father died. He did not regain consciousness to recognise Akira. His mother did not weep, but went quietly about preparations for the simple funeral. When the urn of remains had been buried in the village cemetery, he packed his bag to return to the front. His mother came and knelt beside him, pushing forward a piece of white cloth.

  ‘This will protect you. Never be without it,’ she had said.

  He looked down at th
e senninbari, folded neatly before him on the matted floor. From the windows of the military hospital he had seen women, standing stoically, hour after hour, in the street below. And seen them again at stations as his train had stopped on the way to the village. They waited in silent vigil to solicit from strangers a stitch on a piece of cloth for a son, a husband or a brother who had gone to war. It was an old superstition that a body belt carrying a thousand stitches, sewn by a thousand different people, was an infallible talisman against death in the field. His mother had collected these one thousand stitches, walking from village to nearby village, begging a stitch from whoever she met. The stitches were decorative French knots, sewn in circles upon the cloth. He bowed to his mother and raising the senninbari, touched it to his brow.

  He still wore the belt next to his body, and placed his hand upon it now. When he had cast off his uniform he had not thrown it away. It was all he retained of a lost self. He might never see his mother again.

  On the train journey back to his village from the military hospital, the track had run precipitously along the side of a hill, like the ravine they had walked through before reaching Hankow. He remembered the paddies, terraced below him in the sun, and a bird gliding high in the sky. He had wished then that he was a bird, free of the earth. Perhaps his wish had been granted. Ghost or bird, he was free to claim himself.

  26

  A Dangerous Course

  Mid-March 1938

  Kenjiro ate the tangerine slowly, savouring its tart, sweet juice in his mouth. The fruit had been flown in from Japan, a present from Supreme Military Headquarters to the Embassy. He offered another to Fukutake. The taste of the fruit threw him back to childhood. He remembered old Chieko peeling, then cleaning the bright orange globe of its white metastasis. Then carefully, she would split the top of each segment with a nail, pulling the membrane free, popping the succulent flesh whole into his mouth.

  He hoped Teng had got away, was safe by now in some distant guerrilla enclave. He had no regrets about what he had done. Certainly, he would not be judged to have acted dutifully. There was no way he could ever explain such an action to Fukutake. Perhaps only the Russian woman would understand. There too he had followed a hedonistic course, but he was not sorry about her either. He made an effort to put the woman out of his mind. Even the thought of her filled his body with inexplicable distress. He looked across the desk at Fukutake.

  Fukutake, he suspected, had now been recruited by the military to probe him in a subtle way. There was a rabbity look about him. His teeth protruded slightly above a receding chin, and his eyes bulged myopically. He was easily intimidated. At Military Headquarters they would only have to grab him by the scruff of the neck for him to scuttle away and do their bidding. Now, he kept pursing his lips together over his teeth, as if he had something to hide.

  Rain beat against the window with a resonant thud. Outside, the town appeared a drab watercolour in which all the paints had run. Kenjiro wondered if this town could ever rise again. On the wall before his desk the Emperor faced him in a thick frame. He sat upon his horse White Snow, in full military uniform. Beneath a peaked cap his eyes stared through rimless glasses, his lips full beneath a thin moustache. There was arrogance in his face. And yet, from other angles, there appeared a certain wistfulness. It was impossible to know anything of his character. He was no God, just a mere man locked up in an ivory tower. Could he know what, in his name, had been done to this town? In what manner did things filter through to him? Had he been duped by ambitious men? Or did he willingly collude in the war?

  Now, when he looked up at this portrait, to which in the Embassy they must bow each day, Kenjiro felt only sad compassion. The Emperor appeared like a distant friend in terrible trouble but beyond all help. To have piled upon one’s name, even if half-unknowingly, such a wilful, primordial, wave of killing was something from which innocence could not be claimed. When he knew of the details, all done in his name, how would the Emperor live with himself? He could not escape guilt. He was after all a man, with responsibilities outweighing those of other men. He was to be pitied. Some day there would be a reckoning.

  He saw Fukutake regarding him strangely. Had these thoughts showed upon his face? Would Fukutake report such nuances back to Colonel Kato if no substantial facts were gleaned? Would Fukutake be pleased to exonerate himself by stoking up suspicion?

  ‘I was thinking of the Emperor, and the weight of the responsibilities he must bear at this time. In comparison our lives are easy.’ He did not lie. Fukutake nodded.

  There was a slight hiss to the gas fire, and a residue of fumes filled the room, making Kenjiro sleepy. After Teng’s escape he expected each footstep to herald his departure to a prison cell. But nothing had happened. The Kempeitai had no proof, and so they had turned to Fukutake. Kenjiro’s life depended upon Tilik Dayal, who had returned to Hsinking. He must trust the thread of decency that had made the man collaborate with him.

  ‘What do they want you to find out from me? Why don’t you just ask me?’ Kenjiro said at last in exasperation. Fukutake started and began to blink in a nervous manner.

  ‘I told you there is a limit to how much I can protect you. They know about your friendship with that Communist, and also that Russian woman, the one they think is a spy.’ Fukutake’s blinking became more rapid.

  ‘I know how dangerous these times are. Do you think I would throw my life away? A favour here or there, or an occasional visit to a friend is one thing. When such things can tip the balance between life or death, what do you think any sane man would choose?’ Kenjiro shrugged impatiently.

  ‘I knew you were innocent of all these absurd things they’re saying.’ Fukutake sat back in relief.

  ‘They have no proof of anything, otherwise they would not have come to you.’ Kenjiro repeated his thoughts out loud.

  ‘Proof is proof, but in these days suspicion alone is enough to finish a man,’ Fukutake worried. ‘What about the woman? Is she a spy?’

  ‘As much as I am,’ Kenjiro managed a laugh. Even a mention of the woman brought her face before him again. A bitter segment of fruit filled his mouth and he spat it into an ashtray.

  ‘It has stopped raining. I have been told to inspect the repairs on the Embassy apartments. Personnel will be returning soon from Shanghai,’ Kenjiro said, standing up. Fukutake nodded.

  Kenjiro was glad of the excuse to get out, away from Fukutake’s peering eyes and the fumes of the gas fire. The air was damp and filled with an unexpected sweetness. A light drizzle was clearing up. At the urging of the new government there was already some rebuilding. The smell of sawn wood smarted in his nostrils. But a defeated look was everywhere. If it were not for the soup kitchens of the Safety Committee most of the town would starve. The new Japanese government seemed in no hurry to relieve this situation.

  He steered clear of the hospital, and took instead a longer route to his destination. There, he inspected the repair work in progress on the Embassy apartments. He returned the way he had come, walking near a section of Nanking’s wall. Suddenly he saw her, as if he had conjured her up, a startled look in her face. For a moment he considered turning away, for both her safety and his, but his feet would not move. On the top of the wall a guard appeared and stared down in some interest at them.

  ‘I must see you,’ she said. ‘I have something to tell you.’·

  ‘Go to the temple pavilion,’ he answered. ‘I will come by a separate route. Wait there for me.’ He spoke without thinking. The decision seemed made long before, as if he had expected this. He wondered at himself. It began to rain lightly again.

  It was dry in the pavilion. The odour of old wood enclosed him again, as it had on that other night. Even in daylight it was a dim world. There was a smell now of urine, as if troops had made use of the building since last they were there.

  ‘I wanted to send you a note, but I didn’t dare. A boy came to the hospital with a message. Teng is safe, and in Hankow.’ She shivered, drawing her coat tig
hter. Kenjiro laughed in relief.

  She turned her face apprehensively up to the rafters. There was the same rustle of wings in the darkness above. The weariness in her face gave it new delicacy. The knowledge that had been forced upon them these last months had changed expressions forever. She did not move as he stepped towards her. All the old feelings were upon him again. He knew they were powerless before them. She shivered, crossing her arms before her body, hugging herself, as if to fend him off. But she made no attempt to deter him when he pulled her hands down by her sides and lowered his lips to her neck. The scent of her filled him again. In the halflight he saw a low battered Chinese altar against a wall, and led her there.

  Already, the intensity of their need was so great that neither could wait as before, to journey in languor. She wanted him urgently to enter her and linked herself about him. There was no sound but the racing of their breath. At last he raised himself free of her body.

  His heart pounded with the recklessness of all he risked. There was resentment too, now that it was over, that she had the power to guide him to her, as she guided him so quickly to the centre of her body, filling his mind each day in this way. Why could he not rid himself of her? She was a death sentence, not an ordinary woman. He was shocked at himself for coming here. Slowly, his mind began to clear.

  She looked at him with an expression he could not fathom. Perhaps she sensed his feelings. There seemed this time something brutal about their coupling; something compulsive drew them on. It seemed she too had understood the difference, for she turned away, as if ashamed. He knew he must be free of her.

  ‘I never thought I would come here again,’ she said, bitterness filling her voice.

  ‘You don’t know what I risk by coming here,’ he answered in annoyance.