Tokyo (42 page)

From somewhere close, maybe even the kitchen, there came another crash. I had no choice. I pulled out the parcel and tied the handles of the bag tightly, sealing it completely, then pushed it back into my jacket, which I zipped up to the neck. As I did I lost my grip on the torch. It slipped from my numb fingers and landed on top of the skin, the beam hitting the nearby wall in a distorted oval. I grabbed for it, got it, began to lift but lost my grip and dropped it again. The skin tilted this time, tipping the torch forward, plopping it down into the water, its beam seesawing up through the rotting pink colonies of organisms, sending their lacy shadows swirling up on to the walls. I plunged after it, swinging for it, my hand moving in slow motion under the water, swirling up dustclouds under the surface, but the torch sank silently away, pirouetting lazily, its faint yellow glow thinning to just a glimmer. Then - gloop. Quite near me something small but weighty dropped into the water and swam.

Tears of terror welled in my eyes. The torch. The torch. Don’t need it. Don’t need it. You can manage without it. What’s that in

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the water? Nothing. A rat. Don’t think about it. At the top of the staircase, a thin light filtered round the cracks in the panel. I heard a man’s voice, low and serious, and above it the Nurse’s hot equine breath moving round the kitchen, as if she was inspecting it, trying to smell what had come through it.

Stop to think and you’ll die. I sucked in a breath, put my hands on the wall, bent my knees and dropped face down into the pitchy tunnel.

The freezing water filled my ears, my nose. I thrust my hands out and tried to stand, crashing into bricks, grazing my elbows, stumbling around in the floating murk. An unearthly noise reverberated inside me, my own voice, moaning in fear. Which way? Which way? Where did the arch end? Where? It seemed to go on for ever. Just as I thought my breath would run out and it would all be over, my hand shot up from the ceiling, clear above the water, and I went after it, scraping my head, pushing desperately forward, after the hope of air. I surfaced, retching, spitting, my head jammed painfully into the ceiling. I couldn’t stand up straight, but if I bent my knees and held my neck sideways, there was just enough room - a four-or five-inch gap between the water and the brickwork - to breathe.

Breathe. Breathe!

I don’t know how long I was there, or what state of crisis my body entered - maybe I fainted, or went into a fugue state - but as I stood, shaking, only the insistent life-beat of my heart for company, so loud it sounded several hundred times its size, as big as the house itself, something, the cold or the fear, picked up my consciousness and siphoned it slowly out of my reach down a long, silent tunnel, until I was nothing, nothing except a thudding, hollow pulse in a place with no geography, no boundaries and no physical laws. I floated in a vacuum, no awareness of time or existence, bobbing lazily like an astronaut in eternity and even when, after a millennium had rolled by and I became aware of a faint pinkish light coming through the water to my left - the Nurse shining the torch along it -1 didn’t panic. I watched myself from a different place, seeing my frozen face floating on the algae, my lips blue, my eyelids half

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lowered. Even when the light left and eventually, after an eternity, retreating footsteps sounded in the rooms upstairs, I stayed absolutely still, a modern Alice, my head canted to one side, cramped and so desperately cold that I thought my heart would freeze closed and fossilize me there, metres under the ground.

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58

At dawn, as the first light was moving over the garden, when the house had been silent for hours, I reached the open window. I was so numb with cold that it had taken hours to crawl back. Every inch was a fight with the seductive lethargy of cold, but at last I was here. I peered out cautiously, my heart thudding dully, sure that the Nurse would come charging down on me from some hidden lair. But the garden was silent, an eerie, crystalline world, as still and quiet as a ship marooned in ice. Everything was covered in little diamonds of frozen drops, surreal against the snow like necklaces strewn among the trees.

Climbing out of the window exhausted me. I dropped into the snow and, for a long time, I was too numb to do anything except sit where I’d landed, slumped drunkenly against the branch with the carrier-bag at my feet, and stare distantly at this silent winter world.

What had happened here? What had happened? Every one of the windows in the gallery had been smashed, the branches on the trees had been snapped, a shutter hung on its hinges, squeaking occasionally.

The drops in the branches are so beautiful… In the dawn light my mind moved slowly. So beautiful. I looked at the trees round the stone lantern, at the area of the garden that had so fascinated Shi Chongming. A slow bud of recognition was opening dreamily inside me. Frozen drops of blood and tissue were sprayed in the

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branches, as if something had exploded there. Draped across the stone lantern, like a faded paper chain, was … A hazy memory of a newspaper photograph - a nameless Japanese victim, his viscera spooling below the car.

Jason …

I stared at what was left of him for what seemed like hours, astonished by the patterns - the braids and furbelows, the little scrolls like Christmas decorations. How could it look so beautiful? A wind came, buffeting and pirouetting the snowflakes, springing the blood from the branches. The wind rattled through the broken panes in the gallery and whirled along the corridor. I imagined myself from above, I imagined looking down at the garden, at all the vermiform paths and the thickets, I imagined the way the blood would look, a halo round the stone lantern, and then as I drew further away I saw the roof of the house, its red tiles all gleaming in the melting snow, I saw the little alleyway with a solitary old woman clipping down it in clogs, I saw the poster of Mickey Rourke, then the whole of Takadanobaba, the ‘high horse field’, and Tokyo glittering and glinting next to the bay, Japan like a dragonfly clinging to the flank of China. Great China. On I went, on and on, until I was dizzy and the clouds came over and I closed my eyes and let the sky or the wind or the moon pick me up and drift me away.

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A

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Nanking, 21 December 1937

I don’t know how long we stumbled through the trees in our desperate flight, the snow flurrying behind us. We went on and on. I had to pull Shujin much of the way because she was quickly exhausted and pleaded with me to stop. But I was remorseless, dragging her with one hand, the cart with the other. On and on we went, into the forest, the stars flashing between the trees overhead. Within a few minutes the sound of the motorbike had died away and we were left with only the sounds of our breathing on the deserted mountain, as quiet as a ghost mountain. But I wasn’t prepared to stop. We passed hulking presences in the darkness, the burned and abandoned remains of the beautiful villas, the vast, plundered sasanaqua-covered terraces destroyed, the faint smell of their cinders hanging between the trees. On we went, wading through the snow, wondering if the dead, too, lay out there in the dark.

Then, after a long time, when we seemed to have scrambled half-way to the heavens, and the sun was already sending up red dawn rays above the mountain, Shujin called out behind me. I turned to find her leaning against a camphor tree, her hands on her stomach. ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please. I can’t.’

I slid down the slope to her, catching her by the elbow as her knees gave way and she sank into the snow. ‘Shujin?’ I hissed. ‘What is it? Is this the beginning?’

She closed her eyes. ‘I can’t say.’

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‘Please.’ I shook her arm. ‘This is no time to be shy. Tell me is this it?’

‘I can’t say,’ she said fiercely, her eyes flying open and fixing on mine. ‘Because I don’t know. You are not the only person, my husband, who has never had a child before.’ Her forehead was damp with perspiration, her breath steamed in the air. She moved her arms round herself in the snow, creating an odd little nest, curling into it. ‘I want to lie down,’ she said. ‘Please let me lie down.’

I dropped the cart. We had come so high up that the fires of Nanking were no more than a red stain in the dawn sky. We had reached a small level area, hidden from the lower slopes by dense walnut, chestnut and evergreen oaks. I walked a few yards back and listened. I could hear nothing. No motorcycle engine, no soft footfall in the snow, only the air whistling in my nostrils and the clicking of my jaw as I worked my teeth together. I climbed the slope, and walked in a great circle, every few paces stopping to listen to the great gulping silences among the leafless branches. It was already getting light, and the weak rays filtering through the trees alighted on something about twenty feet further down the slope, half buried in leaves, forgotten and moss covered. It was an enormous stone statue of a tortoise, its snout and shell covered in snow. The great symbol of male longevity.

My heart rose. We must be near Linggu temple! Even the Japanese hold a shrine sacred - no bombs had dropped on our places of worship. If this was to be the place our child emerged into the world then it was an auspicious one. Maybe a safe one.

‘Come here, behind these trees. I’m going to build you a shelter.’ I turned the handcart on to its side and pulled out all the blankets, packing them tightly under the cart. I led Shujin inside, lodging her into the bed, giving her broken icicles from the trees to quench her thirst. Then I went to the other side and kicked snow up against the cart so that it would be invisible. When she was settled I squatted next to it for a while, biting my fingers and staring out of the trees to where the sky was growing lighter by the second. The mountainside was utterly silent.

‘Shujin?’ I whispered, after a while. ‘Are you well?’

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She didn’t respond. I shuffled nearer the cart and listened. She was breathing fast, a tiny whistle of air, muffled in her forest bed. I took off my cap and shuffled closer to the cart, cursing myself for knowing so little about childbirth. When I was growing up it was the province of the matriarchs, the stern sisters of my mother. I was told nothing. I am ignorant. The brilliant modern linguist who knows nothing about birth. I put my hand on the cart and whispered, ‘Please, tell me. Do you think that our baby is—’ I broke off. The words had come out of my mouth without thinking. Our baby, I had said. Our baby.

Instantly Shujin seized on it. She let out a long, drawn-out cry. ‘No!’ she sobbed. ‘No - you have said it. You have said it!’ She hauled the cart upwards and pushed her head out: her hair wild, tears standing in her eyes. ‘Leave!’ she cried feverishly. ‘Leave me. Stand now and walk away. Walk away.’

‘But I—’

‘No! What ill luck you have invited on our moon soul!’

‘Shujin, I didn’t intend—’

‘Walk away now!’

‘Please! Keep your voice down.’

But she wasn’t listening. ‘Walk away with your dangerous words! Take your curses away from me.’

‘But—’

‘Now!’

I dug my nails into my hands and bit my lip. What a fool I had been. How thoughtless, to have infuriated her! And at such a time! At length I sighed. ‘Very well, very well.’ I backed away a few feet through the trees. ‘I will stand here, just here, should you need me.’ I turned, so my back was towards her, and I was facing the dawn sky.

‘No! Further! Go further. I don’t want to see you.’

‘Very well!’

Reluctantly I took a few more clumsy steps through the snow, until the slope of the mountain put me just out of her sight. I sank dejectedly to the ground, knocking my knuckles against my forehead. The forest was so quiet, so silent. I dropped my hand and looked around. Should I try to find help? Maybe there would be

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someone in one of the houses who could offer shelter. But the radio reports had said that all these houses had been looted, even before the eastern gate had been breached. The only people I might encounter would be Japanese army officers, lording it in the deserted mansions, drunk on plundered wine stores.

I straightened, and stepped a little way out of the trees to get a sense of what else was nearby. I pushed aside a branch, took a pace forward, and my breath caught in my throat. For a moment Shujin was forgotten. We had climbed so high! The sun was coming up behind the mountain, pink and flecked with cinders from distant fires, and further down the slopes, perched among the trees, the intense, glazed blue of Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum shone against the snow. If I turned to the east, between the mountains I could see glimpses of the thirsty yellow plains of the delta stretching away into misty horizons. Below me the city basin was smouldering like a volcano, a black pall of smoke hung over the Yangtze, and I saw, with a sinking heart, that it was all as I had guessed: the river at Meitan was in chaos - I could see bombed boats and sampans listing in the mud. Old Liu had been right when he said east was the direction to go.

As I stood there, with the sun on my shoulders and all of Jiangsu stretched out beneath me, I had a sudden surge of defiance, a sudden furious determination that China must survive as the China I grew up in. That the silly superstitious Festivals of White Dew and Corn Rain would live on, that ducks would always be driven across fields at dusk, that every summer the lotus leaves would appear, so thick you would believe it possible to walk across the ponds balancing on the slabbed leaves alone. That the Chinese people would continue - that my child’s heart would be for ever Chinese. As I stood on the mountain, in the first rays of dawn, with a rush of pride and fury, I raised my hand to the sky, daring any evil spirit who cared to come and take my son. My son, who would fight like a tiger to preserve his country. My son, who would be stronger than I had ever been.

‘I dare you,’ I whispered to the sky. ‘Yes, I dare you.’