Nanjing Requiem (16 page)

“Phew, what a smell,” said Minnie.

“We’d better clean up this place soon,” I said.

“Yes, we must get hold of some lime.”

Without going farther west to see the daffodils, Minnie and I veered back toward the business manager’s office. She wanted to send Luhai to the Safety Zone Committee to ask Plumer, who had succeeded Rabe as its chairman, about the lime they had promised to help us procure.

Rulian turned up as we walked along. The second she saw us she said, “A girl killed herself.”

“Where?” Minnie asked.

“In the Central Building.” That was in Rulian’s charge now, because Holly had been hospitalized for tonsillitis and exhaustion. When I went to see Holly two days earlier, she had wanted to come back to Jinling, saying the hospital was too clamorous, but Dr. Wilson insisted that she stay there for another week. He knew she wouldn’t rest in bed once she returned to the camp.

Together Minnie, Rulian, and I headed for the Central Building. The fragrance of fruit blossoms made the air a little sweetish. Some refugees lazed around in the quad, where the two blind girls brought over by Cola, the young Russian, three months ago, and joined by another two blind ones, piped flutes and sawed away at the two-stringed
erhus
, learning to play snatches of the local Kun opera.

A crowd had gathered on the second floor of the Central Building. We entered a classroom that held more than sixty women. The room had a strong smell that brought to mind a chicken coop, but I was already accustomed to this odor. Rulian took us to the far end, which was shielded by a sky-blue screen. Minnie and I bent down to look at the dead girl closely—she was in her late teens, a tad homely but with soft skin and abundant hair. She looked pallid; her eyes were closed, her lips dark and parted, and through them I could see sticky blood in her mouth. Her round cheeks were grayish, but her expression was relaxed, as though she were about to yawn. Her short-fingered hand was resting on her chest, which seemed to be still heaving. Next to her clothes bundle, which served as a pillow, was an empty ratsbane bottle; she must have found it in one of the defunct kitchens. A frayed blanket covered the girl’s abdomen, but her legs stuck out, one foot wearing a scarlet woolen sock and the other bare. Although she looked familiar, I didn’t recognize her right away.

“Who is she?” Minnie asked.

“Her name is Wanju Yu,” Rulian answered.

At that, I remembered the girl, who’d been among the twelve taken by the Japanese on December 17, but I didn’t know how to tell Minnie about her in the presence of this crowd.

“Why did she do this to herself?” Minnie went on.

“I’ve no idea,” Rulian said.

“Any of you know why she took her life?” Minnie asked the women standing around.

They all shook their heads. A moment later one said the girl had cried a lot at night, and another added that she had often skipped meals, just sitting cross-legged in the corner like a statue and studying the floor. A thirtyish woman, suckling a baby in her arms, guessed that the dead girl must have been a student because she had often read a thick book alone and also crooned movie songs to herself. Since the first day these women had wondered if she had a cog loose.

I tugged at Minnie’s sleeve and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

We left the room, followed by Rulian. In the hallway I told Minnie, “The girl was pregnant and went to the infirmary a couple of days ago. She wanted an abortion. We told her we couldn’t do that for her because we had no doctor here. We should’ve given her more help, but we couldn’t kill a baby. The nurse and I really don’t know how to abort a fetus.”

“Who was the father of the baby?” Minnie asked.

“Some Japanese bastard.”

“I don’t get it. How did it happen?”

“Remember when the Japs grabbed twelve girls one evening last December?”

“Yes. And six of them came back the next morning.”

“Well, the dead girl was one of the six.”

“But they all said they were unharmed.”

“That’s just what they claimed. How could they admit they’d been raped? How could any of them find a husband if they were known as having been violated by the Eastern devils? Neither they nor their families could bear the shame.”

Stunned, Minnie swayed a little. She put her hand on Rulian’s shoulder, sputtering to me, “Why didn’t you breathe a word about this? Those girls should at least have received medical attention.”

“This isn’t something people would talk about. I thought I’d let you know one of these days, but for a long time I had no evidence to back up my guess. Who could’ve imagined the girl would kill herself?” I lowered my eyes and wished I had informed Minnie after Wanju showed up at the infirmary.

“Where are the other five girls?”

“I don’t think they’re still here except for Meiyan, Big Liu’s daughter.”

Without another word Minnie spun around and clumped down the stairs. She went out alone.

Meanwhile, I called in the janitor Hu and Old Liao. They carried the body to a flatbed cart and hauled it away. Minnie turned up, and we followed the men to the hillside beyond a small orchard. We picked a spot on the slope of a ravine and set about digging.

Hu and Liao dug by turns, and I helped them a little, not being strong enough to dig with a shovel for longer than three minutes. When the grave was almost a foot deep, tubby Hu, his sparse hair stuck to his flat forehead, had started gasping “umph” at every thrust with the shovel. Minnie took over the job. She worked with all her strength, leaning the weight of her body on her right foot on top of the scoop and drawing herself up halfway when tossing out the dirt. She swung the shovel with a rhythm, and her supple movement impressed us. I knew she had grown up in a farm village and done all kinds of work in her childhood. She had also been a basketball player at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she got her BA, so she was “sturdy as a Clyde,” in her own words. Soon she began breathing audibly, yet she applied herself harder. From time to time tears welled out of her eyes and mixed with the perspiration on her cheeks. She was huffing and puffing, while her nose seemed blocked.

“If only we could give her a coffin,” Minnie said a few minutes later, handing the shovel to Old Liao.

“I wish we knew where her folks are,” I said, “so they could take her home.”

Crows wheeled around in the limpid sky, letting out grating cries. Two feral dogs, both spattered with mud, stood nearby, pawing at the ground and touching it with their noses, as though they were planning to dig out the interred girl once nobody was around. This reminded us that we must bury the dead at least two feet deep. Old Liao regretted not having brought along a reed mat in which we could roll up the body.

“Wanju, please forgive us,” Minnie said, as the men laid the girl in the grave. They began shoveling the dirt back into it. I took the shovel when they needed a breather.

After burying her, we stood in silence before the pile of earth for a while. Minnie said, as if to promise the dead, “I will never let this kind of crime happen in our camp again. I’ll do everything I can to protect the girls and women. If I have to fight the soldiers, I will fight. I won’t be a coward anymore.”

I said, “Rest in peace now, Wanju, and forget about this unjust world. I’ll come tomorrow and burn a bunch of joss sticks for you.”

Then Minnie crouched down, no longer able to suppress her emotion. She wailed, “It was also my fault, Wanju. I should have stayed in the compound to stop the Japanese from snatching you away. After you came back, we should have given you more help.” Minnie paused, then continued, “Rest assured, those beasts will be brought to justice. God will deal with them on your behalf.”

I felt so sad that I began weeping too.

Old Liao and Hu helped Minnie up, and together we headed back to campus. Hu was pulling the cart with a leather strap around his shoulder.

We washed our faces in the ladies’ room, then went down the hallway to the president’s office. Big Liu was in there, seated on a sofa and absentmindedly leafing through his small textbook. When we stepped in, he lifted his eyes and peered at Minnie wordlessly.

She sat down and told him about the suicide. He responded calmly, “I heard about it.”

“I’m such an idiot,” she said.

“Don’t blame yourself, Minnie. It was the Japanese who killed her.” His voice was somehow devoid of any emotion.

“I cannot do our Chinese lesson today—my mind is too full.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Don’t go, Anling,” Minnie urged me.

So I stayed, and together we discussed the progress of the petition. Sufen had just reported to Big Liu that she’d seen her son four times now. The boy had told her that the prisoners were sent to tear down houses and build a bridge outside the city, though many of them were too ill to work anymore. They were each given two bowls of boiled sorghum a day, plus a few pieces of salted turnip or rutabaga. Once a week they could have rice. He begged his mother to find a way to get him out soon or he would perish in there. She promised to do that, though she had no idea how. He also asked her to bring him some food, which she couldn’t come by either.

By now more women had participated in the petition: in total 704 had filed. We decided to take the list to Dr. Chu and hoped he would present it to the office in charge of such a matter.

19

M
INNIE AND I SET OUT
to see Fukuda at the Japanese embassy with the petition. The moment we turned onto Shanghai Road, we saw that numerous ramshackle stores, mostly built of used plywood and corrugated iron, had emerged on both sides of the street. Many of them were just small stalls manned by one person. There were all sorts of things for sale and barter: door planks, windows, lamps, cast-iron stoves, furniture, stone hand mills, utensils, musical instruments, clothing, used books, and magazines. As for food, there were baked wheaten cakes, fried twists, tofu, vegetables, eggs, pork, and pig offal, all five or six times more expensive than before the occupation. I bought a smoked chicken for seven yuan for Liya, who had been weak after her miscarriage, often coughing and sweating profusely even without exerting herself. “This is like eating silver,” an old woman kept saying, watching the vendor wrapping up my purchase in a piece of oil paper. I made no reply and felt that money might get more devalued anyway, so it was better to spend it now.

The city was strictly guarded, and whoever was without a
mingto
, the ID certificate, would be arrested. The soldiers would strip people of whatever was valuable on them—a pack of cigarettes, a fountain pen, a pocket harmonica, even a brass button from a coat. They also examined men who looked like potential fighters, making them stand at roadsides, shed their jackets and shirts, and spread their arms; if a man had a vaccination mark, they would detain him, believing it was a shrapnel scar. The Japanese seemed apprehensive, especially troubled by the guerrillas, who attacked their sentry posts in the countryside and blocked their transportation routes. Lately so many trains had been derailed that the railroad service had become erratic, and sometimes there was no train to Shanghai three days in a row. What was more troublesome was that the guerrillas fought outside the norms of conventional warfare, harassing small Japanese units day and night, blowing up isolated fortresses, and ambushing convoys. Once in a while artillery bombardments could be heard in the early-morning hours and within five or six miles of the city, as if another siege was impending. Meanwhile, the new regulations allowed few foreigners, much less Chinese, to leave Nanjing, though more Western diplomats had returned.

Near the Japanese embassy an opium den flaunted a banner that read
OFFICIAL EARTH
. Narcotics used to be banned here, but now anything was legal for sale. Evidently the majority of the goods were loot from outside the Safety Zone. After the soldiers had plundered the houses, the civilians would go in and gut them, taking whatever was useful or salable. For many people, looting had become a way of life, because there were no jobs. The Safety Zone was relatively safe for doing business, so most vendors brought their goods here.

Fukuda received us cordially, but explained that he still couldn’t locate any of the men and boys on the list Minnie had presented to him in late January. A young Japanese woman wearing a flowered kimono and wooden clogs came in, carrying a clay teapot and three cups on a tray. After tea was served, Minnie said to Fukuda, “We’ve just learned that there are many civilians in the Model Prison.”

“Are you sure?” He looked incredulous, his eyebrows locked together.

“Positive.” Minnie went on to speak about Sufen’s son. “He’s her only child and was taken on December fifth. He told her there were many young boys in there.”

Fukuda heaved a feeble sigh, tapping his cigarette over an ashtray in the shape of a flatfish. He said in halting English, “I thought that place was holding only soldiers. Well, we shall investigate. Try to give more physical descriptions of this boy. If he is there, I shall try to help him come out of prison.”

“I’ll let his mother know. Thank you.”

“Miss Vautrin,” Fukuda said with some feeling, his bony face flushing, “I mean to help. I hope you can believe I have been doing my best.”

“Of course I can.”

I knew Minnie didn’t completely trust him. He might be sympathetic to the poor women, but he couldn’t act himself, given his role as an attaché. Besides, there must be a military office in charge of such a matter, but he had just said he was unclear about that when Minnie asked him. Maybe he simply didn’t want to bother or offend the army with our petition. This could also mean he wasn’t deeply involved.

We thanked him again and left the embassy. I was impressed by Fukuda’s courtesy, though Minnie and I were now less convinced that he would bring our petition to his superiors. He was always very officious, as if wearing an impenetrable mask, and seemed unable to feel anything. Never having seen his face fully at ease, I couldn’t even place his age—maybe he was in his late twenties, but he could also be pushing forty.