The Communist's Daughter (18 page)

“You go,” I told Jean. “I'll stay with this man.”

As I said, there had been raids almost every day, but the bombs usually fell miles away, toward the middle of the city or harmlessly into the river. In lighter moments we'd even begun calling the bombs “fish killers.” What Smedley had said was true, for the most part: the Japanese pilots seemed eager to get rid of their bombs as quickly as they could, before coming into range of the feeble air defences. People died in Hankou and Han-yang, yes, but more often as a result of bad luck than precise bombing.

In a moment, however, we heard the radial engines screaming toward us. These pilots, for whatever reason, were not of the jittery type we'd grown used to. The anti-aircraft guns started up, but the planes didn't veer off and they came in low over the city. Then came the sound of a bomb whistling through the air, and another, and another, followed by a series of explosions. I laid my body over the patient, a slow, deliberate act, almost as if I were covering him with a blanket. Jean ducked close in to the exterior wall and hugged her knees as the entire hospital shook with the force of an earthquake. The window just above her was blown out, filling the room with shards of glass. A powerful fist of air filled the room and turned our guts and shook loose plaster and debris, raising a cloud of dust so thick that I could see nothing before me but a dull haze.

I lay atop the man for many minutes, protecting his wound. When the sound of the planes began to recede, the rescue teams began to fill the yard and hallways, the dust began to clear and the all-clear sirens sounded, I pulled myself up to find the man grinning from ear to ear. Jean got back up onto her feet, unhurt, and dusted herself off as if she'd just slid in to home base. She smiled.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “show a little fear at least.”

The patient said something to me.

“What's he saying?” I asked her.

“He says his ancestors are grateful and he's thanking you.”

*

It was here, in Hankou and Han-yang, and with Dr. Morrissey's help, that my introduction to the Chinese way of being and thinking began. Every day I was surprised by something I learned. He answered an endless number of questions and was very helpful on the most basic issues of manners, custom and diet. He shared his ideas and provided me with volumes of reading, which unfortunately I was only able to skim, for my time, as you can imagine, was stretched quite thin. Where it was our natural tendency to treat the world as an entity distinct from ourselves and our interests, he said, the Chinese held that the individual was intricately connected to a greater, older, wider world and could not exist without it. There was a certain indebtedness and responsibility that they were always aware of. He described the Chinese spirit as hierarchical, based on age and wisdom, and much more reverent of the past than the Western mind. This brought to mind the selflessness of the man who'd bidden me to retreat to the air-raid shelter at the expense of his own safety, and his unusual gratitude when I had chosen not to.

“He thanked me on behalf of his ancestors,” I said. “It was an unusual sort of thank-you.”

Morrissey leaned in and said, “Norman, that's it, right there. You've got it. If you want to understand the Chinese, remember that moment.” We were sitting in his cramped office overlooking a lovely park, its cherry trees covered with a light dusting of snow.

“Have I?”

“Well, you see, it's faith for us in the West, isn't it? Faith in God. Faith in a cause. Whatever you believe in, it's faith, this self-imposed engine that, rightly or wrongly, permits us to hold on to our beliefs. Are you a religious man, Doctor?”

“No,” I said. Not like my father, I thought.

“I didn't suspect so. For the Chinese, faith is nothing. What they have in place of it is duty. You see it in the real religion here. Buddhism? Confucianism? That's horses——t. This civilization's been around for thousands of years, and those ideas only for a few hundred. The real religion here is ancestor worship. In every house, every cave, every room you'll find a shrine, a candle, something that represents the dearly departed, and not just granny or your favourite dead aunt. And any people whose principal religion is situated in a pure devotion to duty,” he said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands over his lap, “will never, not in a thousand years, lose a war.”

It was during one of our conversations that Morrissey began to ask questions about Spain. He was cut off here and desperate for news. I told him what I could, attempting to provide an overview of the political realities there and a frank assessment of our chances for victory. I mentioned the victory at Teruel, the one I'd read about in the
Guardian,
but didn't have any news more recent than that. I described in some detail the mobile blood-transfusion unit and the documentary Karpathi and Kline had made. He listened with great attention, and pursued a line of questioning consistent with a medical man's interests. After we had exhausted the topic, he suggested I might be interested in visiting Hankou's Changchun Studios, the most famous of the film studios in the country, where the Hungarian Robert Capa was spending a couple of days, preparing some groundwork for a documentary.

I asked him if he knew Capa. Though I'd never met him while in Spain, I knew his most famous pictures, particularly the “moment of death” photograph that had garnered him, and the Spanish War, such attention. Morrissey told me that he did not, but had been informed of his arrival in Hankou—from Spain via London and Hong Kong—only two or three days before. He knew everything that happened in Hankou, this Morrissey, especially if it involved well-known foreigners.

*

You know what I thought the other day? In this Godless army I imagined myself a chaplain administering last rites. Can you imagine? At least playing tricks with myself gives me an occasional chuckle.

*

I have just now recalled something. I wrote recently that your mother had talked to me only of her father's journey to America and the difficult times that resulted. Well, I have remembered something else that you might be interested in hearing about. She told me that her favourite place on earth was her mother's kitchen. She didn't even have to think about it. We were playing a silly game to help pass the time, waiting for Kajsa's blood to fill the bottle sitting next to her. We both added to the blood supply as often as we could, usually after hours when the clinic was closed to the donating public. “Where would you be if you could be any place on earth?” I said, and she said, “In your arms,” and I said, “Seriously,” and she said, “Sitting on the counter in my
mother's kitchen waiting for the apple-nut strip to come out of the oven.” I said, “That sounds perfect,” and slipped the cannula from the vein. When I applied the gauze and told her to bend her arm she said, “Light as a feather. Can I go now, Doctor?”

*

The following Saturday in Hankou, stealing a moment away from the hospital, we hired a rickshaw to deliver us to the studio, located in an industrial corner of the city, with the Yangtze at its eastern edge. The lot covered twelve acres and was a busy hive of men and women, all eagerly serving the war effort. My first five minutes there I was obliged to remind myself that the wounded I saw walking about laughing, with their heads bandaged, bleeding from gaping wounds, were in fact actors in costume. The set we visited was a perfect replica of the interior of a city apartment, with its walls blown out and windows smashed. The resources were vastly superior to those we'd had at our disposal in Madrid. We did not find Capa but spent an interesting hour watching them shoot a propaganda film that would be completed and ready for the screen within two months.

Two days later, another rickshaw brought me to the offices of Chiang Kai-shek's confidant and publicity chief, Hollington Tong. He was a severe-looking man with square shoulders and a hard, impatient gaze. Every afternoon he stared down a gathering of jaundiced American and British correspondents who, unimpressed, slouched in their chairs, doodling, daydreaming or otherwise waiting for the true story to come their way. At the conclusion of each press conference, these men reconvened at The Blond Dutchman, a bar frequented by white Russians and voyeuristic Americans, where they caught up on the real news from the front. This, at least, according to Agnes Smedley. I was very eager for the latest word on the war, both official and unofficial, and this, she told me, was where you could hear it. At the press conference, the government told you what it wanted you to know; for everything else you went to the Dutchman.

I arrived early, under a cold grey sky, and was ushered into a small room by an unassuming clerk. Uncomfortable wooden stools had been placed before a large oak desk, from which I presumed the daily press release would be read. Posters on the walls declared the rightness of the Generalissimo and Madam Chiang's New Life Movement. This was Chiang's thinly disguised attempt to fill the vacuum left in the hearts and lives of people who have been denied the inspiration of Communism. In place of a true social ethic, Chiang's movement calls for a ban on spitting, smoking in public places, and the fraternization of men and women in the street. There is even said to exist on file the proper length of sleeve of a chaste woman's frock—one inch longer or shorter and her virtue will be questioned. In its highly rigid code of conduct, you find nothing directed to the inspiration of the spirit, only a schoolmarm's list of rules.

Other posters consisted of colourful drawings of a group of Chinese tanks, a squadron of I-15bis fighter planes and troops rolling forward to the Sea of Japan. There was no mention here of the Red Army or Mao's heroic trek north to Shensi or the tens of millions of peasants who'd taken up arms in his name. This was the sanitized face of two Chinas, united for the time being against the Japanese. I sat at the back of the office and was wondering if I'd come to the right place when Eli Ansell, the journalist I'd met on board the
Empress of Asia,
stepped inside and smiled. “Good to see you again, Doctor Bethune,” he said. “They told me you were in town. Have you met this degenerate? We've been looking everywhere for you.”

The degenerate to Ansell's left was in fact a very handsome man with a wide grin. I recognized him immediately as Robert Capa, his likeness having accompanied some of his magazine work. His dark wavy hair was slicked back, Valentino-like. The man deserved a harem. You might be forgiven for imagining you were in the presence of a motion-picture celebrity or high-living Continental but for his reputation as a recklessly brave and superbly talented photographer. He was barely in his mid-twenties, I think. After we were introduced he asked what had drawn me from Madrid.

“Wouldn't it be the rightness of it?”

“Convincing enough answer,” he said. “Madrid was right, too, though, wouldn't you say?”

“What about you, Ansell, did you get to Nanking?” I asked. “Did you meet your good Nazi? What was the name?”

“Yes. I tracked him down. John Rabe. I found him at the German Consulate smoking a large cigar. He's saved more lives than a whole fleet of surgeons. Incredible, really. But still a loathsome sort. A wonderful study in contrasts.”

“I trust you'll do something with it,” I said.

“Likely. But I've got this degenerate on my hands, and all he wants to do is take pictures of beautiful girls and get drunk.”

“I prefer the Spanish face,” Capa said.

“Isn't that scandalous? You've no shame, do you, Capa? You should be congratulated for your candour, then shot for your vanity.”

Soon three other correspondents arrived to complete our small gathering, two Brits and an American. We chatted briefly, then sat down on our uncomfortable little stools. Mr. Tong entered the room, followed by a small man wearing glasses. This second man was Mr. T. T. Li. Mr. Tong began the press conference by rapping his knuckles on the surface of the table where he sat, clearing his throat and welcoming us to Hankou on behalf of General Chiang. His presentation lasted perhaps three minutes. He spoke in unadorned English of the United Front's triumphs, studiously avoiding any mention of its setbacks. He received no questions from the gallery, whereupon he vacated his seat for Mr. Li, who then read the day's official press release. Afterwards, we all made for the Dutchman.

“I saw you in Kline's documentary,” Capa said. “I'm here to make one myself.”

He explained that he wanted to find a mobile unit of the Eighth Route Army and follow a child soldier around to see if that could be turned into a documentary. “You know, a child's face in war.”

“There are lots of those,” I said.

The Dutchman was underground, cavern-like, with arched brick ceilings and deep recesses like the vestibules I'd seen under Madrid. We sat at a wooden table in one of these recesses. The bar was loud. A man at the far end of the room was playing a piano, his long, scrawny back hunched over the keys, swaying slightly. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. I saw no Chinese.

“Your friend here believes you should be shot,” I said.

“The Hungarian is to be shot at dawn,” Capa said. “Do you know what Capa means, Doctor? It is not my real name. My old name is Friedmann, you know. But Capa—
capa,
that's ‘shark' in Hungarian. Shark. Do you know who Robert Capa is? He is my invention. It's true. I am an invention. He who sits before you is an invention. At this precise moment a drunken invention. If I cease what I'm doing I no longer exist. I know I will die soon.”

“That's lovely,” I said.

“But you are not an invention, I can see that. You are a serious man, Doctor. You are a scientist. A pragmatist and a realist.”

“I think the Shark is drunk,” I said, turning to Ansell.

“Have you ever brought a dead man back to life, Doctor?”

“I suppose
you
have?” I said.