The Message

by Mai Jia

  5

  There was the evidence, in black and white.

  There was no longer any point in Li Ningyu denying it. Denial would only provoke Gu Xiaomeng even more. Instead, she decided to admit everything. Of course, admitting everything wasn’t going to be enough; she had to explain and beg for forgiveness. She said she’d forged Gu Xiaomeng’s writing because she knew that Hihara wouldn’t really suspect her, and even if he did, her father could get her off.

  What kind of logic was that?

  In situations like that, it doesn’t matter so much what you say so long as you keep talking and coming up with excuses, lying if necessary, anything to make you seem helpless. Of course, the best way to make yourself look helpless is to cry, but not too loudly. Li Ningyu hugged Gu Xiaomeng tightly as she sobbed and whispered in her ear, ‘We’ve been such good friends, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me. If you don’t, then I’m dead – do you really want to send me to my grave? If I die, my two babies will be orphans, and they love you so much, they always make such a fuss about wanting to go and see their Auntie Gu… I didn’t have a choice, Xiaomeng – I’m really sorry. Think of my children, you have to forgive me.’

  She cried, she pleaded, the tears trickled down her cheeks, she choked down her sobs, and she begged Gu Xiaomeng to forgive her.

  Her tears did make Gu Xiaomeng less angry, but she was still a very long way from feeling able to pardon her. So Li Ningyu tried a different tack: she started lying.

  [Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]

  She thought that I was really in love with that creature Jian, so she lied to me and said that he was one of her comrades.

  To begin with I didn’t believe a word of it, but she was very convincing – she knew a lot about his family and his background, about how we met, and other things that hardly anyone else knew, so she made it sound good. I certainly got the impression that she knew him very well, even better than I did.

  Some of what she said I’d never heard before, but there were a few things she mentioned that I knew to be true – like that he’d gone to Chongqing in secret. That I knew to be a fact. And it was also true that he read a lot of progressive books and magazines, like Threads of Talk and Fiction Monthly – that kind of thing. He bought them on the quiet, but I knew he read them.

  Jian was a big star in Hangzhou in those days, famous in the arts world for his pro-Japanese performances, so the newspapers often carried stories about him, and there was plenty of gossip doing the rounds too. So she could have got some of her information that way. The other source would have been me – I’d forgotten what I’d told her, but she hadn’t.

  She even claimed that the reason he’d become so friendly with me was that he wanted me to become a comrade too. Later on, I found out for a fact that he wasn’t a member of the Communist Party and never had been, but she felt confident in plucking all this out of thin air because she knew I couldn’t check her story with him. She was prepared to lie herself blue in the face if it might get me to calm down and stop me from turning her in.

  Ha! She had absolutely no idea that there was no point in talking like that to me – I never had the slightest affection for Jian, and I was never going to be one of their comrades. It wouldn’t have made any difference if that Jian creature had genuinely turned out to be a Red.

  And then she tried to recruit me into the Communist Party, right there and then, because she wanted me to take her message out. She tried everything: summoning up every patriotic martyr, right back to the twelfth century, to General Yue Fei; listing the horrors the puppet army was guilty of; describing the vile behaviour of various collaborationist traitors; trying to make out that she and her comrades were the only people doing the right thing in the face of all the outrages that were happening in our country.

  I listened to what she had to say, but it disgusted me. I swore at her and made fun of her in the worst way that I could think of. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m sure that in order to demonstrate that I was not the shameless traitor she thought I was, I must have made some very pointed remarks. And that was when she started to suspect who I really was.

  [Transcription ends]

  When Li Ningyu realized, thanks to all the curses and sarcastic comments, that Gu Xiaomeng might be working undercover for the Nationalists, she tried another tack – blackmail!

  ‘Okay,’ Li Ningyu said, ‘you don’t need to say any more. I understand. In fact, I understand everything. So, we ought to help each other, since, after all, you Nationalists and we Communists are really on the same side.’

  ‘What do you mean, you know everything?’ Gu Xiaomeng asked, stalling, appalled at the possibility that she might have blown her own cover. ‘How are we on the same side?’

  Li Ningyu went on the attack. ‘Why won’t you admit what you’ve been up to? You should be given credit for your patriotism. But you also shouldn’t try and make me take the blame for everything. If you turn me in, I’ll say that you wrote the message – I don’t care if they kill both of us!’

  ‘Well, off you go then,’ Gu Xiaomeng shot back defiantly. ‘Go and turn me in right this minute!’

  Li Ningyu gave a hollow laugh. ‘You might be fine with that, but what about your father? You and I are mere minnows in this particular pond – Hihara won’t get much satisfaction from arresting and killing the two of us, will he? But think how he’ll enjoy being able to catch a big fish, someone who managed to get so close to the traitor Wang Jingwei.’

  Gu Xiaomeng was out of her depth. After a couple of rounds of this, she was already on the back foot, unable to extricate herself. She didn’t know what it was that she’d said – how could Li Ningyu have discovered her father’s real identity?

  In fact, she hadn’t said anything; at the most, she’d given a few pointers as to their real opinions, but Li Ningyu was very alert to that kind of thing, and she’d understood immediately. She grabbed hold of what she had and then without the slightest compunction forced Gu Xiaomeng into a corner, using a mix of veiled threats and lies. In the end, Gu Xiaomeng had to throw down her weapons in surrender, and Li Ningyu came up with the terms for a temporary truce: Gu Xiaomeng wouldn’t betray Li Ningyu to the authorities, and Li Ningyu wouldn’t make Gu Xiaomeng help her get the message out.

  The fact that Gu Xiaomeng agreed to this meant that Li Ningyu was even more convinced that she’d guessed right.

  Having got this far with her story, the old lady became very emotional. ‘Li Ningyu could steal things right out from under your nose; she was a very crafty character. She could also make you believe whatever she said, and as for trying to work out what she was up to – well, that was impossible. Any ordinary person would have been flummoxed in that situation, but she counter-attacked on nothing at all really – it was the flimsiest of hunches – and managed to knock me off balance. I didn’t know what to do, I had no idea how I was going to get out of it. I really didn’t know which was worse: turning her in or not! That’s why she was perfect as an underground operative – she was the sort of person who planned her actions from every conceivable angle, and whatever happened, she never panicked. No matter how dangerous things became, she never showed the slightest fear.’

  I felt that the story was now unfolding in much the same way that a flower bud unfurls its petals. The old lady was very much enjoying her recital of the events of so long ago and seemed oblivious to the fact that our time was up, so I encouraged her to carry on talking. However, Mrs Chen was too professional to allow that; she immediately noticed that the corners of Madame Gu’s eyes were drooping, which she said was a sign that she was getting overtired. She told me that I would have to leave. When I hesitated, she said, in a rather teacher-ish fashion, ‘When a child gets overtired, they recover after a short rest; if you get overtired, you can take a nap and you’ll be fine; but if she gets overtired, it will be a couple of days before she’s back to normal.’

  What she meant was that I had to consider t
he bigger picture.

  That evening I went back to Taipei in a fever of speculation. I didn’t sleep all night because my mind was in such a ferment.

  I now had two important questions.

  One: given the circumstances described (the two women having become enemies), what happened to make Gu Xiaomeng eventually decide to help Li Ningyu?

  Two: how did Gu Xiaomeng get the message out?

  Regarding the second question, I had a strong feeling that the very best way would have been to simply put the three capsules back where Gu Xiaomeng had found them and then wait for Turtle to collect them the following day. The first question, however, was a lot more complicated. The two of them were now sworn enemies, and Gu Xiaomeng wasn’t the sort who could be easily persuaded to change her mind. In addition, her agreement with Li Ningyu that neither of them was to turn the other in had been forced upon her; it wasn’t the result of any sincere desire to assist her.

  So what could have happened to change her mind?

  That question caused me a sleepless night. My eyes burnt with the unbearable pain of insomnia.

  FIVE

  1

  Insomnia is a state of mind in which the darkness of the night torments you.

  The following day, Madame Gu noticed the shadows under my eyes and asked me what the matter was. I told her the truth: I hadn’t slept all night. She laughed cheerfully. ‘What on earth could be keeping you awake? If anyone should be losing sleep, it’s Li Ningyu.’ That took us straight back into our conversation.

  As you can imagine, Li Ningyu had not been sleeping at all well. She knew better than anyone just how bad the situation was – she’d realized that even before they’d all been rounded up and driven to the Tan Estate. When Commander Zhang phoned that evening to ask her if she’d told anyone about the top-secret telegram from Nanjing, she immediately understood that something must have gone badly wrong. Her message about the Gathering of Heroes must have been intercepted. A couple of hours earlier, she’d put it in the rubbish bin on base, and now here was Commander Zhang suddenly asking about the telegram. Straight away she decided to drag Chief of Staff Wu into the imbroglio. As the old lady said, that was a master stroke on Li Ningyu’s part.

  Li Ningyu had long been determined that, at some point, Chief of Staff Wu should pay for his actions in support of the puppet regime. She had practised several people’s handwriting but had paid particular attention to mastering Wu Zhiguo’s – every line, every stroke – and it really did look like his. She wrote most of her secret dispatches in his handwriting, in the hope that if intercepted they would get this hero of the anti-insurgency campaign into serious trouble; if she could trick people into believing that he was a Communist, that would get him executed.

  This had always been the plan, but she was now obliged to put it into action earlier than she’d wanted. Her original idea had been to create some false intelligence, allow it to be intercepted, and entrap Wu Zhiguo that way; if the intelligence was false, the underground wouldn’t be compromised and she herself would never be suspected. But what had now happened was the worst of all possible scenarios. The intelligence that had been intercepted was real, which meant that her comrades had no idea what was actually going on, placing K and the others in extreme danger. And she’d been unable to avoid being caught up in it too.

  Even though she was taken to the Tan Estate with the others, she wasn’t frightened to begin with because she knew – she’d planned right from the start – that Wu Zhiguo would get the blame. What worried her was being under house arrest; there was no way she could get a message out. So, that morning, when she realized that Turtle had come to find her, she was absolutely delighted. She thought she might be able to get her intelligence to him. However, she had no idea quite how many things would happen that afternoon.

  [Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]

  First of all, she had no idea that Hihara was going to keep such a close eye on her. Judging by what she told me later, at that time she wasn’t sure whether Chief of Staff Wu was alive or not, but she thought it most likely he was dead – she couldn’t imagine how he’d have persuaded Hihara to suspect her instead without actually killing himself. In this, Li Ningyu made a mistake, and that’s why, later on, Hihara was so determined to pursue his investigations into her activities.

  Secondly, she was even less prepared for the fact that I would cause her so many problems. She hadn’t expected me to work out the truth, and that made it very difficult for her to decide what to do for the best. Although I had said too much myself, which had allowed her to discover my true identity and so get me to promise not to turn her in, she had also seriously upset me, so she had to be afraid that in the end I would betray her. We’d been friends for a long time, so she knew me very well; she knew that I was stubborn and competitive, that I hated to feel that I’d lost out on something, and that if I got angry, there was no saying what I might do. So, as you can imagine, she needed to make sure that I would stay on her side, and that I would remain completely silent.

  To tell you the truth, I had no intention of reporting her to the authorities, because I was afraid she’d then just turn round and denounce me. But nor was I going to forgive her, and as for helping her… no way. I hoped that she would confess, because that would be best for both of us. But she said she’d never do that – at least, not until after the message had been smuggled out. Unbelievable, isn’t it? She was trying to set conditions: she said that if I helped her get her intelligence out, she would confess. I told her to stop dreaming. She said that there was no point in her still being alive if the message didn’t get out – she’d rather be dead. So I told her to go right ahead, she could hang herself or take poison or swallow razor blades, whatever the hell she wanted. Anyway, I was very hard on her – I really didn’t want to say another word to her ever again. As far as I was concerned, I’d already done enough by not turning her in; under no circumstances whatsoever was I going to do anything else to help her.

  However, I was nowhere near as tough as she was. She kept on at me, on and on, and in the end I agreed.

  [Transcription ends]

  2

  That proved to be a very special evening. The usually silent Li Ningyu spoke from the heart and told Gu Xiaomeng many things.

  Madame Gu told me that when they left the bathroom and went back to their room that evening, she went straight to bed, without even washing her face and hands. Li Ningyu did likewise. At first, the two of them behaved as if they were complete strangers; each lay in their own bed without saying a word to the other, and the only sound in the room was of them tossing and turning. The sound of insomnia.

  During the latter part of the night, Gu Xiaomeng dozed fitfully. At one point she thought she heard Li Ningyu getting out of bed and feeling her way around the room for a good long time. She had no idea what she was up to.

  In fact, she was dismantling the bugs.

  After she’d disconnected the listening devices, Li Ningyu woke Gu Xiaomeng up and started to talk to her. Every detail of her life, everything that had happened – it all came pouring out.

  [Transcript from the interview with Gu Xiaomeng]

  To cut a long story short, Li Ningyu was born into the gentry in Hunan province, into a well-educated and forward-thinking family. At sixteen she went with her older brother – that old reprobate Mr Pan senior – to study in Guangdong. He went to the Whampoa Military Academy and she went to the Women’s Medical College. While they were away studying, the Revolution came to their home town – landlords came under attack, land was redistributed to the peasants, and their father was targeted by the Red Army for being the richest landlord in the area. He ended up being shot.

  Li Ningyu and her brother swore that they would avenge their father’s death, so after they graduated they both joined the Nationalist Party’s National Revolutionary Army. They were sent to the front line in Jiangxi and Hunan provinces, and both of them participated in the Nationalists’ encircleme
nt campaign against the Red Army there.

  It’s hard to believe, but a few years later, her brother joined the Communist Party in secret. And then so did she. In time, Li Ningyu fell in love with the man who’d brought her brother into the Party. She married him and had two children with him, but then he died in 1937, during the Battle of Shanghai. He was killed at home, hit by a stray bullet while he was reading the newspaper – can you imagine! Apparently, nobody ever found out who was responsible. Li Ningyu was pregnant with their third child at the time, but, unsurprisingly, the shock of seeing her husband die like that caused her to miscarry. Her baby went to join its father in paradise.

  When she got to that part of her story, Li Ningyu started to cry. It really was sad, and I was moved too, but I was still so furious with her that I refused to give her any sort of reaction. I stayed completely quiet and still, in the dark there. The silence was quite oppressive.

  [Transcription ends]

  Eventually, Li Ningyu regained her self-control. She wiped away her tears and continued. ‘Let me tell you the truth, Xiaomeng. I’ve shared all of this with you not because I want you to feel sorry for me, but so that you understand my position. You hold my life in your hands. If you so much as open your mouth in Hihara’s presence, it wouldn’t even matter if I were a cat with nine lives, I’d be off to meet Marx regardless. But we’ve been such close friends, I don’t want to die without you understanding how I got to this point.’

  ‘There’s no need to go on about it!’ Gu Xiaomeng said. ‘I’ve already told you I’m not going to turn you in.’ That was the first thing she’d said all night.

  Li Ningyu reached out and tried to take her hand. ‘Thank you, Xiaomeng. If you can forgive me, it shows that we’re still friends.’

  ‘Stop that!’ Gu Xiaomeng brushed her aside. ‘We aren’t friends – we just have a deal.’