China Seas

by John Harris

  There seemed to be corpses everywhere. The Japanese were hungry now. As the Americans began to attack their supply lines, their huge armies, unable to feed themselves, were beginning to fall back to the coast, so nervous of American bombing, they hid at any noise that sounded like an aeroplane. They left their sick and dying behind them and bodies were being found in tanks, lorries, cars, even ships, hundreds of them, Japanese boys hardly out of school. There was cholera everywhere and in one of the houses into which they stumbled by mistake, there seemed to be dozens of bodies in all stages of death and decomposition, red, white, green and blue, bloated and shrivelled, eyes staring, fingers clawing, hands raised in what seemed to be an attitude of prayer.

  ‘I think it’s actually coming to an end,’ Willie said. ‘I think we’re beginning to win.’

  ‘What will happen when it does?’ Sue-Lynn asked.

  ‘I should think a lot of people will turn up who were thought to be dead. Me, for instance. And you.’

  She looked at him with a sombre face. ‘William,’ she said, ‘I think I owe you an apology.’

  He was startled by the admission because she had always kept herself aloof, even faintly suspicious of him. ‘What for?’

  She frowned, as if finding the admission difficult. ‘I had one of the women here from the hospital at Jangjao,’ she said. ‘She was raped twenty-four times. It went on all day. Then, when they’d finished with them, the Japanese bayoneted them. She managed to escape.’ She paused. ‘That would have happened to me but for you.’

  Willie gestured that she should forget about it, but she insisted on going on. ‘It was you who brought me here,’ she said, watching him carefully so that he was conscious of being faintly embarrassed under her gaze. ‘You’ve been brave and resourceful, as well as very kind and understanding.’

  Willie shrugged. ‘I’m not brave. I’ve never been brave.’

  She remained distant as she continued to go to the little hospital every day. There wasn’t much she could do, but she boiled water and bathed away encrusted dirt and blood that was making wounds septic. Sometimes she was bitter at her inability to do more and depressed at the condition of her patients. She was uncertain. She had arrived in China full of idealism and hope, certain she could help. Now, confronted with the country as she had been, she was no longer sure she was right. There was so much to do, so much to put right.

  He could tell how her thoughts were moving and knew that sometimes she found it all a little too much. Despite China’s intellectual past, despite the giant strides she had made, most of the country was still barely out of the Middle Ages and the steps she was taking to drag herself into the present century involved ruthlessness, cruelty and often treachery, and they appalled Sue-Lynn. They were not what she had expected, weren’t even touched by the idealism she had brought from America. There was idealism enough, but it was a different idealism from hers and somehow it shut her out.

  Yet she persisted in trying to belong, to believe that her background made her at one with the Chinese. When something happened that showed they disagreed, however, when some villager she had attempted to treat simply ignored her and returned to the safer village antidotes and cures they had always known, she became cast down and morose so that Willie had to jerk her out of the mood. Despite her eagerness to share the sorrows of China, she had grown up in an American city and missed the conveniences of civilisation. Willie had learned to live anywhere and he had long since developed his psychology of survival. To survive, you had to try to survive.

  Often she looked angry, bewildered and desperate, as if something she’d believed in had vanished, and she lost weight so that her cheeks lost the roundness they’d had when he’d first seen her. But, if anything, it made her more beautiful, even in the hideous blue suit she’d acquired that chafed at the soft skin at her throat and made marks on her wrists and ankles.

  Occasionally, by the warm hearth of the charcoal stove, they talked of their past lives. But never of Zychov, who always remained a canker in Willie’s heart, smouldering, gnawing, making him go hot with rage when he thought about him. She had long since guessed there was something which troubled him, but she didn’t ask questions. Instead she concentrated on her own background. She had always wanted to he a doctor and had been a brilliant student. But always she had felt that her destiny was not in America where she had been born and brought up, but in suffering China, which she had never seen. ‘What do you do?’ she asked. ‘You’ve never told me.’

  ‘I sail ships.’

  ‘You’re a sailor?’

  ‘An owner.’

  ‘Then you must he wealthy.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘But you gave it all up to come here, to help China?’

  He managed a little laugh. ‘I think I was conscripted,’ he said.

  Eventually they began to realise they hadn’t seen a Japanese soldier for some time. They had left Yusiao some time before because the Japanese were believed to be in the countryside around, but as they started their foraging expeditions for food and news, it suddenly occurred to them that perhaps they had been withdrawn.

  There were still hungry people about, shuffling by in a soundless hush that was broken only by the scrape of feet or the squeak of wheels. They walked mechanically, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, bodies bent, heads wobbling weakly, fathers dragging carts, mothers pulling at ropes, all but the smallest children carrying huge loads. But there were also a few hardy characters who had survived the winter to sow wheat, protecting their crops with clubs, knowing that if they were stolen they, too, would starve.

  It was some time before they learned the war was over. They had seen no aerial activity for some time and slowly it began to dawn on them that the Japanese had gone, that in their area hostilities had ceased. Then they began to hear rumours of a terrible new weapon the Americans had introduced, and that the Japanese, unable to face it, had surrendered. It seemed unlikely, because surrender was against all the Japanese military code of ethics, but the rumours persisted and finally a man on an old stumbling horse came into the village where they were sheltering to tell them it was fact, that the Japanese had lost the war.

  The surrender caught everyone by surprise, not only themselves but the Chinese around them. They had all expected the Japanese to make a last desperate stand, but it hadn’t happened. It was hard to believe, but finally they were convinced and Sue-Lynn turned to Willie and, quietly putting her arms round him, held him to her. For a while they clung to each other, leaning on each other, too full of emotion to say anything.

  ‘Thank God,’ Sue-Lynn said eventually. ‘Thank God.’

  A few days later they learned the war had been finished for weeks and that the Americans were bringing in food for starving people and even talking of looking among the Japanese for the men who had committed the atrocities that had made the struggle so bitter.

  With the opening up of the country and the freedom to pass on information, they discovered that the Communists had refused point-blank to work with Chiang. It didn’t seem to worry Sue-Lynn, who had grown thoroughly disillusioned with the Kuomintang. Although Chiang appeared to have won several intoxicating victories against the crumbling Japanese forces, there were stories of strong discontent which had accumulated during the war years.

  ‘The civil war will start again,’ Sue-Lynn said calmly. ‘And that can only end with the destruction of Chiang.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ Willie asked.

  ‘It’ll be what China wants.’

  ‘And you? What will your part be in it? I suppose you’ve decided you’ve got a part.’

  She looked at him quickly as if she thought he was offering criticism, then the bewildered expression returned to her face. It seemed to come more often these days.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted wearily. ‘I expect they’d welcome a helping hand.’

  Willie’s experience suggested otherwise. ‘Will they?’ he asked, and as
she turned her head away quickly, he saw that her eyes were suddenly moist.

  With the end of the war, it was important to return to civilisation and, as they considered ways and means, it seemed easier to make for the coast rather than head north for distant Chungking.

  ‘We’re bound to be able to get word to the Navy or something,’ Willie suggested. ‘God knows, we might even bump into one of my ships.’

  But because of the delay in hearing of the Japanese defeat, too much time had elapsed and it was once more too close to winter to attempt to move out of the mountains. Already the fogs and the rain had started and the mists came every morning, creeping along the valleys like ghostly serpents. The roads were already deep in mud that clung to the ankles as you walked, and when the cold came it would set hard in a black frozen coral that would make walking impossible.

  ‘We have to wait until the weather changes,’ Willie said. ‘So we might as well make ourselves comfortable.’

  There was still some left of the money Mallinson had provided and, for a few coins, they rented a small two-roomed house at the end of a village on the lower slopes of the hills. It contained practically nothing, but Willie managed to construct sufficient furniture for them to live. They scrubbed the place out and though it could hardly be called comfortable, as least it was bearable after Willie had stopped up the hole under the door and started a fire.

  The state of the surrounding countryside was still chaotic. China had slipped back into the dark ages that had existed before the rise of the Kuomintang. A few British and Americans who had escaped being rounded up in places like Shanghai and the coastal ports where they had happened to be working had tried to reach Chungking but they heard they had been betrayed and handed over to the Japanese by villagers terrified of reprisals, and now, roamed by starving people, bandits and deserters from the renegade Chinese regiments employed by the Japanese, the countryside was as dangerous as it had been before the war.

  From time to time, groups of men appeared, ragged, tired and ill, and once again, with nothing to offer but her knowledge, Sue-Lynn started a small surgery of sorts. They could offer nothing in the way of medicine, but the advice they gave was welcomed and there was a steady stream of sick to see them. Many of them had been mutilated by the war and there were legless, armless and blind. But slowly, around them, people were trying to start their lives again and one day they saw one of the peasants trying to hack at the earth with an old-fashioned mattock.

  There was typhus in the village and, terrified of it after suffering from it in Russia, Willie immediately began to think of moving on. But then he noticed that Sue-Lynn was listless and low in spirit and the following day he saw she was shuddering and swaying on her feet. Without arguing, he hurried her back to the house and pushed her into bed. By this time she was sweating, her face bloodless, and by evening her body was covered with red blotches so that he knew her condition was serious.

  By the following morning she was unable to think coherently and had no idea who he was. Remembering all he could from what he had seen in Russia, he tried to look after her. Managing to find disinfectant, he worked through the whole of the house, but by this time she was delirious, her eyes bloodshot, the lashes gummed up, her lips cracked and sore. He bathed her body, kept her warm and tried to push weak soup into her.

  Having once suffered from the disease himself, he was terrified he would also catch it and they would both die, but he seemed to have become immune. Sue-Lynn was feeble and often in a sort of wakeful stupor, staring at him with contracted pupils and an obviously diminished capacity for perception. He had no means of judging her temperature but eventually, as she began to perspire freely and all the distressing symptoms of the disease began to abate, he judged she was past the crisis.

  Finally she opened her eyes and stared at him through half-closed lids. ‘What happened to me?’ she asked.

  ‘Tyf,’ he said, trembling with relief that she was going to survive.

  ‘Did you nurse me?’

  ‘As best I could. I had it myself in Russia in 1920.’

  ‘Am I going to be all right?’

  ‘You know that better than I do, but I think so.’

  Her hand lifted instinctively to her hair. Then it fell weakly to her side. ‘What happened to my hair?’

  ‘I had to cut it off. It’ll grow again.’

  He was staring down at her, his face concerned. It was a good face, she felt now, after too many months of suspicion, a strong face, with a straight, narrow nose, crisp hair streaked with grey, fine eyes and lines that were strong, grim even, but still full of humour and occasionally, as now, gentleness. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with shame at her indifference to him in the past and she reached out weakly to touch his hand. ‘Oh, William,’ she said, and he saw tears streaming down her cheeks.

  For a long time she was silent, then she looked at him, her eyes moist and gentle. The relationship between them had grown warmer over the months they had spent together. She had treated his hand when a splinter had made it septic, and now he had nursed her through typhus. But he was also aware of a change in himself. She had started to do catastrophic things to him. The constant proximity, watching her wash, bathe, living closely with her, and now nursing her from the edge of death, had been more disturbing than he enjoyed and, with a shock, he realised that, in her calmness, her compassion and her sense of duty, like Nadya, she too was a copy of Abigail.

  ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ he kept telling himself. ‘She’s years younger than you.’

  ‘The winter’s almost over, Sue-Lynn,’ he said quietly. ‘It’ll soon be spring. Then we’ll go south.’

  But it was a long time before she was able to stand on her feet and, with his help, take a few hesitant steps.

  ‘Soon,’ she said.

  But the warmer weather had come before she was strong enough to face the journey south.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ Willie encouraged.

  There was a strange inner glow coming from her face these days, a glow he hadn’t seen before, a glow that came from serenity and a curious mature calm, as though all her strong feelings had been ironed out. Humbly, he touched her cheek, oddly grateful for the warmth of her expression.

  ‘We’ll make for the Pearl River,’ he said shortly. ‘Perhaps we can persuade a junkmaster to take us down to Macao or somewhere like that.’

  Two days later they set off south. Every road in China seemed to be edged with ruins and full of people trying to find their way back to homes they had quitted years before, Their journey was slow because their shoes were shrunken and stiff with mud and Sue-Lynn still hadn’t the strength to walk long distances. Mallinson’s money was almost gone and Willie was hoarding what was left so he would have enough to bribe the junkmaster when he found him. Sue-Lynn was in total agreement and insisted there was no other way to travel. But she tired quickly and, grudgingly, Willie paid a man with an ox and a cart to carry them, and for two days they rolled to the jolt and jerk of the clumsy vehicle, their ears filled with the squeak of the wheels.

  ‘Squeaks are cheaper in China than oil,’ Willie pointed out.

  Even the ox-cart was slow, but within three weeks and with Sue-Lynn growing stronger with every day, they were staring at the Pearl River in the evening light wondering how they were going to use it. There was a small river port where junks collected and at a village a few miles further on called Yai-Ten they found a junkmaster due to head downstream who agreed to take them to Canton.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Come tomorrow. Bring food.’ He grinned, showing a set of teeth like discoloured gravestones. ‘Bring money also.’

  They agreed on a price and, because it was raining, they went in search of somewhere to sleep. There was still a little money left so they decided to use the last of it to stay the night at an inn. They were given a room with a charcoal brazier and a single large bed. Willie was about to protest when Sue-Lynn shook her head and spoke stiffly, defiantly almost.

 
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘After all this time, it doesn’t matter.’

  After they’d eaten, they began to worry that the junkmaster might have taken their money and gone without them, so they walked to the port in the drizzling rain to make sure. The junkmaster knew what they’d been thinking and grinned at them.

  ‘You think I go, Mastah?’

  Slightly shamefaced, they began to retrace their steps to the inn, but the rain began to fall more heavily until in the end it became a downpour and they were soaked. They fell into the inn and went to their room to dry off by the brazier. As Willie stoked up the charcoal, the rain hissed and spattered outside. Sue-Lynn dragged off her clothes and, flinging more charcoal on to the brazier, Willie turned to her. She was shivering and her teeth were chattering but she insisted on helping him to pull off his wet clothes.

  They had only a square of cotton to dry themselves and he insisted on drying her first, rubbing at her skin until she began to protest.

  ‘Warm now?’

  ‘Yes, I’m warm.’

  Heated by his exertions, he passed her one of the blankets to put round herself and started to dry himself as she hung her clothes in steamy bundles near the brazier.

  ‘Let me dry you.’ She turned to him, staring at him over the top of the square of cotton, then she stopped dead, wide-eyed and silent. As she lowered the cotton cloth, he reached for it and took it from her, and unexpectedly she took a step forward, then, catching at his hands, she pulled him to her, mouthing little sad longing sounds, her body relaxed against his and shaken by a dreadful paroxysm of sobbing. Her arms went round him and she was clinging to him as if she had lost all courage and he was her last refuge. The contact made him giddy and, as they sank to the bed, their mouths searching eagerly for each other, he gave up the struggle with his conscience.

  When Willie woke, she was lying in the crook of his arm, her cropped head against his shoulder, her face peaceful and purged of all uncertainty. His thoughts were confused.