by Geling Yan
He would put it like this: ‘My children, sacrificing oneself for others takes you to a very sacred place. Through sacrificing yourselves, you will become pure and holy women.’ But even before he went into the kitchen, he realised that these words were utterly ridiculous, totally false, embarrassing even to himself.
So what should he say?
He almost hoped they would rebel, turn against him, begin to shout abuse. That would give him the strength to say: ‘I’m very sorry but you must go with the Japanese. Leave this church immediately.’
There was not a second to waste, yet Father Engelmann still dithered, overwhelmed by indecision.
‘Father!’ Fabio came running round from the back of the church. ‘The graveyard is full of Japanese soldiers. They came in over the wall and they’re hiding among the graves!’
Father Engelmann pushed open the kitchen door. There was only one thought in his head: Please let these women be good Chinese women and meekly accept their fate.
Then he stood rooted to the spot.
The women were sitting around the large chopping board, in the middle of which was a guttering candle, looking as if they were holding some sort of secret meeting.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Fabio in a low voice.
‘I brought them up here,’ said Yumo.
‘About a dozen of the Japanese soldiers didn’t leave with their officers. They’ve taken over the graveyard!’ said Fabio.
Yumo glanced at him, unconcerned. Then she turned to Father Engelmann.
‘We have all discussed it –’
‘I don’t remember you discussing it with us!’ exclaimed Jade.
‘We’ll go with the Japanese,’ Yumo went on. ‘The schoolgirls will stay behind.’
For a moment Father Engelmann was stunned. Then he realised what Yumo had said and felt relief wash over him, then guilt at his relief. He hated this ruthlessness in himself.
‘You don’t really think you’ll get wine to drink and meat to eat?’ interrupted Fabio urgently.
‘Even if there was, I wouldn’t go!’ said Nani.
‘I’m not forcing you,’ said Yumo. ‘But I can only take the place of one.’
Hongling got lazily to her feet. ‘Do you think you’re nobler than Yumo?’ She looked at them all. ‘Your lives are muckier than pond sludge, and you’re all playing Little Miss Precious!’ She walked up to Yumo and put her arm around her waist. ‘I’m getting into your good books. I’m going with you.’
‘Mucky or precious, I’ve still got my life!’ Jade shouted.
‘We’ve still got parents and brothers and sisters to keep on our wages,’ some of the others chimed in.
‘I haven’t put my name down for this. What would I want to go for?’
‘Fine!’ said Yumo angrily. ‘You want to carry on hiding here, cadging off these people? You want to watch the Japs carrying those children off to their doom? You do that! Just who do you think you’re saving yourselves for? Is there anyone who gives a toss whether you live or you die?’ She was beginning to sound like a foul-mouthed countrywoman, every sentence a stream of curses. ‘You think you can hide yourselves away and you’ll be reborn as nice young schoolgirls, just like that? Face it, you were born to be whores, the scum of the earth! But if you do a good deed now, maybe you’ll have better karma in the next life.’
Father Engelmann did not really follow what Yumo was saying. It was not just the words she used, but the meaning behind them. But Fabio understood. He had grown up in the countryside where life for women was harsh. It was common to hear them take any opportunity, including scolding their children, to bemoan the sadness of their lives. But so long as they felt that this was their karma, they would always, in the end, accept any injustice fatalistically. Yumo was talking to the women now in terms which they understood. They quieted down.
Suddenly Fabio could bear it no more. ‘You don’t have to take the schoolgirls’ places,’ he shouted.
Yumo was taken aback. Fabio felt Father Engelmann’s eyes boring into him as he repeated, ‘No one need go.’
‘Talk sense, Fabio!’ said Father Engelmann in English.
‘Keep them all hidden in the cellar. Maybe the Japanese won’t find them,’ said Fabio.
‘But the Japanese already know there are schoolgirls in hiding here –’
‘That was because you admitted it! You’d already decided to sacrifice these women.’ Fabio was so outraged he was scarcely comprehensible and, seeing the older priest was straining to understand, he repeated the accusation. For the first time in his life, he felt Chinese through and through. There was something almost feudal about this xenophobic desire to protect ‘his’ womenfolk from being ill-treated by any foreign man.
‘Fabio Adornato, I’m not discussing this with you.’ Father Engelmann’s quiet voice quelled the younger man.
There was a ring at the doorbell and the candle flame flickered.
‘Get down to the cellar,’ Fabio ordered the women. ‘You’re not going to be dragged off like scapegoats, not while I’m alive to stop it.’
‘We’re not being dragged, we’re volunteering,’ said Yumo looking at Fabio. It was a look Fabio had been waiting for, a look that instantly bewitched him. And now the eyes which gave him that look would depart with her body …
‘I’ll go and talk to their officer and ask for another ten minutes,’ said Father Engelmann.
‘Twenty minutes. It’ll take at least twenty minutes for us to put on their clothes,’ said Yumo.
It was a clever idea. Father Engelmann was taken aback by Yumo’s intelligence and maturity.
‘Do you think you can look convincing?’ he asked.
Hongling spoke up. ‘Don’t worry, Father. We can pass ourselves off as anyone except for ourselves!’
‘Get the girls’ clothes, Fabio, please,’ said Yumo. ‘Not the stuff they wear every day. We want what they wear for special occasions, quickly!’
Fabio sprinted to the workshop. Halfway up the ladder it suddenly struck him that Yumo had called him not ‘Deacon’ or ‘Father’ but ‘Fabio’. And she had made ‘Fabio’ sound like an authentic Chinese name.
* * *
The officer agreed to Father Engelmann’s request and his troops waited silently in the chilly night for another twenty minutes. Father Engelmann had explained why they required more time: the choir robes had not been worn for a while. Some needed buttons sewed on, others mending and ironing. The soldiers stood patiently in rows outside the church compound wall, bayonets at the ready. Good things were worth waiting for, and the Japanese were sticklers for ceremony.
Exactly twenty minutes later, the kitchen door opened and out came a group of young girls dressed in wide-sleeved black choir robes. They walked with their heads slightly bent, like girls trying to hide their budding breasts. Each girl carried a hymn book tucked under her arm.
Father Engelmann stood at the gate, making the sign of the cross over each of the women as they passed. It was difficult to tell which of the black-robed women was which. But he recognised Yumo from her height. She brought up the rear of the procession. When she reached him, she smiled shyly and performed a genuflection like a good Catholic schoolgirl.
‘You came here seeking protection,’ said the priest softly.
‘And thank you for taking us in, Father. If you had not, I don’t know what terrible things would have happened to us by now.’
Fabio had moved closer and was staring at Yumo.
‘Women like us can never escape ruin, or from ruining others,’ she added with a sly glance at the two clergymen.
Fabio pulled the heavy door open for the women to pass through. Outside, the torches illuminated a forest of bayonets. The Japanese officer stood to attention, his face in darkness, only the brightness of his eyes and teeth betraying a wolfish delight.
Fabio had never imagined that he would open the door and send these women on their last journey; send this woman, Yumo, on her last journey. Even though Yumo had
been born luckless, he had assumed that there was still some shred of hope for her. But not any more. He felt a surge of melancholy. He had first been infected by such feelings as a child when his Chinese adoptive mother took him to operas. She had sown so many seeds of melancholy in his heart. Yes, he thought, seeds grew, and could turn into something quite different.
Beside the burned-out tree, a truck was parked. Two soldiers stood by the tailgate and, as the first ‘schoolgirl’ approached, they each took hold of an arm and hoisted her up the step. It was no use refusing their help. They blocked any attempt to struggle with drawn bayonets.
Father Engelmann stood at the entrance to the compound. He watched as each woman stepped up and disappeared under the tarpaulin covering. He regretted that he had not asked them their real names, the ones their parents had given them. Eventually all the women were in the truck apart from Yumo. He saw the officer reach out to help her up, and he saw Yumo instinctively jerk away, then give the officer a faint smile. It was the genuine smile of a young girl, shy and modest. She could fool anyone with that smile.
The officer mounted his horse and ordered the truck to start.
‘Please wait!’
Father Engelmann ran towards the truck.
The officer on horseback turned to him.
‘I’ll go with my students,’ the priest said.
‘Ii-e!’ the officer replied.
Fabio didn’t need to speak Japanese to understand that this meant ‘no’.
‘I’ll go and make sure they sing properly. It has been ages since they last sang…’ Father Engelmann insisted, trying to climb into the truck.
The officer shouted an order for the truck to pull out. It lurched forward. With a hand clutching the wooden rail of the truck bed and a foot on the rear wheel, the priest was left suspended, his long, black cassock entangling his limbs.
‘Father Engelmann!’ Fabio called out.
The officer yelled something.
Yumo reached out her hand and placed it on Father Engelmann’s.
‘Father, you shouldn’t…’
‘Give me a hand, my child…’ the priest cried out.
All of a sudden the truck picked up speed. Rifles sounded. Yumo screamed as Father Engelmann fell off the truck. Fabio saw her clutching her bleeding forearm as the priest thudded to the ground. He rushed to his side and called his name, but Father Engelmann could no longer hear.
Epilogue
Shujuan would never forget those last, awful hours in the compound of St Mary Magdalene. No one could speak to or look at anyone else. Fabio gave the girls a hasty dinner of potato soup and then hurried off to the Safety Zone.
The girls sat in the cellar in silence. ‘Let us fill our bellies, don’t let those prostitutes take our food away,’ was the prayer they had been muttering for days. Now they had finally got what they wanted. They had never expected, however, that their prayer would be answered in such a cruel way. As she ate her soup, Shujuan glanced surreptitiously at Sophie, who sat opposite her. Sophie’s face was covered in long scratches made by the other girl’s nails during the scrum. The marks were the only signs of life on her otherwise subdued face. No one said with regretful sighs: ‘Those women saved our lives!’ or ‘I wonder if they’ll survive…’ But Shujuan knew that all of them, like her, felt pangs of remorse.
When Fabio arrived back, after midnight, it was with a tall Western woman. The girls recognised her as Miss Vautrin. She had brought a barber with her and he shaved the girls’ heads. Two hours later, the little band of schoolgirls had been transformed into a band of schoolboys. Miss Vautrin had come in an ambulance and, just before dawn, the ambulance drove away from the church full of sickly young patients, wan and dull-eyed, each one dressed in striped hospital pyjamas which flapped so loosely on their skinny frames that it looked as if there was nothing underneath.
The ‘boy’ patients spent two days hidden in the sickroom at the Jin Ling Medical Institute. Then they were smuggled out to a place in the nearby countryside, from where they were put onto a boat downriver to Wuhu and then onto another boat to Hankou. Fabio escorted them all the way, in the guise of their doctor.
* * *
In the years that followed, China underwent many changes, but Shujuan never changed as much as she did in those few days in December 1937.
Finally reunited with her family, she learned the agony her parents had gone through when they heard the news from China. The moment her father came back from the college where he worked he would sit hunched silently over the wireless, desperate to find out what was happening. There were no telephone and cable links to Nanking. Her father had managed to contact someone in the Chinese consulate, but the answer he got was confused. The situation in Nanking was catastrophic but not a single fact could be verified. He then managed to get through to a friend in Shanghai on the telephone, to be told that some rumours had filtered through to the concessions there: the Japanese Army had carried out a massacre, and some photographs of civilians who had been gunned down had been brought out of Nanking by journalists. As Shujuan lay huddled next to her sobbing friend, imagining her parents enjoying bacon and eggs, they were in fact consumed with anguished remorse, and trying to get boat tickets back to China. They believed, as the Chinese do, that ‘if one in the family was to die, then they should all perish together’.
Shujuan kept in touch with Deacon Fabio Adornato. Like her, he had been profoundly changed by his experiences. He left the Church and began to teach world history and the history of religion. He spoke often of Father Engelmann and the inspiration the priest had been to him. Both he and Shujuan shared the faint hope that they might track down one or two of the women who had so bravely gone with the soldiers. At the very least, if they could find out what had happened to them, it would set their minds at rest.
Shujuan was in her twenties when the Japanese War Crimes Tribunal was held in Nanking in 1946. The entire population of Nanking braved the stifling August heat, and descended on the courtroom to witness the public disgrace of the people who had brutally mistreated them for eight years. Milling crowds packed the courtroom; those who could not get in stood in the surrounding streets. Shujuan was outside, one of the crowd listening through the loudspeakers which were strung from telegraph poles. Suddenly she heard a voice she recognised. A woman was in the witness box testifying to the mass rapes planned and carried out by the Japanese military top brass. Although she was using a different name, Shujuan was sure it was Yumo.
It took Shujuan an hour to push her way through the crowd and get into the courtroom. Once inside, she recognised the woman immediately, even though her back was turned. From behind, she looked as beautiful as ever, in spite of all she had endured. Shujuan squeezed her way through from the edge of the throng, getting soaked in other people’s sweat as she did so, and came up behind the woman who had possessed the most famously elegant shoulders in 1930s Nanking. She reached out and tapped one of those shoulders. But the face which turned to hers was not as Shujuan remembered it. Something looked wrong. It was as if, Shujuan felt afterwards, its natural beauty had been destroyed and then clumsily reconstructed by a plastic surgeon.
‘Zhao Yumo!’ exclaimed Shujuan in low tones. But the woman peered at her in apparent confusion. ‘I’m Meng Shujuan!’ Shujuan went on.
The woman shook her head. ‘You’ve got the wrong person.’ Yet the voice was Zhao Yumo’s, the same slightly off-key voice which had so captivated the Nanking playboys of the 1930s when she sang.
Shujuan did not give up. She pushed her way to her side and said, ‘I was one of the group of schoolgirls you and the other sisters saved!’
But it was no good. Zhao Yumo kept denying she knew her. Yet she gave Shujuan a sidelong glance just as Zhao Yumo used to, elegantly lifting the chin which had survived the ravages done to the rest of her face, and spoke in Zhao Yumo’s Suzhou-accented Nanking dialect. ‘Who is Zhao Yumo?’ she asked.
Then she stood up, edged along the rows of seats past people’s
knees, and left. No one grumbled. How could they when that beautiful chin expressed such exquisite regret at the inconvenience she was causing?
It was, of course, impossible for Shujuan to follow her. No one was going to make way for her. She had no option but to go back the way she had come in. By the time she got outside, there was no sign of Zhao Yumo.
She wrote to Fabio Adornato, who was then in America, and told him that Zhao Yumo was still alive. Fabio’s grandmother had died in October 1945, leaving her house to him, and Fabio had gone back to sell it. Shujuan told him in her letter how the woman had denied that she was Zhao Yumo. In his reply, which arrived a month later, he said that perhaps it was only by changing her identity that she could go on living. He urged Shujuan to try to put the past behind her now and get on with her life.
Ever headstrong, Shujuan resolved never to give up her search for the stories of the Qin Huai women. If she didn’t remember them, who would? Some information came to her from Japanese journalists’ notes and some she got by chatting to Japanese veteran soldiers. But most was elicited from the Chinese she met as she travelled through the provinces of Jiangsu, Anhui and Zhejiang, which surround Nanking.
When Zhao Yumo had given her testimony to the War Crimes Tribunal, she had talked about how, when they were first taken, two of the women had tried to resist with knives taken from the St Mary Magdalene kitchen. They were killed on the spot. The other eleven, when the officers had had enough of them, were deposited in a newly established comfort station. Over the next couple of years, they died one by one; some were executed for trying to escape, others died from disease, and a few even committed suicide. The fact that Zhao Yumo was fortunate enough to survive was probably down to her looks and her style, which meant that she was used by middle-ranking and junior officers. They gradually relaxed their vigilance and eventually she made her escape. That was after about four years of being a ‘comfort woman’.