Nanjing Requiem

by Ha Jin

  Minnie wordlessly adjusted his leg while I moved the stretcher alongside him so that he could get on it again once the thin quilt dried a bit. Before we could turn away, he opened his eyes. “I met another good-hearted foreigner,” he breathed, as if he couldn’t see that I had a Chinese face. Then his voice became a little louder. “A Canadian doctor dressed my wound every other day in Danyang. Every time I was in such pain that I yelped like mad, but he never lost his temper and always patted my forehead to calm me down. Once he wiped my face with a warm towel. Before I left, I told him that if I were younger, I would’ve wanted to have him as my godfather. Such a good man.”

  I realized that this young fellow might be a Christian. Touching his forehead, Minnie said, “God will help you get well soon.”

  I couldn’t say a word. As we stepped away, I wondered how we could console these men without lying to them. Most of them, infested with lice and fleas and depleted of strength, would soon join the yellow soil of China. An upsurge of sadness constricted my chest. Suddenly tearful and stuffy-nosed, I rushed out of the waiting hall to compose myself in the chilly air. Why would God let our land go through such horrendous destruction? Why did these innocent men have to suffer like this? When would God ever show his wrath against the violent aggressors? Those questions, usually lurking in the back of my mind, again cropped up and bewildered me.

  Minnie came out and joined me. “This is awful, awful,” she said with a sob in her voice, her cheeks tear-stained. “I never thought it could be so bad.” Her brown hair was tousled a little and her lips twisted as if she were chewing something. In silence I patted her shoulder.

  We went back in a few minutes later. A young man, actually a teenager, howled in a childlike voice, “Take me home! I want to see my mom and dad before I die.” His eyes were injured, and his entire face was bandaged save for his mouth.

  Minnie touched his head and said, “They’re going to send you home soon.”

  “Don’t lie to me! Liar, liar, all of you are liars.”

  She turned away while I went to help Holly fill canteens with boiled water that had cooled down. At the far end of the hall, John Magee, the kindhearted minister, was praying. He came here every night to direct a team of young volunteers trying to help these men, and also to administer the last rites for the dying ones.

  “Anling.” Minnie beckoned to me from behind a high-backed bench.

  I put down the canteen I was filling, went over, and saw, lying on the floor, a man whose right leg had been shot off close to the hip. He was motionless, his gaping wound emitting a foul odor. Minnie whispered to me, “Do you think he’s still alive?”

  As I was wondering, his hand twitched as if stung by something. “Apparently he is,” I said.

  I bent down to observe his wound. The flesh had begun to rot; it was whitish and oozing pus. Thanks to the cold weather there were few flies, yet I saw four or five tiny maggots wiggling on the edge of the decayed flesh. The stench from the stump was so overpowering that I had to hold my breath. Obviously these men had been left like this for days.

  “Do they have a list of their names?” Minnie asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, surprised by the question.

  “I’m wondering if there’ll be a cemetery for these poor men who have sacrificed everything for China.” Minnie turned tearful again.

  Deep inside, I knew there might be no list of their names at all. Everything was in such disarray that their superiors wouldn’t bother about these useless men anymore. After they died, who’d be able to tell where their bodies were? Perhaps their parents would receive a “lost in battle” notice. These country lads seemed to have been sent into this world only to suffer and to be used—the spans of their lives depended on how much they could endure.

  The more we observed the one-legged man, the more grief-stricken we became. Minnie went up to Holly and asked almost crossly, “Why can’t they cleanse and dress his wound?” She pointed at the man behind the bench.

  “They have no medicine here, not even rubbing alcohol or iodine solution,” Holly said.

  I was afraid that Minnie might fly off the handle. As I feared, she stepped across to a young woman in a white gown and said, “Look, I know the man over there might be a hopeless case, but why not dress his wound and let him die like a human being?”

  “We don’t have any bandages,” the woman answered. “We’re here just to feed them and give them water.”

  “So your job is to prolong their agony?”

  “I wish I could do more, Principal Vautrin.” The young thing forced a smile, her face careworn and haggard.

  “Minnie, it’s not her fault,” I said.

  As I pulled her away, Minnie admitted, “You’re right. She’s not even a nurse and must be a volunteer like us.”

  “At most she’s a nurse’s aide,” I replied.

  “If only our students were still around. Then we could bring over two or three classes. Some of the well-heeled students would donate medicines and bandages for sure.”

  “They would,” I said.

  I debated whether I should wipe the man’s wound—to get rid of the maggots at least—but I was uncertain whether that would increase his pain. Without any medicine, it might make his wound more infected, so instead I found a newspaper and spread it over his stump.

  We left the train station after ten p.m. All the way back, Minnie was withdrawn while Holly and I were talking about the collapse of the Chinese lines. Evidently Nanjing would fall in a matter of days. We were sure there would be more wounded men and refugees pouring into town.

  As we approached our campus, Minnie said, “I must take a shower to get rid of the awful smell.”

  “I guess you won’t stop thinking about those dying men for a while,” I said.

  “Are you a worm inside me, Anling?” Minnie asked, using the Chinese expression. “How can you read my mind?”

  Holly chortled, then said, “We may not be able to visit them again.”

  Indeed, we would be too occupied in the forthcoming days to go to the train station again.

  4

  THE BORDERS of the Safety Zone had all been marked by Red Cross flags, though the Chinese army had been building batteries and defense works inside the southern part of the zone. John Rabe had to wrangle with Colonel Huang, an aide-de-camp to Generalissimo Chiang, to get the troops out of the neutral district. The young officer believed that the very sight of the Safety Zone would demoralize the soldiers who “must defend the city to the last drop of blood.” No matter how Rabe argued that from the military point of view it was absurd to set up defenses here, the colonel wouldn’t be persuaded—yet he took off with the general staff a few days later. Rabe joked afterward, “It’s so easy to resolve to fight with others’ blood.”

  Before the generalissimo departed, he’d had another forty thousand yuan of the promised cash delivered to the Safety Zone Committee with a letter thanking the Westerners for their relief work. Some of the foreigners believed that the Chinese army was just putting up a show to save face, but Rabe didn’t think so. He was fearful that General Tang Sheng-chi, Chiang’s rival of a sort, who had only reluctantly assumed the role of the commander of the Nanjing defense, might sacrifice everything, including the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Two days earlier the general had had dozens of boats burned to demonstrate that his troops would stand their ground, fighting with their backs to the river.

  Rabe protested again to the officers in charge of the artillery units placed inside the Safety Zone and even threatened to resign his chairmanship and dissolve the Safety Zone Committee if the military personnel remained there, because that would give the Japanese a pretext to attack and eliminate the zone. General Tang assigned Colonel Long to work with Rabe, and together they managed to remove the troops. At the news of their withdrawal, we breathed a sigh of relief—our effort to set up refugee camps might not be wasted.

  On Wednesday afternoon, December 8, Minnie held a neighborhood
meeting, and more than a hundred people attended it, mostly women. Usually such a gathering in the chapel would draw a larger crowd because food was offered afterward, mainly bread and light pastries. Today the attendees were not interested in loaves and fishes; instead, they were eager to find out how soon they could come to Jinling at the time of crisis. For many of them, our college was the only sanctuary they could imagine. Miss Lou, an evangelical worker in the neighborhood, was present at the meeting. The previous day Minnie had allowed this middle-aged woman with intense eyes and a slightly sunken mouth to move into the Practice Hall and take charge of the refugees to be housed there. Miss Lou had no official affiliation with our college, but she was one of the few locals we could depend on. This little woman knew which people in the neighborhood were really destitute, so whenever we wanted to distribute charity, we’d go to her for assistance.

  “Principal Vautrin, can I bring my dad with me when I come?” a slope-shouldered woman asked. “He’s bedridden and I can’t leave him behind.”

  “Well, we will open our camp only to women and children,” Minnie answered.

  A few men booed. One of them complained, “You can’t reject us like this, Principal Vautrin! This is unfair.”

  I turned around to scowl at those men, some of whom were ne’er-do-wells, playing chess, cards, and mah-jongg day and night. Some had even snuck onto our campus to pilfer things.

  Minnie waved for them to stop. As the hall quieted down, she resumed: “Ours is a women’s college, so it would be inappropriate for us to accommodate men.” She turned to a group of women. “Your menfolk can go to the other camps that take in families.”

  “Why separate us?” a female voice asked.

  “You won’t be separated for long,” Minnie said. “We’re talking about a matter of life or death while you’re still thinking about how to stay comfortably with your man.”

  That cracked up the audience. We all knew that this woman had no children; she had been nicknamed the Barren One. She dropped her eyes, her cheeks crimson.

  “Where are those camps that also accept men?” another female voice asked.

  Minnie replied, “Wutaishan Primary School, the old Communications Ministry, Nanjing University’s Library, the military chemical shops—practically all the other camps admit families except for the one at the university’s dorms.”

  “They’re too far away,” an old woman cried.

  My temper was simmering. As I was wondering whether to say something to those selfish people, Miss Lou stood up and turned around to face them, her deep-set eyes steady behind her thick glasses. “Let’s remember who we are,” she said. “Jinling College is under no obligation whatsoever to accommodate any of us, but it offers to shelter us from the Eastern devils. We ought to appreciate what Principal Vautrin and her colleagues have been doing for us.”

  “Shut up, little toady!” a male voice shouted from the back.

  I stood and began to speak. “This is a chapel, not a cheap tavern where you can swear at will. So stop name-calling or make an exit. As for the men here, don’t you feel ashamed to compete with women and kids for safety? If you cannot fight the enemy and protect your families with arms, at least you should have the decency to leave them in more capable hands, while you look for refuge for yourselves elsewhere.”

  That silenced the crowd, and for a moment the hall was so quiet that the distant artillery fire suddenly seemed to rumble louder and closer. After Miss Lou and I had sat down, Minnie continued, “We welcome all women and children, but we will do our best to shelter young women and girls first. That’s to say we encourage older women to stay home if they already live within the Safety Zone.”

  “How about boys?” a woman asked from the back.

  “Good question,” Minnie said. “Boys under thirteen will be admitted.”

  “My fourteen-year-old is still a little kid,” a mother cried.

  “But there’re fourteen-year-olds who are almost grown. We have to save room for girls and young women. In your son’s case, you should say he’s thirteen.”

  That brought out peals of laughter.

  “When can we come?” the same woman asked.

  “When it’s no longer safe to stay home. Bring only your bedding, a change of clothes, and some money. No chests or boxes, please.”

  At the meeting’s end, Miss Lou, the zealous little woman, read Psalm 70 loudly. She cried out the refrain in a shrill voice: “Make haste to help me, O God.” Then we all stood up and sang the chorus from the hymn “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” I’d bet that only a few of the attendees knew the words by heart; nevertheless, we all sang with abandon, some holding large hymnals with both hands, and our voices were earnest and strong.

  THAT EVENING we received the first group of refugees. Most of them had come from the countryside, and some had trekked all the way from Wuxi, a city more than a hundred miles to the east. The Japanese had not only plundered their villages and towns but also seized young men and women, so people had abandoned their homes and fled to Nanjing, or had tried to cross the Yangtze to reach Pukou, unaware that the Japanese had just captured that area outside Nanjing to cut the retreat route of the Chinese army. The Japanese torched most houses along the way, destroyed whatever they couldn’t use, and had felled thickets and forests within a quarter mile of the railroads to prevent their supply trains from being ambushed. To defend the capital, the Chinese army was also razing civilian homes, especially in the Jurong area; it ordered people to leave their villages and then burned their houses to clear all possible obstructions to its cannons. This created more refugees, and now crowds of them swarmed at the city gates, waiting to be let in.

  A woman with salt-and-pepper hair collapsed in front of us, sitting on a boulder and weeping while relating her story. “My daughter and I came to town to sell taros,” she sobbed, “but there was such a big crowd gathering outside Guanghua Gate that I lost her. I thought she’d get through the gate anyway and we could meet inside the city wall, but after I came in, the gate was suddenly closed ’cause the Japs began shelling that area. I waited inside the wall for the whole afternoon and couldn’t go out to look for her. Our home’s already gone, and she wouldn’t know where to go. Oh, my poor child, she’s just eleven.”

  Some families came intact, but the men had to go elsewhere to find shelter for themselves. Most of them were willing to do so, grateful that their wives and children were in safe hands. A sleepy-eyed man went up to Minnie and implored her to give his family a little food because they had no money. She told him, “Don’t worry. We won’t let them starve.”

  Word had it that the camps that accepted men as well were filling rapidly. We had not expected to receive refugees so soon, and now, on the evening of December 8, more than a hundred were already here. Minnie told ruddy-faced Luhai to set up a soup kitchen that would open the next morning.

  5

  IT WAS EERILY QUIET the next morning, and for hours few gunshots were heard. The cannonade in the east, south, and west had ceased too. We couldn’t help but wonder if the Japanese had entered Nanjing. That seemed unlikely, since the Chinese troops were still holding their positions. As Minnie and I were discussing the influx of refugees, Old Liao, our gardener, came and handed Minnie a leaflet. He was her longtime friend. Minnie had hired him from Hefei eighteen years ago when she came to Jinling to become its acting president—in place of Mrs. Dennison, who had gone back to the States for fund-raising for a year—because she wanted to create a beautiful campus. “I found this on the west hill this morning,” Liao said in a husky voice, pointing at the sheet, and smiled as if it were just a regular day for him. “There’re lots of them in the bushes. A Japanese plane must’ve dropped them. I don’t know what it’s about but thought you might want to take a look.”

  Minnie skimmed it, then handed it to me. The leaflet bore words from General Matsui, the commander in chief of the Japanese Central China Expeditionary Forces. He demanded that the Chinese side capitulate without delay,
declaring, “This is the best way to protect the innocent civilians and the cultural relics in the ancient capital.” So we must all lay down our weapons and open the city gates to welcome the Imperial Army. The decree continued: “It is our policy to deal harshly with those who resist and to be kind and generous to noncombatants and the Chinese soldiers who entertain no hostility to our invincible force. Therefore, I order you to surrender within twenty-four hours, by 6:00 p.m., December 9. Otherwise, all the horrors of war will be unleashed on you mercilessly.”

  There were fewer than ten hours left before the zero hour. Minnie told Liao, “This is an order from Iwane Matsui, the top Japanese general.”

  “Never heard of him. What’s he want?”

  “He demands that the Chinese surrender the city to him. What do you think we should do?”

  “Well”—Old Liao scratched the back of his round head—“I don’t know. I hope he’ll leave people in peace.”

  His answer seemed to amuse Minnie. Unlike the other staffers, Old Liao was untroubled by the coming of the Japanese, though his daughter had left with his grandchildren. We knew he was a timid man, and all he cared about was growing flowers and vegetables. War was simply beyond his ken. Yet Minnie had deep affection for this old gardener, who had a marvelous green thumb—whatever he touched would turn pretty and luxuriant in due time. As he slouched away trailing the grassy smell that always clung to him, I turned his answer over in my head. Maybe he was right to a degree—the common people would have to live, so whoever the ruler was, insofar as he did not interrupt their livelihood, they could accept him. But I stifled this thought, because all the recent Japanese atrocities spoke against such a possibility.

  The leaflet from General Matsui might explain the quiet of this morning—the invading force must have been waiting for our side to respond to the ultimatum. I told Minnie this, and she agreed. Lewis Smythe confirmed our hunch when he came later that morning to inspect our medical clinic. Our telephone was already out of service, so he had to come in person. Lewis was surprised that Jinling had so far admitted only three hundred refugees, but he praised our careful planning and also told us that the four Britons and the Danish man on the Safety Zone Committee had just left Nanjing. We shouldn’t worry, though, he assured us, because more people, especially the locals, had begun participating in the relief work.