Nanjing Requiem

by Ha Jin

  I thought about telling her my doubts about the six girls’ claim that the Japanese had not molested them, but I had no evidence to back up my conjecture, so I refrained.

  Minnie talked with me about the twenty-one “prostitutes.” Should we report that as well? If we did, what should we say? Would the board members in New York understand the situation? I could tell that Minnie was worried about Mrs. Dennison, because the old woman was in New York at the moment, fund-raising for our college, and she had always kept a close watch on Jinling. Mrs. Dennison might make a big fuss about this incident and even publicize it as a scandal, as we could not describe the circumstances in detail without putting ourselves at greater risk with the Japanese authorities.

  After we had deliberated, Minnie said to me, “If it’s a mistake on my part, I’ll bear the guilt alone and do more good deeds to atone for it. God is greater than our hearts and knows everything.”

  I didn’t fully understand her last sentence and asked, “You mean your conscience is clear?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that. But for now I prefer to keep this matter between God and me.”

  “If you’re at fault, I’m part of it too. Don’t worry about it. Nobody will say you’re responsible for losing those women. We all know that the Japanese would have seized them one way or another that day.”

  Somehow we both felt that some of the abducted women might come back, that it might be too early to fully gauge the weight of the incident. What’s more, we were certain that among the twenty-one women there’d been at least two or three former prostitutes. Deep down, though, we both knew that most of the women were unmarried and innocent. If only we had some information on them. If only we could find a way to bring some of them back. Those young lives had been ruined. No matter how we tried to reason away our responsibility, we were somewhat implicated, since by now everyone knew that Minnie had granted the Japanese permission. I made a mental note to write to Dr. Wu about this incident once I heard from her.

  The more Minnie ruminated on this, the more remorseful and distressed she became. I urged her to stop thinking about it. There was so much to worry about at the moment that we mustn’t let our sense of guilt paralyze us.

  We decided to focus on the first eleven days of the Japanese occupation, up to December 23, so that Minnie wouldn’t have to mention what had transpired on the twenty-fourth. When the next report was due, she could start from Christmas. Besides her inability to clearly explain her responsibility for the abduction, she was afraid of giving Mrs. Dennison a weapon to use against her. We knew that the only person who cared to scrutinize her report was the old woman, who seemed to hover over Minnie’s shoulder all the time. To appease Mrs. Dennison, Minnie stressed that the refugee camp here was only temporary, that we would try to reinstate the college as soon as possible after the refugees left.

  Having written about a few more rape cases and several such attempts that had been stopped in time, Minnie concluded: “I wish we could have prevented all the tragedies, but compared to most of the other camps, our record is exceedingly good.” That was true, yet it didn’t ease her mind.

  One of the accomplishments she wrote about was teaching the refugees to line up for food. For weeks the women and girls had crowded the porridge stands, jostling to reach the cauldrons. The lawn had been trampled into puddles of mud, and even the cypress hedges were crushed in places. How marvelous it was to see the women standing in orderly lines at mealtimes now. Minnie also reported that many refugees complained that the porridge was too watery. Obviously there was theft going on in the porridge plant, but as yet we hadn’t been able to find out where. The graft angered Minnie, and she assigned Luhai to keep a close watch on the cooks, but he couldn’t detect the cause. Minnie vowed to get to the bottom of it and questioned the headman of the kitchen personally. The pockmarked man named Boom Chen hemmed and hawed, saying he’d do everything in his power to thicken the porridge, but so far nothing had changed and the refugees kept griping.

  Several times our college had offered to run the porridge plant ourselves, yet the local Red Cross people would not let us. Minnie couldn’t understand why they still had profit in mind under such circumstances. If only there was a way to nab the crooks.

  The report was at last completed. How should she send it? Minnie said she would ask a fellow missionary going to Shanghai to mail it from there.

  16

  THE JAPANESE TROOPS grew less violent after the New Year, and some refugees felt things were stable enough that they no longer needed to stay in our camp. By mid-January, we still had seven thousand refugees. Many women believed that only through Minnie’s intervention could they get their menfolk back, so they stuck with us. In late January Minnie and Big Liu presented the petition to the Japanese embassy, where an attaché named Fukuda accepted it and said that some office would give it full consideration. At the same time the puppet municipality, the so-called Autonomous City Government, composed of some bureaucrats and local gentry who had Japanese connections, ordered that all the refugee camps close down by February 9, which in a way eased Minnie’s mind a little because she knew that Mrs. Dennison would hate to see the college remain a refugee camp.

  We began persuading the older women among the refugees to go home. Some left, but they came back within two or three days. Many of the refugees had no place to live anymore, for nothing was left of their homes. One woman in her early forties was dragged away by four soldiers; they molested her for a whole night and did not release her until the next afternoon. She came back and begged Minnie never to make her go home again. A woman of sixty-three went back and was caught by two soldiers. She told them she must be as old as their grandmothers; all the same, they knocked her down, raped her, and stomped on her bound feet. She limped back to Jinling the next day, still shaken, and couldn’t stop her tears. Some of the women, shocked and humiliated, wouldn’t speak to anyone after they were back in our camp.

  Their stories upset us, and we realized that we could not close the camp in a hurry. Even if we tried hard, there was no way to meet the deadline, which was just a week away. One thing we were clear about now—no matter what, we must never force any woman to leave. We ignored the deadline, giving the excuse that most of the refugees were homeless.

  THE DEADLINE had passed, but not a single camp closed down. John Rabe insisted to the officials that there was no way to send the women home without exposing them to molestation by the soldiers, so the matter was dropped. Meanwhile, the Autonomous City Government had been registering all the citizens and refugees, and declared that anyone older than fifteen without an ID certificate would be arrested and jailed. Frightened, people lined up at various camps to go through the registration process. Some living outside the Safety Zone even came a day before and, bundled in overcoats or wrapped in blankets, waited a whole night to get registered. A lot of men feared that this might be another ruse to ensnare the so-called former soldiers and have more of them “mopped up.” Indeed, in the past three weeks the Japanese had seized more than twenty thousand men from various registration sites. Promised leniency and well-paid jobs, those men had stepped out, hoping to make some money for their families, but the Japanese apprehended them all. About three thousand of them were forced into convict labor while the rest were led to execution grounds.

  Hundreds of men were coming to our camp, wanting to get registered here, because if they were accused of being former soldiers, some brave women, as instructed by me, would step forward and vouch for them, saying that the men were their husbands or sons. As a result, the officials would be likely to let them pass and give them the ID papers, a one-page document, five by three inches, folded down the middle, stamped with a scarlet seal, and printed with the characters Good Citizen Certificate. On the inside was information about the carrier and also his or her mug shot. The Japanese had been in charge of the registration originally, but it got more and more confusing, and it was hard, almost impossible, for them to tell who was a former soldier,
so they left the whole matter in their puppets’ hands. The Safety Zone Committee urged all the refugee camps to participate in the registration as a gesture of “cooperation” with the new municipality. In addition, John Rabe and his colleagues all believed that it would be safer for the refugees to register in the foreigners’ presence, and therefore they told people to get the ID papers now.

  Siemens had decided to close its Nanjing office by the end of February, so Rabe would be returning to Germany. His imminent departure caused quite a stir among the camps. He had been nicknamed the Living Buddha and was revered by the refugees. Some people called him Mayor Rabe, but he forbade them to do that, not wanting to antagonize the Autonomous City Government, which was eager to replace both the Safety Zone Committee and the International Red Cross Committee. For days Minnie and I had been thinking about giving him a farewell dinner, but it was impossible to get fresh meat and fish, so we decided to give a tea party instead.

  It was like spring on February 17, balmy and cloudless. The refugees at Jinling hung their bedding in the sun while some girls mopped the floors and wiped the windows and doors of the buildings. The whole campus looked lively and colorful—laundered clothes and diapers were spread on evergreen hedges, making the place resemble a thickly settled village. The unkempt sight made me wonder how long the refugee camp would last. If Mrs. Dennison saw this, she might have a stroke.

  I made a kind of fruitcake, using minced candied fruit, for the tea party in Rabe’s honor. We also opened the last box of chocolates in our pantry and placed it next to a tray of peeled tangerines and a bowl of canned pineapple. Rabe brought along two stout sausages, which we cut and placed next to a platter of cured duck. In addition to three German businessmen and eight American missionaries, John Allison, the second secretary at the reopened U.S. embassy, attended too. He’d done diplomatic service for five years in Tokyo and Kobe and spoke Japanese. Allison now functioned as the top American diplomat in Nanjing. Oddly, today he was escorted by a Japanese guard, a hulk of a soldier, as if he were under arrest. This was probably because a sentry had manhandled him a fortnight before and several newspapers in the West had reported the incident. Allison had returned to Nanjing six weeks earlier and was still shaken by the horrific condition of the city, particularly by the corpses scattered on the streets, some partly eaten by dogs and birds. He couldn’t understand why the Imperial Army, noted for its discipline, would kill so indiscriminately. The Germans in Nanjing—Rabe, Rosen, Sperling, and a few others—often made fun of his shock, calling him Allison in Wonderland.

  On the round table sat a bowl of vegetable salad mixed with cellophane noodles and peanut butter, which all the guests liked. Most of them stood around chatting, with plates and forks in their hands. Big Liu proposed a toast, raising a cup of oolong tea and announcing with a smile: “Even if the Chinese are totally deprived, we still have fine tea.”

  People raised their cups and drank to Rabe’s health and good fortune back in Germany. To my knowledge, Rabe wasn’t doing well in spite of his hardy appearance. He always carried a vial of insulin and a syringe in his pocket for his diabetes. Because he often had to climb out of bed in the dead of night to repel soldiers who attempted to break into his home or into the small compound of the German school, he’d feel sleepy during the day and nod off at times. Rabe was going to Shanghai first and from there sailing to Genoa, which would take more than four weeks; then he’d head to Berlin by rail. He had no idea what was in store for him back home. He told Minnie and Holly, “I’ll collapse by the time I join my children.”

  Minnie apologized to Rabe for such a shabby party, without cheese or wine. We all knew he loved cheese and nowadays often groused to his cook about a cheeseless table. He even missed potatoes.

  “This is wonderful and memorable,” Rabe said. “Thank you, Miss Vautrin.”

  He had grown thinner lately, but still sported a small paunch. Holly often joked about him in private, “If he was single, I’d chase him to the end of the globe.” I’d say to her, “Oh, come now, he’s too old for you, not a good catch.” Rabe was fifty-five, older than Holly by a good fifteen years.

  He and Lewis were quite close, having worked together on a daily basis since November. Lewis admired his large heart, his common sense, and his ability to get things done, while Rabe liked Lewis for his energy and unflagging enthusiasm for whatever he undertook. But the two of them wouldn’t stop chaffing each other. Lewis would call Rabe Rockefeller on account of the grand house, the headquarters of the Safety Zone Committee, where he stayed during the daytime. Whenever his loyal assistants, Han or Cheng, came in to hand Rabe a telegram, Lewis would quip, “From Hitler?”

  Now, teacup in hand, Lewis came over and smiled quizzically, crunching popcorn. Rabe swatted him on the shoulder and said, “I know what you’re going to say: Hilter summoned me back. Right?”

  “He must have a big job waiting for you,” Lewis said, his face straight. We chuckled, knowing Rabe was a leader of the Nazi Party in Nanjing.

  “As a matter of fact, the Führer may not want to see me. Chancellor Scharffenberg was in the embassy the other day and summoned me. He chastised me, urging me to stop tangling with the Japanese. He stressed that what the Japanese were doing here should not concern us Germans, because he believed that the Chinese, once left alone to cope with the Japanese, would cooperate with them. I guess by now even Hitler might be tired of me.”

  Minnie raised her teacup and said to Rabe, “John, regardless of your political persuasion, you’re a man I look up to.”

  We touched cups with him and each took a mouthful. Then Robert Wilson came over, his balding crown pinkish, and rested his hand on Eduard Sperling’s shoulder. “John, I have something for you,” Bob said. Because the Japanese would let few medical personnel come into the city, for almost six weeks Bob had been the only surgeon in town. He actually lived at the University Hospital so he could work around the clock. His face creased a little as he smiled; he looked frazzled as a result of having to operate on patients day and night. Sometimes his hands got swollen from overwork, yet he had to continue.

  “What’s that?” Rabe asked. “I hope it’s not another house. I cannot bring any real estate back to Germany, you know.” There’d been so many houses “given” to him recently that he was sick of them, because the owners also meant to have the properties protected by him, knowing he’d have to leave them behind when his stint here was over.

  Bob touched a canvas satchel under the table with the side of his boot. “I have one hundred ampoules of insulin for you—don’t you want them?”

  “Good Lord, I’m delighted,” Rabe said. “But don’t you need them for other patients?”

  “We only treat people with gunshot and bayonet wounds. I feel like a butcher, doing nothing but cutting and stitching bodies.” He lifted the satchel of insulin, put it on the table, and told Rabe, “Use them soon—they’ll expire in a year.”

  “I will. Thanks very much,” Rabe said.

  While people were talking, Searle Bates dozed off in a chair in a corner, his veiny hand still holding a teacup. His bumpy Adam’s apple jigged from time to time. Usually he was the most convivial one among the Americans, thanks to his sharp wit and vast learning, but this afternoon he was too exhausted to remain on his feet. These days, besides managing the camps at Nanjing University, he drove a truck to deliver rice and firewood and coal to porridge plants within the Safety Zone, which fed more than two hundred thousand refugees. Because only foreigners could transport the rations without being robbed, Searle and several others had to do the driving. Now none of us disturbed him.

  When the party was about to end, Minnie suggested that Allison leave first because he had a Japanese guard in tow, so the diplomat left before the others. Then Rulian came in and, her almond-shaped eyes smiling, whispered to me that some women gathering outside wanted to say farewell to Rabe.

  I went up to him and said, “Mr. Rabe, some women in our camp want to say good-bye to you. Can
you spare a minute?”

  “Okay, I’m coming.” He drained his cup, then followed us to the door. The others were also coming out.

  What we saw in front of the Science Building staggered us. More than three thousand women and girls were kneeling on the ground, wailing and begging, “Please don’t go! Please don’t abandon us!”

  “Don’t leave us in the lurch!” a voice rang out.

  “Don’t stop protecting us!” shouted another.

  Rabe was flustered. He approached the front row of the crowd and said, “Please get up.”

  But none of the women budged. He bent down a little and said a few more words in English to them; still nobody moved. Then he bowed three times to the crowd in the Chinese fashion. He straightened up and waved at the women and girls, some of whom were crying louder now. He asked Minnie, “What should I do?”

  “Say something to them.”

  “What can I say? There’s no way I can justify my leaving. If only I could stay like you.” He swallowed, a film of sweat on his broad forehead. Unable to speak Chinese, he turned to the crowd and made another three deep bows.

  Still, the crowd wouldn’t get up and many kept crying. Rabe said to Minnie, “I’d better go.”

  “Okay, this way. You can use the side gate,” said Minnie.

  I beckoned Luhai over and told him to open that small exit for Rabe. Rabe followed him along the roofed path and went out of the yard through a moon gate, leaving his car behind. He had to walk all the way home, as did the other guests.

  Afterward Minnie talked about the crowd with me. “I didn’t expect they’d have such deep feelings for John Rabe.”

  “Yes, they’re more than grateful,” I said. “Also, they must be scared and want to be protected.”

  To many of the women and girls, Rabe must have been like a protective father who had never hesitated to confront the soldiers and even risk his own life. He was more than a hero to the refugees.