by Mo Hayder
I dropped the cart. We had come so high up that the fires of Nanking were no more than a red stain in the dawn sky. We had reached a small level area, hidden from the lower slopes by dense walnut, chestnut and evergreen oaks. I walked a few yards back and listened. I could hear nothing. No motorcycle engine, no soft footfall in the snow, only the air whistling in my nostrils and the clicking of my jaw as I worked my teeth together. I climbed the slope, and walked in a great circle, every few paces stopping to listen to the great gulping silences among the leafless branches. It was already getting light, and the weak rays filtering through the trees alighted on something about twenty feet further down the slope, half buried in leaves, forgotten and moss-covered. It was an enormous stone statue of a tortoise, its snout and shell covered in snow. The great symbol of male longevity.
My heart rose. We must be near Linggu temple! Even the Japanese hold a shrine sacred – no bombs had dropped on our places of worship. If this was to be the place our child emerged into the world then it was an auspicious one. Maybe a safe one.
‘Come here, behind these trees. I’m going to build you a shelter.’ I turned the handcart on to its side and pulled out all the blankets, packing them tightly under the cart. I led Shujin inside, lodging her into the bed, giving her broken icicles from the trees to quench her thirst. Then I went to the other side and kicked snow up against the cart so that it would be invisible. When she was settled I squatted next to it for a while, biting my fingers and staring out of the trees to where the sky was growing lighter by the second. The mountainside was utterly silent.
‘Shujin?’ I whispered, after a while. ‘Are you well?’
She didn’t respond. I shuffled nearer the cart and listened. She was breathing fast, a tiny whistle of air, muffled in her forest bed. I took off my cap and shuffled closer to the cart, cursing myself for knowing so little about childbirth. When I was growing up it was the province of the matriarchs, the stern sisters of my mother. I was told nothing. I am ignorant. The brilliant modern linguist who knows nothing about birth. I put my hand on the cart and whispered, ‘Please, tell me. Do you think that our baby is-’ I broke off. The words had come out of my mouth without thinking. Our baby, I had said. Our baby.
Instantly Shujin seized on it. She let out a long, drawn-out cry. ‘No!’ she sobbed. ‘No – you have said it. You have said it!’ She hauled the cart upwards and pushed her head out: her hair wild, tears standing in her eyes. ‘Leave!’ she cried feverishly. ‘Leave me. Stand now and walk away. Walk away.’
‘But I-’
‘No! What ill luck you have invited on our moon soul!’
‘Shujin, I didn’t intend-’
‘Walk away now!’
‘Please! Keep your voice down.’
But she wasn’t listening. ‘ Walk away with your dangerous words! Take your curses away from me.’
‘But-’
‘Now!’
I dug my nails into my hands and bit my lip. What a fool I had been. How thoughtless, to have infuriated her! And at such a time! At length I sighed. ‘Very well, very well.’ I backed away a few feet through the trees. ‘I will stand here, just here, should you need me.’ I turned, so my back was towards her, and I was facing the dawn sky.
‘No! Further! Go further. I don’t want to see you.’
‘Very well!’
Reluctantly I took a few more clumsy steps through the snow, until the slope of the mountain put me just out of her sight. I sank dejectedly to the ground, knocking my knuckles against my forehead. The forest was so quiet, so silent. I dropped my hand and looked around. Should I try to find help? Maybe there would be someone in one of the houses who could offer shelter. But the radio reports had said that all these houses had been looted, even before the eastern gate had been breached. The only people I might encounter would be Japanese army officers, lording it in the deserted mansions, drunk on plundered wine stores.
I straightened, and stepped a little way out of the trees to get a sense of what else was nearby. I pushed aside a branch, took a pace forward, and my breath caught in my throat. For a moment Shujin was forgotten. We had climbed so high! The sun was coming up behind the mountain, pink and flecked with cinders from distant fires, and further down the slopes, perched among the trees, the intense, glazed blue of Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum shone against the snow. If I turned to the east, between the mountains I could see glimpses of the thirsty yellow plains of the delta stretching away into misty horizons. Below me the city basin was smouldering like a volcano, a black pall of smoke hung over the Yangtze, and I saw, with a sinking heart, that it was all as I had guessed: the river at Meitan was in chaos – I could see bombed boats and sampans listing in the mud. Old Liu had been right when he said east was the direction to go.
As I stood there, with the sun on my shoulders and all of Jiangsu stretched out beneath me, I had a sudden surge of defiance, a sudden furious determination that China must survive as the China I grew up in. That the silly superstitious Festivals of White Dew and Corn Rain would live on, that ducks would always be driven across fields at dusk, that every summer the lotus leaves would appear, so thick you would believe it possible to walk across the ponds balancing on the slabbed leaves alone. That the Chinese people would continue – that my child’s heart would be for ever Chinese. As I stood on the mountain, in the first rays of dawn, with a rush of pride and fury, I raised my hand to the sky, daring any evil spirit who cared to come and take my son. My son, who would fight like a tiger to preserve his country. My son, who would be stronger than I had ever been.
‘I dare you,’ I whispered to the sky. ‘Yes, I dare you.’
60
You can never tell what’s going to make the headlines. Most of the evidence surrounding the crime scene in Takadanobaba pointed to one guilty party: Ogawa, the so-called Beast of Saitama. And yet for one reason or another (perhaps you could forgive the nervousness of the journalists involved) this detail was never widely publicized by the newspapers. She was brought in for questioning, but quickly and mysteriously released, and to this day lives free, somewhere in Tokyo, occasionally glimpsed behind the smoked glass of a fast-moving limousine, or entering a building at dead of night. It’s a mistake to underestimate the links between the yakuza and the Japanese police.
Meanwhile the murder of Jason Wainwright, as I later discovered he was called, hit the news and stayed there for months. It was because he had been well educated and was a good-looking Westerner in Japan. Hysteria gripped his mother’s state of Massachusetts. There were accusations of police incompetence, of corruption and mob influence, but nothing that ever led anywhere, least of all to Fuyuki and the Beast of Saitama. Suit-wearing teams of family lawyers jetted in on Thai Air jumbos, but no matter what strings they tried to pull, what money was offered, no one would talk about Jason’s life in the months before the killing. Nor was the mystery female who had called his mother a day before his death ever found.
But probably what caught the public’s imagination more than anything was the horror of the crime scene. It was what the Nurse had used to decorate the stone lantern. It was the image of the Wainwright family man arriving fresh off a plane from California, knocking on the door, still clutching his Samsonite travel bag, an aeroplane toothbrush and a taxi receipt in his pocket, snow falling on to his suit. It was the thought of what he saw when he got no answer and decided to walk a few feet down the alley, where two rusty garden gates stood open.
I had been gone from the house only half an hour. I had crept through the gates, taken my bag from the alley and gone to the public baths on the other side of Waseda Street. As the Wainwrights’ man was making sense of the serpentine coils round the stone lantern, as the blood left his face, as he sank to his knees, fumbling for a handkerchief, I was only a hundred yards away, squatting on the little green rubber stool in front of the knee-high showers, shivering so hard that my knees were knocking. Ten minutes later, when he staggered out on to the street, his hand up to hail a taxi, I was in
another taxi on the way to Hongo, perched on the edge of the seat, my hair wet, a cardigan clasped round me.
I stared out of the taxi window, at the piled-up snow, at the strange light it reflected into the faces of the women as they picked their way carefully along the pavements under pastel-coloured umbrellas. I had an overwhelming sense of the loneliness of this city – a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all – I thought of the electricity cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city’s guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over. The tallest, most-visited building in Tokyo, the Sunshine Building, stood over the spot where Japan’s prime minister and all her war criminals had been executed. It seemed to me so odd that no one knew what had just happened to me. No one had come up to me and said, ‘ Where have you been all night? What’s that in your rucksack? Why haven’t you gone to the police? ’ I watched the taxi driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, certain that he was studying my face.
I got to Todai just after nine. The blizzard had picked up and the snow was settling on all the parked cars and the tops of lamp-posts. The Akamon, the huge red lacquered gate at the entrance of Todai, was visible only as a wavering red splash in the white, an intermittent blaze in the snowstorm. A guard wearing a black slicker ushered me through the gate and the taxi nosed along the driveway until, out of the white, a light appeared, then more, and at last the Institute of Social Sciences, rising up in front of us, lit and gilded like a fairy castle.
I asked the driver to stop. I tucked in my coat collar and got out, standing for a while, looking up at the building. It was four months since I’d first come here. Four months, and I knew so much more now. I knew everything – I knew the whole world.
Slowly I became aware of a dark figure not far away from me, small as a child, standing perfectly still in the snow, as insubstantial and wavery as a ghost. I peered at it. Shi Chongming. It was as if my thoughts had conjured him, but done the job half-heartedly so instead of the real flesh and blood Shi Chongming I’d created only this watery half-person.
‘Shi Chongming,’ I whispered, and he turned and looked and smiled. He came towards me, slowly materializing from the white, like a ghost evolving. He was wearing a coat and his plastic fisherman’s hat pulled down over his hair.
‘I was waiting for you,’ he said. His skin in the odd light looked papery and insufficient: there were penny-sized liver spots on his face and neck. I saw that his jacket was fastened tightly round his neck.
‘How did you know?’
He held up his hand to hush me. ‘I don’t know. Now, come and get warm. It’s not good to stay out in the snow for a long time.’
I followed him up the steps. Inside, the institute was warm, overheated, and we trailed melting snowflakes across the floor. He closed the office door, put on his glasses and began to make the room comfortable. He plugged in a heater, and made me a bowl of steaming tea. ‘Your eyes,’ he said, as I put down the holdall and knelt on the floor, instinctively adopting the seiza position, as if it would warm me to be so contained, cupping the hot tea in both hands. ‘Are you unwell?’
‘I’m… I’m alive.’ I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering. I held my face into the sweet steam. The popcorny smell of rice tea. It smelt of Japan. I sat for several minutes until the shivering subsided, then I looked up at him and said, ‘I’ve found out.’
Shi Chongming paused, a spoon raised above the teapot. ‘Please – say it again.’
‘I’ve found out. I know.’
He let the spoon drop into the teapot. He took off his glasses and sat down at his desk. ‘Yes,’ he said wearily. ‘Yes, I thought you had.’
‘You were right. Everything you told me was right. You must have known all the time. But I didn’t. It’s not what I was expecting. Not at all.’
‘No?’
‘No, it’s something Fuyuki’s had for a long time. Maybe for years.’ My voice grew quieter and quieter. ‘It’s a baby. A mummified baby.’
Shi Chongming fell silent. He turned his head to the side and, for a moment, his mouth moved up and down as if he was reciting a mantra. At last he coughed and put away his glasses in a battered blue case. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, I know. It’s my daughter.’
61
Nanking, 21 December 1937
And it is unbearable now to think of it: to think of that one moment of clear peace, of clear hope. How very still everything was in those few seconds before Shujin’s screams echoed through the forest.
I looked round vaguely, as if someone had casually mentioned my name, frowning into the air, as if I didn’t know what I’d heard. Then she screamed again, a short yelp, like a dog being beaten.
‘Shujin?’ I turned in a trance, pushing aside the branches and moving back through the trees. Maybe the birth was closer than I’d expected. ‘Shujin?’
No reply. I began to walk. I crested a slope and picked up speed, breaking into a numb trot back to the place I had been sitting. ‘Shujin?’ Silence. ‘Shujin?’ My voice was louder now, a note of panic creeping in. ‘Shujin. Answer me.’
There was no reply, and now real fear hit me. I broke into a run, leaping up the slope. ‘Shujin!’ My feet slid, pine trees dropped their soft snow loads on to me. ‘ Shujin! ’
At the base of the tree the handcart had been set upright, our blankets and belongings scattered around it. A set of muffled tracks led away into the trees. I swerved into them, my eyes watering, ducking as the bare branches whipped against my face. The track led on for a few more yards, then changed. I skidded to a halt in a flurry of snow, breathing hard, my heart racing. The tracks had become wider here. An area of disturbed snow stretched around me for several feet, as if she had fallen to the ground in pain. Or as if there had been a struggle. Something lay half buried at my feet. I fell to a crouch and snatched it up, turning it over in my hands. A thin piece of tape, frayed and torn. My thoughts slowed, a terrible dread creeping over me. Attached to the tape were two Imperial Japanese Army dogtags.
‘ Shujin! ’ I leaped up. ‘ SHU – JIN?’
I waited. Nothing came back to me. I was alone in the trees with just the sound of my panting and my pulse. ‘ SHUJIN! ’ The word reverberated into the trees and slowly folded away into the forests. I spun round, searching for a clue. They were out there somewhere, the Japanese, holding Shujin, crouching and sharpening their bayonets, framing me with their blood-filled eyes, somewhere, behind one of those trees…
Very close behind me someone released their breath into the silence.
I whipped round in a crouch, my hands out, ready to leap. But there was nothing, only the trees, black and mossy, icicles dripping in the branches. I breathed in and out through my nose, my ears straining for any sound. Someone was there. Very near. I heard a whisper of dry leaf, a rustle from about ten feet away where the ground dipped, then the crack of a branch, a sudden, mechanical sound, and a Japanese soldier stepped out from behind a tree.
He wasn’t dressed for combat – his webbed steel helmet hung on his belt with the ammunition pouches, and his badges of rank were still in place. He held up not a rifle but a cine-camera, the lens pointed directly into my face. It was whirring, the crank handle whipping round and round. The Shanghai cameraman. I knew him instantly. The man who had filmed the soldiers’ exploits in Shanghai. He was filming me.
We stood for a few seconds in silence, me staring at him, the lens staring unflinchingly at me. Then I lunged forward. ‘ Where is she? ’ He took a step back, the camera steady on his shoulder, and at that moment, from further down the trail, I heard Shujin’s voice, as sweet and breakable as porcelain.
‘Chongming!’
Years and years from now I will recall that sound. I’ll dream about it, I’ll hear it in the cold white spaces of my future dreams.
‘Chongming!’
I stumbled away from the cameraman into the tree
s, the snow almost up to my knees now, blindly following her voice. ‘SHUJIN!’
I waded on, tears in my eyes, ready for a bullet to come whistling through the air. But death would have been easy when compared with what happened next. From ahead came the distinctive jangle of a bayonet frog in the frosty air. And then I saw them. They stood a hundred feet further down the goat track, two of them in their mustard greatcoats, their backs to me, looking at something on the ground. A motorcycle leaned against an old black pine tree. One of the men turned and glanced nervously at me. His hood was pulled over a field cap: he, too, was not dressed for battle, and yet his bayonet was slotted into his rifle. There was a line of blood on his face, as if Shujin had scratched him during the struggle. As I stared at him he lowered his eyes with shame. I had a brief flash of what he was, not much more than a teenager kept awake on amphetamines, worn down to nothing but skeins of naked nerves. He didn’t want to be there.
But then there was the other man. At first he didn’t turn. Beyond him, against a tree, Shujin lay on her back in the snow. One of her shoes had come loose, the naked foot blue against the snow. She was clutching a small, lacquer-handled knife against her breast. It was a sharp little fruit knife for dicing mango, and she was holding it in both hands, pointing up at the men.
‘Leave her,’ I shouted. ‘Stand back.’
At my voice the other man became very still. His back appeared to grow – to gain in stature. Very slowly he turned to face me. He wasn’t tall, only my height, but his eyes seemed to me very terrible. I slowed to a trot and then to a walk. The single gilt star on his cap flashed in the sun, his fur-collared greatcoat was open, his shirt ripped, and now I saw that it must have been his dogtags I’d found. He was close enough for me to smell last night’s sweet sake in his sweat and the odour of something trapped and old coming from his clothing. His face was damp, a sick, sweaty grey.