Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  And who sacrificed themselves by their tens of thousands in Taierzhuang? Those who spoke so loudly about freedom and civilization and capitalism and equality and liberation and revolution? No! Ordinary people, poor people, uneducated people, inarticulate and modest people, the very dregs of society swept up off the floor and press-ganged into its armies and battalions where they so willingly and uncomplainingly and heroically died for a country in which they had no interest or standing or acclamation.

  So is history made.

  *

  Wei found that the armoury to which he was making his way had been withdrawn several hundred yards. When he finally located it the armourer looked at the anti-tank rifle and shook his head.

  ‘That’ll take a time to repair,’ he said. ‘Was it any good?’

  Wei nodded. ‘Took out three tanks.’

  ‘Good,’ says the armourer. ‘I’ve got new orders for you.’

  He took out a piece of paper. Somewhere within the collective memory of the rapidly dying regiment someone had remembered Wei’s prowess with his Lee Enfield. His potential as a sniper.

  The armourer handed the paper to Wei.

  ‘These are your orders. You are to be transferred to the western side of the city, where the western gate is coming under heavy attack. They desperately need snipers.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Wei.

  ‘Ah,’ said the armourer, suddenly remembering something. ‘I’ve got a little present for you as well.’ He passed back into the stores and re-emerged with something in his hand. ‘Things being as they are we’ve been amalgamated with several other armouries since I last saw you.’ (Which must have been at least twenty-four hours ago.) ‘When checking their inventories I happened to see this. Thought, if you ever returned from the front, it would be just the thing for you.’

  It was a brand new, immaculate sniper scope made specifically to fit a Lee Enfield .303 – gleaming and shiny.

  Wei took it and gazed at it with admiration.

  ‘Oh, and I found these too,’ said the armourer.

  He plonked two large pouches of .303 ammunition on the table.

  Wei grinned.

  A large shell landed nearby.

  ‘I’ll show you how to operate the scope later,’ said the armourer. ‘But first, when did you last sleep and when did you last eat?’

  Wei couldn’t remember either.

  The armourer gave him a wholesome meal then ordered him to sleep for two hours on the floor. Wei did so. The armourer woke him, instructed him on the use of the sniper scope, presented him with his written orders and sent him on his way.

  Wei walked back through the streets, passing through several military police checkpoints, all of which fortunately contained soldiers who could read.

  He passed out of the south-east gate, over the pontoon bridge, and then followed the south bank of the canal to the west. Suddenly he could see long distances again. He saw trees and hills and in the distance mountains. He walked on earth. Birds sang. Crickets chirped. He breathed more easily. Crossing the canal again on a bridge of single planks, he walked on grass up beside the western walls of the city. Ahead of him were the sounds of heavy fighting.

  16

  Guo Morou faced a bit of a dilemma. Normally life was so easy. But now? In Wuhan? He could address crowds with no problem – have them eating out of his mind. He could face the most arcane, abstruse of theoretical problems and his flawless Marxist dialectic would waltz through them without even hesitating. But now?

  He was feeling restless and ill at ease. To Gou Morou the world just did not seem right. Why was it so much at odds with him? In the past it had always agreed with him. Echoed him. Congratulated him on his verbal fluency, his intellectual rigour, his dialectical brilliance. His selfless dedication to the cause of world revolution!

  But now something was wrong. Was it being in Wuhan? Such a grimy, ugly place. Nowhere the slightest concession to beauty, enlightenment. The worst sort of industrial city. Just like Chicago. Of course, its workers were magnificent. Full of revolutionary fire and heroism! But that was back in 1927. Now Wuhan was ruled by that squalid little fascist Chiang Kai-shek. And the communists – the Communist Party of China, no less!!! – squatted subserviently beneath his throne and did whatever he ordered them to!

  That was bad, dispiriting enough. But something else, something even worse, ate into him like a cancer. In a horribly ordinary hotel room, curtains drawn to keep out the stench and the smoke, poor Guo was stricken with lethargy and despair. Even his brain had stopped!

  For why? For why should he be carrying all the sorrows of Young Werther? Why was this young dancer – why was she acting in such an irrational manner? A liberated feminist refusing his advances? He had never heard of such a thing. Here he was, China’s most illustrious intellectual, litterateur, orator. Women had never been an obstacle in the past. They’d just fallen into bed with him. But this thing, this stripling of a girl – muscles of iron, mind of iron – was refusing him, point blank, without a trace of embarrassment or apology. Was it something they put in the water in Wuhan? Something in this filthy industrial air?

  His mind, like a wounded hart – to think he was now the hunted, not the hunter – returned yet again, obsessively, to their first fateful meeting in Hong Kong.

  He’d accepted an invitation to attend the opening of an exhibition of young Chinese artists in Hong Kong’s most avant-garde art gallery. There he first set eyes on the young, the beautiful, the firmly muscled eighteen-year-old body of Yu Liqun, the Marxist dancer. The sun was setting dramatically across Victoria Harbour, great jagged black clouds reflected its yellows and reds and oranges, thunder rolled in across the bay. Groups of English and Chinese aesthetes debated Art in the dull monotones of English. (A recording of Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Factory Sirens, Artillery Guns and a Hydro Plane played randomly in the background.) Suddenly there, before him, stood his fate. Set against the dramatic lighting of the bay. Indifferent to the chatterings in the rest of the room, alone and alienated like him, she danced. Quivered her arms, abruptly jerked her back and legs, imitating the harsh movements and rhythms of a piece of industrial machinery, she danced her Marxist dance to the groans and shrieks of Arseny Avraamov.

  Entranced, he approached. He assumed he’d do what he always did. That what always happened would inevitably happen. He addressed her.

  ‘I’m Guo Morou.’

  This did not seem to impact on her in any way. She continued her mechanistic motions.

  ‘The writer.’

  ‘Of course you are. You had an affair with my sister, Yu Lichun,’ she said, continuing her motions.

  ‘Oh, er, yes, I did, most unfortunate.’

  ‘It is of no importance to me,’ she said, still continuing her exercises. ‘The fact that she continually indulged herself in petit bourgeois Goethe-esque melodramatics and finally ended it all in an entirely frivolous and self-indulgent suicide is not of the slightest interest to me.’ She stopped her machinations for a second. ‘In an age of revolution, proletarian steel and sacrifice, she was a counter-revolutionary disgrace.’ She resumed her articulations.

  Guo was enraptured.

  ‘So you’re a dancer.’

  Very slowly she slowed down, like a complex piece of machinery coming to rest. He looked down into her face. Every muscle fixed as iron, not a single etch of emotion or life or femininity.

  ‘Of course I’m a fucking dancer.’

  In the background someone in a monotonous voice was reciting Boris de Schloezer’s treatise on musique concrète, while harsh squeals and grunts escaped the gramophone.

  Like an implacable machine, like a gun turret swirling on a battleship, like a piston driving the mighty wheels of a locomotive ever onward, she resumed her motions. In her whole body there was not one touch of sympathy, warmth, sens- or sex-uality.

  Guo’s mouth was very dry. He could imagine her starting to melt like steel. Slowly meld and molten and consume in flame and tempest til al
l yielded and exploded like bombs.

  Guo had never fallen in love so quickly or fatally before. He had an enormous erection – not that anyone of the mindless bourgeois in the art gallery were paying the least attention; they continued to chatter away in English about Picasso and Mondrian.

  He moved in close to her.

  ‘I would like to see you again.’

  Nothing. Guo Morou coughed.

  ‘I said, “I would like to see you again,”’ he repeated.

  ‘I am a revolutionary. In three days’ time I am going to Wuhan with my revolutionary dancing to inspire the masses to repulse the Japanese attacks, overthrow the fascist Nationalist regime, and install the eternal dictatorship of the proletariat. Daddy has booked my ticket.’

  ‘But I really must see you again.’

  She shrugged her un-sexual shoulders.

  ‘I rehearse in my studio every morning. If you insist you can come and watch.’

  Guo Morou, pot belly and erection, did go and watch. But to no avail. On the third day the completely indifferent eighteen-year-old packed her bags and flew to Wuhan.

  Guo had eventually followed her.

  Now, hopeless, feeling sick, he drew back a curtain and stared from his hotel window out on to the madhouse of The Bund. It was as though he was twenty years old again, lost in deliriums of Shelleyan madness and emotion.

  And, to cap it all, they were sending that worm, that dismal little hack Lao She round to try and entice him to write, to orate, to inspire once more. Apparently he was even going to try and persuade him to write as Lao She wrote. Him? Guo Morou?? Write like Lao She??? Just let him try!!!

  *

  For early April it is a very hot day.

  I plod along the Bund. I pass the walls where the newspapers are pasted and political debates take place. Discussions which involved four or five people three months ago have now grown to billowing crowds of several hundreds, all vociferously debating each other, orators and would-be politicians and revolutionaries and fanatics from all parties and none precariously perched on soap boxes orating and aerating on future worlds. Their audiences love it. The government, feeling under pressure, has even announced there will be some sort of elections. Elections in China?!?!?

  I plod up the concrete steps outside Guo Morou’s plush hotel. The doorman inspects this scruffy human being. I have to open the door for myself. I ask the clerk at the desk the number of Guo Morou’s room. He tells me to wait. I sit down on a sofa, which the label informs me was made in Swansea.

  This whole business of being a pimp is exhausting. Ever since Chou En-lai dumped his patriotic blackmail on me I’ve been unable to think of anything else. I’ve continued writing, of course. Actually, I’ve discovered that writing soap opera while thinking of something else actually improves the quality of the soap opera – but I don’t think that’s a lesson I’ll pass on to my students!

  There is no escape from the fact that I am about to betray every feeling and ideal I have ever held about women. Every time I see a young girl or old woman tottering along the Bund, scarcely able to keep her balance on the tips of her miniscule bound feet. Every time I see girls and women being auctioned by their fathers, husbands, owners on the street – that terrible blank look on their faces. Every time I see wives being publicly whipped and beaten by their husbands. Every time as a child I watched my poor mother having to degrade herself as she fought to support our now fatherless family. What has my writing been about, pretty much from the start, but the trials and horrors Chinese women have to daily face? And yet here I am now, pimping a girl into an arranged marriage!

  Of course, I know my beloved wife would have no scruples about it. If it comes down to choosing between the fate of one single girl or one single family and the fate of the whole of China, there is no choice. The people of China come first! That’s why Chiang Kai-shek or Chou En-lai can send off millions to their deaths. That’s why soldiers lay down their lives without a murmur. Because they have decided to. This is war. And you, Lao She, have no choice but to fight it too.

  I shake my head vigorously, trying to remove the rats from my brain.

  The clerk approaches and informs me that Mr Guo will now see me. He gives me his room number. Shrewd Chou En-lai was right. The pleas of party apparatchiks and outraged citizens could be ignored. But the threat of a rival writer…?

  I climb the well-carpeted stairs. But why does it have to be Gou Morou, a writer who makes me incandescent with rage? Why must I plead, grovel, ingratiate myself with this monster of egotism and terrible prose…?

  An ice-cold glance from my wife silences me. I will humiliate myself, I will grovel before him. Agree with everything he says. All the time, by effortless guile, slick-tongued flattery, guiding him towards the deal, the horse trade, the final grand bargain. ‘In exchange for being lionized, loved, deified by the Chinese intelligentsia for your high-flown glorious writings and crowd-inspiring oratories – for you are loved, Guo Morou, you alone are truly beloved above all writers in China – in exchange, in your big fat marriage bed, you will receive the staked-out, beaten, humiliated… the loving, keen and amorous young virgin, Miss Yu Liqun.’ That is all I have to achieve. And will achieve.

  I have arrived outside his door. I knock on it.

  No answer.

  I knock again.

  Still no answer.

  Eventually the door opens.

  Guo Morou, pot-bellied, balding, in a dressing gown, looks down at me.

  (Actually, he’s considerably shorter than me, but he still looks down on me.)

  ‘Ah, the Manchu scribbler.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Standing there like some cringing European Jew. Not of course that all Jews are like that. Marx and Lenin were both brilliant and noble.’

  I smile at his correctness.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demands in his perfect Han accent.

  ‘Can I say, Mr Guo,’ I say, ‘that I have always been a great admirer of your work. That in many ways you have been the greatest inspiration for all my own writings.’

  Guo looks at me.

  ‘And can I say, as chairman of the “Resist to the End” writers’ collective, that all of us welcome such a great writer as you yourself here in Wuhan.’

  ‘Shoddy hacks,’ states Guo.

  ‘Beside a writer such as yourself,’ I say, ‘we undoubtedly are.’

  He ignores this and carries on.

  ‘If you want to inspire the Chinese masses to greatness, to immortality, you do not speak to them in the mealy-mouthed street banter which you employ in your “novels”, the argot which I hear you insist all your fellow writers here adopt for their street drama. The Han people of China have time and again evolved the highest, most enlightened civilizations in world history. And from these civilizations have crystallized the most divine, the most exquisite language mankind has ever heard. All that is needed is for someone who loves High Mandarin, who knows expertly how to use and play it like a musical instrument, to stand up in public and start to descant its beautiful notes and tones – and every Han there, whether peasant or scholar or factory worker or coolie, will be transported and transformed, reborn in action and industry and…’

  He stops abruptly. Turns and walks to the window and stares moodily out of it, like a hero in some cheap Hollywood melodrama.

  Guo Morou is being overwhelmed by images of the lissome young Miss Yu Liqun, alone with him in this room now. Naked. Dancing. Her limbs and nipples and wet places glowing and pulsing, leading him on, leaning over his sofa, enticing his hands to… Then he looks up and what does he see? This pathetic worm Lao She. He cannot bear it. He lights a Senior Service.

  I meanwhile have been droning on about why speaking in dialect is necessary when addressing audiences of country people, of how much can be done in the popular imagination by using stereotypes and melodrama and constant surprises, but when he lights a Senior Service something within me snaps. I don’t know whether it’s class hatre
d, the thought of what an easy life this thing has had, how he’s had everything handed to him on a plate, but in revenge I immediately take out one of my cheap-as-chips Chinese cigarettes and light it.

  Clouds of foul smoke enshroud the room.

  Guo Morou’s nose puckers in disgust.

  ‘What on earth is that you’re smoking?’

  ‘A cigarette. A proletarian Chinese cigarette,’ I reply, heartily inhaling and blowing the smoke all round the room.

  Oh God, I think, I hope I haven’t gone too far…! I haven’t. Rather than rising to my challenge he turns away.

  Guo Morou is flooded with emotion. That it should come to this! Arguing with some literary rent boy in a tawdry hotel room. He is in utter despair! All Guo Morou’s age, his eminence, his brilliance falls away from him. Again he is a twenty-year-old student. Flaming with desire and passion but turned away, denied the eternal burning beauty of a young female’s flesh. The agony, the humiliation! There is only one way out. Guo Morou climbs onto the window sill.

  What is he doing, I ask myself?

  He opens the window.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He steps out onto the sill.

  Oh my God, I think, he’s going to kill himself, go the full Goethe. I am going to be held responsible for the death of China’s most eminent writer – all because I lit a Chinese cigarette. I’m never going to hear the end of this.