Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Before Spider Girl made Donald his sandwich, she felt inside her smock pocket. There rested the tiny, nearly empty stone bottle of wild pear juice. The Wei family lived.

  12

  Spider Girl held her father’s hand. She sat beside him as he lay unconscious – still in an opium dream – on a bed.

  He breathed and he breathed. Slow and steady. Like a great river flowing.

  Spider Girl gently moved a damp, warm cloth across his slightly feverish forehead. He sighed. Then he stirred, he moved a bit restlessly. Perhaps it was a bad dream, a memory of battle? His body tensed and bowed, his head turned from side to side. The great river had undercurrents and turmoils within it.

  Very gently Spider Girl took from her clothing the tiny bottle of wild pear juice and carefully smeared a few drops across his lips. He stirred again, but this time differently, as though some memory, some familiarity moved deep within him, and again he settled, he lay, his breathing once again resumed its calm, its powerful progress.

  Spider Girl waited a few minutes, then quietly withdrew.

  She washed the bowls and pans – The Drab was too clumsy to be trusted with the china – while The Drab scrubbed the floor.

  Spider Girl dusted and cleaned Agnes and Hu’s rooms and filled three crates of Freda’s bottled bath juice, got The Drab to carry the crates downstairs to the street door where Spider Girl hailed a rickshaw and paid him to transport the crates to a market stall on the Bund (where they were wildly popular!).

  Instructing The Drab on which vegetables to chop for the meal, Spider Girl returned to her father’s side and took his hand in hers.

  Just to touch him, just to feel him, just to smell him was all she wanted.

  It was the morning after Agnes had rescued Wei. Donald and Hu, after they’d finished their shift, had carried him back to the apartment on a stretcher. Agnes insisted Wei, as a soldier, be given the place of honour so he lay on Freda’s bed and Freda had had to move in and share Agnes’s bed. Spider Girl slept on the floor beside her father’s bed, The Drab continued to sleep under the sink and Donald lived in the pokey little attic where he was perfectly content.

  *

  One matter which has not been much covered in this chronicle is the flowering relationship between Freda Utley and Vernon Bartlett. This is probably because they were both very discreet about it – Vernon because he was a gentleman, Freda because she was still horribly undecided on whether to commit herself or not.

  She was in turmoil. While Spider Girl sat with her father in Freda’s ex-bedroom, Freda explained her many problems and difficulties to Agnes in the kitchen.

  ‘He is a very attractive man.’

  ‘He is, if you like that sort thing. I prefer them rougher.’

  ‘We talk an awful lot, discuss all sorts of things. We agree on a lot.’

  ‘I agree on a lot of things with you. It doesn’t mean I want to go to bed with you. If you want to go to bed with him, why don’t you go to bed with him?’

  Agnes had chapter ten of her book to finish.

  ‘It’s not that simple. I have a child.’

  ‘And…?’

  There was a pause. Freda continued:

  ‘You and I haven’t seen each other in a long time – ten years at least. A lot’s happened since then.’

  Agnes forgot about chapter ten.

  ‘Tell me, Freda…’

  ‘Well, you knew me when I was married to Arcadi Berdichevsky, the Russian who used to work at Arcos, the Soviet Trade Mission in London. Before MI5 got them thrown out in ’27 on trumped-up charges of spying.’

  ‘Yes. We met just after that in ’28, I think, in Berlin, when I was working for the Indian Nationalist Movement.’

  ‘Well, Arcadi did various jobs for Russia around the world. He was a wonderful man. We had a baby, the beautiful Jon Basil. We were both committed communists. But in 1936 we were summoned back to the Soviet Union. On April the fourteenth of that year, Arcadi was arrested. He disappeared. I was left alone with my baby in this tiny, damp, dirty little flat in Moscow. I hardly had any money. Jon Basil had the most awful croup. I didn’t know what to do. I went to the police station. They said they didn’t know anything about it. I went to the central prison. They wouldn’t say anything about him. Not even say they’d arrested him. I said I had no money, a baby who was sick, they shrugged.’

  ‘They were probably using you and your baby as a lever,’ said Agnes matter-of-factly, ‘to get Arcadi to talk. That’s how secret services work.’

  ‘I asked if he was going to be put on trial, if I could go. They shrugged. I returned to our flat. My neighbours wouldn’t speak to me. For a while I traipsed back and forth to the prison, demanding to know what had happened to my husband, trying to push them into letting him go. Nothing. In desperation I tried to write to my parents, begging to send me money so I could leave. The police visited me, threatened me with a beating.’

  Agnes listened to all this in a fairly dispassionate manner. She’d been beaten up by the Chinese Nationalists when she’d returned from communist areas of the country, by the Japanese as she was covering their invasion of Manchuria, by MI6 in Berlin and New York while she working for Indian independence, and when only a child she’d watched miners being shot dead in the street before her by Pinkerton men in Nevada and Colorado. Violence and murder, as she saw it, was an everyday part of the revolutionary process.

  ‘This was happening while all the show trials were going on in Moscow,’ Agnes observed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Freda very quietly. Then she continued. ‘Eventually my parents managed to arrange for me and Jon Basil to return to England. But I still don’t know whether Arcadi is alive or dead.’

  Agnes offered Freda a cigarette, lit it, lit one for herself. For a while they smoked in gentle companionship.

  ‘In England my parents took over raising Jon Basil. I thought I should get a job so I could support us, put some money aside for Jon Basil’s education. I knew quite a lot about China, Japan – did my PhD on them, their trade issues – so I became a journalist and came out here. Mind you, I’m still slanting my articles with a pro-Soviet angle. I’m scared stiff if I write anything hostile they’ll take it out on poor Arcadi.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So what exactly is the problem you have with sleeping with Vernon Bartlett?’ asked Agnes.

  Freda ignored this and continued with her own train of thought.

  ‘There are an awful lot of communists out here in Wuhan, in the press corps. I find it quite intimidating moving among them, listening to their loud voices and sloganizing – when I know what I know. And how do I know they’re not spying on me?’

  ‘Well, I’m a communist,’ said Agnes. ‘Not the Russian sort, more the Chinese variety – with lots of syndicalism thrown in from my wonderful days in the IWW. And I’m not spying on anyone.’16

  ‘You’re different,’ said Freda.

  ‘And Vernon isn’t a communist, he’s a wishy-washy sort of socialist-cum-liberal – so what’s the problem?’

  Freda paused. Then continued.

  ‘The difficulty I have with sleeping with Vernon is that I’m still in love with Arcadi – deeply, completely – whether he’s alive or dead. I love him with every fibre in my being. But I am a woman. I like a man to look at me as Vernon looks at me. With admiration, with arousal. I expect Vernon’s a bit of a roué, a bit too smooth. All those radio shows he does…’ She paused. Then with emotion: ‘The thing is, I don’t want to be abandoned again.’

  Agnes sighed. She could never fathom how upper middle-class Englishwomen could be so utterly self-obsessed while surrounded by millions of people starving to death.17

  *

  That evening, as Spider Girl tended him, her father, still unconscious from the opium, seemed more restive, more sentient. As though just below the surface he was quickening, pushing to break from the depths and stick his head above the water so he could be reborn into this world.

  Ah, she th
ought, the wild pear juice works within him.

  His hands were moving restlessly, as though searching for an implement or tool he needed. His legs flexed, unflexed, as if he was walking, searching. His face was pursing, grimacing like a man working out a problem, trying to reach a decision.

  Spider Girl knew where he was. He was back on their farm. He was always restless, pacing like this early in the morning when, having inspected his fields, he was deciding who in the family should do what tasks that day, always bearing in mind who could do particular jobs best and who was feeling ill or incapable that day.

  She gripped his hand. (Only gently, so that she did not wake him.) Her love was without end.

  13

  I meet her at the Methodist chapel. We’ve just had a particularly rousing sermon from our fiery young preacher about all the hopes for us, for China, that lie ahead, despite the fact that this will be probably one of our last services in Wuhan before most of us flee to escape the Japanese. But he sees only good things ahead for China. And it is cheering for us all to hear him.

  After the service, as always, we reassemble in the hall next door for tea and biscuits. Everyone sits in a large circle and we all chatter away nineteen to the dozen. I find myself next to a vivacious and funny young lady. She introduces herself as Miss Hu Lan-shih. She runs what appears to be a professional eye over the various cuts and bruises on my face, which I received while in prison. I ignore this and introduce myself.

  ‘My name is Lao She.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Lao She? The writer? I have read several of your books. I really enjoyed them!’

  A writer always like to hear this sort of thing, especially from non-literary people. Literary people tend to read complicated theories and psychologies into your books which you never intended in the first place. It turns out she’s read Rickshaw Boy (inevitably), Cat Country, and my early comic novel Mr Ma and Son about my experiences in London in the 1920s. She’s also read my short story ‘Crescent Moon’, which, as a woman, she likes.

  I find out a bit about her – her life in a Shanghai cotton mill, her escape from there to Wuhan, the varied and interesting jobs she’s done since getting here. Wuhan is such an extraordinary place! It’s so invigorating! Instead of everyone being stuck endlessly in the same unchanging, repetitive lives which most people in most places in the world inhabit, Wuhan is filled with extraordinary people adapting themselves continuously to doing different and challenging work and getting great satisfaction from doing so.

  She asks me about my bruises. She is a nurse, after all. I make a few dismissive remarks. As a bright and perceptive young girl she doesn’t ask me more. Instead she asks what I am writing at the moment.

  Ah, well, there’s a question. I embark on an odyssey of explanations and descriptions of Defend Wuhan! – what it’s all about, its themes, its characters. She is very interested. She gets the detail into her head very quickly and laughs at the jokes and hopes all the marching will work. The people of Wuhan deserve a bit of enjoyment in their lives, she observes. After all, I add, we’re not going to be here much longer. We both laugh.

  Then I get on to the sort of stuff which writers love to talk about at length with willing listeners – the difficult bits which aren’t working.

  I point out I’ve pretty much got the main bits – strong patriotic speeches, a young hero (played by a middle-aged actor) breaking out of jail and leading the resistance, young women dressed as soldiers doing superbly choreographed marching, lots of music and songs and choruses. But the thing I haven’t got really, yet…

  ‘Yes?’ she asks.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘this isn’t really the thing to say in a Methodist church hall, but we need a bit of…’

  ‘Sauce?’ she says. ‘Sensuality?’

  ‘What the Americans call “leg”.’ I blush, look around me. ‘Sexy,’ I say, sotto voce. ‘Traditional Chinese dancing can be very charming, alluring, but…’

  ‘Ah,’ she says, and thinks. Such an innocent young lady. ‘I think there’s someone you should meet,’ she announces.

  *

  We leave the Methodist hall. In our Sunday best we pass down the Bund – fewer people around because all the time its population is vanishing upstream. Until we arrive at a tea house. Not just any tea house, but ‘that sort of’ tea house.

  ‘Do not be worried,’ says Hu, smiling gently. ‘But you really must meet this woman.’

  This nice Methodist girl leads me in through the door, up the stairs. No one bats an eyelid. We are passing down this corridor, girls and boys and patrons parading up and down in various states of undress, some completely naked. I am not embarrassed by this. As a boy, scraping a living off the streets of Beijing along with the rest of my family, I had often carried messages and letters in and out of brothels at all times of the day and night. None of it surprises or upsets me. But the sight of this pristine and delightful young Methodist girl, clothes carefully washed and pressed, leading me confidently through this gruesome bacchanal, appeals to me. It’s the sort of scene that might appear in one of my novels.

  We go through a door. Suddenly the atmosphere changes completely. It is quiet, clean. Amazingly, in the rooms off the corridor, men, what appear to be patients, are lying in beds.

  ‘I hope she’s not working,’ observes Hu, as we pass two nurses carrying bandaging.

  I am in some state of astonishment.

  ‘Is this a hospital?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she replies.

  Hu knocks on a door. There’s a voice from inside.

  ‘Good,’ she says, ‘she’s here.’

  We walk in. A lady, wearing very little and with a young child on her hip, is talking to two similarly clad whores. There is obviously some dispute over who gets more money for servicing the same customer. The woman with the child reaches a decision, gives it, and the two accept it without demur and exit.

  ‘Hu,’ says the lady.

  ‘Intelligent Whore,’ says Hu. ‘I have a gentleman who needs your help.’

  ‘Will this take some time?’ asks ‘Intelligent Whore’.

  ‘Yes,’ says Hu.

  ‘Intelligent Whore’ turns to her child and says:

  ‘Little Aigou. How is your book coming on?’

  ‘Well, Mummy. I am drawing aeroplanes in it. Like the ones I want us to fly in.’

  ‘That is very good,’ says Intelligent Whore, letting her child slip to the ground. ‘Why don’t you paint a picture of the ship we are going to sail up the river in? With sails and people and you and me standing in it?’

  ‘I want to do that,’ says Little Aigou, obviously her son, and hurries over to a corner of the room where a book and a box of crayons lie. He plonks down and starts drawing.

  Hu introduces me to Intelligent Whore.

  ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘you are Lao She. I’ve read some of your short stories – that one about the girl being forced into prostitution.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘“Crescent Moon”.’

  ‘Much too sentimental. Now, what do you want from me?’

  Hu explains, briefly, concisely – time is obviously of the essence with Intelligent Whore – about my project Defend Wuhan! What it’s about, what it’s trying to achieve, the problem I face. Hu, I feel, would make a first-rate aide to some high-powered business tycoon.

  ‘What Mr Lao wants is a dancer, a traditional dancer, sensual but also modest – fully dressed – who will lure and win the hearts of all the audience – women as well as men – and display the spirit of Wuhan. I thought of you.’

  Little Aigou has wandered back to his mother, holding his book.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Little Aigou?’

  ‘This boat?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve drawn it, and now I’m drawing you and me standing in it.’

  ‘Yes?’

  I am standing there, witnessing this, and having to force myself not to weep, so much does it remind me of my own youngest child and her consta
nt requests of me.

  ‘Well, Mummy, what coloured dress should I draw you wearing?’

  ‘How about you painting my yellow one? It’s my favourite dress’

  ‘No,’ says Little Aigou quite decisively, ‘I’m going to paint you in your green one. That’s the one I like best.’

  With that he hurries back to his crayons to continue his creation.

  Intelligent Whore continues the conversation as though there has been no interruption whatsoever. She looks directly at me.

  ‘So you want me to dance a dance which expresses the soul of Wuhan. This dance must be alluring but not sexual.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you want me to sing?’

  ‘Yes. That would be good. If I can find the right words. But first I need to hear you sing and see you dance.’

  ‘Of course. Just wait a minute.’

  Intelligent Whore tells her son she’ll just be gone a moment, exits from the room, and returns almost immediately with two musicians, one with a two-stringed fiddle, the other with a zither. Brothels always have musicians on call in case any clients like musical accompaniment to their various grunts and thrusts.

  ‘What would you like me to sing?’ she asks.

  ‘Something moving,’ I suggest, ‘noble.’

  She has a brief confab with her musicians, then sings.

  She has a beautiful voice. Firm, strong even, but also able to suggest emotion, vulnerability. She stands there and belts out a patriotic song and I see China in all her glory, all her majesty, all her suffering. Wow! I am not going to have any difficulty finding the right words for such a singer. We can work out the music later.

  But now we have got to the tricky bit. The dancing.

  ‘How much of my body do you want me to show? Do you want something risqué?’

  ‘No,’ I say, quite firmly, ‘not risqué.’

  But what do I want?