But one old man had hung on. And Spider Girl had had her eye for a long time on one particular coffin of his. It did not look exactly distinguished. Its wood was deep pinkish, almost fulvous orange. It was unvarnished and rough and hard as teak, its surface ancient, gnarled and full of knotholes. But it was precisely what Spider Girl wanted. And when he peeked over the side of the cart, Wei wanted it too.
Spider Girl approached the coffin seller. She had no scruples about haggling with a coffin-monger.
‘You have never sold this coffin. It has been here for months. No one wants it.’
‘Anyone of taste wants it.’
‘Look at the roughness of its side. The person buried in it will never be able to lie still because of all the splinters in it.’
‘Look at the beauty of that red and orange. They will enjoy it.’ He banged its side. ‘Feel the quality of that wood, its hardness, its steadfastness. The human that lies in this coffin will lie in it forever as it sails into the eternal afterlife – his body will be safe within!’
Spider Girl was moving in for the deal.
‘What’s it made of?’
‘Wild pear tree. The hardest wood ever.’
Spider Girl wasn’t impressed.
‘Never heard of it. Sounds like a weed.’
She offered a very low price. The salesman offered a very high price. Etc., etc.
As soon as it was bought Wei wanted to lie in it. He had known the wood immediately. The wood of his ancestors, the wood of the bones of his beloved sister. They laid him gently into it. He made little chirrups and squeaks of joy and touched its sides and ran his fingers up and down its rough, hard grain.
‘It is mine. It is mine forever.’
They turned the donkey’s head towards where the ferries for Hanyang and the west sailed.
On the ferry, as all the world fell apart, Spider Girl carefully dosed her father with three drops of the sulfonamide drug in his chest then dripped a few drops of wild pear juice and some of Freda’s bath water down his throat. This revived him. As they crossed the Han River they dined on fat lamb and plump peaches and sweet chestnuts. The donkey munched contentedly on dried sorghum leaves and herbs, with some thistles and blackberry leaves thrown in. They felt like emperors.
The sun was setting over Wuhan. All the western skies were gloriously alight with the yellow of peaches and the purples of plum and grape.
All the time as they ate Spider Girl held her father’s hand. She fed him tiny morsels of the delicacies they had brought, choosing each individual scrap scrupulously, cawing and clicking like a mother crow feeding her young.
‘Oh Father. Oh Father.’
*
The Bund is filled with families carrying their bedding and furniture – pots and pans and food and keepsakes in panniers slung at either ends of poles – making their way to the final boats or ferries. The crackle of small arms fire comes distinctly from the eastern suburbs. The Chinese Army is making its last stand there. Well-to-do families with enormous female servants carry several babies and infants, poor peoples’ children follow their parents through the chaos tied on a string so they will not be lost.
All the electric lights in the city have gone out.
Towards the ships people have stuck up violet-white arc lights and lit yellow flares. The ships themselves have trained their own lights on the chaos below. People flit past holding flaming torches or the better-off electric ones. Stray dogs, bewildered sheep absolved from execution, parents berserk – they’ve lost their children, old women clutching Pekinese. Everyone is shouting at everyone else.
I stand in the midst of all this. Indecisive, panicking. Which way to go – the ship or the post office? I went to the post office at nine and they said that in all the confusion the post from the north – which has been routed in from Ichang because of the fighting – would not arrive until twelve thirty. Thirty minutes after my boat sails. The last boat.
I find out why the lights have gone out. Amid this bedlam, like some immaculate ballet troupe, suddenly glides this flawless mechanism of coolies, grunting and chirruping messages and instructions back and forth to each other to maintain their perfect equilibrium of motion and support. Smooth as cream, an eighteen-ton circular turbine from the electricity-generating station – its whole steel mass intricately tressed and rigged with a whole spider’s web of ropes and poles to evenly distribute its weight among the coolies – glides like a ghost through our midst and then disappears into the darkness where, at the dockside, the cranes are waiting to load it upon its ship.
So that was why all the power to the city was cut off early this morning. The city’s electricity-generating plant is being shipped lock stock and light bulb to Chungking!
I make my decision. I will not be going up the Yangtze like Wuhan’s electricity-generating plant. I have to know if my family still exists. I must know.
It is now eleven thirty. I turn towards the post office. Walk straight into the torrent of humanity hurtling in the opposite direction. Buffet, fight my way through. I am almost there when I hear a voice behind me calling out my name.
‘Mr Lao! Mr Lao!’
I turn. See a young man looking at me, shouting my name. Straight-backed, open-faced. I sort of know him.
‘Mr Lao,’ he cries.
He is pulling a rickshaw.
‘I have a message for you. A letter.’
I realize who he is. The young communist rickshaw man who took me out to see their deputy leader, Chou En-lai, in his bungalow. Months ago. It had started all that wretched Yu Liqun business.
I had liked him. I start to walk towards him.
‘What is it?’
‘Mr Lao, I have a message for you. It is from your family in the north. The comrades managed to get it south.’
He hands me a letter. I rip it open. From my wife. I race through the first bit. They are alive!
I stare at him with my mouth open.
‘Are you all right, Mr Lao?’
‘Yes,’ I croak.
Then I think. If they are alive, I must stay alive. I must catch that boat.
‘I must catch that boat. I must catch it.’
‘It’s almost midnight already. I’ll give you a lift.’
I leap into his rickshaw.
He runs, avoiding pedestrians and carts like a deer in flight avoids trees in a forest.
I think back. At my meeting with Chou En-lai beneath the peach blossoms, about Yu Liqun’s marriage to Guo Morou, Chou, in exchange for my help, had offered to use the resources of the Communist Party to find out whether my family was still alive.
Chou En-lai – a politician – had kept his word.
We arrive as close to my boat as we can get. It is still there.
I thank him.
‘It is a great honour to help a great writer like you. Please keep writing.’
‘I will.’
I pause.
‘But what is happening to you? I am sure I could wangle a passage for you.’
‘Thank you. I stay here.’
‘But the Japanese…’
‘It is my duty to stay. I will stay here and fight the Japanese.’
‘But surely you’ll be found?’
‘I will. And they will shoot me. But someone else will take my place, and then someone will take his place – on and on til the people finally triumph. I am proud to serve.’
I am humbled. I touch his arm.
‘Thank you.’
‘Keep writing good books.’
He goes. I make my way up the crew’s gangway. I get onto the deck, sit down, read my wife’s letter in full. She and all the children are all alive but, sorrowfully, my mother has died. She did not survive her broken leg. My wife, with the children and with the help of a pious Japanese, took her body back to Beijing where my mother was buried among her ancestors. My wife now works quietly within our community – she is a Manchu like me – as a teacher and graphic designer. She is making plans to escape with the childre
n and rejoin me in Wuhan – or Chungking.
I cover my face and weep.
The boat does not leave until one o’clock. On time. Feng Yuxiang tricked me. Once again.
22
The next morning Imperial Japanese warships anchored off the Bund. The warships of the other imperial powers, also anchored there, ignored them. As did their ambassadors and embassy officials.
Except the Italian consul-general who, as the Japanese naval officers stepped ashore on the Bund, was standing there in full plumaged regalia to greet them. He shook their hands heartily and congratulated them on their victory, then made a florid and very lengthy speech.
As Japanese troops marched into the city, Italian soldiers posted in the Italian Embassy deployed on either side of the street and as the Japanese marched between them they snapped their heels and gave the full fascist salute. White Russian dancing girls and prostitutes and bartenders, including Ralph Shaw’s ex-squeeze Big Wanda, stood cheering them on the street and handing out free cigarettes to them.
There were not as many atrocities in Wuhan as there had been in Nanking or Shanghai. This was partly because the worldwide condemnation of these massacres had startled the Japanese. (Isn’t this how imperial powers always behave?) But it was also because the Japanese High Command had realized that now, being in the middle of China instead of on its fringes, involved in what was going to be at best a protracted war and being surrounded by hostile countryside, they were going to have to treat the Chinese with a certain, albeit very low, level of humanity.
So there was comparatively little killing of civilians within Wuhan.
The defeated soldiers were a different matter. Several thousands were captured as the city was taken. Wounded ones were despatched immediately.
The rest were marched to the Bund’s quayside. There some were used for bayonet practice, but most were driven out onto the long wooden pontoons floating in the river where they stood and were used as target practice and machine-gunned down until they were all dead. Their corpses floated downstream til they started to bob and knock against the hulls of the other nations’ warships moored downstream.
‘Look,’ they seemed to say. ‘Today it is us. Tomorrow it will be you.’
All the warships’ crews had been sent below and the hatches battened down.
One junior officer was left on the bridge of each ship.
*
Aboard the British gunboat, HMS Ladybird, was a young British squaddie, Howard Andrews, posted to the British Embassy but sent on an errand to the Ladybird and caught there when the Japanese started machine-gunning their prisoners. He was sent below with the naval crew. They were able to witness the butchery through a porthole.
Howard, who was quite political, did not like fascism. He didn’t like the Japanese – but he liked Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels even less, they being closer to his home and family. So, being a spirited lad, he started to think what he himself, post-Munich, might do to fight back now that his government had proved so passive and cowardly. He had a sudden idea. To rally people – not with political speeches, but with songs.
Even though the Sikh military band attached to the embassy was pretty rubbish, he enjoyed marching to ‘Colonel Bogey’. It had swing, swagger. It made you feel good.
Howard liked words. Liked using them, liked writing them down. He started to compose a ditty.
How do you hit fascism below the belt? Where it really hurts? In the short and curlies? Then the magical words started to arrive… About Hitler. And his testicular shortcomings.
23
The little swallow, brightly dressed,
Comes every spring to visit us.
I ask the swallow: ‘Why do you come here?’
She replies: ‘Spring is the most beautiful here!’
Little swallow, let me tell you,
This year things here are prettier still,
We’ve built large factories,
With new machines.
Welcome,
And please stay for a long time.
‘Little Swallow’, Chinese children’s song, 1953
The sun shines as Prometheus makes its stately progress up the great Yangtze River. Flat countryside on either side. Hills in the distance. Mountains beyond.
The coppery brown of the eternal river. Slipping, sliding on either side of us. The pale feathery green of bamboo groves beside white farm compounds and the flat jade green of rice fields and the glossy dark green of camphor and pomelo trees.
Men fishing from boats with tame cormorants. The cormorants perch all round the gunwales of the boat, squawking and flapping their wings. They have short strings attached to their legs and rings round their necks so they cannot swallow their prey. A kite tries to rob a cormorant of its catch, dancing and sliding in the air above it.
In some places whole banks are strewn with pink and white autumn flowers and the breeze off them comes fresh and scented across our decks. A red line of hills grow more prominent as they approach us, with red orange patches of early autumn leaves and the dark green of camphor on their slopes, the lighter green of tea groves and bamboos, red soil and whitish rocks. The hills break upon the river in cliffs. Red cliffs.
Here, commanded by the great Zhuge Liang himself, Liu Bei’s army defeated the forces of the evil Cao Cao – bent on conquering all China – at the mighty Battle of Red Cliffs. As we pass the passengers cheer and applaud. I, rather pathetically, cry.
My children are alive. My wife is alive. My mother has died. A sloping line of wild geese fly by.
As we sail, in parallel to us, on either bank, run roads and trackways along which travel patient lines of refugees, soldiers, civilians, farmers – all trekking steadily west. Lorries, buses, camels, cars, yaks, peasants driving livestock, carts piled high with belongings or farm implements, large groups of children, whole schools marching west, many singing songs. Coolies bearing equipment and parts of machinery and babies and old ladies and fat uncles in bathchairs or slung from poles or on their backs. The tracks and roads they travel on weave back and forth, so sometimes they are close to us and wave, sometimes they are far away and disappear. But there are regular food and fodder stations, where they can stop and rest. A whole nation on the trek.
On board there’s just as much variety. Farmers with stock. Missionaries with Bibles. Farmers’ wives with chickens and geese and ducks. In the saloon, with velvet upholstery and on glossy teak tabletops, twenty-four-hour gambling and chatter in a haze of cigarette and opium smoke, children squirming under the tables and women squatting on the floor breastfeeding, arguing, knitting, screaming at their children. A universal clack-magg!
On deck people parade. Or rather squeeze between each other. A university professor holds a seminar among his youthful students, all jammed together. A young couple in love conveniently crushed up against each other. Lots of people fast asleep on the deck. An anti-aircraft gun lonely on its platform with no one to man it. Someone has hung their washing over its barrel. The officer and seamen on the bridge ignore all we mere mortals. And up in the bows a flock of young, blind orphans chatter and bubble among themselves. They’ve been put in the bows because the blind love to smell things, and the beautiful scents and perfumes of the countryside we’re passing through can best be savoured unsoiled by the smoke from the funnel and the stink of tobacco. A rather stern-looking woman with glasses commands them.
We sail on. Out into the flat countryside once more. On both banks are paddy fields, where the year’s last crop of rice has a silver frosty bloom to its tips. Patchwork grass meadows rippling in the breeze like greensilver pools.
At night, beneath the heavens, we look down on the dots of light which dance upon the river – fishing sampans, shrimp trappers, passing steamships and junks. I lie on my back and look up into the depths of the Milky Way. A great estuary of light spread across heaven.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
*
The next morning we steadily approach a line
of mountains, its peaks like an army on the march. The Yangtze flows down, fast, impetuously amid these mountains. We must sail up through these fast, fierce waters before we can pass out on the other side into the broad fertile plains of South-West China.
We are approaching the famous, fearsome Three Gorges.
On either side the travellers on foot and on the road who have accompanied us thus far from Wuhan peel away to follow their own vertiginous routes through the mountains to Sichuan. On either side of the river – now narrower and much more fast-flowing – where freighters can unload their really heavy cargoes of machinery and steel, which will be hiked and hauled up through the passes by chained-together tractors, teams of horses, or long long lines of coolies. Junks also stop at these quays and unload their passengers, who will have to walk up through the mountains. Junks with just sails cannot make it through the gorges.
But our steamer will steam up through the great gorges. Prometheus is tough. Prometheus was built on the Tyne by boat builders Palmers of Jarrow. But even it has to pause at a quay while we load more coal and attach giant six-inch rice straw ropes around our bows while 300 coolies set off ahead of us up a track.
At the start of our voyage they do not have to take any weight because our boilers are at full cry, the smoke and steam roaring out, and we make progress against the flood.
But then we enter the gorge, the first gorge, and the coolies start to chant ‘Hey Yah, Hai-yah’ and take the weight, swinging into their work, swaying as one from foot to foot, drawing us forwards inch by inch, foot by foot, yard by yard, up into the high gorges.
Rolling waves sweep down the gorge which towers above us like a whale’s jaws hugely opening – stone cliffs for lips, mountain after mountain high above like layers of serrated teeth, as around us, through its throat, roars the river’s rage, spouting spray, gulping with hunger at our frail craft, making small ships and skiffs travelling down spin and skip and drop like feathers over rapids amid the surf and turmoil.
Wuhan Page 72