by Dennis Bock
“As we take inspiration from this nation’s fighting win.”
“An exceedingly polite race, really,” said the Bishop, smiling. “You’ll find that.”
“Tell him I’m eager to put into practice here what we learned in Spain. Tell him that with the right supplies and support, I’ll establish units like the one established in that country, where our survival rate on the front lines was close to 90 per cent. Tell him the new medical techniques I bring to the guerrilla war in China will be a shining example to the world, and that I’m eager to get to the front as soon as possible. Please tell him that the first order of business is to arrange for our transport to the Eighth Route Army’s base.”
The Bishop obliged, yet despite my expertise and enthusiasm, I was told that issuing a pass ensuring transit north would take some time, since the Nationalist government held that swath of territory. Meanwhile Hankou, as the de facto capital since the fall of Nanking, was sure to provide a stimulating sojourn. It was, the Lieutenant added, full of entertainments and internationals, including spies, British naval officers, black-marketeers and prostitutes.
“And sometimes they’re not so easy to tell apart,” said the Bishop, smiling.
Growing impatient, I said, “Tell him I’m here to work. And the sooner the better. I don’t care to socialize with expats. Ask him how long we might expect to be delayed.”
“Impossible to say,” said the Lieutenant.
“Days?” I asked.
The Bishop smiled yet again and didn’t bother translating the question. “You would do well, Doctor Bethune, to think of this war as an old mule labouring up a mountain trail. Nothing about it moves very swiftly. Nor should it, my good man. History such as this must be savoured.” And with that he took my arm, and Jean’s, and delivered us to a small table set with tea and cakes, where we found Agnes Smedley, bottle of gin in hand, holding court with a Finnish industrialist and a short, unshaven Italian journalist.
*
It has occurred to me that I have not spoken much about your mother’s family, but sadly I know little of her life before we met. I wish I could tell you some things about her childhood and your maternal grandparents, but the simple fact is I cannot. I know only what she told me. I suppose your mother left me with so little in that regard because we never really understood how precious the time we had together truly was. That it would be taken so quickly. We believed Spain was only the beginning, I suppose. What she told me was that her carpenter father had gone to America in search of work at the age of twenty-eight, never to return. As so many men did in his day, he crossed the Atlantic to find a new life and prepare the way for the rest of the family. After three months he would send for them. With a pack on his back, he climbed aboard the SS Numidian, sailing from Stockholm. He promptly found a steady job at a lumberyard in Chicago, on the north side of the river, but also what he hadn’t bargained for and couldn’t possibly fight against. Enraptured by the dream of new beginnings, he found a life there before his family was able to join him. A fresh start, he heard everyone saying, is the meaning of America. So he fell in love with the pretty German maid who worked at his rooming house in the Swedish neighbourhood of Armour Square. He believed a young German wife was what young America had intended for him. “So there, you see,” your mother told me, “we were left behind, Mother and I. But I always thought of him. I always wondered. Always prayed that the letter telling us to come would arrive the next day, or the next. I still live like that, always expecting something to change in my life. But it never does. Maybe that’s why I came here. War changes everything.”
“It changes a person,” I said.
“But I’m still waiting for something.”
“Then I’ll take you to America. That will change you. It turns you into something you can’t know. There you can never rest, never appreciate. You only aspire. It’s like a war.”
“I don’t know how we managed,” she said, “to live without a man in the house. I think my mother forgave him, but his absence was always painful. Then one day a solicitor came to say he was sorry to inform us that my father had died. It was a great loss, he said.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
“He’d left money behind, enough that my mother didn’t have to work any longer. We moved to the seaside, and when his body didn’t come home we had our own services there. My mother prayed that I would have the strength to forgive my father, and I prayed as well. We stood in the sea and prayed and then went up to our cabin and prepared a meal together.” She paused. “When I got older I began to see what my mother had been forced into when we had nothing. I saw that it was not our failure but the failure and shame of living without the protection of a man in a man’s world. I began to understand my mother’s degradation.” She looked at me. “Does that shock you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling embarrassed. It is a shameful thing to say. Sometimes we’re embarrassed by our silences, if not by our inability to care about things we should have known all along. “This is what brought you here?”
She said, “Prostitution is a form of nihilism, wouldn’t you say?”
It is easy to judge those you don’t know, but often difficult to accept the ways of those whom you do.
I have wrestled with this thought now for some time. I wish I’d had the chance to meet your grandmother, to stand in the sea and listen to that prayer.
*
It became clear soon enough that the Bishop knew all too well what he was talking about. The transit passes proved a major stumbling block that held us back no less than three weeks. But I decided that I would not spend this time idly, as a tourist samples the local foods and takes in the sights. Everywhere I looked those first days in Hankou, on all the faces I encountered, I saw tales of the greater struggle waiting just beyond our reach. The Bishop was again correct. As the seat of the Nationalist government, the city was lively, bristling with military attachés, British officers, and American privateers (the Flying Tigers were making something of a name for themselves there), diplomats and businessmen, as well as the artistic and society types, the “war tourists,” as your mother called them, that feed off the glamorous danger of a besieged and transitional capital. I was told, I think by Smedley, that the British authors Auden and Isherwood had passed through Hankou only days before, looking for their next book. I knew they’d been in Spain, with the Republicans, and wished them well, but also hoped they were truly interested in the cause.
China was now the only story. Here one saw the many refugees flowing down from the north, the simple villagers and farmers mercilessly ripped from their land and now hapless in a city unprepared for their arrival. But they were not a story. They were a fact. Meanwhile, the international problem was growing. Mixed in with the Tartars, Manchus and Mongols, I discovered around this time the small but very noticeable community of white Russians, blurry-eyed and violent, that favoured certain teahouses and bars in the seedier neighbourhoods. Their daytime melancholy often rose to a peak of drunken violence by nightfall. Early on during my stay, I saw a group of them walking unsteadily down the wet, snowy street, clearly drunk. It was a cold Tuesday evening. One man produced a bottle from his heavy coat—Russian vodka, probably—took a long drink and unceremoniously broke it over a companion’s head. That man fell to the ground, stunned, and for a moment remained on all fours, like a beaten dog, blood emerging from his long shaggy hair. I was about to intervene when suddenly he rose and lunged at his friend. They set upon one another in a rage, then just as quickly, and without a word, collapsed into each other’s arms in hilarity.
War tourism, so agreeable to some, was obviously not for me. I could not stand by, simply observing. After three days, and at my insistence, Jean and I were given a temporary assignment at the Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Han-yang, a quarter of an hour west of Hankou, until such time as we would be provided with our transit papers north.
We found the hospital in a sadly primitive state, barely limping into the twentieth century. It was in desperate need of supplies and equipment, overrun with TB and typhus, its staff undertrained and overworked. Temporary though we might be, its management would certainly benefit from the expertise of two experienced staff. The director, an ebullient Englishman named Morrissey who enjoyed drinking rice wine and telling stories of his youth in Manchester, was a good doctor, an island of iron will and professional conduct in a country torn apart by internal conflict and a foreign invader. He simply could do no more. Grateful for our help, on more than one occasion he very nearly begged us to reconsider our plans for heading north.
Morrissey, having been in China some twenty years, turned out to be a great and prolific gossip. He knew all the latest, it seemed. He spoke with great relish of an odd romantic entanglement between a Portuguese consular official and a German general’s wife; he was very good with a German accent and, for some reason, quite ruthless toward the Portuguese. I think gossiping, along with the rice wine, was his preferred method of saving himself from overpowering anxieties. Occasionally we dined together, Jean sometimes joining us. He seemed to long for English-speaking company and took every opportunity to take me aside for a chat. He had a pretty wife from Hankou and a grown child now studying in England. He was very obviously homesick, despite his deep roots here, and quite despondent when finally our transit passes were issued.
During the almost daily bombing sorties over the city, our orderly descent into the cellars beneath the hospital was uneventful and routine. We treated a variety of wounds, primarily lower-body trauma, as most wounds above the waist prove fatal within twenty-four hours. We moved those patients we could, others remained in their wards. One day, preparing a leg for amputation, I was thinking how grateful I was to be back at work after close to two months away from it, when the sirens sounded. I looked up, and Jean was waiting for my order. This poor man, like so many others, had been subjected to unimaginable horrors over his long journey to my table—on average, over ninety hours—from the nearest front. I walked quickly to the window and watched the Japanese planes on their approach. By then I knew my aircraft. The three planes coming in were the Ki-15 Mitsubishi, a light attack bomber. I turned back to the man, who was still conscious. Just before the sirens started up, he’d attempted to thank me with a salute for doing him the service of cutting off his leg. When I turned to face him from the window, he smiled and mustered what strength he had left to raise his right hand and shoo me away to the basement shelter.
“You go,” I told Jean. “I’ll stay with this man.”
As I said, there had been raids almost every day, but the bombs usually fell miles away, toward the middle of the city or harmlessly into the river. In lighter moments we’d even begun calling the bombs “fish killers.” What Smedley had said was true, for the most part: the Japanese pilots seemed eager to get rid of their bombs as quickly as they could, before coming into range of the feeble air defences. People died in Hankou and Han-yang, yes, but more often as a result of bad luck than precise bombing.
In a moment, however, we heard the radial engines screaming toward us. These pilots, for whatever reason, were not of the jittery type we’d grown used to. The anti-aircraft guns started up, but the planes didn’t veer off and they came in low over the city. Then came the sound of a bomb whistling through the air, and another, and another, followed by a series of explosions. I laid my body over the patient, a slow, deliberate act, almost as if I were covering him with a blanket. Jean ducked close in to the exterior wall and hugged her knees as the entire hospital shook with the force of an earthquake. The window just above her was blown out, filling the room with shards of glass. A powerful fist of air filled the room and turned our guts and shook loose plaster and debris, raising a cloud of dust so thick that I could see nothing before me but a dull haze.
I lay atop the man for many minutes, protecting his wound. When the sound of the planes began to recede, the rescue teams began to fill the yard and hallways, the dust began to clear and the all-clear sirens sounded, I pulled myself up to find the man grinning from ear to ear. Jean got back up onto her feet, unhurt, and dusted herself off as if she’d just slid in to home base. She smiled.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, “show a little fear at least.”
The patient said something to me.
“What’s he saying?” I asked her.
“He says his ancestors are grateful and he’s thanking you.”
*
It was here, in Hankou and Han-yang, and with Dr. Morrissey’s help, that my introduction to the Chinese way of being and thinking began. Every day I was surprised by something I learned. He answered an endless number of questions and was very helpful on the most basic issues of manners, custom and diet. He shared his ideas and provided me with volumes of reading, which unfortunately I was only able to skim, for my time, as you can imagine, was stretched quite thin. Where it was our natural tendency to treat the world as an entity distinct from ourselves and our interests, he said, the Chinese held that the individual was intricately connected to a greater, older, wider world and could not exist without it. There was a certain indebtedness and responsibility that they were always aware of. He described the Chinese spirit as hierarchical, based on age and wisdom, and much more reverent of the past than the Western mind. This brought to mind the selflessness of the man who’d bidden me to retreat to the air-raid shelter at the expense of his own safety, and his unusual gratitude when I had chosen not to.
“He thanked me on behalf of his ancestors,” I said. “It was an unusual sort of thank-you.”
Morrissey leaned in and said, “Norman, that’s it, right there. You’ve got it. If you want to understand the Chinese, remember that moment.” We were sitting in his cramped office overlooking a lovely park, its cherry trees covered with a light dusting of snow.
“Have I?”
“Well, you see, it’s faith for us in the West, isn’t it? Faith in God. Faith in a cause. Whatever you believe in, it’s faith, this self-imposed engine that, rightly or wrongly, permits us to hold on to our beliefs. Are you a religious man, Doctor?”
“No,” I said. Not like my father, I thought.
“I didn’t suspect so. For the Chinese, faith is nothing. What they have in place of it is duty. You see it in the real religion here. Buddhism? Confucianism? That’s horses——t. This civilization’s been around for thousands of years, and those ideas only for a few hundred. The real religion here is ancestor worship. In every house, every cave, every room you’ll find a shrine, a candle, something that represents the dearly departed, and not just granny or your favourite dead aunt. And any people whose principal religion is situated in a pure devotion to duty,” he said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands over his lap, “will never, not in a thousand years, lose a war.”
It was during one of our conversations that Morrissey began to ask questions about Spain. He was cut off here and desperate for news. I told him what I could, attempting to provide an overview of the political realities there and a frank assessment of our chances for victory. I mentioned the victory at Teruel, the one I’d read about in the Guardian, but didn’t have any news more recent than that. I described in some detail the mobile blood-transfusion unit and the documentary Karpathi and Kline had made. He listened with great attention, and pursued a line of questioning consistent with a medical man’s interests. After we had exhausted the topic, he suggested I might be interested in visiting Hankou’s Changchun Studios, the most famous of the film studios in the country, where the Hungarian Robert Capa was spending a couple of days, preparing some groundwork for a documentary.
I asked him if he knew Capa. Though I’d never met him while in Spain, I knew his most famous pictures, particularly the “moment of death” photograph that had garnered him, and the Spanish War, such attention. Morrissey told me that he did no
t, but had been informed of his arrival in Hankou—from Spain via London and Hong Kong—only two or three days before. He knew everything that happened in Hankou, this Morrissey, especially if it involved well-known foreigners.
*
You know what I thought the other day? In this Godless army I imagined myself a chaplain administering last rites. Can you imagine? At least playing tricks with myself gives me an occasional chuckle.
*
I have just now recalled something. I wrote recently that your mother had talked to me only of her father’s journey to America and the difficult times that resulted. Well, I have remembered something else that you might be interested in hearing about. She told me that her favourite place on earth was her mother’s kitchen. She didn’t even have to think about it. We were playing a silly game to help pass the time, waiting for Kajsa’s blood to fill the bottle sitting next to her. We both added to the blood supply as often as we could, usually after hours when the clinic was closed to the donating public. “Where would you be if you could be any place on earth?” I said, and she said, “In your arms,” and I said, “Seriously,” and she said, “Sitting on the counter in my mother’s kitchen waiting for the apple-nut strip to come out of the oven.” I said, “That sounds perfect,” and slipped the cannula from the vein. When I applied the gauze and told her to bend her arm she said, “Light as a feather. Can I go now, Doctor?”