I have a meeting to go to. A meeting I am really looking forward to. It is across the river from the university, at a tea house on the Bund.
On the way to the ferry I walk through my university campus. It is extraordinary how it has transformed. When you think of a university you think of hallowed groves of learning – silent libraries, scholars walking solemnly in long traditional robes down long corridors whispering erudite words to each other, paper scrolls of ancient learning tucked under their arm. Dust everywhere.
Now things are rather different. Loud, raucous, frenetic. Corridors crowded, jostling, people shouting out to each other, students running to their next class, discussions in crammed lecture halls breaking out into arguments, even fisticuffs in the passageways. Everyone has a point of view, everyone is desperate to find new truths, new knowledge, everyone must talk to everyone else.
All the time individuals and groups pour out from our campus. Expeditions set forth, one after another. Geography students are armed with theodolites, clinometers and compasses so they can accurately map out distant provinces where fighting might break out – and so our armies, using these highly accurate maps, can calculate the shortest and quickest routes our troops can march along to engage the enemy; so the roads our enemy use can be minutely studied for the best place to ambush them; so that our artillery can accurately bombard the enemy on the other side of a mountain without even seeing him.
Meanwhile groups of geology students are being despatched to those regions in the south-west we are most likely to hold on to so they can discover deposits of valuable metals, minerals, building materials. Coal, iron ore, limestone for steel, bauxite for aluminium, stone for constructing roads and railways and buildings.
Doctors and nurses, along with all available supplies and equipment, are being hurriedly despatched, trained or only partially trained, to the many fronts our troops are fighting on.
Engineers are being taught and deployed to build defences, bridges, weaponry, factories, hospitals, steel mills and airfields.
In the midst of death, everyone is very much alive.
Even our literature and drama department is crash coursing whole regiments of sensitive young poets and dramatists, turning them into blaring and totally unscrupulous brainwashing machines. They too march forth into the field.
*
Unscrupulous brainwashing machine I might be, but even I baulk at certain abominations. Such as the all-singing, all-marching, all-patriotic pileup entitled Defend Wuhan! which I am being forced to write for the delectation of General Chiang Kai-shek and his lovely lady wife. I ponder all this as my ferry chugs across the Yangtze towards Hankow.
Two weeks and I haven’t had a single idea. A single tweak in my imagination. Popular culture? Popular culture! Popular culture?!? Why can’t I write some unpopular culture? Something gentle, loving, about my wife and children and mother…
I step off the ferry and walk along the Bund towards my meeting. Only a few months ago this whole area was a towering necropolis of empty coffins and bodies being prepared for burial. All is changed. Money has changed hands, concepts explored. All the coffins serve the living before they serve the dead. A whole community has sprung up amid them. Coffins are used as ironing boards, cupboards, pantries. The big formal ones made of blackwood or camphor wood are used as temporary desks in temporary offices for lawyers and accountants and will writers, or as tables and chairs in cafes which serve passengers awaiting boats or rickshaw men and coolies taking a break. Whole families sleep in them, rolling them over on top of them as protection from the rain as they sleep. They are hired out during the day to anyone who needs a sleep, even to fornicators and worse. Mini-hotels. Apothecary shops have laid out counters of blue and white jars containing medicinal roots and herbs and seaweed and chalk and glass jars with snakes preserved in alcohol inside them or dried alligator skins. Dead ladybirds are considered efficacious for liver complaints; the alcohol drained from the dead snakes does wonders for your potency.
With deaths among the general population of Wuhan in decline, there is only one time when this now large community reverts to its roots. When there is an air raid. A bombing is immediately followed by a frenzied deconstruction of the community as coffins are sought en masse to be rushed to the stricken area. We Chinese like to be in the comfort of our coffins as soon as possible after our deaths.
As I emerge from the extraordinary integration and disintegration, I notice a cinema to my left. It’s running an old James Cagney musical – Footlight Parade. I’m not too fond of Cagney. Too wild haired, wild eyed for me. I prefer the softness and subtlety of Fred and Ginger. There’s something so unassuming, so gentle about Fred, with Ginger effervescing away backwards before him, heels clacking, blond hair bobbing. And I love their emotional numbers, like ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’. Its loneliness, its dark desperation. With Europe in such danger, the Nazis marching, the two of them face the music – and dance!
Please excuse me – I’m being far too self-indulgent. I look again at the Cagney posters. Fred wouldn’t be at all appropriate as my hero in Defend Wuhan! I need a fireball like Cagney, punching out haughty dames, rich tycoon types and the Japanese. A hero with swagger! A Chinese Cagney! Yangtze Doodle Dandy? Shanghai Li?
And of course we’d need some big Busby Berkeley-like numbers. Like that thundering finale to 42nd Street with Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell tap dancing into the blackness of infinity. The Yanks might be lousy at fighting fascism but they’re great at putting on shows!
But then I start to doubt again. This is China. What I propose would be great in America, but who would understand it here? What Chinese person would like the aggressive dancing, the loud music, all the mugging and grimacing?
I am passing a puppet play with a crowd gathered tightly round it. What are they doing? What drama causes such ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs?’ I worm my way in. It’s that old favourite, Mulan Joins the Army. What a shrewd choice by the manager! All about a young girl whose family is threatened by raiding nomads. Since there are no boys in the family she dresses as a soldier and volunteers. On the battlefield she is a brilliant warrior. All her comrades love her. None suspects she is a young girl. Together they drive out the Japanese – sorry, nomads – and then she returns to her farm as a pious daughter to serve her mother. What story could more deeply move the Chinese at this time? At this time of war? The play is at least two thousand years old!
It is so confusing being in Wuhan at the moment. Everything is a blur. All is changing. The people of Wuhan and I myself love the old, the familiar, the reassuring, but at the same moment we’re starting to be seduced by, lured into the modern. Its movement, its endless restlessness – let’s face it – its frenzy! Everyone loves the new for no other reason than that it’s new. There’s nothing more exciting than something new! A lamp stand, a cigarette holder, a light bulb, chewing gum. It’s new! It’s new! The second it’s old everyone loses interest. Which do I choose – new or old? Which would my audience want to stir them and inspire them into fighting back against Japan? What is Wuhan? What is China?
I am almost at the tea house where I am due to meet my friend. I order my brain to remember in detail everything I’ve just been thinking – about Cagney, Busby Berkeley, Mulan Joins the Army – ancient vs modern – but like all writers I’m well aware of the holes which can suddenly appear in your brain the second you try to remember what you wanted to remember. OK, so I’ll write it down with pencil and paper. Then I remember I’ve forgotten my pencil and paper. A writer must always remember to bring pencil and paper to write down what he wants to remember in case he forgets it. But in this case I’ve forgotten them.
I look around. A woman is selling onions on a stall beside me.
‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but could you briefly lend me some pencil and paper?’
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘My boss has some.’
She picks them up off a back shelf and hands them to me, quite trusting I will return them. Ordinary people are so naturally helpful. She sees I need them, I’m not a thief, so she just hands them to me and lets me get on with the strange mysteries and rituals of writing on a piece of paper. She herself is clearly illiterate.
I finish my writing and pass her back the pencil, thanking her profusely. I feel immensely guilty that she has given me something for nothing and I cannot give anything in return. I buy a large bag of onions.
*
Jack Belden the American and Rewi Alley the New Zealander took the ferry across the Yangtze from the Bund to Wuchang on the south shore.
The tiny ferry steamed past the Western gunboats anchored in a line off the Bund, guns all pointed at the teaming onshore hordes.
Jack looked at the gunboats.
‘What I can’t figure,’ he said, ‘is the point of these fucking gunboats? Here they are, in Chinese waters, guns all pointing at the Chinese but never firing at them, and then a few hundred miles downstream in Shanghai there’s an identical line of British and American and French gunboats, in Japanese waters, all pointing their guns at the Japanese but not firing at them. Pretty soon the Japs will take Wuhan and then they’ll all be pointing their guns at the Japanese and not firing them. What’s the fucking point of it?’
‘Bloody obvious,’ responded Rewi, pointing along the Bund. ‘What’s those bloody great buildings all along the waterfront?’
‘Banks.’
‘Banks. Western banks. That’s what they’re here to defend. All our governments care about is keeping our banks open. The Japanese have killed, what, twenty million Chinese, but if the Japanese request a loan from one of these banks so they can slaughter even more – “Great! How much do you want?”’
‘But what I can’t figure,’ continued Belden, ‘is why? Why they’re loaning the Japanese all this money so they buy steel and oil and chemicals to make arms, ammunition and poison gas? Can’t the fucking banks, can’t our fucking governments, see they’re building a monster out here in Asia – just like in Europe, where they’re financing the Nazis – which one day, pretty soon, will turn on us, devour us too?’
‘Then the banks’ll be able to finance our own war industries and armaments and make even bigger profits.’
‘So, whether we live in democracies or dictatorships, the bankers are going to rule us forever?’
‘That’s what bankers think. But, whisper it, bankers are incredibly stupid, short-sighted, ill-informed creatures. They believe they shall rule us forever. They believe that the wolves can eat as many sheep as they want but that they will never develop a taste for fat, short-sighted bankers. And that even the sheep themselves might one day have had enough and start chomping their teeth.’
‘Not with politicians like Chamberlain and Daladier around they won’t.’
The ferry arrived in Wuchang.
The two had been invited by the Chinese government’s press office to attend the site of a recent Japanese atrocity where the Japanese Imperial Army had used poison gas against Chinese troops and civilians. The attack had taken place about fifty miles east along the southern bank of the Yangtze River at Kiukiang.
The Japanese attack had not been entirely successful. They had fired chemical mortars and gas cylinders – containing mustard gas – into the Chinese lines and the village behind them. The gas was successful, killing many Chinese, but then suddenly the wind changed direction and the gas was driven billowing back into the faces of the advancing Japanese troops. It killed all of them too. The area where this atrocity had taken place was thus still in Chinese hands.
A smart young officer greeted them on the quayside and they drove off.
They passed through the familiar sights of an army in retreat. Civilians, carts, lorries, wounded soldiers walking, women and children.
They arrived at the village and the two men walked quietly amid the houses and surrounding fields. Corpses lay all over the place, strangely united in death. Japanese uniforms, Chinese uniforms, peasant smocks and shoes, tiny children with their playthings, ducks and pigs, even the odd rat and crow who’d turned up for a free bite. To die in a gas attack is particularly painful. Once the gas gets into your lungs you are stricken with fever and chills. Then you get a craving, a desperate thirst for water. Your throat is on fire. So you gulp it down, and as the liquid spreads through your body your face turns black and swells and bursts in pustules and blood pours from your mouth and nose and your lungs start fermenting and melting and the poison finally enters your bowels and guts so in your last agonies you squirm and writhe and give rictus grins which freeze in death.
Belden and Alley had both been on battlefields before so they were quiet, matter of fact and detached as they went round viewing the slaughter, noting down the details, searching for the correct words and phrases.
‘Like to see The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune printing this,’ murmured Jack.
Jobs done, the two returned to their car.
Rewi Alley was a short, straight-backed New Zealander. He sported a military moustache and black swept back hair. His liberal parents, of Scottish ancestry, named him after Rewi Maniapoto, the legendary Maori warrior who had fought back against the British invaders. In 1916 Rewi had volunteered for the Western Front and won the Military Medal. After the war he’d become a factory inspector in Shanghai and was so appalled by the conditions the mill workers were forced to work in he resigned and, with the help of several Chinese trade unions, had started organizing self-governing cooperatives where members could work in safe and sanitary conditions.
When the Japanese overran Shanghai, he and the cooperatives swiftly moved machinery, workforce and families upstream to Wuhan. Here in Wuhan, he worked with General Feng Yuxiang in funding and organizing further cooperatives and facilitating their movement upstream to Chungking.
Short of money, he also worked as a ‘stringer’ for various New Zealand and British papers.
Rewi sighed.
Jack passed him his flask of bourbon. Rewi drank from it.
Rewi sighed again.
‘Got something to say?’ enquired Jack.
Rewi paused.
A shadow passed over his face.
‘I lost a brother, my older brother, in the Great War, in France. My parents have never recovered from it.
‘You know why all we soldiers volunteered and set sail from New Zealand, on the other side of the world, travelled thousands of miles across the oceans to fight that bloody war in Europe?’
He paused.
‘Because the bloody politicians told us, swore, it was the last war, the very last war, the war to end all wars. By fighting in this war, they promised us, we’d stop all future wars. Because when the war was won they, the politicians, would set up this League of Nations, a worldwide organization that would never allow another war. They swore it! Not one single war! Because any nation trying to start a war with any other nation would be immediately stopped by all the other nations, members of the League, sending all their troops and battleships to intervene and stop it. They told us this. The fucking governor general of fucking New Zealand himself stood on the verandah of our cricket pavilion in front of our whole school, lined up on the field, and fucking swore to our faces that the imperial British government in London had solemnly pledged that this is what would happen. The League of Nations would be set up. It was for this promise my brother died on the Western Front. It was for this promise millions of young men were butchered.
‘Look at this slaughter here in China. Twenty million dead because our governments refused to allow the League of Nations to intervene. Intervene in Manchuria, in Abyssinia, in the Rhineland, in Spain, in China, in Austria…’
He paused.
‘The thing I feel worst about, hurts me the most, is the shame, the bloody shame. That we have betrayed all those young men who laid down their lives fighting for a better world, for peace. All their families who have grieved their loss ever since. All the weak, defenceless nations we’ve allowed these fascists to devour.
‘Above all – we’ve betrayed ourselves.’
There was a pause.
‘Rewi?’
‘Yeah?’
‘How did your brother die?’
‘In a bloody gas attack.’
*
I continue my stroll down the Bund, carrying my large bag of onions, and arrive at the tea house. My friend is sat outside. The sun has certainly got to him, his face is tanned. He looks fitter and healthier and more relaxed. Must be all that walking and fresh air. He looks about him, watching all the faces and people passing by him, then he sees me. His face breaks into a wide grin.
‘Mr Lao,’ he shouts.
‘Tian Boqi,’ I shout.
‘It is so good to see you.’
‘And you. You are looking so healthy.’
‘All the walking, route marches. Putting up stages, taking them down, engaging in fierce sword fights, talking all hours of the night and day to all sorts of people.’
‘And you are looking really happy. I am so glad.’
A shadow crosses his face.
‘Compared to last time, you mean? My family?’
‘No,’ I hasten to tell him.
He thinks a second, then smiles.
‘I love the countryside. And the people. The warmth, comradeship even more. And the going up into the mountains. They give me such strength.’
One piece of information I should give you before Tian Boqi and I get stuck into our conversation is that he is sporting a very prominent black eye. But I naturally ignore this. I order tea for us both – he might have more-than-full-time work but he is still paid virtually nothing. I put my bag of onions on the table, we sit down, and I demand to hear his story.
‘Well, first we returned to the village where we had our disgraceful first show. We apologized over and over to the villagers for what we’d done and then talked a lot with them about drama. We told them of various ideas, they had their own ideas, so we worked on them together with the villagers and then played them out in front of the whole village. They had their comments and suggestions which we tried to incorporate – if they were practical – into the plays. People would come up to us and say – “He wouldn’t say that in that circumstance. That sounds daft. You should have that woman saying it. She’d be much funnier.” And we’d do it. And of course everywhere we travelled we heard: “We have to have more swords. We must have to have more fights. And more romances. Lots and lots of sighing and suffering!” Four or five villagers joined us in the troupe – a couple as actors, one as a writer (though technically he couldn’t write, I wrote down his dialogue – which was incredibly good – and of course he always got the dialect dead right) and the other two using their carpentry skills to build our stages and sets.’
Sometimes it’s difficult to follow Tian as he’s speaking at such a gallop. He asks me what had happened to all those orphan children who had put on that extraordinary play that day?
I smile. ‘They came back with us to the university and started to work with my colleague Lao Xiang on the play they were performing, then on other plays he wrote for them, and some which they wrote for themselves.’
‘And they’re off touring?’
‘Yes. In a way. They were put into the government’s orphans programme. But because they were already such a strong group, a family almost under their young leader Su, it was decided not to split them up but instead to give them an “aunty” and then send them all upstream to Chungking so they could start to work with all the other orphans there, helping them with their problems and fears, touring out into the countryside. I decided to put Chang Lee in charge of them. The student in your group who walked all the way from Shanghai?’
‘I remember him,’ says Tian.
‘He is quite childish in his way. And he relates to children very well. Has their fantasies, knows how to express their feelings, their thoughts.’
Suddenly Tian Boqi is serious.
‘I am such a horrible man,’ he says. ‘I treated him so badly, mocked him and bullied him. I was so stupid.’
‘And you have learnt how not to be stupid. We have all had to learn how not to be stupid. Except the rich and powerful. You remember the little girl, the silent one, Lim From The Forest? The one who went from person to person in the audience, staring at them and trying to see her parents in them?’
‘I still have nightmares about her.’
‘She’s started talking again. Only a little bit. She’ll only talk within the group, to those she knows and trusts. But a doctor I spoke to is sure she’ll change. That she’ll soon be a non-stop chatterbox. And she’s stopped looking for her family everywhere.’
Our tea and sweet dumplings have arrived. I’d ordered a double portion because Tian Boqi is looking quite gaunt. I still do not mention his black eye.
‘So tell us about how you work in the countryside, sort out your plays?’
‘Well, as we learn we adapt. We’ve developed different kinds of drama for different situations. There’s a lot of sharp minds in our group.
‘If there’s a tea house in the village we warn them ahead of time, then we enter the tea house as customers, start mixing with the villagers, performing our prearranged play in a way that involves interacting with all the villagers, bits of comedy, bits of anger, improvising lines and actions, leaving them intrigued because they can’t decide which bits are real, which are fantasy. We do slapstick (always clearing up afterwards), information bits, bits of traditional theatre while we’re there drinking their tea. Generally the audiences love it. If people are put off or scared we explain to them what is happening and once they understand they start joining in themselves.
‘We do the same sort of improvised stuff in the streets. Sometimes, when a village festival is on, we – with the villagers’ permission – take part in the procession, distributing propaganda leaflets, making the people laugh, then we put on a proper play on our stage. One of the problems is that in many places people know that there is a war on, are terrified of it, but don’t have any idea what it’s about. So we put on a play about when the Japanese first attacked us at Marco Polo Bridge, or one celebrating Taierzhuang or the communists’ victory at Pingxingguan. People are very moved to see that we are fighting back. Even winning. It makes them want to join in. On other days and nights we do great patriotic plays from the legends and histories of China. You’d enjoy them,’ he says, grinning at me.
I laugh back. It is wonderful to watch his enthusiasm.
‘On occasions, if something important has happened in the war, like Taierzhuang, we work up an overnight improvisation on it to inform people about it immediately.
‘And all the time we’re travelling. On and on and on. Some of our audiences want to put on their own plays, pass the message on to other nearby villages we haven’t been to. So we leave one of us behind to help them prepare it, then let them stand on their own two feet. We do some literacy work, especially among children, so they can go back to their parents and start teaching them how to read and write.
‘And we travel so much – through beautiful country, amid all sorts of different cultures and peoples. In some areas people are prosperous, in other areas, especially in the mountains, with villages and terraces clinging to the mountainside, we pass through places where women will never leave their own homes because they’re too poor to afford clothing.
‘We do plays encouraging villages to set up their own committees and start trying to cooperate, govern themselves. We discovered that that was already happening in many places spontaneously. In Nationalist areas Chiang Kai-shek’s officials and politicians would often be hostile to this. In the Communist areas they try to make them tow the party line. But the best places are behind the enemy lines.’
I was shocked. ‘You’ve been behind enemy lines?’
‘The Japanese have taken over vast areas. Far too large for their troops to properly control. In many places the lines between the Japanese and the Chinese are extremely fluid. Those areas, those villages and communities, are the best places to be. They’re wonderful. The peasants have simply taken over. They run the landlords out and take over the government. They’re organizing the resistance. And they’re so knowledgeable. All the little details and jokes we put in our plays they get. And they suggest new ones.
‘Everything is working fine, but then Nationalist agents and officials turn up. “You can’t put stuff like that on. Say things like that. Be disrespectful to our great leaders.” And the villagers simply stand up and throw them out. Some of the officials sneak back and watch the shows because they agree with them. And the communists are just as funny. They start to tell everyone what to do in these solemn Marxist voices and the villagers simply start to argue back, saying “That won’t work. That’s nonsense. If you want people organizing themselves effectively you’ve got to allow this and that and this.” And when the Eighth Route Army turns up – the communist soldiers – the peasants have already worked out the best way of defeating the Japanese in their area, the best places to waylay and ambush them, the best ways to confuse and terrorize them. Because they know their own countryside, every hollow and copse and cave, and the soldiers don’t. So the soldiers – the revolutionary vanguard – have to follow the orders of village peasants. It’s wonderful!’
We both laugh. Seeing him makes me so happy. Seeing his metamorphosis.
Tian Boqi has come to Wuhan for three days so he can advise and train our current students on how to put on the most effective propaganda in the towns and villages. I can think of no one more inspiring to encourage and steer them.
I make a passing reference to his black eye. He grins.
‘The perils of acting! In one town we were doing some improvised street theatre. I was playing this villainous money lender. Playing it very well. Too well, in fact. This farmer comes round the corner, doesn’t realize a play is going on, listens to all my foul deeds and love of other people’s gold and wives, and promptly punches me straight in the face. One must suffer for one’s art!’
‘It’s a credit to your acting,’ I say. ‘And it gives you a certain air of derring-do! You look a bit like Errol Flynn in one of his pirate movies.’
‘My acting is a bit forceful,’ agrees Tian. ‘It’s true, I do like to play villains.’
We finish our food and part. Since he is obviously living in straightened circumstances and has little to eat I offer him the only thing I have that might help him, my bag of onions. He gratefully accepts them.
What neither of us realizes, as we have sat there talking and laughing, is that, not six feet away, someone has been sitting at a nearby table and noting down every exact word we have spoken.
Before long I will be sitting somewhere else, listening and sweating while someone reads back to me every single word of our conversation.
*
‘Why does Donald want these bicycle parts?’ asked Spider Girl.
‘Not sure,’ replied Hu. ‘It’s to do with his surgery.’
‘That’s cutting people up?’
‘That’s cutting people up to make them whole again.’
‘I want to come and see him cutting these people up and making them better. Sounds like a butcher’s stall.’
‘I’m sure you can come,’ said Hu.
Spider Girl and Hu were pushing their way through the crowds on the Bund.
‘He’s a very strange man, Donald.’
‘He seems a very nice man to me,’ said Hu.
‘He is very nice. But he is also strange. With his bow tie.’
‘That is just a piece of dressing. Which Europeans wear.’
‘That is maybe what they tell us. I was washing it last night. It was covered in blood. I thought it could have many powerful magical spells woven into it. He looks so strong when he wears it.’
‘Donald Hankey is not a magician.’
‘Of course he is not. He is trying to save people’s lives. And he needs great strength to do that. Which is why he wears his bow tie.’
Hu could see this conversation was going nowhere and so shut up. They pressed on through the Bund.
The Bund is an aggregation, a concretion, a huge amassal of created things. Vegetables, fruit, bowls, salt, spices, flowers, musical instruments, shoes, hats, chairs, barbers, mattresses, coffins, small machines (sometimes large machines), clothing, dead meat, live meat, entertainments, witches who could curse anyone you wanted them to curse, astrologers who could foretell the future, bedding and chamber pots and inkpots. All in their different ways created, made.
But it was also a mass assemblage of unmade things. Things dismantled, torn apart, disaggregated back into their constituent parts and pieces. These too could provide money and income by being traded with people who did not want the whole object but only one part of it. On sale in this area of the Bund were machine parts, clock parts, typewriter bits, wagon and rickshaw and motor car and cinema projector and electrical bits, wooden legs and arms and fingers and teeth. It was also an area which sold lots of worn-out tat and clothing and holey shoes and well-into-rottenness fruit and vegetables and meats. There is money to be made as much in de-creation and decomposition as in creation and aggregation.
It was into this graveyard of once complete aggregations that Spider Girl and Hu pushed in search of Donald Hankey’s requested bicycle segments. Neither of them had ever visited this bit of the Bund before. All sorts of parts and offcuts and remnants were on sale.
‘There!’
Quick-eyed Spider Girl had spotted it. A necropolis of dead, disincorporated bicycles. Once noble cycles split apart, butchered up, rendered into their meanest, tiniest parts. All lying in piles and mounds.
‘And there’s the parts he wants,’ said Hu.
A bucket full of them stood like a quiver full of porcupine quills.
Hundreds of them.
Spider Girl looked at the proprietor, who returned her gaze. He was dirty, dodgy and devious. She licked her lips.
‘How many does he want?’
‘Fifty at least. But for what God alone knows.’
I do this for you, noble surgeon, thought Spider Girl. She eased into her haggle.
*
Donald nervously fiddled with his bow tie and set his large shopping basket down on the operating floor.
Hu had accompanied him to the hospital, partly to ensure he did not get lost, but also because she was becoming more and more fascinated by the work being done there. The deftness and expertise of the surgeons, the lives they saved, their dedication and sheer indefatigability. She also tarried there, of course, because she was fascinated by what Donald was actually going to do with the bits of bicycle she and Spider Girl had purchased.
Bob McClure was in conference with Ahsan Bhattacharyya and Maninda Atwal. Dick Brown had disappeared for food. Donald waited til the conference was over and then approached Bob.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Howdy, Donald,’ said Bob, ‘what can I do you for?’
‘Just wondering, and I don’t want to be a pain, but if, later, we should happen to have a lull in the number of patients…?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I was wondering if I could try out a few tests on a broken-femur patient – if one should present and nothing else was going on. I swear it will be nothing in any way hazardous.’
Bob looked at him with a squint.
‘Is this more of your saving limbs crusade, Donald?’
‘Sort of. I think I have a solution. I’ve thought of something we could use as a splint which won’t infect the patients. Do you have any traction equipment?’
‘We have one set. It happens to be unused at the moment. The patient left last night.’
‘And plaster?’
‘We have plaster.’
Bob’s squint was getting ever more gimlet.
‘Then, if we have the time, and it should only take a few minutes, and if we have a suitable patient, I would like to attempt an operation to save their leg without infecting the wound.’
Bob thought.
‘Well, if we have the time – and that’s a big if – but if we have the time, yes, you can do it. We’d be very interested. And we can always have the leg off if it doesn’t work.’
Donald sighed with relief. His newly washed and ironed bow tie positively glowed.
*
Late that afternoon a lull did occur. Donald’s operation was possible. There were no more patients and they’d held back one, a young soldier, with a broken femur.
As he was being lifted onto the table Donald approached Hu, who was standing in a corner of the room to watch.
‘I say, Hu, couldn’t help me out in this operation, could you?’
‘I don’t have any skills, Donald.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I’ll just need you to hand me some things while its going on.’
‘All right.’
‘First, go into the next-door room, roll up your sleeves and wash your hands and arms thoroughly.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, by the sterilizing equipment you’ll find a tray covered with a clean cloth. Just bring it in here to the operating table. You will stand by me during the operation and, when I ask you, just lift up the cloth and pass me one of the splints. OK?’
‘OK.’
Hu went into the room next door, carefully picked up the tray, and brought it back into the operating theatre. The patient lay on a wooden board on top of the operating table. He had been quietened with brandy. Two strong orderlies pinned him by his shoulders, another held his unwounded leg. Hu stood beside Donald with her tray. The other surgeons stood behind her and on the other side of the patient.
Donald did two swift incisions to the soldier’s upper leg – one above the break in the femur, the other below. He then delicately cut away the broken flesh between the two cuts, revealing the broken bone. He took a small surgical drill and drilled two small holes into the bone, one a few inches above the break, the other the same distance below. The patient tried to squirm. A strong nurse stopped him doing this by pinioning down his hips.
Donald moved away and carefully washed his hands in a bowl. He stepped back.
‘A splint please, Hu.’
Hu lifted the cloth. Beneath it lay a whole array of bicycle spokes. She handed one to Donald.
‘Bicycle spokes!’ exclaimed Bob.
‘Bicycle spokes?’ asked Dick. ‘They’re made of steel. They’ll rust and infect the patient just like any other splint.’
‘They’re not made from ordinary steel, Dick,’ said Donald. ‘In China, for some reason or other, they make bicycle spokes out of stainless steel.’
‘Stainless steel?’ said Bob.
‘Stainless steel doesn’t rust,’ said Maninda.
‘I noticed it,’ said Donald, ‘when I was taking a snap of a bike someone had parked on the Bund. It’s always jolly important to observe things at close quarters,’ he added, giving his bow tie a quick preen.
‘Get on with the operation, Donald,’ said Bob.
Donald held the spoke against the bone, measuring the distance between the two drill holes and, having calculated a slightly shorter length for when the bone had been reset, cut off the requisite length with some sterilized pliers which Hu handed him from the tray. Then, having bent back the two ends of the spoke with the pliers, he placed the crimp of one end of the spoke into the drilled hole above the break – it fitted perfectly – then gently manoeuvred the lower leg so that the two ends of the broken leg reformed and then popped the second crimp into the second hole. The two ends held. The bone was now aligned correctly, pinioned securely, and ready to start the slow process of re-forming.
Donald quickly swabbed the wound with a chloride solution and then sewed up the flesh he’d cut through, except he left a small hole over the break where the bone could be inspected and disinfected. He closed the hole with a swab dipped in chloride solution. Donald nodded and the patient was carried out for plastering and traction.
Bob looked at Donald for a long time. Then he spoke.
‘Okelly-dokelly. The procedure works. We’ve got enough plaster and chloride solution and we got splints by the million. But – how do we get hold of sufficient traction units? There’s the problem.’
Everyone turned and gazed at the bike Bob had ridden in on. He’d left it leaning against a wall in the operating theatre. All had suddenly become seized by a sudden faith in the humble bicycle’s ability to solve all their surgical problems. What other miraculous singularities might it be imbued with?
‘When I was very young,’ said Ahsan, ‘we used to go and visit our uncle in the countryside. I remember there was a man who came quite regularly on his bicycle. He was a knife grinder. When he got to the village all the wives would bring their kitchen knives out for him to sharpen. He would turn his bicycle upside down so it rested on its saddle and handlebars, then he unhooked its chain, detached its rear wheel, and then in its place put a circular grindstone. He reattached the chain and then, turning the pedal so that the grindstone spun round, he sharpened their knives on the whirling grindstone.’
Everyone approached Bob’s unfortunate bike and turned it upside down. They then all stared at it. They studied it from various angles. Every so often someone would turn the pedals. They all reached a unanimous decision.
‘Wowzer!’ said Dick.
‘But you’re not using my bike,’ stated Bob.
*
Spider Girl never had any doubt that Donald’s operation would succeed. Not that she had any idea what an operation was. But Donald, she knew, was a man who would always succeed in life. And she admired him for that.
So that morning on the Bund, after she’d found and purchased Donald’s bicycle spokes and Hu had left for her work, Spider Girl set off for the area of the market where the vegetables were sold. She was after one particular one. She was going to cook Donald a very special meal to celebrate his success. She searched out the vegetable very carefully – spring chives. She found four stalls selling them. She touched the spiked green stems very gently. Then she asked each stall holder the same question.
‘When were these chives last rained on?’
The first three said something like ‘last week’ or ‘I don’t know’. Only the fourth one answered correctly. ‘Last night.’ She took a large handful.
Her mother had always told her that chives which had been rained on the night before tasted the most sweet and the most succulent. She also purchased some expensive rice and various special spices – all from her own savings.
She got home and started to prepare the meal for Donald all by herself and then cook it. The Drab for once had no work to do so sat down. To pass the time she started crooning. She was a very bad crooner. Every so often Spider Girl had to cuff her to shut her up.
It took a lot of slow cooking and delicate stirring and gradual commingling of the various spices and condiments and culminated finally with the stirring in of the chives.
It had to be eaten right now. Spider Girl had timed it for nine o’clock exactly because by then everyone had usually returned from their work. But no one had turned up. The dish had to be eaten within ten minutes of it having been cooked. Spider Girl’s mother had always been adamant about this: if you don’t eat it in ten minutes it loses all its flavour and succulence. Her family always did this and it was always followed by much smacking of lips and heartfelt burpings.
Ten minutes passed. Half an hour. The Drab started crooning and stopped abruptly. Eventually, two hours later, Hu came in. She looked at Spider Girl.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘I cooked this meal. This lovely meal for Donald. To celebrate his successful operation. It had chives in it which had been rained on last night…’
‘Ah, my mother always said they tasted best.’
‘…and no one turned up. The meal’s ruined.’
‘I dropped in on them. They’re all busy arguing about bicycles.’ Hu got out a piece of paper with a list on it. ‘And they want you to buy a whole lot more bicycle parts at the market tomorrow.’
Spider Girl looked upset.
‘Come on, Spider Girl,’ said Hu. ‘I’d really like to eat it. I’m sure it’s wonderful. I used to love it when my mother cooked it for me when I was back home.’
So they all sat down at the table – including for the first time The Drab – and silently ate Spider Girl’s excellent celebration meal.