Freda Utley and Agnes left first thing in the morning, Freda to catch the ferry to Shanghai – foreign nationals were still allowed to travel through Japanese-occupied China – and Agnes to catch the ferry to Wuchang, where she would commence her journey southwards.
Agnes said farewell to Donald and Hu and The Drab – insofar as you could say goodbye to The Drab – and lastly to Spider Girl.
Both being practical women their conversation was brief and to the point.
‘You don’t want any money?’
‘No. You need it yourself.’
‘If I was to give the money to The Drab?’
‘She would not know what to do with it.’
‘Look after yourself, Spider Girl.’
‘You too, Agnes. You do not take care of yourself nearly enough. You eat too much rice. Eat more vegetables – ones which will cleanse you, ones which will nourish you.’
‘Thank you, Spider Girl,’ said Agnes, ‘that is very helpful.’ (Though she didn’t have the least intention of doing it – she couldn’t wait to get back on the iron rations of a route march.) ‘You would make an excellent trade union negotiator,’ she added.
‘What’s a trade union?’
‘Stop stealing cheap detective novels from booksellers and start stealing socialist pamphlets.’
Agnes went. Everyone else (except The Drab) then travelled together to the aerodrome to wish Donald and Bob McClure a fond farewell. Before Spider Girl left Donald gave Wei a strong dose of opium. He also reassured Spider Girl that she was doing the best she could for him.
They drove in the ambulance that the Chinese Laundryman’s Association of New York had presented to the Chinese people. The sombreness and quietness of the vehicle reminded Spider Girl of the special carts she used to sit in when the family were going to a funeral. Spider Girl still did not know how they would get out of Wuhan, but she refused to allow herself to feel down to ensure she would be alert enough to exploit any opportunity to escape.
At the aerodrome they climbed out. A cold and misty morning. The savage clump of artillery shells fell quite close. There were bomb craters the length of the runway but an adventurous pilot could still wind his way around them as he took off.
Bob’s and most of Donald’s baggage had been sent ahead by steamer. Donald still clutched his surgeon’s portmanteau. He was harbouring a hangover and was minus his bow tie, which had unfortunately parted company with him during last night’s bacchanal.
They looked dumbly at each other – all except for Donald, who looked at the ground as he was ashamed of last night’s drunkenness.
‘Remember, Hu,’ said Bob, ‘there will always be a place for you in any hospital I or Donald work in.’
‘Here, here,’ mumbled Donald.
‘If you come to Chungking, look us up.’
‘I will,’ said Hu.
At last Donald looked up at Spider Girl.
‘And if you want work, there’ll always be a place for you as my housekeeper and helper, and plenty of space for your father, if he is…’
‘Thank you, Donald,’ said Spider Girl, looking at him, ‘that is very kind of you. We will try to get there.’
Donald looked in his surgeon’s bag.
‘Spider Girl,’ he said, ‘thing is, I’ve got something for you.’
He took out a small empty bottle and a larger one filled with red liquid, then placed the portmanteau back on the ground.
‘Been a bit short of money recently. Haven’t we all? But there’s this new really good anti-bacterial drug on the market. Antiseptic sulfonamide. It releases a process of bioactivation inside the body, especially against streptococci infections. I didn’t have the money but I telegraphed my rugger chums in Wiltshire – decent chaps, all farmers – and they held a whip-round at the local pub and airmailed it to me.’
Spider Girl looked at him.
‘Thing is,’ he continued, ‘I can’t give you all of it. I must take it to Chungking for the many patients who will need it there.’
He started to carefully decant a small amount of the liquid into the small bottle.
‘And, Spider Girl,’ he said looking directly at her, ‘it will not save your father’s life. The infection, and other infections, are too deep set into him.’
Spider Girl looked at him.
‘But he will revive for a short while. You must give him three drops through the rubber bicycle valve into his chest three times a day. Here you are.’
He handed her the small bottle. She continued to look straight at him.
‘Thank you, Donald,’ she said. ‘You are a noble soul. Please thank your friends in England for this wonderful gift. I understand entirely why you can only give me some of it. It is noble that you will use it to save all sorts of other peoples’ lives.’
Silence.
The aircraft was getting ready for take-off.
‘And I’ve got something for you, Donald,’ said Spider Girl. She took from her pocket his bow tie. She’d rescued it from the floor of the Last Ditch Club as she left. Never had it been so astoundingly laundered, so skilfully ironed, so lovingly folded. Its colours gleamed and glowed. It had blossomed.
‘My lucky mascot,’ murmured Donald. ‘Well done, old girl.’
Spider Girl stepped forwards and tied it around his neck as a military general might pin a medal on a gallant soldier.
Donald touched her arm.
‘Thank you, Donald,’ said Spider Girl.
The pilots were starting the aircraft’s engines. Time to leave.
Donald and Bob turned towards the plane.
It was at this moment that everything changed.
A bicycle courier (they must have passed him on their drive out to the aerodrome) puffed up with a message for Dr Robert McClure. He started waving it, shouting ‘Dr McClure, message for Dr McClure.’
Bob indicated who he was. The messenger brought the telegram towards him. This interested Spider Girl. She asked Hu to translate for her what was being said.
Bob read the telegram.
‘Damn,’ he said. Then, as a pious Methodist, corrected himself. ‘Jumping Jehoshaphat!’
‘What is it, Bob?’ asked Donald, slightly alarmed.
Hu and Spider Girl leant in to listen.
‘That iron lung we ordered from America. It should have gone straight to Chungking. Instead it’s just been delivered to the hospital workshop. They want to know what to do with it.’
Bob signalled to the pilot of the plane to hold on.
Donald and Bob stared at each other.
‘We can’t let it fall into the hands of the Japanese,’ said Donald.
‘If they could get it down to the Bund,’ said Bob, ‘there’s a warehouse there for emergency freight. But there’s only two of them at the workshop and one of them’s just leaving.’
‘I suppose it should be destroyed.’
Spider Girl’s eyes glinted. She stepped forwards.
‘Is the donkey and cart that brought it to the workshop still there?’
‘Must be,’ replied Bob. ‘They won’t unload it til they hear from us.’
‘If me and Hu take it from the hospital to the warehouse, can we keep the donkey and cart?’
‘The hospital won’t have any further use for them. Why not?’
‘We’ll do it.’
After that it was only a matter of seconds while Bob scribbled instructions to the workshop staff, the address of the warehouse for Spider Girl and Wei, and a brief letter to the warehouse staff emphasizing to them the importance that the iron lung reached Chungking.
The airport staff were meanwhile frantically trying to herd Donald and Bob towards the plane, whose engines were roaring.
They went.
They leapt into the plane.
Spider Girl and Hu waved wildly.
The greatly overloaded aeroplane wobbled and staggered on a zigzag course down the runway, finally lurching into the air and almost immediately disappearing into the mist.
Spider Girl turned to Hu.
‘We’ll get the ambulance to drop us off at the hospital workshop.’
*
By midday it’s turned into quite a nice day in Wuhan. The mist has lifted from the river and the swallows, zithering joyfully across the waters, do their final dances and pirouettes and death dives before heading off south for the winter.
I’ve paid my daily visit to the central post office to see if there is any post from my wife. Nothing.
In the river the imperial warships hold their usual smart line in the water, each with the flag of their respective nation painted on their deck so the Japanese hopefully do not bomb them. Past them hurry some of the last ships of the evacuation – jam-packed with families and soldiers, merchandise and heavy machinery.
Within hours Japanese warships will slip silently between the foreign warships, their wakes jostling and unsettling them, the new menace succeeding the old.
I sit outside a tea house on the Bund, smoking a cigarette and sipping my tea.
I see him coming from a distance, surprisingly light on his feet for such a heavy man.
‘Lao She!’
‘Feng Yuxiang!’
He is wearing his customary peasant clothes.
‘How are you?’
‘Alive.’
‘Not many people can say that these days.’
It is really good to see him. He radiates bon courage.
‘The wife sends her regards. She’s in Chungking, setting up new schools.’
‘Good for her.’
He orders tea and sits down. Looks about.
‘You know the people who’ve done really well out of this war?’
‘Japanese, American arms manufacturers?’
‘No. Coolies. The Bund’s still swarming with them. I mean look at them. How well they’re dressed compared to the wretches they used to be. Strong, expensive fabrics, solid sandals. See that line of women over there, queuing for the boat?’
He points over to a line of quite prosperous-looking young women, some with babies and infant children.
‘Yes?’
‘I went up and talked to them. Know who they are?’
‘Young bourgeois?’
He laughs.
‘Coolies’ wives. The wretches are doing so well they can even afford wives. And to dress them.’
‘That’s progress, comrade.’
We laugh.
‘How’s the war going?’ I ask.
‘Not the person to ask. I’m totally excluded from any sort of access to high command or decision-making. As are Generals Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren. They served their purpose, holding the Japanese at Taierzhuang, and afterwards they were immediately demoted. So they can’t in any way threaten our great Generalissimo.’
I look swiftly around but can see no men with glasses or without glasses trying to listen in on our conversation. People are too disturbed and in a hurry to linger over their teas.
‘Our leader is again promoting mediocrities?’
‘Makes him feel safe. And at least we achieved our objectives. To check the Japanese. Give them a bloody nose. So in future they treat us with more respect, caution. Taierzhuang gave us the time to withdraw in good order, move our factories and steel mills upstream, rebuild them and modernize and expand them where they are safe, where our people are safe. Our leaders had little to do with it. Our people had everything to do with it.’
His tea arrives. He smells it and congratulates the tea boy just to encourage him. Tomorrow he will be serving Japanese officers. Or dead.
‘Sorry I missed your great open-air play,’ says Feng. ‘I was in Chungking. But I’m sure it was adequately appalling.’
We both smile mordantly.
‘You’re probably the bastard who recommended I write it.’
He ignores this.
‘Everyone thinks you’ve made a great success of your teaching. Our country is now filled with patriotic actors persuading the ordinary folk to rise up and murder the enemy.’
‘Someday I will write decent novels again.’
‘Someday we will all do good things again.’
‘You think so? Chiang Kai-shek doesn’t seem at all eager to win this war.’
‘We all know that the man has an aversion to competent generals. We retreat to the south-west and other mountain fastnesses and then wait it out until stronger countries defeat the Axis powers.’
‘The democracies aren’t going to fight fascism. Chamberlain’s just signed his surrender to it.’
‘Chamberlain does not represent the people of the democracies. They will not allow fascism to triumph. The Soviet Union will not allow it. Chiang Kai-shek is waiting for them to enter the struggle, which will be worldwide, which the people will win. You read the papers? The Battle of Lake Khasan – back in August?’
‘Of course.’
‘For a second time the Japanese invade the Russians from Manchukuo, get utterly routed. They’re stuck here in China, can’t get out, even more desperate for raw materials than before they invaded. If they can’t plunder them from Russia – and they can’t – there’s only one way they can go, south – for Dutch oil in the East Indies and British rubber in Malaya.’
‘But Britain and France will drive them back.’
‘They won’t. By that time they’ll be engulfed in their own life-and-death struggle in Europe.’
‘So who…?’
‘To get to the East Indies and Malaysia they’ll have to go through the Philippines. The American Philippines. That means war. You do not take on the Russians AND the Americans. That will mean we survive. Terrible, disgusting war, I know – millions dead – but we will survive.’
A silence. He smiles.
‘And how are you, dear friend?’
I pause and then answer, more emotionally than I intended.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say. ‘Whether I should leave or not.’
‘Of course you must leave. The Japanese will be here today or at latest tomorrow.’
‘But my wife and I had an agreement that if she and the family were well she would write to me care of Wuhan Central Post Office. I have not yet heard from her, but I know it is very difficult to get a letter through, and if I am not here I may never hear from them, know that they still live.’
‘Your dear wife is a highly intelligent woman. She will know that Wuhan has fallen. It will be on every Japanese radio station and billboard. She will know to write to Chungking – the post office there.’
‘She could have already posted it – to Wuhan.’
‘Have you booked a berth on the steamer to Chungking yet?’
‘No. I want to keep checking. The last post arrives at nine this evening.’
‘The last boat leaves at midnight. You will be on it!’ His voice has risen. ‘I am your friend! Your wife is my friend! Your children are my friends! You pain me with your indecision!’
‘I want to know whether my family is alive or dead.’
‘You will be on that boat. Hu Jieqing could simply have decided not to write to you as it was too dangerous.’
‘I have to know!’
Feng clicks his fingers. A young adjutant who’s been quietly reading a newspaper at the next table comes over immediately. I recognize him as the young soldier Feng sent to Jinan to give me the letter summoning me to Wuhan.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘It is good to see you.’ I remember him as a nice young man. He played with my children.
‘Good morning, Mr Lao,’ he says, clicking his heels. ‘It is an honour to meet you again.’
‘Yang,’ says Feng. ‘The last steamer to leave Wuhan is Prometheus – at midnight. I want you to write an executive order and take it to the captain immediately. He is to reserve a place for Mr Lao on it.’
He turns to me. Continues in the clipped military manner.
‘When you arrive at the ship before midnight, you will not try to board at the passenger gangway, which will be jam-packed. You will go to the crew’s gangway and board there. They will be expecting you. You have already sent your writings and books ahead of you upstream to Chungking?’
‘Yes,’ I admit in a surly voice, as if my doing so indicates some weakness in my character.
Feng sighs. He leans over and speaks gently.
‘Dear Lao, my dear, dear friend. You are a wise man. A good man. It is right that you are upset about your family. You are deeply worried about what might have happened to them. But you staying on here in Wuhan will not help them in any way. Say you stay here and a letter arrives from your wife. They open and read it. You go, from wherever you are hiding, and get it – and immediately the Japanese arrest you. The famous Lao She! And they shoot you. Which they will. How, if your family is still alive, does that help them? They have lost a husband and a father. Their protector. And worse, the Japanese will now know, by the postmark, that you have a family, and in what district they live. Please, please get on that boat. Prometheus. Midnight.’
He gets up and he and his adjutant quietly leave.
I have not been won over by his arguments – but he certainly knows how to argue.
I set off for the post office. My letter might have arrived.
*
The ambulance dropped off Hu and Spider Girl at the hospital workshop. The workshop had been entirely cleared and all its valuable if antiquated engineering and welding equipment efficiently transported upstream. A single man awaited them, standing beside a donkey and a cart bearing a large iron lung. Spider Girl passed the man Bob McClure’s note. He read it and handed over responsibility for the cart and the iron lung to the two women. Wishing them luck, he hurried off. He had a family to save.
‘First we’ll go to the apartment,’ said Spider Girl, ‘pick up my father and The Drab and supplies.’
Hu looked at her.
‘You know what you’re doing, Spider Girl?’
‘Not yet. But I will,’ said a now confident Spider Girl.
Hu had been pulled from the collapsed air-raid shelter and her life had been saved because of Spider Girl’s cleverness. She trusted her now.
They arrived at the apartment. With infinite care Hu and Spider Girl and The Drab lifted Wei, still sleeping, down the stairs and laid him on cushions in the cart beside the iron lung. Spider Girl and The Drab had pre-packed the food and supplies in baskets and they quickly loaded the cart. Following her previous experience of long marches, Spider Girl understood the importance of water. Several crates of bottles containing Freda’s fragrant bath water were hoisted onto the cart.
‘There’s posh,’ said Hu.
They both laughed.
Hu tethered The Drab to the rear of the cart so she wouldn’t wander. They set off, Hu leading the donkey and Spider Girl riding on the rear tailgate.
Following Bob’s instructions Hu navigated their way to the warehouse for emergency freight. She showed the guard the letter from Bob McClure and he let them in.
The foreman led them to a space on the floor and a team of coolies arrived, and, having gently rested a still sleeping Wei upon the floor, removed the iron lung and secured it to a pallet, they then gently lifted Wei back on the cart as carefully as if he had been exquisite porcelain. Spider Girl thanked them.
Then something really bizarre happened.
Suddenly round a stack of crates containing invaluable works of art and priceless ancient manuscripts, immaculate as a diamond hatpin, strode Madame Chiang.
Not a perfectly painted eyelid batted as she saw them. With that flawless memory for names which so many influential people seem to possess, she immediately hailed them.
‘Ah, Hu Lan-shih and Wild Pear Blossom, it is so long since I saw you. How are you both?’
Hu was a bit at sixes and sevens.
‘We are well, thank you,’ said Spider Girl.
Madame Chiang held out her hand. Hu went forwards to shake it. Then Spider Girl moved forwards to shake it too. As she did so, Madame Ching studied her.
‘Excuse me for saying so, Wild Pear Blossom, but last time I saw you, I seem to remember you were suffering from rickets? You seem to be walking quite well now. What has happened?’
Now it was Spider Girl’s turn to be a bit flummoxed. Hu leapt enthusiastically into the breach.
‘Oh, Madame Chiang,’ she said, ‘this wonderful surgeon I went to work for…’
‘Yes, I remember that,’ said Madame Chiang, somewhat icily.
‘Well, using bicycle parts – and he uses bicycle parts in quite a lot of his operations, because there are so many bicycles in China – he used these bicycle forks to support Wild Pear Blossom’s legs so that she can now walk much more easily.’
‘What is this surgeon’s name?’ asked Madame Chiang.
‘Donald Hankey,’ said Hu. ‘He is very good.’
‘Walk up and down again, Wild Pear Blossom,’ instructed Madame Chiang.
Spider Girl rankled slightly at this. Hu gave her a meaningful stare. Spider Girl walked up and down a bit.
‘Stand still,’ ordered Madame Chiang. ‘Bicycle parts he uses, you say?’
Hu smiled broadly at this. Spider Girl even allowed herself a silent whoopee.
But things took a turn for the worse.
‘Lift your skirts, Wild Pear Blossom,’ said Madame Chiang, ‘I wish to examine his work more closely.’
What is it with upper-class women, thought Spider Girl, that they’re always wanting to stare at my private parts?
She did not budge an inch.
Hu gave her a meaningful glare. Spider Girl gave Hu a meaningful glare. Then Hu gave Spider Girl a really meaningful glare. Spider Girl sighed and raised her skirts.
Madame Chiang croopied down and started thoroughly exploring all the various bicycle parts and leather strap parts festooning Spider Girl’s private parts. At one stage she poked Spider Girl rather too vigorously. Spider Girl swayed and stopped herself from falling forwards by resting her hands briefly on Madame Chiang’s back. She regained her equilibrium. Madame Chiang re-arose.
‘Hankey,’ she said. ‘Donald Hankey. Where is he?’
‘He’s just flown to Chungking, Madame Chiang.’
‘Just the sort of surgery this country needs. Cheap. Lots of easily available braces and supports. When I’m in Chungking I’ll look him up.’
She looked at Hu.
‘I suppose you left working on my committee so you could work with him?’
‘Yes, Madame Chiang, that was the reason.’
‘Good for you. But if you ever want your old job back…’
‘Yes, Madame Chiang.’
‘And thank you too for introducing me to Intelligent Whore. It has transformed our nursing services.’
‘Madame.’
‘Good luck to both of you,’ said Madame Chiang, turning away. ‘I’ve got all these artistic relics to get together for Chungking.’
And she strode briskly away.
Spider Girl and Hu, leading the donkey, walked on out of the warehouse and onto the Bund, with Wei still asleep in the cart and The Drab tethered behind.
‘Spider Girl,’ asked Hu, ‘what are we going to do next?’
‘I want to buy a coffin for my father,’ said Spider Girl.
‘Do you think this is the time for that?’ asked Hu. ‘We should be getting out of Wuhan. Besides, we don’t have the money to buy one.’
Spider Girl stopped the cart.
‘My father is going to have the very best coffin money can buy,’ she stated bluntly. ‘I’ve got my eye on a particular one.’
‘But we don’t have any money!’
Spider Girl looked at her.
‘You didn’t see what happened back there, did you?’
‘What happened back there?’ said Hu, perplexed.
‘You are so innocent, Hu. We’ve got all the money we want.’
‘What are you saying, Spider Girl?’
‘You should have watched more carefully at the warehouse. Then you’d have seen me picking Madame Chiang’s purse.’
‘WHAT?!?’
Hu stared at her.
‘While she was poking in her disgusting way around all my private parts, I fell forwards a bit. So I had to rest my hands on her.’
‘Yes…?’
‘That’s when I did it. Picked it.’
‘You can’t have picked Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s purse!?!’
Spider Girl put her hand in her smock pocket and surreptitiously displayed some rather large silver coins to Hu.
Hu stared at her. And stared at her. And then started to laugh. Laugh and laugh and laugh. People stopped and stared. Then Hu looked at Spider Girl, her eyes dancing.
‘You are a wicked woman!’
‘No, I am not. I am a practical woman. It would help you to be a practical woman too. That way you’d have got on that aeroplane and would now be helping Donald.’
Hu stared at her some more.
‘But she’s the most powerful woman in China. When she finds out she’ll hunt us down.’
‘What, in all this chaos?’ asked Spider Girl, indicating the fleeing crowds all around them. ‘She probably won’t even look in her purse for a couple of weeks. Rich people never pay for anything. And even if when she finds out she decides it’s us I doubt she’ll do anything. Rich women like her quite like being stolen from.’
Hu looked at Spider Girl steadily, then they resumed their passage along the Bund.
The Bund was a sad sight.
Fewer people, ever more frantic.
The sounds of small arms fire could now be heard popping in the distance. Artillery shells were landing. The Japanese, against tooth and nail opposition from the Chinese Army, were grinding their way into the city’s eastern suburbs.
Wuhan was falling.
But some Chinese people were still entering the city. Poor farmers and smallholders were arriving in their thousands. All year in the countryside outside they had been tending and cultivating and nourishing their precious fruit trees and bushes, coddling them like newborn babes, unable in all that time to earn a raw penny from them, having to gamble their existence on these few short weeks when their trees stood ripe and bearing. Whatever the circumstances, whether they had to face plagues, floods, Japanese bayonets, they would still bring their crops to market to earn the only money they would make for the whole of that year.
They came with their carts and fruit-laden baskets under their arms and slung from poles and bundled in blankets on their heads and they laid on the cobbles of the Bund their fruits in great long lines and piles and profusion. All of them crying out for custom.
Hu and Spider Girl passed silently between lines of the most wondrous, ripened fruits spilling out across the cobbles.
Every variety and size of grape – blue, green, black and purple – every kind and shape of pear, each variety of apple. Those beautiful, fragrant, sweet, crisp little pears; crab apples as big as harvest apples; and for fragrance only, the small apple-sized quinces; light orange-coloured, honey-flavoured Fuyu persimmons, heart-shaped Hachiya persimmons bitter in their taste, and the ancient red persimmons, heavy and succulent in flavour; enormous peaches with white flesh, tiny peaches with blood-red flesh; Beijing apples, covered with little gold stars, which decorated rooms and added fragrance to the air (how on earth had they got through the war zones?); tiny red dates with smiling faces; green apricots in little rush baskets the size of a fist which were sold with a dash of syrup to passing children; long apricots – half red, half green – others big and deep yellow, small and light yellow, or the tiny red ones; by themselves the famous white apricots. Fruit used in the worship of the moon – pillow-shaped watermelons decorated with strips of gold paper and displayed lying on red and yellow coxcomb blossoms. Chestnuts big and fat, being roasted over little sidewalk furnaces, drowned in molasses when eaten.22
The fruits of Wuhan.
The cries of the sellers, desperate that there were so few customers, went up to the skies, as all this abundance and fecundity lay ignored around them.
On the stalls of the wine pedlars lay great earthen jars of wine beside soft slices of mutton amid snow-white onions. Fresh water crabs, fed and fattened on grain, hung in baskets of matting from poles. Honey from all over China was being sold.
Hu and Spider Girl and The Drab stared open-mouthed at the profusion as they passed by. Even an awakened Wei struggled and raised himself to look over the cart’s sides to gape at all the abundance. Spider Girl bought him a bag of Fuyu persimmons because they were his favourites, and two white-fleshed peaches. They might encourage him to eat.
For the first and only time in her life Spider Girl, purchasing the market traders’ fruits and food, refused to haggle with the sellers and paid them whatever price they demanded. She also bought milk. There was a man who milked a cow on the Bund, milking it straight into his customers’ containers. Spider Girl thought about buying some for her father – cow’s milk is very nourishing – but he had never liked it as much as the thinner, less nutritious goat’s milk. Back home Eldest Son had milked the goat and then, in the evenings, when he had finished in the fields, her father would sit and drink some and then sing songs. It was a family custom that when the songs finished Grandfather would tell a story and then they would all go to bed except Wei, who stayed up to repair his machinery. Spider Girl found the stall which sold goat’s milk. Her father sipped and enjoyed it. He even smacked his lips.
Spider Girl bought honey to restore her father and winter clothing as they would be travelling through December mountains. She also purchased incense and joss sticks, a sheaf of paper money and a spade.
They passed through the flower markets. Although it was autumn there were camellias large as a girl’s face, cascades and fountains of anemones, asters, astilbes, early plum blossoms, peonies, lilies, roses, magnolias, and a few chrysanthemums.
The blossoms of Wuhan.
There were only a few chrysanthemums because the sellers knew that the chrysanthemum was for the Japanese the most dazzling and emotional of all blooms. They were, for the time being, concealing them so that when the Japanese arrived they could display them in all their glory and the Japanese would be so overcome with emotion and joy they would be unable to bayonet their creators. They prayed.
Finally, at the far eastern end of the Bund, they entered coffin world. It had shrunk greatly since its days of pomp when coffins piled to the heavens and citizens colonized and plied their trades and slept within and between its wares. A huge row had broken out among the coffin-mongers. Most, calculating that the Japanese did not bother to put their victims in coffins but just left them where they killed them or rolled them into the Yangtze, had taken their coffins – piled high – upstream to Chungking, where people still respected the elaborate and profitable rituals of death.
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 children 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.