Nanking, 20 December 1937
There is nothing so painful, so agonized, as a proud man admitting he has been mistaken. On our way back from the factory, leaving the dead child on the street, we reached the point where we would separate and Liu put his hand on my arm. ‘Go home and wait for me,’ he whispered. ‘I will be with you as soon as I’ve seen young Liu back to the house. Things are going to change.’
Sure enough, less than twenty minutes after I’d arrived home, there was a coded series of knocks on the door and I opened it to find him standing on the threshold with a coarse bamboo-hemp folder under his arm.
‘We need to talk,’ he murmured, checking to make sure that Shujin wasn’t listening. ‘I’ve got a plan.’
He took off his shoes as a mark of respect and came into the small room on the ground floor that we use for formal occasions. Shujin keeps the room properly prepared at all times, set out with chairs and a red lacquered table, which is beautifully inlaid with peonies and dragons in mother-of-pearl. We seated ourselves at it, arranging our robes round us. Shujin didn’t question old Liu’s presence. She slipped upstairs to tidy her hair, and after a few minutes I heard her go out to the kitchen to boil some water.
‘There’s only tea and a few of your wife’s buckwheat dumplings to offer you, Liu Runde,’ I said. ‘Nothing more. I am sorry.’
He bowed his head. ‘There is no need to explain.’
In his folder he had a map of Nanking that he had prepared in great detail. He must have been working on it over the last few days. When the pot of tea was on the table, and our cups were full, he spread it out in front of me.
‘This,’ he said, circling a point outside Chalukou, ‘is the house of an old friend. A salt trader, very wealthy – and the house is large, with a fresh well, pomegranate trees and well-stocked pantries. Not so very far from Purple Mountain. And this,’ he put a cross a few li further into the city, ‘this is Taiping gate. There are reports that the wall has been badly shelled in this area, and there is a chance, with the rush to the west, that the Japanese won’t have assigned enough men to guard it here. Assuming we get through, we’ll walk from there along back-streets, following the main Chalukou road, reaching the river a long way north of the city. Chalukou can be of no strategic importance to the Japanese, so if we’re lucky we’ll find a boat, and from the far shore we will disappear inland to Anhui province.’ We were both silent for a while, thinking about taking our families through all those dangerous places. After a while, as if I’d expressed a doubt, Liu nodded. ‘Yes, I know. It relies on the Japanese being concentrated upstream at Xiaguan and Meitan.’
‘The radio says that any day now there’ll be an announcement about the self-governing committee.’
He looked at me very seriously. It was the most unguarded expression I’d ever seen him wear. ‘Dearest, dearest Master Shi. You know as well as I do that if we stay here we’re like rats in a drain, waiting for the Japanese to find us.’
I put my fingers to my head. ‘Yes, indeed,’ I muttered. Tears were suddenly in my eyes, tears I didn’t want old Liu to see. But he is too old and wise. He knew immediately what was wrong.
‘Master Shi, do not take this blame too heavily – do you understand? I myself have done no better than you. I, too, have been guilty of pride.’
A tear ran down my face and fell on to the table, landing on the eye of a dragon. I stared at it numbly. ‘What have I done?’ I whispered. ‘What have I done to my wife? My child?’
Old Liu sat forward in his chair and covered my hand with his. ‘We have made a mistake. All we have done is to make a mistake. We have been ignorant little men, but that is all. Only a little ignorant, you and I.’