Nanking, 20 December 1937
I am writing this by the light of a candle. My right hand is painful, a thin burn running diagonally across the palm, and I am cramped on the bed, my feet tucked under me, the bed curtains drawn tight to make sure that there is no possibility, absolutely no possibility, of any light escaping into the alley. Shujin sits opposite me, mortally terrified by what has happened tonight, clutching the curtains closed and shooting glances over her shoulder at the candle. I know she would rather I had no light at all, but tonight of all nights I have to write. I have an overwhelming sense that any history written in these days, however small and inconsequential, will one day be important. Every voice will count because no one person will ever contain or calibrate Nanking ’s story. History will fail, and there will be no definitive Nanking invasion.
Everything I thought I believed has fled – in my heart there is a hole as naked and rotten as in the body of the child outside the factory, and all I can think about is what this occupation has really cost us. It means the end of a China that I haven’t valued for years. It is the death of all belief – the end of dialects, temples, moon cakes in the autumn and cormorant fishing at the feet of our mountains. It is the death of lovely bridges spreading over lotus ponds, the yellow stone reflected in the silent evening water. Shujin and I are the last links in the chain. We stand on the cliff-face, holding China back from a long fall into nothing and sometimes I startle, as if I’ve been awakened from a dream, thinking that I am falling and that all of China – the plains, the mountains, the deserts, the ancient tombs, the festivals of Pure Brightness and Corn Rain, the pagodas, the white dolphins in the Yangtze, and the Temple of Heaven – everything is falling with me.
Less than ten minutes after old Liu left our house, even before I’d found a way to tell Shujin we were leaving, the terrible screaming of motorcycle engines came from a street somewhere to the right of the house.
I went into the hall and grabbed the iron bar, positioning myself behind the spirit screen, my feet wide, the bar ready over my head. Shujin came from the kitchen to stand next to me, silently searching my face for answers. We stayed that way, my trembling arms raised, Shujin’s eyes locked on mine, as the dreadful thunder of engines funnelled up the alley outside. The noise grew and grew, until it was so loud that the engine seemed to be almost inside our heads. Then, just as I thought it might drive straight through the door and into the house, there came a choked rattle, and it began to diminish.
Shujin and I stared at each other. The sound headed away to the south, gradually faded into the distance, and silence fell. Now the only thing disturbing the quiet was the unearthly echo of our own breathing, hard and hollow.
‘What…?’ Shujin mouthed. ‘What was that?’
‘Ssh.’ I gestured to her. ‘Stay back.’
I stepped round the spirit screen and put my ear to the barricaded front door. The engines had faded, but I could hear something else in the distance – something faint but unmistakable: the pop and spit of fire. The yanwangye is going about his diabolical work, I thought. Somewhere, in one of the streets not far away, something was burning.
‘Wait there. Don’t go near the door.’ I went up to the next storey, climbing two stairs at a time, still carrying the iron bar. In the front room I ripped away a loose slat of wood and peered out into the alley. The sky above the houses opposite was red: snarling flames leaping twenty and thirty feet into the air. Little black flecks floated down, pitted and scarred like black moths. The yanwangye must have come very close to our house.
‘What is it?’ Shujin asked. She had come up the stairs and was standing behind me, her eyes wide. ‘What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said distantly, my eyes fixed on the falling snow. The flakes were speckled with greasy soot and, riding on the tide of black smoke, came the smell again. The smell of meat cooking. The smell that had been haunting me for days. Earlier we’d filled our stomach with buckwheat noodles, but there had been no protein in the meal, no cai to balance the fan of the noodle, and I still craved meat. I drew in a lavish lungful of the smell, my mouth watering hopelessly. It was so much stronger this time – it coiled round the house, getting into everything, so pungent that it almost overpowered the smell of burning timbers.
‘I don’t understand,’ I murmured. ‘It can’t be possible.’
‘What can’t be possible?’
‘Someone’s cooking.’ I turned to her. ‘How can this be? There’s no one left in the neighbourhood – even the Lius don’t have any meat to cook…’ The words died in my mouth. The black smoke hung directly over the alley where Liu’s house was. I stared at it in a trance, not speaking, not moving, hardly daring to breathe as a dreadful, unspeakable suspicion crawled into my throat.