Authors: Mo Hayder
‘I’ve already seen it. I mean I’ve seen him taking something. Something - a …’ I held my thumb and forefinger an inch apart to indicate the size of the Nurse’s phial. ‘A fluid. With a brownish powder in it.’
Shi Chongming looked at me for a long time. He rubbed his lips as if they were chapped. Eventually he said, in a controlled voice, ‘Brownish?’
‘Isn’t that what you expected?’
‘No, no, indeed,’ he said, fumbling a handkerchief from his pocket and mopping his forehead. ‘It is exactly what I was expecting. A powder. A decoction.’ He finished patting his brow and returned the handkerchief to the pocket. ‘Now then …’ he said, and I could tell it was an effort to keep his voice steady. ‘Now, this is where you can help me. I need to know what that powder is.’
I didn’t reply at first. I leaned forward, placed the cup carefully on the tray and sat, my hands flat between my knees, hunched over, looking at the cup, thinking about what he was saying. When a long time had passed I cleared my throat and looked up at him. ‘You’re telling me that in return for me finding out what that powder is you’ll let me see the film?’
‘Don’t take this lightly. You cannot understand how dangerous it is. If anyone ever knew, or suspected, that I was asking questions …’ He held up his finger, his face intense. ‘He must never know I am asking questions. You cannot approach him directly. You must work with the utmost discretion. Even if it takes weeks, months.’
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‘I didn’t ask you that. I said, if I do it will you let me see the film?’
‘Will you do it?’
‘Will you let me see the film?’
He didn’t blink. His face didn’t change. He looked back at me stonily.
‘Well? Will you show me th—’
‘Yes,’ he said abruptly. ‘Yes. I will.’
I hesitated, my mouth open. ‘You will?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it exists,’ I said. ‘It does exist. I didn’t invent it?’
He sighed, lowered his eyes and put a hand wearily to his temple. ‘It exists,’ he muttered. ‘You didn’t invent it.’
I dropped my head then because a smile was spreading across my face and I didn’t want him to see. My shoulders were quivering and I had to put my thumb and forefinger on either side of my nose and shake my head, relief popping like laughter bubbles in my ears.
‘Now, will you or won’t you?’ he said. ‘Will you help me?’
At last, when I had stopped smiling, I dropped my hand and looked at him.
He seemed somehow even smaller, more crumpled and frail with his threadbare jacket pulled up round his shoulders. His eyes had focused to pinpoints and there was a light sweat on the bridge of his nose. ‘Will you?’
What an amazing thing. To enter into a deal with an ageing professor, who could, for all I knew, be just as insane as everyone said 7 was. Isn’t it a constant surprise the things people will do for peace of mind? We sat for ages looking at each other, the sound of the insects pounding in my head, while above us the planes heading for Narita made vapour trails across the hot blue sky. Then at last I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘Yes. I’ll do it.’
There were gates to the street set in the ground floor, creating a tunnel under the upper storey of the house. It came as a surprise to find, when Shi Chongming left in the early afternoon, that the rusting key in the lock still worked and that the old gates could
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still, with a struggle, be opened, allowing him to step straight out into the street. ‘In China,’ he told me, as he stood in the doorway, his hat pulled down, ‘we don’t think of time the way you do in the West. We believe that our future … that our future can be seen in our past.’ His eyes drifted to the garden again, as if someone had whispered his name. He put up his hand, as if he was feeling the air, or a breath on his palms.
I turned and looked hard at the stone lantern. ‘What can you see, Shi Chongming?’ I said. ‘What do you see?’
He was calm and soft-spoken when he answered. ‘I see … A garden. I see a garden. And I see its future. Waiting to be uncovered.’
When he’d gone I locked the gates behind him and stood, for a moment, in the shade of the tunnel, where the plaster was falling from the underside of the top floor to reveal cobwebby grey lathes. I looked out at the garden. I had an image of the landlord’s mother and father here - her clogs tapping on the tobiisbi steppingstones, a scarlet parasol, maybe a bleached bone comb fashioned like a butterfly, accidentally dropped and forgotten, kicked under the leaf cover, where it remained hidden and, over the years, changed and grew slowly into the stone. Shintoism puts spirits in trees, plants, birds and insects, but in Tokyo there were few green areas and the only flowers were the strings of plastic cherry blossom hanging outside the shops at festival times. You never heard birdsong. Maybe, I thought, all the spirits in the city had to cram into forgotten places like this.
At that moment, standing in the shade, knowing Shi Chongming had the film that would make sense of what had happened to me, of what I believed I’d read in a little orange book all those years ago, I knew that the answer I wanted was somewhere very near by - that it wouldn’t be long before I would reach out into the air and find, when I drew my hand back, that it had crept up to me and was lodged firmly in my palm.
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Jt
18
Nanking, 12 December 1937 (the tenth day of the eleventh month) late afternoon
I am writing this by the light of a single candle. We cannot risk kerosene or electric lamps. We must make our buildings look as if they are uninhabited.
All day yesterday we could hear explosions from the direction of the Rain Flower Terrace. I told Shujin it must be our military blowing trenches outside the city wall, or destroying the bridges over the canal, but in the streets I heard people whispering, ‘It’s the Japanese. The Japanese.’ Then, earlier this afternoon, after a long period of silence, there came an almighty explosion, shaking the city, making Shujin and me stop what we were doing and turn to each other with deadly pale faces.
‘The gate,’ shouted a boy from the street. ‘Zhonghua gate! The Japanese!’
I went to the window and watched him as he stood, his arms stretched wide, expecting shutters to fly open, voices to answer his, as would ordinarily be the way. Usually our lives are lived in the streets, but on this occasion all that could be heard up and down the neighbourhood was the furtive barricading of doors and shutters. It wasn’t long before the boy noticed the silence. He dropped his arms and scuttled away.
I turned. Shujin was sitting like a column of stone, her hands folded neatly, her long face as still as marble. She was dressed in a house qipao and trousers in a bronze colour that made her
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skin seem almost bloodless. I watched her for a while, my back to the open shutters, the cold street silent behind me. The light in the city, these days, is very odd, very white and clear: it flooded into the room, illuminating her skin in great detail - as if I was sitting very close to her. I stared. Her face, her neck and her hands were all covered in tiny bumps like goose-skin and her eyelids seemed almost translucent as if I could see her secret fears moving under them.
At that moment, as I looked at her, something elemental seemed to rise up in me, something that tasted of saffron and the thick smoke of cooking pots in Poyang, something that made me choke, brought tears to my eyes. I hovered, moving anxiously from foot to foot, vacillating over the choice of words: Shujin, I am wrong, and you are right. I cannot tell you how afraid I am. Let’s leave the city. Quickly now, go and make some guoba, let’s pack, let’s go. We’ll be at Meitan harbour by midnight. Or more dignified, Shujin, there has been a small change of plan …
‘Shujin,’ I began. ‘Shujin maybe … we should—’
‘Yes?’ She raised her eyes hopefully to mine. ‘Maybe we should … ?’
I was about to answer, when a frenzied screeching came from behind me and something shot through the window, slamming into the back of my head, sending me stumbling forwards. Instantly the room was filled with a terrible sound. I cried out where I lay on the floor, my hands over my head. In the commotion a bowl shattered, water flooded across the table and Shujin jumped up, knocking her chair over in her panic. Overhead something large and shadowed ricocheted furiously from wall to wall. Cautiously, my hands protecting my face, I raised my eyes.
It was a bird, a huge, clumsy bird, flapping desperately, catapulting into the walls, bouncing off the floor. Feathers flew everywhere. Shujin was on her feet, staring at it in astonishment, as it squawked and clattered, sending things crashing down. At length it exhausted itself. It dropped to the floor, where it hopped around dejectedly for a while, bumping into walls.
Shujin and I took a step forward and peered at it in disbelief. It was a golden pheasant. The bird that some say stands for China.
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Unbelievable. Until today I had only ever seen a golden pheasant in paintings, I couldn’t have been more surprised had the feng huang itself flown through the window. Its orange feathers were as bright as if a fire had been lit in the centre of our house. Every time I took a step forward, it hopped away, trying to flee, colliding with the furniture. I couldn’t understand why it had burst in here. It was only when the bird took a desperate leap in the air and passed quite close to me that I saw its eyes and understood.
‘Move away,’ I told Shujin, snatching up my brocaded changpao from the chair, gathering it and casting it like a net over the bird. It panicked, jumping and beating its wings and lifting a foot or so into the air, and for a moment the gown seemed to move around the room independently - a brightly patchworked spirit slithering across the floor. Then I crouched next to it, quickly trapping the bird with both hands. I straightened, carefully peeled out the bird, exposing first its little head, its sightless eyes, then its wings so that Shujin could see.
‘It’s blind,’ I murmured.
‘Blind?’
‘Yes. Maybe the explosions at Zhonghua—’
‘No!’ Shujin’s hands flew to her face. ‘No. This is the worst of luck, the worst! A golden pheasant! China’s bird. And blinded at the hands of the Japanese.’ She dug her fingers in her scalp like a crazed thing, looking frantically around the room as if searching for some miraculous means of escape. ‘It’s true - now it’s really going to happen. The earth, our soil. The Japanese are going to harm the earth - they’re going to destroy the dragon lines in the ground and—’
‘Hush, now. There is no such thing as a dragon line—’
‘They will destroy the dragon lines and then there will be nothing but drought and famine in China. All the pheasants will be blinded, not only this one. All of them. And all the humans too. We’ll be killed in our beds and—’
‘Shujin, please. Please keep calm. It is only a bird.’
‘No! Not only a bird - a golden pheasant! We’re all going to die.’ She was moving round the room in circles, erratic and fevered, throwing her hands up and down despairingly. ‘The
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president, your precious president, your supreme arbiter, has run away like a hunted dog, all the way to Chongqing, and all that’s left in Nanking are the poor and the sick and—’
‘Enough!’
‘Oh!’ she cried, dropping her hands and staring at me with the most intense anguish. ‘Oh - you’ll see! You’ll see! I am right.’ And with that she ran from the room, her feet thundering on the stairs.
I stood for a long time, staring after her, the blood pounding in my temples, astonished that everything had changed so rapidly. I had been ready to concede to her, prepared to flee the city. But her taunts had me leaping in defence of a position that I am quite unsure of.
I might have stood there for ever, staring at the empty staircase, had the pheasant not begun to struggle. Wearily I took its feet in .^|
one hand and whipped it through the air in the swift, curling movement my mother had taught me as a child, windmilling it down at my side as if I was shaking water from a cloth, once, twice, until the bird’s neck was broken and I was left holding only a limp clot of feathers. I locked the shutters and carried the dead bird, wings lifting feebly once in a death spasm, into the kitchen.
I rarely go into Shujin’s kitchen, but now it was the only place I wanted to be. It comforted me. When I was a boy I would sit on the floor of the kitchen and watch my mother drop chickens into boiling water to soften the feathers. Now I filled a pot with water, lit the fire and waited until the bubbles rose to the surface. Moving in a daze, I scalded the bird, holding it by the feet, then sat at the table, plucking it, scraping at the pinfeathers on the breast, letting my mind rest on the familiar picture of my mother’s kitchen. I recalled her face in the days before my father’s business began to thrive and we could afford an amah, when she would spend all day in the kitchen, patiently packing cooked ducks in salt, wrapping them in cloth for storage, winding the birds’ intestines on to a skewer to be dried out in the pantry. Chiang Kai-shek, I thought dully, wants China to look forward. But is it so simple for a nation to rip the history from inside its heart?
I finished plucking the bird and carefully tucked its head under its wing, tying it with string the way my mother used to, the way
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Chinese women have done for generations. Then I put it into the pot and sat, the brilliant wet feathers sticking to my arms, and watched the bloody foam rise to the surface.
A
Nanking, 13 December, afternoon
Last night I boarded up the house, nailing wood across every window and door. (Shujin would not help because her superstitions tell her that hammering in a nail will cause a deformity in our baby.) All evening we heard strange noises coming from the east, and before we went to bed I rested an iron bar against the spirit screen. Who knows if I will be able to use it, should the need arise? This morning we were woken by a distant rumble, like thunder, and half an hour ago Shujin filled up a pan to boil noodles for lunch. When she went to rinse her fingers the tap bucked and shuddered and only a thin brown liquid came out of it. What does this mean? Does it mean that the Japanese—