‘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 I 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 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 tobi-ishi stepping-stones, 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.
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 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. 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.