‘I had no idea we were so close.’
‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘It means we’re nearer the walls than I thought.’
A cloud crossed the moon, a silver and red scrap of lace, and the shadows on our roof seemed to shift and flutter. I closed my eyes and huddled closer to Liu. Behind us in the street we could still hear the Japanese troops. Suddenly all the tiredness in the world came to me: I knew we were going to have to sleep there on the roof. Liu pulled his jacket tight round him and began to talk very quietly. He told me about the day his son was born, in Shanghai, in a house not far from the fabulous Bund, about how all the family had come to the man yue when the boy was a month old, bringing him coins in envelopes, playing with him, making him kick and laugh and squirm so that the little gold bells on his ankles and wrists jingled. Liu could hardly believe that now he was living in a one-storey hut in an alley, scurrying through the streets hunting sick dogs for food.
While he talked I tucked my sleeves into my gloves and arranged my tunic so that it covered as much of me as possible. Liu’s words flowed over me, and my mind drifted out, past Tiger Mountain and along up the Yangtze, stretching away from Nanking: across the salty alluvial plains stretching eastwards to Shanghai over miles of countryside, wayside shrines littered with incense ash, graves dug on the slivers of ground next to the railways, the clatter of ducks being driven to market, dwellings carved into the yellow stone – unbearably hot in the summer, insulated and safe in the winter. I thought of all the families across China, waiting patiently under teak trees in villages, of all the smallholdings where people are honest and nothing is wasted – straw and grass are burned for fuel, and children’s balloons are made from nothing more than pig bladders. I tried – I tried hard not to imagine Japanese tanks rumbling through it all. I tried hard not to picture them crushing the countryside under their treads, the rising-sun flags fluttering as the entire continent quaked.
Eventually my eyes grew heavy, and before long old Liu’s words became quieter. They faded with my thoughts into the night, and I fell into a light sleep.
Nanking, 19 December 1937 (the seventeenth day of the eleventh month)
‘Wake up.’
I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw, very close to me, was Liu Runde’s face, wet and pink, his eyelashes covered in snow. ‘Wake up and look.’
It was early morning and he was pointing out over the roof, an uneasy expression on his face. I jerked up, startled. I had forgotten where I was. The roof was covered with snow and the dawn was sidelighting everything a weak, supernatural pink.
‘Look,’ he urged. ‘Look.’
Hurriedly I brushed at the layer of snow that had fallen on me in the night and tried to push myself up. I was so cold that my body creaked and seized up, and Liu had to grab me by the shoulders and lift me to a sitting position, setting my body in a westerly direction, forcing me to look in the direction of the mountain.
‘ Tiger Mountain. See?’ There was a kind of ghastly awe in his voice, something that made him sound very young and unsure. He stood at my side, brushing the snow from his gloves. ‘Tell me, Shi Chongming, is that the Tiger Mountain you know?’
I blinked, sleepy and confused. The skyline was red with fire, as if we were in hell, its oblique blood-tinted light falling on the terrible mountain. And then I saw what he meant. No. It wasn’t Tiger Mountain at all. I was looking at something completely different. As if the earth had coughed up something poisonous. Something too fearsome to keep in its bowels.
‘It can’t be,’ I whispered, pushing myself to my feet in a daze. ‘Old Father Heaven, am I imagining this?’
It was a hundred, no, a thousand, corpses. They had been carelessly piled, one on top of the other, countless levels of twisted bodies, their heads pointing in unnatural directions, shoes hanging from limp feet. Liu and I had fallen asleep gazing at a corpse mountain in the moonlight. I can’t chronicle here everything I saw – if I put down the truth it might burn through the paper – the fathers, the sons, the brothers, the infinite variations of sorrow. There was a noise, too, a low murmur that seemed to come from the direction of the mountain. Now that I thought about it, I realized that it had been there for a long time, since before I had woken. It had been in my dreams.
Liu got to his feet and picked his way across the roof, his gloved hands held out in front of him. My frozen body numb, I stumbled clumsily after him. The view yawned wider and wider in front of me – the whole of western Nanking spread out: to our right the intermittent grey glitter of the Yangtze, the slim, dun beak of Baguazhou Island, to our left the brown factory chimneys of Xiaguan. And in the centre, about half a li away, dominating everything around it, the dreadful corpse mountain, rising up from the earth.
We put our hands on the crumbling wall and, very slowly, hardly breathing, dared to put our noses over the top. The ground between the house and the mountain, which was open scrubland with neither streets nor buildings, was swarming with people. Thick on the ground they moved in a single tide, some carrying possessions, bedrolls, cooking pots, small sacks of rice as if they anticipated only a few days’ absence from home, some supporting others, jostling and tripping. Dotted among them were the distinctive mustard-brown caps of Japanese officers, their heads switching back and forward like oiled machinery. These were prisoners being rounded up. The backs of their heads were lit by the rising sun, and although we couldn’t see their faces, we knew what was happening from the low murmur that rose from them as they recognized the true nature of the mountain ahead. It was the sound of a thousand voices whispering their fear.
They were all men, but they weren’t all soldiers. This soon became clear. I could see grey heads among them. ‘They’re civilians,’ I hissed to Liu. ‘Can you see?’
He put his hand on my arm. ‘Dear Shi Chongming,’ he whispered sorrowfully, ‘I have no words for this. There was nothing in Shanghai to compare with this.’
As we watched, those at the head of the crowd must have grasped that they were being led to their death because panic broke out. Shouts went up and a wave of bodies bucked, backing away from their fate, trying desperately to reverse. Instead they collided with the prisoners behind, creating a pleat of mayhem, all fighting to run in different directions. Seeing the chaos, the Japanese officers, working with mystic, silent communication, formed themselves into a horseshoe round the prisoners, limiting and confining the crowd, raising their rifles. As the prisoners on the outskirts spotted the rifles and terrified skirmishes broke out, belongings were held up in defence: anything – a cap, a tin cup, or a shoe – would do. The sounds of the first shot rang across the heads of the crowd.
The effect was astonishing. It was as if we were watching a single living entity, water maybe, or something more viscid, moving as a single organism. A wave started. The force of bodies held the injured and dying erect, while in the centre of the crowd a pucker appeared, a protrusion where the bodies pressing forward were causing some in the crowd to clamber on to each other. More shots rang out. Even above the shouts I could hear the metallic shunt of the rifles being reloaded, and the small raised bud in the centre began to grow and grow, people climbing over each other to escape, until in front of my eyes it evolved into a terrible human column, slowly, slowly stretching skywards like a tremulous finger.
The screams came to us and, next to me, Liu dropped his face into his hands, beginning to shudder. I didn’t put out a hand to him, I was so horribly riveted by that wavering finger. The human spirit is so strong, I thought distantly, maybe it can climb all the way to the sky without anything to hold on to. Maybe it can climb on air. But after a few minutes, when the column seemed impossibly high – maybe twenty feet – something in its structure collapsed, and it dissolved, tumbling outwards, crushing everyone beneath it. Within seconds the tower was re-forming in a different part of the crowd, the little liquid beginnings of a finger pointing inquisitively out of a lake, then rising and rising until, before long, it was pointing rigidly at the sky, screaming out with accusation, ‘Will you allow this to happen?’