I couldn’t believe it. He had broken his promise. I waited the whole day, sitting on the sofa in the living room, the shades all drawn against the heat, a pile of my books scattered around me. I stared and stared at the phone. But the only times it rang it was for Jason. I’d snatch it up and it would be a Japanese girl sighing plaintively down the line, refusing to believe it when I told her he was out.
That Sunday I took five messages for him, all from different girls. Most of them were sweet and sad, some were rude. One took a shocked breath when she heard my voice, and screamed at me in shrill Japanese, ‘ Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing answering the phone? Put Jason on the fucking phone. NOW. ’
I spent some time listing all the names. I doodled faces next to them, trying to imagine what they looked like. Then, when that got boring, I sat with my chin in my hands, staring glumly at the phone that didn’t ring for me all day and night.
12
Nanking, 1 September 1937
Trouble is coming out of the east. It is just as I thought. The Japanese are in Shanghai and fighting for it street by street. Could it really be the Japanese, and not the Communists, who are the greatest threat to our stability? Could it even be that the Communists were correct to force this military unison on Chiang? Pu Yi, the Japanese puppet, has been on his borrowed throne in Manchuria for six years, no fault of our president, and five years ago the Japanese bombed Shanghai. But nobody has spoken about our safety in Nanking. Until now. Now, and only now, citizens are starting to take precautions. I spent this morning painting our blue-tiled roof black, to hide it from the Japanese bombers that we are warned will rise up one day from behind Purple Mountain, coming with the morning sun.
At about ten, when I’d finished half of the roof, something made me pause. I don’t know if it was a noise or a premonition, but as I stood on my ladder something made me turn to look out to the east. Dotted on the city skyline there were maybe twenty other men like me, high up on their ladders, spidery against the sky, their half-painted roofs glistening beneath them. And further, further beyond them, the spreading horizon. Purple Mountain. The red east.
Shujin has always said there is something bad in Nanking ’s future. In her doomy prophetic way, she has always talked about it. She says she has known from the moment she stepped from the train a year ago that she was trapped here. She says that the weight of the sky dropped straight down on her and the air infected her lungs and the city’s future pressed against her so hard she had to fight to remain standing. Even the slick dark train she had just alighted from, boring its way out through the milky light, wasn’t an escape. At that moment, standing on the Nanking platform, she looked up at the ring of mountains, dark, like an opened ribcage set in the land, and knew they were a great danger. They would hold her like a claw, those poisonous mountains, and the trains would stop running while she was here. Then Nanking would have her and use its weak, acid air to dissolve her slowly into its heart.
I know something vital happened to her that day, when I escorted her back to Nanking from Poyang lake, because I remember one vivid grain of colour in the train journey. A cherry pink parasol. A girl in the rice fields had paused to wait for the goat she was leading to catch up. When the animal stopped stubbornly the girl tugged on the rope, half-heartedly, more concerned with the idleness of watching than with the animal coming towards her. We had come to a halt somewhere just south of Wuhu and everyone in the train stopped what they were doing and turned to the windows to watch the girl waiting for the goat. At last the animal relented and the girl continued, and soon there was nothing left but the emerald paddy-field. The other passengers turned away from the window and went back to their games, to their conversations, but Shujin remained motionless, still watching the patch of land where the girl had been.
I leaned over to her and whispered, ‘What are you looking at?’
‘What am I looking at?’ The question seemed to puzzle her. ‘What am I looking at?’ She repeated it several times – her hand on the window, still staring at the empty space left by the girl. ‘What am I looking at?’
It is only now, so many months later, that I understand exactly what Shujin was looking at. Gazing at the girl under the cherry pink parasol she was looking at herself. She was saying goodbye. The country girl in her was going. When we got to Nanking she lingered on for a while in some places – the tender lines on the backs of her knees, the dusting of colour on her arms and the steady non-lilting Jiangxi dialect so amusing to the Nanking citizens – but everywhere else the woman was coming through, unwillingly, emerging blinking and baffled in the huge city. The city that she believes will never let her leave.
13
I watched Shi Chongming arrive at Todai University at eight o’clock the following morning. I’d been there since six thirty, waiting first on the street corner, then in the Bambi café when it opened. I ordered a large breakfast – miso soup, tuna flakes on rice, green tea. Before the waitress placed my order in the kitchen she whispered the price to me. I looked up at her, not understanding. Then I realized: she didn’t want me to think I’d get it for free again. I took the chit to the counter and paid it. Then, when she brought the food, I gave her three thousand yen notes. She stared at the money in silence, then blushed and tucked it into her pie-crust frill apron.
It was a hot day, but Shi Chongming wore a blue cotton Mao-style shirt, odd little black rubber plimsolls, the elasticated sort that English schoolchildren used to wear for PE, and his strange fisherman’s hat. He walked very slowly and carefully, his eyes on the pavement. He didn’t notice me loitering at the gate until I had stepped out of the shaded trees and was standing right in front of him. He saw my feet and came to a halt, his cane outstretched, his head down.
‘You said you were going to phone.’
Slowly, very slowly, Shi Chongming raised his face. His eyes were dim, like cloudy marbles. ‘You’re here again,’ he said. ‘You said you weren’t going to come here again.’
‘You were supposed to call me. Yesterday.’
He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘You look different,’ he said. ‘Why do you look different?’
‘You didn’t call me.’
He looked at me for an instant more, taking this in, then made a noise in his throat, and began to walk away. ‘You’re very rude,’ he muttered. ‘Very rude.’
‘But I’ve waited a week,’ I said, catching up and walking alongside. ‘I didn’t call you, I didn’t come here, I did what I was supposed to do, but you, you forgot.’
‘I didn’t promise to call you-’
‘Yes, you-’
‘ No. No.’ He stopped and held up his walking-stick, pointing at me. ‘I made no promises. I have a very good memory and I know I didn’t promise you anything.’
‘I can’t wait for ever.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Do you like wise old Chinese sayings? Would you like to hear a profound truth about a mulberry leaf? Would you? We say that patience turns a mulberry leaf into silk. Silk! Imagine that, from nothing but a dried-out old leaf. All it takes is patience.’
‘Well, that’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Worms turn it into silk.’
He closed his mouth and sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I don’t see a very long life for this friendship, do you?’
‘Not if you don’t call me when you promise. You’ve got to keep your promises.’