She didn’t answer. But she did take the eggs out of the bags and into our bedroom, where she arranged the quilts round them, so they lay in a little nest on the bed, waiting for the day when we would come home.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, looking anxiously at her white face when she came downstairs. ‘Do you feel well?’
She nodded silently, and pulled on a pair of gloves. She was wearing several layers of clothing: two ordinary cheongsams, a pair of my woollen pants underneath and fur-lined boots. Our faces were blackened, our refugee certificates pinned to our clothing. At the door we stopped and stared at each other. We looked like strangers. At length I took a deep breath and said, ‘Come on, then. It’s time.’
‘Yes,’ she replied soberly. ‘It’s time.’
Outside a light snow was falling, but the moon was bright, shining through the flakes so that they appeared to dance merrily. We got as far as Zhongyang Road and stopped. Without Liu Runde, the old horse who knew its way, I was unsure. About a hundred yards away I could see a dog, lying on its back in the snow, bloated so that its four legs were forced open as wide as could be, like an overturned stool. One or two of the houses had been burned since I was last here, but there were no tracks in the snow and the street was deserted. I had no idea how Liu had planned to break through the Taiping gate, no instinctive compass or intuition of what had been in his head. The lock of his hair was inside my glove. It lay against the burn on my palm and I tightened my hand on it. ‘Yes,’ I said steadily, pulling the collar of my jacket up round my ears to keep out the whirling snow. ‘Yes, this way. This is the right way.’
We walked in silence, Purple Mountain rising ahead of us, terrible and beautiful against the stars. The streets were deserted, nevertheless every new corner deserved our suspicion. We went slowly, keeping near the walls, ready to abandon the cart and shrink into the gaps between the buildings. Shujin was absolutely silent, and for a long time all I could hear were our footsteps and my heart pounding. Once in the distance I heard the rumble of a truck going past on Zhongshan Road, but it wasn’t until we had passed the Xuanwu area that we saw our first human being: a bent old man, struggling towards us out of the snow, carrying two heavy baskets on a bamboo yoke. He seemed to be headed in the direction we’d come, and in each of his baskets was a child, asleep, arms collapsed and dangling out of the basket, snow settling on their sleeping heads. He didn’t appear to register us at all, he didn’t blink or nod or focus on us, he only kept coming towards us. When he got very near we saw he was crying.
Shujin stopped in her tracks as he approached.
‘Hello, sir,’ she whispered, as he drew parallel with us. ‘Are you well?’
He didn’t answer. He didn’t slow down or look at her.
‘Hello?’ she repeated. ‘Are your children well?’
It was as if she hadn’t spoken. The old man continued limping down the street, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance.
‘Hello!’ she said loudly. ‘Did you hear me? Are the children well?’
‘Sssssh!’ I touched her arm and pulled her to the side of the road, afraid that she had spoken too loudly. ‘Come away.’
The old man was shuffling away into the snow flurries. We stood, pressed into a doorway, watching him stagger along under his cargo, a spectre in an old coat.
‘I wanted to know if the little ones were well,’ she murmured.
‘I know, I know.’
We both stood in silence then, not meeting each other’s eyes, because from behind, the answer to the question was clear. One of the children was asleep, but the other, a boy, slumped in the right-hand basket, was not asleep at all. He had been dead for some time. You could tell that from just one look.
Midnight found us creeping through the alleys near the military academy. I knew the area well. I used to go through it as a student on my way to view the Xuanwu lakes and I knew how close to the wall we were. In an abandoned house I discovered a scorched rosewood clothes trunk, and found that if I climbed up on it and peered through the gaps in the burned houses, I could just glimpse the Taiping gate.
I put my finger to my lips and leaned forward a little further, until I could see a two-hundred-yard stretch of the wall. Liu had been right. The wall had been shelled and broken in several places and in both directions I could see piles of bricks and rubble stretching off into the night. Where the gate had been, two sentries in khaki caps stood erect, lit only by army lamps balanced on piled-up sandbags. Beyond them, outside the wall, a Japanese tank was parked among the rubble, its flag dirty with ash.
I slid off the chest. ‘We’re going north.’ I brushed off my gloves and pointed out beyond the houses. ‘That way. We’re going to find a breach further up the wall.’
And so we crept up a side-street, moving parallel to the wall. This was the most dangerous part of our journey. If we could get through the wall we’d have achieved the greatest hurdle. If we could just get through the wall…
‘Here. This is the place.’ A hundred yards up from the gate I happened to peer through a fence and saw, beyond a burned and devastated patch of land, a valley-shaped notch in the wall, stones tumbling into a scree below it. I took Shujin’s arm. ‘This is it.’
We slid between the houses on to the main road and pushed our heads out from the gap, peering up and down the length of the wall. Nothing moved. We could see the dim glow of the sentries’ lanterns to the south. To the north the snow fell in darkness, only the moonlight illuminating it.
‘They’ll be on the other side,’ Shujin whispered. Her hands were fluttering unconsciously round her stomach. ‘What happens if they’re waiting on the other side?’
‘No,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady, trying to keep my eyes on hers and not look down at her hands. Did she sense an urgency that she wasn’t communicating to me? ‘I make you this promise. They are not. We must get through here.’
Half bent to the ground we hurried across the open patch of land, the handcart skidding in the churned-up snow and earth, causing us both to slip and almost lose our balance several times. When we got to the wall we instinctively dropped to a crouch behind the cart, breathing hard and peering out into the silent snow. Nothing moved. The snow swirled and shifted, but no one shouted to us or came running.
I put my hand on her arm and pointed up the slope of rubble. It was a small climb, and I covered it easily, turning back and reaching down for the handle of the cart. She did her best, trying to lift it, trying to push it up the scree to me, but it was almost impossible for her, and I had to double back and drag it up with all my strength, my feet sliding hopelessly on the rubble, the stones avalanching down and making a noise I was sure would wake every Japanese soldier in Nanking.
Eventually I reached the top of the scree. There, I let the cart roll as far down the other side as possible, until I couldn’t lean any further and had to let it topple away, bouncing down the stones and falling on its side, all our belongings tumbling out into the snow. I held out a hand to Shujin, hauling her up, her ponderous weight coming slowly, so slowly, her eyes all the time on mine. We half scrambled, half slid down the other side of the wall, where we fell on to our belongings, grabbing them up in armfuls, throwing what we could into the cart, then racing blindly into a group of maple trees, me bumping the cart wildly behind me, Shujin doubled over as she ran, a bundle of clothing clasped to her chest.
‘We’ve done it,’ I panted. We huddled in the shadows under the trees. ‘I think we’ve done it.’ I squinted out into the darkness. On our right I could just make out a few slum dwellings, unlit and probably uninhabited. A track ran in the shadow of the wall and about twenty yards along it, in the direction of Taiping gate, a goat was tethered under a tree. Apart from that there was not a soul to be seen. I put my head back against the tree and breathed out, ‘Yes, we have. We have.’