I held my breath. It was so easy to recognize a person across more than fifty years. A youthful face, cut out of wood, it seemed, and ill, very ill. Grey and sweating. But the eyes were the same. The eyes, and the miniature cat’s teeth when he grimaced.
The camera crank mechanism must have wound to a halt then, because the picture disappeared, a jumpy join in the film rattled through the projector like a train on the brink of derailment, and suddenly we were at a different angle, looking at Fuyuki who stood, sweating, breathing hard, little puffs of steam issuing from him. He was a little bent, and when the camera drew back I could see that he was fitting a bayonet into his rifle. At his feet a woman lay on her back, her qipao pulled up above her waist, her trousers torn away to show the dark slant of her stomach.
‘My wife,’ Shi Chongming said quietly, his eyes locked on the film as if he was watching a dream. ‘That was my wife.’
Fuyuki was shouting something at the camera. He waved and grinned, revealing his cat’s teeth. The camera seemed to sag, as if wilting under his gaze. It backed slowly away, and the screen yawned wider, taking in the slope of the ground, more trees, a motorbike propped against one. In the corner of the frame I saw the second soldier. He had taken off his coat and his big arms were wrapped round Shi Chongming, whose mouth was open in a silent, anguished howl. He twisted and fought, but the soldier held him firm. No one was interested in his pleading. Everyone was watching Fuyuki.
What happened next had been living inside me for years. It had started as just a sentence on a page in my parents’ house, but now I was seeing the reality. The thing everyone said was in my imagination was now a grainy truth crawling across the screen in flecks of black and white. It was all so different from the way I’d pictured it: in my version the edges had been clear-cut, the figures weren’t blurred and jumpy, bleeding into the scenery behind them. In my version the act itself had been swift and ornate – a samurai dance: a trademark flick of the sword afterwards to clean it of blood. A dark, peacock tail splatter on the snow.
But this was something different. This was ungainly and fumbled. This was Fuyuki’s bayonet locked and twisted into his rifle; he was holding the weapon in two hands like a spade, elbows seesawing up behind his body, thick and black against the snow, and this was him, the man trained in bayoneting since boyhood, plunging it into the woman’s unprotected stomach with all his strength.
It took two vigorous movements. She jerked the first time, lifting her arms in a strange, casual way, the way a woman sometimes moves her arms to ease a tight shoulder muscle, dropping the knife she was holding into the snow. With the second thrust she seemed to sit up, her arms out in front of her like a puppet. But before she could raise herself completely her strength left and she fell back abruptly, rolling slightly to the side. Then she was still, the only movement a darkening stain spreading its wings round her like an angel.
It was so sudden, so unexpectedly cruel, that I could feel the shock that descended on the forest even fifty-three years later. The second soldier’s face became slack, and the cameraman must have fallen to his knees, because the picture jolted. When he regained control and managed to straighten, Lieutenant Fuyuki was reaching into the messy hole he’d made. He tugged out an arm, then the whole baby, slipping it out intact, steaming, a bloated clot of placenta coming with it. He dropped it a few feet away in the snow, and stood over the mother’s body, poking his bayonet idly into her empty stomach, biting his lip thoughtfully as if there might be something else in there. The junior soldier had had enough, he put his hands to his throat and stumbled away, releasing Shi Chongming, who shot forward, throwing himself into the blackening snow. He dropped down on to all fours, grabbed his daughter into his quilted jacket and crawled clumsily to his wife. He was inches from her, shouting into her face, into her lifeless eyes. Then the cameraman moved a little, sideways, revealing Fuyuki standing above Shi Chongming, holding a small handgun, a ‘baby nambu ’, pointed directly at his head.
It took a moment or two for Shi Chongming to realize what was happening. When he felt the shadow fall on him he looked up in slow, creaky stages. Fuyuki released the revolver’s safety catch and extended his free hand in a simple gesture known across the globe. Give me.
Give me.
Shi Chongming struggled to his knees, the baby clasped to his chest, never taking his eyes off that extended hand. Slowly, slowly, Fuyuki cocked the nambu, and squeezed the trigger. Shi Chongming flinched, his body sagged, and two feet behind him the snow leaped once. He wasn’t hit, it was only a warning, but his knees buckled – he began to shake visibly. Fuyuki took a step forward, putting the muzzle of the gun against his head. Trembling, weeping, Shi Chongming looked up at his captor’s face. Everything was there in his eyes, everything was there among the reflection of the trees, the long twisting story of his wife and their baby, the question ‘Why us, why now, why here?’ His history stringing back into the past.
Somehow I knew what was going to happen next. I felt it all about to accelerate. Suddenly I understood why Shi Chongming had kept this film secret for so many years. What I was watching, I realized, was him measuring and weighing his life against the value of the baby in his arms.
He stared at the hand for so long that the camera wound down, another film join went through, and when the picture came back he was still staring. A tear ran down his face. I put my fingers to my forehead, hardly daring to breathe, conscious of the old Shi Chongming sitting in silence behind me. With a single sentence that seemed to mean nothing to anyone but himself, Shi Chongming raised the baby and rested it gently across Fuyuki’s arms. He bowed his head, then struggled to his feet and walked wearily into the trees. No one stopped him. He walked slowly, limping slightly, every few paces his hand going up to steady himself against a tree.
No one moved. The second soldier stood a few yards away in the snow, his head bowed, his face in his hands. Even Fuyuki was motionless. Then he turned, said something to the camera, and picked up the baby by a foot – holding her for inspection like a skinned rabbit.
I didn’t breathe. This was it. This was the crucial moment. Fuyuki looked at the baby, with a strange, intense expression, as if she held the answer to an important question. Then, with his free hand, he pulled out his rubber belt and knotted it round her ankles, lashing her tightly round his waist, letting her swing down, hanging upside-down, facing his leg. She twisted there for a few moments. Then her hands flexed.
I sat forward, gripping the chair arms. Yes. I had been right. Her hands were moving. Her mouth opened a few times, her chest rose and fell and her face crumpled in a wail. She was alive. She twisted and reached out blindly, instinctively trying to grasp Fuyuki’s leg. When he turned she lost her grip and flared in an arc from his waist like a dancer’s skirt. He did it once, twice, showing off for the camera, letting her weight bump against his uniformed thigh, smiling and saying something. When he stopped and let the baby come to a rest, her instinctive grasping resumed.
The film ran through its guides and at last sputtered out, I felt as if the breath had been punched out of me. I fell forward, on to my knees like a supplicant. The screen was empty, only a few amoebic squiggles and hairs left in the gate. Shi Chongming reached over, switched off the projector and stood looking down at me on the floor. The only sound in the office was the dull thock thock thock of the clumsy old timepiece on the mantelpiece.
‘Is it what you expected?’