I wiped my face with my sleeve. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She lived. It’s what the book said. The babies were living when they came out.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Shi Chongming, in a hushed voice. ‘Yes, she was alive.’
‘For years…’ I lifted my arm to wipe my eyes ‘… for years I thought I’d – I’d imagined that part. Everyone said I was insane, that I’d made it up, that no baby could live through – through that.’ I dug in my pocket for a tissue, balled it up and dabbed at my eyes. ‘I know now I didn’t imagine it. It was all I wanted to know.’
I heard him sit down at the desk. When I looked up he was staring at the window. Outside the snowflakes seemed suddenly bright, as if lit from below. I remember thinking that they looked like tiny angels falling to earth.
‘I’ll never be sure how long she survived,’ he said. ‘I pray it wasn’t long.’ He rubbed his forehead and shrugged, looking blankly around the office as if searching for something safe to rest his eyes on. ‘I am told that Fuyuki became well after this. He killed my daughter and I am told that, shortly afterwards, his symptoms disappeared. It was a placebo effect, quite coincidental. The malaria would have left him eventually, and over the years the attacks would have lessened whether or not he had my…’
His eyes stopped roving and met mine, and we looked at each other for a long time. There and then, as I was, prone on the floor of Shi Chongming’s office, something terrible and inescapable stood up in me: the knowledge that there wasn’t going to be a quiet escape. Alive or dead, our children would hold us. Just like Shi Chongming I was going to be eternally connected to my dead baby girl. Shi Chongming was in his seventies, I was in my twenties. She would be with me for ever.
I got to my feet and picked up the holdall. I put it on the desk in front of him and stood with my hands resting on it, my head lowered. ‘My little girl died too,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s why I’m here. Did you know?’
Slowly Shi Chongming took his eyes off the holdall and raised them to me. ‘I have never known why you came to me.’
‘Because I did it, you see. It was me.’ I pushed at the tears with the heel of my hand. ‘I killed her myself – my little girl – with a knife.’
Shi Chongming didn’t speak. An awful puzzlement crept into his eyes.
I nodded. ‘I know. It’s terrible, and I’ve got no excuse for – for crying about it. I know that. But I didn’t mean to – to kill her. I thought she would live. I’d read about the Nanking babies, in the orange book, and I – I don’t know why, but I thought maybe my baby would live, too, and so I-’ I sank into the chair, staring down at my shaky hands. ‘I thought she’d be okay and they’d take her away and hide her somewhere, somewhere my… my parents couldn’t find her.’
Shi Chongming shuffled round the table and put his hands on my back. After a long time he sighed and said, ‘Do you know something? I consider myself a man who knows sadness very well. But I – I have no words for this. No words.’
‘Don’t worry. You were kind, you were so kind because you kept telling me ignorance wasn’t the same as evil, but I know.’ I wiped my eyes and tried to smile up at him. ‘I know. You can’t ever really forgive someone like me.’
63
How can you measure the power that the mind exerts over the body? Fuyuki would never have believed that the tiny mummified corpse of Shi Chongming’s baby didn’t hold the secret of immortality. He would never have believed that what he had carefully saved and protected over the years, slowly nibbling away at, was only a placebo, and that what had really kept him alive was his own powerful belief. Those who surrounded him believed it too. When he died in his sleep, only two weeks after the theft of Shi Chongming’s baby, they believed wholeheartedly that it was because he’d lost his secret elixir. But there were others, the sceptics, who wondered secretly whether Fuyuki’s death was brought on by the strain of the sudden interest paid him by a working group based within the USA Department of Justice.
It was a small, dedicated team specializing in the investigation of war criminals, and the team members were delighted to hear from one Professor Shi Chongming formerly of Jiangsu and Todai universities. Now that he had his daughter’s remains safe, Shi Chongming had opened up like a shell in warm water. For fifty-three years he’d been working towards it, trying to get permission to travel to Japan, struggling with the bureaucracy of the Land Defence Agency, but now that he had her everything came out: his notes; the soldier’s ID tags; a collection of unit logs from 1937; photographs of Lieutenant Fuyuki. Everything was packaged up and couriered to Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. A little later a 16mm film followed across the Pacific, a grainy black-and-white film from which the team were able to get a positive identification of Fuyuki.
Some whispered that something was missing from the film, and pointed to some very modern-looking edit points. They said sections must have been removed from it recently. It had been my idea to take out the few frames that showed Shi Chongming giving up his baby. I’d done the splicing myself in a hotel room in Nanking, crudely, with scissors and Scotchtape. I had made a decision for him, overruled him. I had decided that he wasn’t going to martyr himself. It was as simple as that.
I didn’t copy the film before I packed it in bubble-wrap, carefully addressing the parcel with black marker pen. Dr Michael Burana, IWG, Department of Justice. I could have sent it to the doctors in England, I suppose, maybe a copy to the nurse who used to crouch next to my bed in the dark. Maybe a copy, with a dried flower pressed inside, to the jigging girl. But I didn’t need to – because something had happened. I was older now, I knew lots and lots of things. I knew so much that I was heavy with it. I knew instinctively what was born of ignorance and what of madness. I no longer needed to prove anything to anyone. Not even myself.
‘But now it is over,’ Shi Chongming said. ‘And, really, I see my wife was right to say that time circles constantly, because here we are. We have come all the way back to the beginning.’
It was a blue and white December morning, the sun reflecting blindingly from the snow, and we stood among the trees on Purple Mountain above Nanking. At our feet was a fresh, shallow hole and in his arms Shi Chongming held a small bundle wrapped in linen. It hadn’t taken him long to find it, the place where he had given up his daughter. Some things on the mountainside had changed in those fifty-three years: now, little trams flashed red through the trees, taking tourists up to the mausoleum; the city below us was a grown-up twentieth-century city, extraordinary with its hazy skyscrapers and electronic signs. But other things were so unchanged that Shi Chongming became silent when he looked at them: the sun glinting on the bronze azimuth, the black pines drooping under the weight of snow, the great stone tortoise still standing in the shadows, staring impassively at the trees that grew and seeded on the slopes, died and resprouted, died and resprouted.
We had shrouded the baby’s remains in white, and across the bundle I’d tied a little sprig of yellow winter jasmine. In a shop on the Flower Rain Terrace, I’d bought a white qipao so I could dress traditionally for the burial. It was the first time I’d worn white in my life and I thought I looked nice in it. Shi Chongming was wearing a suit with a black armband. He said that no Chinese parent should come to their child’s funeral. He said, as he stepped into the hole, that he shouldn’t be here and he certainly shouldn’t be standing in the grave, placing this small bundle in the ground. He should be following etiquette, standing to the left of the grave, averting his eyes. ‘But,’ he said, under his breath, as he scraped dirt down on the tiny shroud, ‘what is as it should be any more?’