Yumo was a highly ambitious and resourceful woman. She could adapt her language and behaviour to people from all walks of life. She had always thought she had been born into the wrong family—she should have been the petted daughter of wealthy parents. She was worth just as much as any of them. She had been well educated in the classics, played the pipa and could paint and do calligraphy. Her parents were people of status and education but hopeless with money and, at the age of ten, she had been given by her father to an uncle to pay off a gambling debt. After the man died, his widow sold her to a brothel on the Qin Huai River. By the age of fourteen, she knew all the tricks of the trade. When she played drinking games, she could quote lines from classical poetry and even knew all about the allusions in the poems. She was twenty-four when Shitiao met her, and she had made up her mind that she would not tell him she was a prostitute; she would wait until he was so smitten by her that he was ready to abandon his family for her. At her age, she had to start looking for a different kind of life. She could not go on drinking with clients for ever.
She began to tell Shitiao about her life one day in a hotel bedroom. By now, Shitiao was feeling that it was wonderful to be a man and that, in fact, he had wasted the previous thirty years of his life. His ideal woman lay beside him. He did not yet know that Yumo really was a dyed-in-the-wool, grade-one professional prostitute.
She told him half-truths about herself: how she was a virgin until the age of nineteen and had only kept the men company as they drank, and danced for them. One day she met a man and, when he said he wanted to marry her, gave herself to him. When this heartless man broke off their engagement and left her after a couple of years, she was broken-hearted. She fell so gravely ill she almost died. She nestled in Shitiao’s arms, weeping as she told him the sad tale. Even the most hard-bitten man would not have doubted her words, let alone a young man like Zhang Shitiao, ready to right all wrongs and with a heart as soft as glutinous rice.
Not only was he not disgusted by Yumo’s outpourings, he swore on his life that he would not be the second man in her life to let her down.
It was Shitiao’s wife who revealed the truth about Yumo to her husband. She found a hotel manager’s name card in his suit pocket and racked her brains as to why her husband should have been staying in a hotel. One thing they did not lack at home was rooms. He could only have gone to the hotel for some nefarious reason. She called the number on the card and asked the manager: ‘Is Mr Zhang Shitiao there?’ The manager addressed her as Miss Zhao. Shitiao’s wife was a resourceful woman and pretended to be ‘Miss Zhao’. ‘Mr Zhang said to tell you,’ the manager went on, ‘that he’ll be there today at four o’clock, an hour late, and please will you wait for him.’
It only took Mr Zhang’s wife half a day to dig up the dirt on Zhao Yumo. Then she presented her husband with the facts. He categorically denied that Yumo was a prostitute until she mobilised all his old school friends and he was forced to face the fact that there was only one Zhao Yumo in Nanking and that was the famed prostitute of the Qin Huai brothel. However, it was too late. By then, Yumo’s emotional and sexual arts had ensnared him. He insisted that she was the most beautiful and most unfortunate woman in the world. According to him, his friends and family only despised her because they were all of the intellectual class!
In the event, though, it did not prove too difficult to turn Shitiao from his wicked ways. His wife only had to put on a tragic face, accept the painful truth that she had been wronged, and throw herself into caring for his family. Shitiao had spent six years in Europe. He prided himself on his humanist spirit. He never wanted to hurt anyone, let alone someone who was weak, especially when they had already been wronged. His wife not only endured her sufferings silently; she was also suffering from both pretended and real sicknesses. She looked miserable and her breathing grew weak, but she forbore to lay a single word of blame at his door. She never even asked him where he went every evening. Shitiao’s sympathies gradually shifted over to his wife’s side. He bickered with Yumo when they met and began to find her little ways and moods less appealing. When all government departments made the wartime move from Nanking to Chongqing, he at first said he would buy Yumo’s freedom from the brothel and would get her boat ticket so that she could quietly follow the family to Chongqing. But the day before they were due to leave, he sent her a letter saying he had been wounded in an air raid and would have to postpone the transfer to Chongqing. For the moment, he would be going with his wife to Huizhou, her home city, to convalesce in peaceful country surroundings. With the letter he enclosed fifty silver dollars and a gold bar, a gift which was less generous than that of her former lover, who had left her with a diamond ring. To Zhang, a senior civil servant in the Ministry for Education, who believed that everyone was born equal, Yumo was worth only one gold bar and fifty silver dollars.
‘Shameless bitches!’
Yumo’s reverie was broken by a shout that came down the ventilation shaft.
‘Who’s up there?’ asked Yumo.
‘Stinking bitches!’ came the same voice.
The women looked at each other. It was one of the schoolgirls.
‘You wait until the Japs make you into a bitch!’ Hongling shouted back. ‘You think you’re better than us, but when they pull your trousers down, you’re just the same!’
Nani joined in.
‘Don’t you know the Japs love making whores out of nice young girls?’
‘The Japs have searched the Safety Zone and taken dozens of young girls away!’ Hongling gloated cheerfully.
Up above the cellar, as she sat with her shovelful of embers waiting to strike, Shujuan shuddered. Her shoulders were covered with snow but it was the women’s words that caused her to shake. Was it true what that bitch Nani said? It couldn’t be. She was just trying to frighten her.
Shujuan was measuring the length of the shovel, estimating how to aim it to get the most devastating results with the live embers, when she heard a voice behind her.
‘What are you doing?’
Ash and shovel dropped to the ground, and Shujuan turned to find Deacon Adornato looming over her. He looked at the ash with its glowing sparks and repeated his question. ‘What are you doing?’
Shujuan said nothing, just jumped up and pressed herself against the wall. She could not have stood more rigid if she had been put in the corner by her teacher. Fabio was a tall man and could not see the ‘peep show’ going on at the bottom of the shaft.
The cellar grew rowdier; there was clapping and the tempo of the dance quickened.
Telling Shujuan to go back to bed, Fabio went towards the kitchen door. Shujuan leaned over the shaft to watch what would happen.
Yumo had thrown off her high-society airs and graces and was dancing a different dance now, the jitterbug. This was even more seductive. As she undulated, she bumped Major Dai with her shoulder or her crotch. The major was transfixed, leering like an old soldier. Yumo dropped all pretence at coyness and became completely brazen. She knew full well that the schoolgirl was still watching her, and she was aiming to show her that she was not just a ‘bitch’ but acknowledged as ‘top bitch’.
Shujuan saw the women pause for a moment and look up. She knew they must have heard Fabio shout down: ‘Open the trapdoor!’
After a fractional hesitation, Yumo resumed her dance.