Then he heard female voices. What were women doing here?
Six
Shujuan looked into her bowl. Each day the soup seemed to get thinner. She was convinced it was because George was giving extra food to the Qin Huai women.
While the girls were eating their meal, the young prostitute Cardamom came into the refectory. She knew what they thought of her and made no attempt at good manners, shuffling across the old floorboards in her embroidered shoes.
‘You’ve got soup!’ she said.
The girls gave her a look designed to stop the most thick-skinned woman in her tracks. It didn’t work on Cardamom.
‘We only got given two loaves. They’re really dry,’ she complained.
No one paid any attention. George had made four loaves. The sixteen girls, the two clergymen, George and Ah Gu had made do with two of them so that the prostitutes could have the rest.
‘She’s got dry bread, and now she wants soup?’ they thought. ‘Does she think she’s part of the family?’
‘Do you really eat bread every day?’ Cardamom asked. ‘I’m just a country girl. Foreign bread disagrees with me.’ She sidled over to the soup pot which sat on the table. There was only a little left in the bottom, a few overcooked strips of cabbage and scraps of noodle. Cardamom grew bolder and picked up the ladle. The handle was at right angles to the spoon, so you had to lift the handle straight up as if drawing water from a well. Cardamom couldn’t manage it and the soup kept spilling out of the ladle and back into the pot. The girls carried on eating as if she was not there.
‘Is anyone going to help me?’ she asked with an impudent smile that made dimples in her cheeks.
‘Someone should call Deacon Adornato,’ one of the girls said.
‘He’s already been called,’ said another.
Cardamom wasn’t deterred. With her lips pursed and her eyes unblinking, she concentrated on learning how to get the soup from the pot into her bowl. ‘Big deal,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll learn the trick without your help.’
She was too short for the tall pot set on the tabletop, so she stood on her toes and drew the ladle up shakily. Even if she lifted the handle above her head, she still couldn’t get the ladle out of the pot.
‘The table’s too tall,’ she said.
‘The dwarf complains about the table,’ a schoolgirl quipped.
‘I’ve seen taller winter melons,’ said another.
‘You are a winter melon!’ Cardamom snapped back. She’d had enough. She dropped the ladle back into the pot with a hollow clatter.
‘A rotten winter melon,’ a third schoolgirl said.
‘Step up and have a cursing match with me!’ said Cardamom. ‘If you have the guts!’
No one wanted to pick a fight. That would be giving the slut more of their attention than she deserved. They carried on silently and soberly with their dinner. But when Cardamom turned to leave, someone piped up, ‘More rotten than a winter melon in July. No one but the flies would want it!’
It was Xiaoyu.
‘Stinks, doesn’t she?’ added Sophie.
Cardamom turned round. She walked over to where Sophie was sitting, picked up Sophie’s bowl and flung the dregs of her soup in her face.
Sophie leapt out of her chair, dripping with cabbage leaves and bits of noodle. She hurled herself at Cardamom while Xiaoyu pulled Cardamom’s foot. It took several of them to pin the young prostitute down. Shujuan went over to shut the door and wedged her back against it so that neither Fabio nor George could come in. Then all the girls crowded round the thrashing forms on the floor, aiding their friends by landing a kick or a pinch where they could. The Japanese were still abstract enemies, but this teenage prostitute was an enemy they could see.
Cardamom’s shrill swearing percolated through the closed door and reached as far as Fabio’s ears. He made his way to the refectory, too slowly for George’s liking.
‘They’ve been beating her up, Father. Something terrible’s going to happen!’ George exclaimed.
When they finally got the door open, they found Cardamom with her face covered in blood and a hank of her hair pulled out. She was rubbing a bald spot the size of a large coin on her head; it gleamed in the candlelight. George ran over to help her up, but she pushed him away and got to her feet unaided.
‘I’ve had beatings since I was a kid,’ she said to the girls through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve had sticks broken over my backside. Your weak little fists are neither here nor there. What kind of people do you think you are anyway, all picking on me at once?’
The girls were paper-pale and tearful, as if they were the ones who had been injured. They all piped up at once: ‘She started it! It was her fault!’
‘Are any of you hurt?’ Fabio asked, his eyes checking their faces.
They looked at him. Of course they were hurt. They were deeply wounded. All those filthy words the young whore had uttered had sullied innocent ears more used to Father Engelmann’s resounding homilies, to music played on the church organ, to the classical poetry recited in their classes. The words forced an answer to their vague wonder about what happened between a man and a woman.
Fabio asked George to escort Cardamom back to the cellar. In a few minutes he was back, to say that Zhao Yumo was asking to speak to Deacon Adornato.
‘No!’ shouted Fabio, startling himself with the brusqueness of his response. As he saw George’s surprised expression he realised how abrupt he must have sounded. He turned and headed in haste towards the rectory. You think you can seduce me with a pair of pretty eyes, do you, Yumo? he thought to himself. You think I’ll come running when you call? We’ve got to get rid of those women. I’ll petition Father Engelmann to get them into the Safety Zone one way or another.
Fabio’s footsteps suddenly slowed, as he came to the anguished realisation that he could not steel himself to do it.
When Fabio Adornato was a boy of six, his missionary parents had died of plague while away on a trip. But the woman who had been a true mother to him was his Chinese ‘granny’. (Though ‘granny’ was only a manner of speaking, as actually she was only a few years older than his parents.) It was she who had looked after him since birth, and carried him around all day on her back. It was her soft, flaccid breasts which had been his haven when he was a little boy, which would send him to sleep as soon as he nestled into them. After his parents died, his real, American granny came to China to reclaim him. She was a tall woman with a mass of curly hair, dressed from head to toe in black. He hid behind his Chinese granny and refused to come out to be introduced to her. She had come to take him back to America, she said, via the painful interpreting of a Chinese teacher in the local town. As soon as Fabio heard this awful news, he made his escape.
The rice had just been harvested and there were plenty of straw stacks to hide in. At nightfall he sneaked back to his Chinese granny’s thatched hut and pulled down some dried water chestnuts and rice cakes which she stored by hanging them under the eaves. These he took back to the straw stack to eat. The old woman had a dozen or so speckled ducks and Fabio knew exactly where they laid their eggs. He supplemented the chestnuts and rice cakes by going to the place before she went to the river to collect the eggs, stealing a couple, cracking them open and eating them raw. She complained that her things went missing and that someone was stealing them, but she knew perfectly well who it was. Why should an old widow like her not be a bit selfish? She wanted to hang on to Fabio.
His grandmother sorted out her daughter and son-in-law’s possessions, and sold off their furniture and clothing. Then she waited in vain for Fabio to come back. Finally, she could not bear village food, houses, toilets and mosquitoes any more and gave up the idea of taking her grandson home with her. She asked the clan head in the village to tell the Chinese teacher in the local town that as soon as Fabio was found he should write to her in English and she would come back and collect him. But Fabio’s grandmother never received any further news of her grandson from the village.