Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking aka Tokyo

The screams came to us and, next to me, Liu dropped his face into his hands, beginning to shudder. I didn’t put out a hand to him, I was so horribly riveted by that wavering finger. The human spirit is so strong, I thought distantly, maybe it can climb all the way to the sky without anything to hold on to. Maybe it can climb on air. But after a few minutes, when the column seemed impossibly high – maybe twenty feet – something in its structure collapsed, and it dissolved, tumbling outwards, crushing everyone beneath it. Within seconds the tower was re-forming in a different part of the crowd, the little liquid beginnings of a finger pointing inquisitively out of a lake, then rising and rising until, before long, it was pointing rigidly at the sky, screaming out with accusation, ‘Will you allow this to happen?’

Just then a flurry of activity erupted close to the house where we were sheltering – someone had broken loose from the crowd and was racing towards us, pursued by another figure. I grabbed Liu’s arm. ‘Look.’

He dropped his hands and raised fearful eyes to the gap. As the men drew near we saw a young Japanese soldier, bareheaded, his face grim and determined, chased by three older men, senior officers, I guessed, from their uniforms. Swords bounced at their sides, hampering their progress, but they were strong and tall and they closed quickly on the fleeing man, one lunging forward and catching his sleeve, sending him whirling round, his free arm flying out.

Liu and I pressed ourselves even lower into the crumbling roof. The men were only a few yards away. We could have leaned over and spat on them.

The fugitive stumbled on for a few steps, moving in a circle, windmilling his arm, only just managing to regain his balance. He came to a halt, his hands on his knees, breathing hard. The officer released him and took a step back. ‘Stand up,’ he barked. ‘Stand up, you pig.’

Reluctantly the man straightened. He pulled back his shoulders and faced the men, his chest rising and falling. His uniform was torn and pulled out of shape, and I was so close that I could see white ringworm circles on his cropped scalp.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ one of the officers demanded. ‘You broke ranks.’

The soldier started to say something, but he was trembling so hard that he couldn’t speak. He turned mutely and looked back at the scene from hell, at the human column, men being dropped like crows from the sky. When he turned back to the officers he wore an expression of such pain that I felt a moment of pity for him. There were tears on his cheeks and this seemed to infuriate the officers. They gathered round him, their faces rigid. One was moving his jaw, as if grinding his teeth. Without a word he unbuckled his sword. The young soldier took a step back.

‘Change your mind,’ ordered the officer, advancing on him. ‘Go back.’

The soldier took another step backwards.

‘Change your mind and go back.’

‘ What are they saying? ’ hissed Liu at my side.

‘ He doesn’t want to shoot the prisoners.’

‘Go back now!’

The soldier shook his head. This angered the officer even more. He grabbed the soldier by both ears and swung him round, twisting him bodily, dropping him on to the ground. ‘Change your mind.’ He pressed the sole of his hobnailed marching boot against the soft side of the soldier’s face and put some weight behind it. The other officers gathered even closer. ‘Pig.’ He put more pressure on the boot and the skin on the junior’s face pulled forward until a big soft part of his cheek was hanging across his mouth and he couldn’t stop his own saliva spilling out. His flesh would tear soon, I thought. ‘One more chance – CHANGE YOUR MIND.’

‘No,’ he stammered. ‘No.’

The officer took a step back, raised the sword above his head. The soldier half raised his hand and tried to say something, but the officer had his momentum now and stepped forward. The sword slammed down, the shadow whipping across the ground, the blade glinting and whistling in the morning sun. It made contact and the soldier jolted once, then rolled forward, his hands over his face, his eyes closed.

‘No. Heavens, no,’ Liu whispered, covering his eyes. ‘Tell me, what do you see? He’s dead?’

‘No.’

The soldier was rolling and squirming on the ground. The officer had only slapped him with the side of the blade, but it had almost destroyed him. As he tried to get to his feet he lost his footing, his legs treadmilling in the snow. He collapsed to his knees and one of the other officers took the opportunity to swipe at him with his gloved fist, sending him backwards, blood spurting from his mouth. I clenched my teeth. I would have liked to leap over the wall and grab that officer.

At last the soldier made a concerted effort and got himself upright. He was in a pitiful state, twitching and staggering, blood covering his chin. He muttered something under his breath, held up a hand to the captain, and stumbled back in the direction of the massacre. He stopped to pick up his rifle, lifted it to his shoulder and continued on in zigzags as if he were drunk, aiming haphazardly into the crowd, letting loose a volley of shots. One or two of the junior soldiers at the edge of the crowd looked at him, but on seeing the three officers standing silent and stony-faced, they hurriedly turned their eyes back to the panicking prisoners.

The officers watched this retreat, absolutely motionless, only their shadows diminishing as the sun crested the top of the house. None of them moved a muscle, not one spoke or even looked at his colleagues. It was only when the soldier showed no signs of running again that they moved. One swiped a hand across his brow, one wiped his sword and returned it to the sheath, and the third spat in the snow, pulling violently at his mouth as if he couldn’t bear the taste a moment longer. Then, one after another, they straightened their caps, and walked back to the massacre, large spaces between them, their arms loose and drooping, their swords and shadows dragging wearily along the ground next to them.

‘You seem very different.’ Shi Chongming was studying me from where he sat on the steamer chair. His coat was wrapped tightly round him, his white hair had been brushed and maybe oiled so that it lay long and straight over his ears, and the pink skin was showing through, like the skin of an albino rat. ‘You’re shivering.’

I looked down at my hands. He was right. They were shaking. That was from a lack of food. Yesterday morning, as the sun was coming up, Jason and I had made breakfast from the convenience-store snacks. And that was the last thing I could remember eating in almost thirty hours.

‘I think you’ve changed.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had allowed a day and a half to go by, and it was only when he’d called me that I mentioned I’d been at Fuyuki’s. Shi Chongming had wanted to come over straight away – he was ‘astonished’, ‘disappointed’ that I hadn’t called earlier. I couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t describe what he couldn’t see – that in just one day something hard and sweet and old had spread out under my ribs, like a kiss, and that somehow things that had once seemed urgent didn’t sting any more. ‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I suppose I have.’

He waited as if he expected me to say something else. Then, when he saw I wasn’t going to, he sighed. He opened his hands and looked round the garden. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ he said. ‘ Niwa, they call the garden, the pure place. Not like your corruptible Edens in the West. To the Japanese a garden is the place where harmony reigns. A perfect beauty.’

I looked at the garden. It had changed since I was last out here. The subtle varnish of autumn was on it: the maple was a deep butterscotch colour and the ginkgo had dropped some of its leaves. The tangled undergrowth was bare, like a collection of dried bird bones. But I could see what he meant. There was something beautiful about it. Maybe, I thought, you have to work to experience beauty. ‘I suppose it is rather.’