Geling Yan - The Flowers of War

Hongling was furious. ‘That’s right!’ she yelled back. ‘I’ve got boils all over me, and the tiles were covered in the pus. Anyone who touches my tiles will catch my boils!’

The girls made hawking sounds and two of them spat through a window, just missing their target.

At that moment Zhao Yumo appeared, having discovered Hongling’s absence.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted. ‘Give you an inch and you take a mile. Get back to the cellar!’ Her shouts seemed to cost her some effort, as if disciplinary language like this did not come naturally to her.

Yumo frogmarched Hongling off towards the kitchen. As they walked past George, who was standing watching on the sidelines, Hongling pointed at Yumo and complained, ‘we’re in her clutches!’ as if George could offer her protection.

Ignoring Fabio’s injunctions to go to bed immediately, the girls shouted belligerently at the retreating figures of the prostitutes: ‘Come back! We’ll give you the tiles!’

Hongling ran back. She craned her neck up at the attic windows, crammed with identical childish faces and reached out cupped hands. ‘Give me them!’

Yumo could tell the girls were baiting Hongling and shouted at her: ‘Have some pride, can’t you!’ But it was too late. Some bone tiles were hurled through the windows so hard they bounced on the ground. One of them hit Hongling on the cheek.

‘Who did that?’ Fabio yelled up at them. ‘Xiaoyu! You were one of them!’

Hongling’s face was red with anger. She wanted to climb the ladder to the attic and take her revenge.

‘Forget it,’ Yumo said. ‘Let it go.’

‘Why should I let it go?’ Hongling protested.

Her accent—she was from a poor province north-west of Nanking—was very pronounced.

‘Because these people have allowed us to stay in this rathole. Because they’re prepared to put up with us. Because we’ve got no face to lose. Because when we’re alive, we’re less than human, and when we die, we’re less than demons. Because we can be beaten and humiliated by anyone at will,’ said Yumo.

At night, the light from the fires was brighter than ever and the girls could not sleep. Xiaoyu had the bed next to Shujuan. Xiaoyu’s father was one of the wealthiest men in the south, with businesses extending from Amoy to Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. When a boycott of Japanese goods was introduced in Nanking, her father had changed the labels on all his Japanese goods and sold them as if they were manufactured in China. He did not lose a cent on the deal. He traded with Portuguese wine merchants and bought gallons of red and white wine at a bargain price or in exchange for raw silk. The red wine used by the church at Mass was also all supplied by him.

The relationship between Shujuan and Xiaoyu was fragile. Xiaoyu was pretty, and seemed not to understand that pretty girls could easily wound those who most admired them and longed to be their friends. Shujuan was just such a girl. The reason why Shujuan was easily hurt by Xiaoyu was that she was secretly unwilling to submit to her friend. Shujuan got top marks, and she was pretty too, but with Xiaoyu around, Shujuan could never shine. Between a pair like Xiaoyu and Shujuan, there was always an element of cruelty. And the one who was cruel and the one who was the victim of cruelty frequently swapped places.

Xiaoyu reached over to Shujuan to see if she was asleep. Shujuan felt it was beneath her dignity to respond straight away because yesterday Xiaoyu had been best friends with Sophie. Her lack of response seemed to make Xiaoyu more eager. She pressed harder with her arm and whispered in Shujuan’s ear: ‘Are you awake?’

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Shujuan, pretending she had just woken up.

Xiaoyu leaned closer. ‘Which do you think is the prettiest?’ she said.

Shujuan was startled. She knew Xiaoyu was referring to the prostitutes, but she had not thought about any of them in this way. Still, she didn’t want to disappoint Xiaoyu. Making up with her friend after a tiff was the sweetest feeling. ‘Who do you think?’ she said.

‘Let’s go and have another look,’ said Xiaoyu.

The fact was that the prostitutes exerted a strange fascination over all the girls. Just thinking about the business they did with that secret place between their legs gave them a little spasm in their own bodies, which they concealed by blushing and exclaiming: ‘Ai-ya!’ There was nothing more seductive than sin and they took a vicarious delight in the fact that these women did bad things which they hardly dared contemplate.

Shujuan and Xiaoyu crept downstairs. The fires cast a lurid light over the church compound. An old American hickory tree with a magnificent canopy reared skyward as if somehow its bare branches were taking root in the golden night sky. An odd smell of burning reached their nostrils.

The two girls stood in the courtyard, forgetting why they had come down. It might just have been to check that Father Engelmann’s red-brick rectory was still there. Or to see that the candle was still lit in the window of Fabio’s bedroom next to the library. At that moment, however, the sound of music caught their attention. Someone was playing a tune on the pipa . The plucked strings made a beautiful sound.

They walked around behind the kitchen and came to the ventilation shafts that let air into the cellar. There were three of them, each one covered with a rusty iron grille. They made excellent spyholes.

It was Cardamom who was playing the pipa . She was an exquisitely pretty girl with an almond-shaped face. If you looked only at her eyes, she seemed to wear a constant smile. But her mouth had an aggrieved expression, as if she was constantly being short-changed. Nevertheless she was a beauty and could have bewitched anyone if she had not been a lowly prostitute. Looking down the spyhole, it did not take the two girls long to decide she was the prettiest of the women.

The cellar was not a cellar any more. It had been transformed into an underground brothel. The women had moved some books from the workshop down to the cellar, and had used them to form platforms on which to sleep. Those who had brought bedrolls had spread them over the cots: silk quilts in impossible pinks and greens, ready for a normal business day by the Qin Huai River. There were mirrors of various shapes standing on book stacks along the walls. The prostitute called Jade was plucking her eyebrows in front of a little heart-shaped mirror. The women’s furs lay strewn around, and the hooks on which sausages and hams had once hung had been wrapped in the silver paper from cigarette packets and festooned with a garish assortment of scarves, wraps and brassieres.

Four women were standing round a wine barrel on which they had placed a large kitchen chopping board, and the girls could hear a pattering sound as they played mah-jong. The temporary loss of five tiles did not seem to have diminished their enthusiasm for the game. Each of the women had a bowl in front of her filled with red wine, presumably the wine used for Mass that was supplied by Xiaoyu’s father.

‘Nani! Let me play a round!’ Cardamom said.

Nani pulled down the lower lid of her right eye with one lacquered fingernail. The girls standing above understood the gesture. ‘In your dreams,’ it meant. ‘You can just watch.’

‘Ai-ya! I’m so bored!’ said Cardamom. She picked up Nani’s bowl and took a swig of wine.

‘Then go and ask the foreign monks for a couple of Bibles and read aloud to us,’ Yumo teased her with a smile.