Ha Jin - Nanjing Requiem

“Get a basin of water for her,” Minnie said, her eyebrows jumping.

“Some of you stay with her today and don’t leave her alone,” I said.

A few women nodded agreement. I picked up the silver flask as a piece of evidence, which we would present to the Japanese embassy.

As two women were helping the girl into her clothes, Rulian came in and said to us, “Some Japanese broke into the northwest dorm.”

“Damn them! Where’s Holly?” Minnie asked.

“She’s in the Library Building. Some soldiers turned up there too.”

The northwest dormitory was behind the Faculty House. When we got there, we saw two soldiers sitting in the dining room, gobbling chocolate chip cookies with a can of condensed milk, which they’d opened with a bayonet. The kitchen door had been knocked off its hinges and was lying on the floor. At the sight of us, the men lurched up and hurried out, one holding the box of cookies and the other the open can. They both wore ropes on their belts for tying up people or animals.

Nobody had said a word during the confrontation. But the soldiers’ actions made me wonder if they were short on rations and hungry. Otherwise, why would they steal all kinds of food from the civilians, even a baked sweet potato and a handful of peanuts? Several times on the streets we had run into soldiers carrying geese, ducks, chickens, and even piglets tied to the tips of their rifles, some of the pigs with their innards ripped out. I hoped that the Western reporters (five or six of them were stranded here and managed to send out articles about the atrocities to The New York Times, The Chicago Daily News , and the Associated Press) would take photos of those savages and of the streets dotted with the bodies of civilians, their faces already black.

AROUND THREE O’CLOCK the next afternoon, a major, lanky and with a bristly mustache, came with six men to inspect our refugee camp. Minnie took them through the buildings slowly, and I knew she hoped that some soldiers would appear so the officer could witness the unruliness of the Japanese troops. We went through the Arts Building, which housed more than eight hundred refugees, then entered the Central Building, which was in Holly’s charge and held more than a thousand. The moment we left that place and were about to cross the quadrangle, Luhai hobbled over (these days he often exaggerated his limp) and said that some soldiers were attacking women in the south dormitory. Minnie invited the officer to come with us, and he agreed. We set off while he and his men followed us, striding south; his hands were clasped behind his back.

In the entryway of the dorm building we heard some Japanese yelling and laughing upstairs. We hastened our steps and bumped into a group at the landing. At the sight of Minnie and the officer behind us, two soldiers let go of the four women they were dragging down the stairs and bolted out of the building. One woman, both hands still gripping the tusk-smooth banister, begged, “Principal Vautrin, please help us! They beat us and forced us to undress in front of kids. Two of them are still up there torturing others.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Minnie said, and hurried up to the second floor, where a male voice yelped.

Walking down the hallway, we saw a soldier standing at the door of a room like a sentry, holding his rifle with one hand, its butt resting on the floor. The man was about to stop us but caught sight of the officer and his retinue, so he thought better of it. We brushed past him, entered the room, and saw a young woman lying naked on a piece of green tarp, crying and twisting, while a soldier with a full beard was thrusting his hand between her legs and making happy noises. A bayonet stood beside her head. We rushed over and were aghast to find the man’s entire hand buried in the woman’s vagina, beneath which was a puddle of blood and urine. Minnie yelled, “Get off her, you beast! Don’t you have a mother or sister?”

Startled, the man pulled out his hand and rose to his feet, still smiling with his lips quivering. The woman, moaning in agony, closed her eyes and turned her head to the wall, a small birthmark below her right ear. Her body reminded me of a large piece of meat ready for cutting, except for the spasms that jolted her every two or three seconds.

When the major came in, Minnie shouted at him, “Look at what your man did to her!” She pointed at the woman on the floor. I was so enraged that for a moment my vision blurred.

The officer stepped over and looked at the woman’s mutilated body. He then turned to the perpetrator and slapped him across the face while yelling something. The bearded soldier stood straight, sweating all over but not daring to wipe his face with his hands, from one of which drops of bloody liquid dripped onto the floor. Then, to our bewilderment, he muttered something apologetically, sidled away to grab his rifle, which was leaning against the wall, and ambled to the door. Before he could get out, a junior officer called to him and handed him his bayonet. Meanwhile, a middle-aged woman covered the victim with a tattered blanket.

Is that all? I wondered. They let him get away like that?

“Why did you let him go?” Minnie asked the officers.

The interpreter, also an officer, told her, “Our commander scolded him. You saw, he also punished him.”

“But no more punishment?” she said. “How come you didn’t even take down his name?”

“There’ll be more disciplinary action, of course.”

“How can you identify the man?”

“We know him. Not many men wear a beard like that. He’s nicknamed Obstetrician.” The interpreter grinned at us lasciviously, displaying his buckteeth. I throttled my impulse to spit in his face, and averted my eyes to suppress my tears and revulsion.

The mutilated woman groaned again, holding her sides with both hands. Minnie told three women to accompany her to the infirmary. Then she furiously said to the major, “I’m going to file a protest with your embassy.” We all knew they had let the perpetrator go.

The officer nodded without a word, his face dark and slightly lopsided. He waved at his men, and they followed him out of the room.

That evening, twenty-five policemen were sent over by the Japanese embassy. Their leader handed Minnie a letter from Vice-Consul Tanaka, which said that Jinling must treat these men well, providing for them charcoal fires, hot tea, and refreshments throughout the night. Minnie sighed. Where on earth could we get those things? Besides, we didn’t need so many policemen. Four would be enough to keep the marauding soldiers away. Looking at these men, some of whom seemed quite rough and could easily frighten the women and children, we wondered if they were real police. Probably they were just a bunch of regular troops assigned to the embassy for guard duty. We had no option but to accept them.

By now the camp had more than eight thousand refugees, and it seemed certain that more would come.

EARLY ON THE MORNING of December 22, Miss Lou informed us that the policemen from the embassy had assaulted two girls in the Practice Hall the night before. Five of them had dragged the girls out of the building and raped them beyond an oval flowerbed encircled with serrated bricks. We were shocked and outraged, but we were caught and couldn’t see a way out. We needed the police to deter the soldiers and had to handle this matter discreetly; nevertheless, Minnie would protest to Tanaka. By now more than seventy women and girls had been raped in our camp alone, and Minnie had submitted a report on those cases to both the Japanese embassy and the Safety Zone Committee.

Around ten a.m., Minnie and Big Liu again went to the U.S. embassy to ask to be driven to the Japanese embassy, where they would present another protest. But they didn’t find Tanaka there and left word with Consul-General Katsuo Okazaki that we didn’t need so many policemen — six would be enough. Okazaki, who was also the diplomatic adviser to General Matsui, promised Minnie he’d pass both the message and the protest letter on to the vice-consul, though he was in a hurry to catch the train to Shanghai, where he’d been residing since last fall.