The Flowers of War

betraying a wolfish delight.

Fabio had never imagined that he would open the door and send these women on their last journey; send this woman, Yumo, on her last journey. Even though Yumo had been born luckless, he had assumed that there was still some shred of hope for her. But not any more. He felt a surge of melancholy. He had first been infected by such feelings as a child when his Chinese adoptive mother took him to operas. She had sown so many seeds of melancholy in his heart. Yes, he thought, seeds grew, and could turn into something quite different.

Beside the burned-out tree, a truck was parked. Two soldiers stood by the tailgate and, as the first ‘schoolgirl’ approached, they each took hold of an arm and hoisted her up the step. It was no use refusing their help. They blocked any attempt to struggle with drawn bayonets.

Father Engelmann stood at the entrance to the compound. He watched as each woman stepped up and disappeared under the tarpaulin covering. He regretted that he had not asked them their real names, the ones their parents had given them. Eventually all the women were in the truck apart from Yumo. He saw the officer reach out to help her up, and he saw Yumo instinctively jerk away, then give the officer a faint smile. It was the genuine smile of a young girl, shy and modest. She could fool anyone with that smile.

The officer mounted his horse and ordered the truck to start.

‘Please wait!’

Father Engelmann ran towards the truck.

The officer on horseback turned to him.

‘I’ll go with my students,’ the priest said.

‘Ii-e!’ the officer replied.

Fabio didn’t need to speak Japanese to understand that this meant ‘no’.

‘I’ll go and make sure they sing properly. It has been ages since they last sang…’ Father Engelmann insisted, trying to climb into the truck.

The officer shouted an order for the truck to pull out. It lurched forward. With a hand clutching the wooden rail of the truck bed and a foot on the rear wheel, the priest was left suspended, his long, black cassock entangling his limbs.

‘Father Engelmann!’ Fabio called out.

The officer yelled something.

Yumo reached out her hand and placed it on Father Engelmann’s.

‘Father, you shouldn’t…’

‘Give me a hand, my child…’ the priest cried out.

All of a sudden the truck picked up speed. Rifles sounded. Yumo screamed as Father Engelmann fell off the truck. Fabio saw her clutching her bleeding forearm as the priest thudded to the ground. He rushed to his side and called his name, but Father Engelmann could no longer hear.

Epilogue

Shujuan would never forget those last, awful hours in the compound of St Mary Magdalene. No one could speak to or look at anyone else. Fabio gave the girls a hasty dinner of potato soup and then hurried off to the Safety Zone.

The girls sat in the cellar in silence. ‘Let us fill our bellies, don’t let those prostitutes take our food away,’ was the prayer they had been muttering for days. Now they had finally got what they wanted. They had never expected, however, that their prayer would be answered in such a cruel way. As she ate her soup, Shujuan glanced surreptitiously at Sophie, who sat opposite her. Sophie’s face was covered in long scratches made by the other girl’s nails during the scrum. The marks were the only signs of life on her otherwise subdued face. No one said with regretful sighs: ‘Those women saved our lives!’ or ‘I wonder if they’ll survive…’ But Shujuan knew that all of them, like her, felt pangs of remorse.

When Fabio arrived back, after midnight, it was with a tall Western woman. The girls recognised her as Miss Vautrin. She had brought a barber with her and he shaved the girls’ heads. Two hours later, the little band of schoolgirls had been transformed into a band of schoolboys. Miss Vautrin had come in an ambulance and, just before dawn, the ambulance drove away from the church full of sickly young patients, wan and dull-eyed, each one dressed in striped hospital pyjamas which flapped so loosely on their skinny frames that it looked as if there was nothing underneath.

The ‘boy’ patients spent two days hidden in the sickroom at the Jin Ling Medical Institute. Then they were smuggled out to a place in the nearby countryside, from where they were put onto a boat downriver to Wuhu and then onto another boat to Hankou. Fabio escorted them all the way, in the guise of their doctor.

* * *

In the years that followed, China underwent many changes, but Shujuan never changed as much as she did in those few days in December 1937.

Finally reunited with her family, she learned the agony her parents had gone through when they heard the news from China. The moment her father came back from the college where he worked he would sit hunched silently over the wireless, desperate to find out what was happening. There were no telephone and cable links to Nanking. Her father had managed to contact someone in the Chinese consulate, but the answer he got was confused. The situation in Nanking was catastrophic but not a single fact could be verified. He then managed to get through to a friend in Shanghai on the telephone, to be told that some rumours had filtered through to the concessions there: the Japanese Army had carried out a massacre, and some photographs of civilians who had been gunned down had been brought out of Nanking by journalists. As Shujuan lay huddled next to her sobbing friend, imagining her parents enjoying bacon and eggs, they were in fact consumed with anguished remorse, and trying to get boat tickets back to China. They believed, as the Chinese do, that ‘if one in the family was to die, then they should all perish together’.

Shujuan kept in touch with Deacon Fabio Adornato. Like her, he had been profoundly changed by his experiences. He left the Church and began to teach world history and the history of religion. He spoke often of Father Engelmann and the inspiration the priest had been to him. Both he and Shujuan shared the faint hope that they might track down one or two of the women who had so bravely gone with the soldiers. At the very least, if they could find out what had happened to them, it would set their minds at rest.

Shujuan was in her twenties when the Japanese War Crimes Tribunal was held in Nanking in 1946. The entire population of Nanking braved the stifling August heat, and descended on the courtroom to witness the public disgrace of the people who had brutally mistreated them for eight years. Milling crowds packed the courtroom; those who could not get in stood in the surrounding streets. Shujuan was outside, one of the crowd listening through the loudspeakers which were strung from telegraph poles. Suddenly she heard a voice she recognised. A woman was in the witness box testifying to the mass rapes planned and carried out by the Japanese military top brass. Although she was using a different name, Shujuan was sure it was Yumo.

It took Shujuan an hour to push her way through the crowd and get into the courtroom. Once inside, she recognised the woman immediately, even though her back was turned. From behind, she looked as beautiful as ever, in spite of all she had endured. Shujuan squeezed her way through from the edge of the throng, getting soaked in other people’s sweat as she did so, and came up behind the woman who had possessed the most famously elegant shoulders in 1930s Nanking. She reached out and tapped one of those shoulders. But the face which turned to hers was not as Shujuan remembered it. Something looked wrong. It was as if, Shujuan felt afterwards, its natural beauty had been destroyed and then clumsily reconstructed by a plastic surgeon.

‘Zhao Yumo!’ exclaimed Shujuan in low tones. But the woman peered at her in apparent confusion. ‘I’m Meng Shujuan!’ Shujuan went on.

The woman shook her head. ‘You’ve got the wrong person.’ Yet the voice was Zhao Yumo’s, the same slightly off-key voice which had so captivated the Nanking playboys of the 1930s when she sang.

Shujuan did not give up. She pushed her way to her side and said, ‘I was one of the group of schoolgirls you and the other sisters saved!’