The Flowers of War

hands on her. All he could do was smile foolishly. Even Wang Pusheng, just a slip of a boy, was enthralled by Yumo’s dancing. Only Cardamom was still absorbed in her poker game.

‘Your go!’ Cardamom turned to look at the boy. His small face swathed in multicoloured bandages, he was staring goggle-eyed at Yumo’s torso and belly, and she gave him a slap.

The evening the gravedigger brought Sergeant Major Li and Wang Pusheng to the church, Cardamom had given up her bed to Wang Pusheng. She first cleaned and dressed the wound in his abdomen and found the gaping hole, an inch and a half wide, in the paper-thin skin. It pouted like a pair of lips drooling red saliva and something grey and soft poked out of it. Sergeant Major Li told the women that when he poked back the intestines, he had tried to get it all back in, but a bit got left on the outside. However, there was nothing to be done until Fabio Adornato or Father Engelmann could get a doctor from the Safety Zone to come. Cardamom promptly became Wang Pusheng’s nurse, doing everything for him, from giving him food and water to washing him.

Cardamom’s slap brought Wang Pusheng to his senses, and he smiled at her. Cardamom was smitten. They were about the same age and both separated from their families. She knew nothing about hers, not even her own surname. She had been kidnapped by an itinerant busker from north of the Huai River and sold into the brothel.

Cardamom was then an exquisitely pretty but lazy, peevish and unambitious seven-year-old who could not even be bothered with learning to do her hair properly. She complained she had been cheated if she lost at cards, and insisted on the winnings if she won. A year passed, and her clients were mainly foot-runners, cooks and common soldiers. After five years of beatings, she managed to learn how to play the pipa but she still dressed in the other girls’ hand-me-downs, all patched and ill-fitting. The brothel madam used to say to her: ‘Cardamom, all you can do is eat!’ Cardamom took the comment in good part, and agreed: ‘Yes, that’s right!’ The only thing she had going for her was that if a man took a liking to her, she would put heart and soul into attending on him.

With someone she was keen on, she would exclaim: ‘You’re a fellow countryman!’ so the world was full of Cardamom’s fellow countrymen. If she wanted to cadge a gift from a client or the other women, she would say: ‘Ai-ya! I’d completely forgotten, today’s my birthday!’

Now she asked Wang Pusheng: ‘Why d’you keep watching her?’

‘I don’t,’ said the boy.

‘When you’re better, I’ll take you to a really big dance hall,’ said Cardamom.

‘But I might die tomorrow,’ objected Wang Pusheng.

Cardamom clapped her hand over his mouth, spat, and scuffed the spit into the floor with her foot. ‘Less of that nonsense! If you die then I’m going with you!’

She was overheard by Hongling, who shouted over: ‘Amazing! Listen to those two lovebirds!’

Wang Pusheng flushed scarlet and his mouth opened so wide the corners disappeared into the enveloping bandages.

‘Leave him alone,’ said Cardamom. ‘He’s only a boy!’

The women laughed. They thought it very funny when Cardamom played ‘big sister’.

‘And how do you know he’s a boy, Cardamom?’ teased Sergeant Major Li.

Only Yumo, still carried away with her dancing, paid no attention; she was so wildly flushed that her cheeks looked as though they were painted. Although, to the others, it seemed that she thought only of the movements of her body, her mind was far away. She was remembering a man she met in a dance hall. A man who had filled her with hopes, which he then shattered.

His name was Zhang Shitiao. His family had been merchants for many generations, but when he was born, his grandfather decided to make this eldest grandson a scholar. The boy first studied abroad and then returned to become section head at the Ministry of Education in Nanking. This was just the sort of step up in the world the family wanted him to make and was the reason why they had invested so much money in his education. He made a good marriage and lived an upright life. And so it would have continued if he had not spent an evening visiting the Sina Dance Hall with his former classmates. It was his chance meeting with Zhao Yumo that night which led him into the dissolute life he began to lead. If it had been a woman like Hongling or Cardamom, he would not even have exchanged a word with her. But then, women like Hongling and Cardamom could not go to that kind of a dance hall. The Sina Dance Hall on Central Road was a small and exclusive establishment. The very best lady singers and dancers were performing in the show, Kabbalah, that night and tickets were one silver dollar each. Sometimes the most popular dancers would only agree to dance if they were paid three or four dollars. It was the kind of place frequented by young men and women from rich families, but only behind their parents’ backs.

That evening was Yumo’s lucky break. She was looking extremely elegant, wearing a string of pearls which were obviously genuine, and holding a copy of the Modern Magazine. From her get-up she looked like an unmarried girl from a rich family, although with a slightly aloof air which gave the impression of unusual maturity. As Shitiao’s party entered the dance hall, they spotted the young woman sitting in one of the armchairs which lined the sides. She was just the sort of girl they were looking for. One of Shitiao’s friends thought she might be waiting for a girlfriend, another that she had danced until her shoes hurt her and was giving her feet a rest. Shitiao watched as two of his friends went up and asked her to dance and were rebuffed with a tactful smile. Then they picked on him and told him to try his luck.

Shitiao asked her if she would do him the honour of taking a cup of coffee with him. She looked at him shyly but stood up and waited as he helped her on with her coat, just like any young lady used to Western manners. Behind them, Shitiao could hear his friends wolf-whistling above the music, presumably because they were jealous.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked politely.

‘Zhao Yumo. And yours, sir?’

What a self-possessed young woman, he thought as he answered her question. They drank their coffee, and he asked what she was studying. She showed him what she had been reading. The Modern Magazine had articles on just about anything current: politics, economics, lifestyle and health, and the scandalous things which film stars were getting up to. There was more to her than dignified elegance, Shitiao felt. From time to time, she would shoot radiant glances in his direction until he was covered with a sheen of sweat, his throat tightening and his heart swelling in his chest. This was a woman whose femininity (and she was supremely feminine) was just waiting to be released. Traditionally, a man set up a family with a decent woman like his mother, yet that deprived him of so much, emotionally and physically. Any man with a bit of experience of life understood that no matter how womanly and coquettish a girl, marriage would instantly kill her desire for pleasure. A girl who combined the attractions of a prostitute with a respectable family background was an impossibility. But the other way round, outwardly a lady but a whore in your bed, that was possible. Someone like Zhao Yumo, for example.

Yumo was a highly ambitious and resourceful woman. She could adapt her language and behaviour to people from all walks of life. She had always thought she had been born into the wrong family—she should have been the petted daughter of wealthy parents. She was worth just as much as any of them. She had been well educated in the classics, played the pipa and could paint and do calligraphy. Her parents were people of status and education but hopeless with money and, at the age of ten, she had been given by her father to an uncle to pay off a gambling debt. After the man died, his widow sold her to a brothel on the Qin Huai River. By the age of fourteen, she knew all the tricks of the trade. When she played drinking games, she could quote lines from classical poetry and even knew all about the allusions in the poems. She was twenty-four when Shitiao met her, and she had made up her mind that she would not tell him she was a prostitute; she would wait until he was so smitten by her that he was ready to abandon his family for her. At her age, she had to start looking for a different kind of life. She could not go on drinking with clients for ever.

She began to tell Shitiao about her life one day in a hotel bedroom. By now, Shitiao was feeling that it was wonderful to be a man and that, in fact, he had wasted the previous thirty years of his life. His ideal woman lay beside him. He did not yet know that Yumo really was a dyed-in-the-wool, grade-one professional prostitute.

She told him half-truths about herself: how she was a virgin until the age of nineteen and had only kept the men company as they drank, and danced for them. One day she met a man and, when he said he wanted to marry her, gave herself to him. When this heartless man broke off their engagement and left her after a couple of years, she was broken-hearted. She fell so gravely ill she almost died. She nestled in Shitiao’s arms, weeping as she told