The Flowers of War

‘Shut up or I’ll throttle you!’

‘And I’ll bite you!’

The voices were replaced by some sort of snuffling noises and Shujuan beat a hasty retreat. These sluts couldn’t sell their rotten bodies for money here, so they were selling them for potatoes instead. When she had moved back half a dozen paces, she found herself between two of the ventilation shafts. Down in the cellar, she could hear someone crying. She sat cross-legged and looked down one of them.

It was not just one woman—Nani and two others were weeping, the stupid way people did when they had been drinking. Yumo was drunk too. A bowl of wine in one hand, she was trying to console the three other women. They were clearly wreaking havoc on the church’s wine stores.

‘I saw those Japanese soldiers!’ Nani was wailing. ‘They were ferocious! They’d fuck you to death!’

‘You can’t have seen them, only their feet!’ Yumo teased her.

‘I did!’

‘All right, all right, you saw them…’

‘I want to get out, I want to go. I don’t want to stay in this fucking hole waiting for them to come and fuck me!’ Nani was getting maudlin.

Sergeant Major Li’s voice came from a corner Shujuan could not see. ‘This dressing’s fucking useless!’

‘Show it to me.’ Major Dai’s voice sounded weak and weary.

She shifted to the other shaft and, when she looked down it, saw Cardamom kneeling beside the boy soldier, Wang Pusheng. He was bare-chested, with a woman’s padded jacket around his shoulders. His face looked different, his features ominously swollen out of all recognition.

‘What’s he saying?’ Sergeant Major Li asked Cardamom.

‘He says it hurts.’

‘It stinks. The dressing needs to be changed. It’ll be painful but he’ll just have to put up with it!’ said Li.

Cardamom stood up, snatched the bowl from Li and took a sip of wine. Then she knelt down again and squirted the mouthful into the boy’s mouth.

‘Drink some wine and it won’t hurt,’ she said. Then, little by little, sipping and squirting the liquid into his mouth, she made him drink the rest of the bowlful. There was silence in the room, as if everyone was suffering along with Wang Pusheng. From Shujuan’s vantage point, she could see the boy struggling feebly, either because he did not like the unaccustomed taste of the wine or because he was trying to evade Cardamom’s lips. He may have been at death’s door, but he could still feel embarrassment.

Caradamom dressed his wound, and then fetched her pipa. It only had one string left, the thickest one which gave a deep bass note. Cardamom plucked it and hummed a tune. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked Wang Pusheng.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’ll play for you every day.’

‘Thank you…’

‘Don’t thank me, marry me,’ said Cardamom.

This time no one mocked her.

‘I’ll go home with you and work in the fields,’ Cardamom said, as if she were a child playing at happy families.

‘We don’t have any fields,’ said Wang Pusheng with a smile.

‘Well, what have you got then?’

‘We don’t have anything.’

‘Then I’ll play the pipa for you every day. I’ll play and you’ll walk with a stick and beg for food, and we’ll give it to your mum,’ said Cardamom, full of happy daydreams.

‘I haven’t got a mother.’

Cardamom was startled. She put her arms around Wang Pusheng and they saw her shoulders jerking. For the first time, Cardamom was crying a woman’s tears.

Nani, no longer maudlin, wept quietly along with several of the other women.

After a while, Cardamom stopped, picked up the pipa and flung it away. ‘It’s useless! It’s made everyone cry! With only one string it sounds worse than plucking cotton wool!’

Shujuan noticed a change in the women. They knew now that nowhere was safe, nowhere was off-limits to the occupying troops. They had imagined this was a secret corner that the war had, by some lucky fluke, overlooked. But the arrival of the Japanese soldiers this evening had disabused them of that idea. Three hundred thousand soldiers had seeped into every corner of Nanking, every alleyway, every home, and every nook and cranny.

Shujuan got up to go, and found her eyes were wet with tears too. She had actually let those women make her cry!

It might have been the dying boy soldier, or perhaps it was Cardamom’s childish marriage proposal that got to her. Or maybe it was the tune that Cardamom was strumming on the single pipa string, a familiar one south of the Yangtze River, called ‘Picking Tea’. Now that southern China had fallen, all that was left of it was ‘Picking Tea’, played on a single string.

Thirteen

When the women in the cellar woke up in the morning, Cardamom’s bed was empty. George said that, when he got up at daybreak to heat water, he had seen her staggering drunkenly around the courtyard. He had tried to persuade her to go to bed, but she had ordered him to go to her house to get three new pipa strings. She said the pipa sounded awful, because it only had one string left. How could he go? George said. He didn’t know where she lived. She had replied that everyone knew how to get to the Qin Huai River. The house she belonged to was right on the riverbank, and her pipa strings were kept in the drawer of her dresser; he couldn’t possibly miss them. George tried to pacify her by saying he would go once it got light, but she said she could not wait. Wang Pusheng would be dead by then. She wanted to be able to play to him properly.

George had gone about his chores thinking she was back down in the cellar sleeping off her drunkenness. He was sure that, when morning came, she would have forgotten her mad idea.

Cardamom’s absence affected everyone in the compound. They were all on edge. When, at nightfall, she still hadn’t returned, Father Engelmann and Fabio went up to the attic to talk to the girls. The two clegymen had to stoop uncomfortably in the confined space, as if they were praying.

Fabio spoke first. He told the girls there was no news of Cardamom.

Father Engelmann interrupted him. ‘It’s no good trying to screen you girls. We have to assume the worst. That Cardamom has been taken by the Japanese and subjected to who knows what tortures…’

As the girls listened, the blood drained from their faces. Now that violence might have been inflicted on someone they knew, it suddenly became very real. They had hated Cardamom. They had fought with her. Now they thought of her as a young girl with a most unjust fate. She had been sold from brothel to brothel like a little dog. Would she have been willing to do what she did had she had a choice? Possibly not. People always said whores had no heart, and yet Cardamom risked her life to get pipa strings just so she could play a better tune for Wang Pusheng. As they sat dull-faced listening to Father Engelmann, they asked in their minds: Why Cardamom? She was too young. Gradually, tears welled up in their eyes. They’d rather God had swapped any of those prostitutes in the cellar for Cardamom.

‘I want you to get your things together and move down to the cellar straight away,’ said Father Engelmann. ‘Fabio and I and some other teachers hid from the fighting down there during the 1927 Nanking Incident. We were safe even though both armies ransacked the church compound several times. The cellar is much safer than the