The next morning, the women in the cellar did not stir. George took them some porridge but could not wake them up. Then, after lunch, they appeared outside the refectory complaining that no one had brought them anything to eat and they were weak with hunger.
Fabio could see that his strictures were having no effect on them. He called Yumo, as their ringleader, into the refectory.
‘This is your last warning,’ he said. ‘If you all come out of the cellar again, you won’t be welcome here any more.’
Yumo was apologetic. ‘I understand that we’re not welcome,’ she said. ‘But the women are really hungry.’
The prostitutes gathered around the refectory door to see whether their negotiator was doing a proper job or needed reinforcements.
‘I’ll come to food in a moment. First, I want to go over the rules once again,’ Fabio said.
His efforts to turn his thick Yangzhou dialect into acceptable city speech caused some of the women a good deal of merriment.
‘Talk about the toilet first, will you?’ said Nani.
‘We get nothing to eat and nowhere to crap!’ complained Cardamom.
‘There’s a women’s toilet in there,’ said Hongling, pointing towards the workshop building. ‘But the girls have locked it and they’ve got the key. We’ve only got the church to use –’
‘You’ve been using the church toilets?’ exclaimed Fabio. ‘They’re for the use of ladies and gentlemen of the congregation and their children during Mass! And the water’s been cut off so they can’t be flushed. They must smell terrible.’
Yumo fixed Fabio with enormous dark eyes. There was no avoiding her gaze and Fabio’s heart skipped a beat.
When Fabio opened his mouth again, it was clear he had succumbed to the effects of Yumo’s steady gaze. He pitched his voice lower and enumerated the arrangements: Ah Gu and George would dig a pit for them in the backyard and give them two tin buckets and two covers made from cardboard. When the buckets were full, they were to be emptied into the pit in the backyard. But that was to be done, he ordered them, before five o’clock in the morning so that they could avoid meeting the girls or Father Engelmann.
‘Five o’clock in the morning?’ exclaimed Hongling. ‘But we don’t usually get up until now.’
She raised a plump wrist and displayed a tiny watch on which the hour hand pointed to between one and two o’clock in the afternoon.
‘From now on, you are to respect church hours, and get up and eat at church times. It’s past breakfast time now, I’m sorry. The girls saved you a few scraps from their plates and you didn’t eat them. They couldn’t let noodles go to waste, could they?’ As Fabio talked, he realised in surprise that he and Yumo were conducting a calm, polite conversation.
‘Hah! Now we’re really going to become nuns!’ said Hongling with a laugh.
The allusion was obvious and the women chuckled. There was an edge in their laughter and even Fabio, who knew little of matters between men and women, was aware they were being lewd. ‘Quiet! I haven’t finished speaking,’ he commanded harshly, although part of the harshness was directed at himself for no longer being sufficiently stern with them.
Yumo turned towards the women and quelled them with a glance.
‘How many meals do we get a day?’ asked Cardamom.
‘How many would you like, Miss?’ Fabio asked scornfully.
‘Well, we usually get four meals, with an extra one at night-time,’ Cardamom answered in all seriousness.
‘Something simple at night would be fine,’ Hongling hastily added, ‘a few snack dishes, a soup, a nice glass of wine…’ She knew Fabio was going to lose his temper. In fact, she thought he was very amusing when he was angry. In her experience, a fight between a man and a woman created instant intimacy and made everything more exciting.
‘Can we join the congregation?’ asked Nani.
Hongling clapped her hands in joy. ‘So we’ve got someone here who wants to be baptised and made into a new person, have we? What she’s actually asking is how many glasses of red wine can a person have when they go to Mass. Don’t be taken in! She can drink a barrel of wine dry!’
‘Bitch!’ Nani swore at her but without any real anger.
Yumo hastily attempted to distract Fabio from their bad language. Fixing her gaze on him again, she said, ‘Deacon Adornato, if it were not for your goodness in taking us in, we would all be facing calamity by now. We are deeply grateful that you are prepared to share a bowl of gruel with women like us in times of war. We would also like you to convey our thanks to the schoolgirls.’
Fabio felt drawn into the depths of those great eyes. Just for those few moments, he forgot that this woman was a whore, and imagined that she was someone he had come across in a park, or by the Xuanhu Lake, or in the shade of the French plane trees on Zhongshan Avenue; someone obviously from a good background. Perhaps she overdid the dignity a little, but her refinement and gentleness were genuine, and her words seemed honest, even if her accent was sometimes difficult to understand.
Fabio had planned to deal with the entire matter in a few brief sentences but he found himself leading Yumo round to the back of the church. Yumo was sharp-eyed and spotted the other women creeping after them. She stopped. ‘Be good girls and go back to the cellar now. Fabio asked me to go with him, not all of you.’
Behind the church, there was a rectangular cistern built of carved white marble. A layer of hickory leaves, rotted to a rusty red, covered the bottom. Fabio pointed to the tea-coloured water which half filled the pond and said, ‘I just wanted you to see this. Since you arrived, the water level has gone right down. Could I ask you to tell them not to pilfer the remaining water for washing clothes or faces?’
He felt ashamed of himself. Deep down he knew that he hadn’t needed to bring her here alone to admonish her. He had just wanted to spend more time in her company, to drown himself in her black eyes. In fact, her eyes seemed to present a more terrible danger to him than the war outside the church walls.
‘Of course, I’ll pass on your message, Father,’ Yumo said with a slight smile.
Her smile terrified him. She had divined thoughts in his head that he had scarcely divined himself. But it was also comforting. It said: It doesn’t matter, you’re a man, and you’ve shown you’re made of flesh and blood.
‘If the water supply stays cut off, within three days we’ll die of thirst. We’ll be as dry as this grass,’ said Fabio, putting his foot on the lawn, which was withered and yellow from the winter drought. He sounded bitter, he thought, although he had not meant to.
‘Was there ever a well here?’ asked Yumo.
‘Yes, but there was such heavy snowfall one year that Father Engelmann’s pony missed its footing and slipped into the well. It broke its front leg. Father Engelmann made Ah Gu fill it in after that,’ said Fabio.
‘Can it be dug out again?’
‘I don’t know. It would be a lot of work. By the time we’ve used up the rest of the water in the cistern, maybe the water supply will be back on.’ As he spoke, he told himself that once he had finished this sentence their conversation must end there.
Yumo seemed to have heard even that unspoken warning to himself. Smiling, she made a slight bow and said, ‘I mustn’t take up any more of your time.’
‘If the situation gets any worse, and there’s still no water, I really don’t know what we’ll do.’ Somehow Fabio found himself leaving Yumo with another sentence. He hoped Yumo would take it as a muttered exclamation which had burst out despite himself, and would say goodbye. But she took it as the beginning of another exchange between them.
‘It can’t get worse. If it does, we’ll go out and fetch buckets of water. On our way here, we saw a pond,’ she said.
‘Strange that I don’t remember a pond,’ he said, telling himself this really was the very last thing he would say. Even if she said something more, he would not answer her.
