The Flowers of War Page 3

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Shujuan, pretending she had just woken up.

  Xiaoyu leaned closer. ‘Which do you think is the prettiest?’ she said.

  Shujuan was startled. She knew Xiaoyu was referring to the prostitutes, but she had not thought about any of them in this way. Still, she didn’t want to disappoint Xiaoyu. Making up with her friend after a tiff was the sweetest feeling. ‘Who do you think?’ she said.

  ‘Let’s go and have another look,’ said Xiaoyu.

  The fact was that the prostitutes exerted a strange fascination over all the girls. Just thinking about the business they did with that secret place between their legs gave them a little spasm in their own bodies, which they concealed by blushing and exclaiming: ‘Ai-ya!’ There was nothing more seductive than sin and they took a vicarious delight in the fact that these women did bad things which they hardly dared contemplate.

  Shujuan and Xiaoyu crept downstairs. The fires cast a lurid light over the church compound. An old American hickory tree with a magnificent canopy reared skyward as if somehow its bare branches were taking root in the golden night sky. An odd smell of burning reached their nostrils.

  The two girls stood in the courtyard, forgetting why they had come down. It might just have been to check that Father Engelmann’s red-brick rectory was still there. Or to see that the candle was still lit in the window of Fabio’s bedroom next to the library. At that moment, however, the sound of music caught their attention. Someone was playing a tune on the pipa. The plucked strings made a beautiful sound.

  They walked around behind the kitchen and came to the ventilation shafts that let air into the cellar. There were three of them, each one covered with a rusty iron grille. They made excellent spyholes.

  It was Cardamom who was playing the pipa. She was an exquisitely pretty girl with an almond-shaped face. If you looked only at her eyes, she seemed to wear a constant smile. But her mouth had an aggrieved expression, as if she was constantly being short-changed. Nevertheless she was a beauty and could have bewitched anyone if she had not been a lowly prostitute. Looking down the spyhole, it did not take the two girls long to decide she was the prettiest of the women.

  The cellar was not a cellar any more. It had been transformed into an underground brothel. The women had moved some books from the workshop down to the cellar, and had used them to form platforms on which to sleep. Those who had brought bedrolls had spread them over the cots: silk quilts in impossible pinks and greens, ready for a normal business day by the Qin Huai River. There were mirrors of various shapes standing on book stacks along the walls. The prostitute called Jade was plucking her eyebrows in front of a little heart-shaped mirror. The women’s furs lay strewn around, and the hooks on which sausages and hams had once hung had been wrapped in the silver paper from cigarette packets and festooned with a garish assortment of scarves, wraps and brassieres.

  Four women were standing round a wine barrel on which they had placed a large kitchen chopping board, and the girls could hear a pattering sound as they played mah-jong. The temporary loss of five tiles did not seem to have diminished their enthusiasm for the game. Each of the women had a bowl in front of her filled with red wine, presumably the wine used for Mass that was supplied by Xiaoyu’s father.

  ‘Nani! Let me play a round!’ Cardamom said.

  Nani pulled down the lower lid of her right eye with one lacquered fingernail. The girls standing above understood the gesture. ‘In your dreams,’ it meant. ‘You can just watch.’

  ‘Ai-ya! I’m so bored!’ said Cardamom. She picked up Nani’s bowl and took a swig of wine.

  ‘Then go and ask the foreign monks for a couple of Bibles and read aloud to us,’ Yumo teased her with a smile.

  ‘I went up to the first floor in the foreign temple and sneaked a look,’ said Hongling. ‘It’s all books! Fabio’s room is next to the library.’

  ‘Us women could become Taoist nuns if we read all those Bibles,’ said Hongling, and declared she had won the round.

  She swept all her winnings into a pile in front of her.

  ‘It wouldn’t be such a bad thing to become a Taoist nun. You’d get fed,’ said Jade.

  ‘Well, you’ve got such a big belly to feed, it would be worth you becoming a nun,’ said Nani.

  ‘It would only be any fun if you hooked up with a foreign monk,’ said Hongling with a giggle.

  ‘They don’t call them nuns in Taoist temples, do they, Yumo?’ someone asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what they’re called, they still have to be vegetarian and celibate,’ said Yumo.

  ‘Never mind the vegetarian food, you’d never get a good night’s sleep if you had to be celibate, would you, Jade?’

  There was a burst of laughter. Jade picked up a tile and aimed it at Hongling. The laughter grew more raucous, and someone shouted, ‘Hongling, that’s the second time you’ve been hit today by a mah-jong tile. The next time it’ll kill you!’ Hongling and Jade chased each other around the cellar knocking things over.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Hongling,’ said Jade, ‘tomorrow evening I’ll get meat for you to eat. I promise I’ll procure that nice Yangzhou Fabio for you and then your celibacy won’t stop you from going to sleep!’

  Hongling made a gesture that the watching girls did not understand, though its lewdness was obvious because the cellar erupted in laughter, and Jade’s ample flesh shook all over.

  Yumo, looking distracted, sat on an overturned barrel with a cigarette in one hand and a bowl of wine in the other.

  After Shujuan and Xiaoyu had been watching for a while, they changed their minds about who was the prettiest. Yumo was becoming more attractive by the minute in their eyes. She was not instantly dazzling but she grew on them and was not easy to forget. Her hair was so thick and heavy that her face seemed to grow smaller when it was undone. As for the shape of her face, it was not square or round or long, it was simply diminutive and she had a pointed chin which gave her a slight air of arrogance. The sort of arrogance that said, ‘If you look down on me, then I’ll look down on you.’ She had big, dark eyes and such a rapt gaze she always made you wonder if she had seen something you had not. Her mouth was her weak point: it was thin and wide, a garrulous, bitter sort of mouth. It was surprising that someone who measured her words so carefully had a mouth like that. It gave her a harsh, even ruthless look. Zhao Yumo’s greatest asset was that she did not behave as if she were a shameless slut. In fact, you could imagine her as a concubine or a young wife in a rich man’s household. Or as the actress in one of the advertisements they showed in movie houses. She looked different now from when she arrived: she had changed into a violet cheongsam of flowered cotton, on top of which she wore a thick white woollen wrap-around coat decorated with a couple of pompoms. She had correctly judged their new situation, and now that she was on the girls’ territory, she made herself neat and tidy. Whether she had done this to save her skin or in an attempt to be treated as an equal, Shujuan had no way of knowing.

  Four

  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.

  ‘I remember it.’ Another knowing smile. All men liked hanging around her, especially a lonely man like this one. The moment she set eyes on him, she had seen just how lonely Fabio was. No one accepted him as one of their own. He was alien both to the race into which he had been born and to the one in which he had grown up.

  Fabio nodded, looking at her.

  Yumo took a few steps, then stopped and turned round. ‘Last night, we took a bet,’ she said, ‘about which side you’d be on if the Chinese and foreigners had a fight.’

  ‘Which do you think?’ asked Fabio.

  She looked at him, smiling, then turned to go.

  Sorceress! Fabio thought fiercely. As Yumo’s elegant back receded into the distance, he vowed that he would never allow her to enthral him with those great dark eyes, even for a second.

  * * *

  That night, an icy sleet made the temperature plunge. Father Engelmann was reading in his study but felt chilled to the marrow in spite of the fire that burned in the fireplace in the library next door. The damage to the church tower me
ant that the first-floor rooms were extremely draughty. George made frequent trips to add wood to the fire but it seemed to make no difference. The next time George came up, Father Engelmann said, ‘We’d better go easy on the wood. There isn’t enough to go round, and many old people in the Safety Zone have frozen to death.’

  Around midnight, unable to sleep, he returned to the library to find something else to read. When he got to the foot of the stairs, he heard women’s voices. These women are like a virus, he thought. If you weren’t careful, they spread everywhere. When he got to the door, he saw Yumo, Nani and Hongling huddled around the embers which glowed in the fireplace, holding out a garish assortment of underwear to dry in the warmth and giggling in low voices.

  Here! In this place full of sacred books and holy pictures!

  Father Engelmann’s jaw muscles went into spasm. Convinced that these women would pay no attention when he rebuked them, he called Fabio from his bedroom.

  ‘Fabio! What are these creatures doing here?’

  Fabio, who had been drinking heavily, had just nodded off. The alcohol fuelled his fury. ‘Blasphemers! How dare you come in here? Do you know what this place is?’ he yelled.

  ‘We’re so cold down there, we’ve got chilblains. Look!’ And Hongling pulled her bare feet with their painted toenails from her shoes and held them up before the two clergymen. Seeing Fabio jerk backwards as if she was contagious, Nani chortled in glee. Yumo elbowed her sharply; she knew they were in trouble now. This was the first time the distinguished old priest had really lost his composure.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, hiding away the brassiere she was holding. Her face was burning hot, her back icy cold.

  ‘I’m not going!’ said Hongling. ‘There’s a fire in here. Why go back and freeze to death?’

  She turned her back on the clergymen and stretched her bare feet towards the fireplace. She wriggled her toes as if her feet were talking in sign language.

  ‘If you don’t get out of here this instant, I’ll make you all leave the church immediately!’ said Fabio.