The Last Rose of Shanghai(103)
“Remember the top-secret information I told you?” he said.
Little Star wouldn’t come so I brought the stool to her, sat down, and secured her between my legs. Pressing her head lower, I combed through her hair with my fingers, searching for lice and their plump eggs. How she got infested with lice after I’d just washed her hair with the kerosene, I had no idea. Now my head itched. “I don’t think you trusted me well enough to tell me that.”
“It has nothing to do with trust, and I still can’t tell you too much. I heard the Americans had bombed Tokyo once, but the aircraft crashed in the Zhejiang province. The distance to Tokyo had been an obstacle for the fighters. But the Americans are coming back with more pilots and B-29s! Do you know what this means? If we have the Americans help us, we can rout all the bastards and win this war!”
He had just said this when another fleet of aircraft soared in the sky, chasing the Superfortresses. They were much faster, catching up even as I watched; then they fired. Black smoke burst from a B-29. Ying tossed the binoculars into the satchel and cursed.
“Listen, Ying.” I caught two lice and crushed them expertly between my nails. Juice burst between my nails. “You’re recovering well. You’ll be out and about soon. Can you do something for me?”
He went into the bedroom and rolled underneath the bed, where he’d made a sound barrier with the sheets I’d stolen from the hotel.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Can you find someone for me? You know him. Ernest Reismann. He used to be my pianist.” A bunch of brown lice eggs, plump, appeared between my fingers. I positioned my thumbs around them and crushed them.
He came out and stood in front of me. The frown on his face made him look like an ill-tempered child. “Did Cheng mean anything to you? He’s only dead for a little more than a year, and you’re thinking about the foreigner?”
Little Star looked up at me, then Ying, and slipped out of my grip. Suddenly, there was nothing I could hold on to.
“Don’t you have any loyalty, little sister?” His tone told me the same old message—I, the little sister, the youngest, must obey.
I said quietly, “Do not talk to me like that.”
He growled.
“Do you remember once we flew a kite together, Ying? You, Cheng, and me. How old was I? Nine? Ten? You made a hawk, and I painted it in red. You were good at making kites, and Cheng was good at running. We went to a field of flowers. I thought they were sunflowers, but I was wrong, they were rapeseed flowers, with small blossoms, slim stems, and delicate petals. Oh, how beautiful the field looked, a rioting yellow, so sharp, like an ocean of paint. I sat in the field of rapeseed flowers, but you wanted me to fly the kite with you, and Cheng shouted at me to run ahead of him because he didn’t want to leave me out of sight. But I couldn’t catch up with him. He was too fast. Then the wind blew up my skirt, and I tumbled down the field and broke my leg. Remember that? I broke my leg.”
Now across China all rapeseed flowers had disappeared, flowers eaten, stems chewed, roots cooked.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Ying. I just want to say I remember this, an episode of our childhood, the things we did, the memories we have.”
When people came into your life, there was a reason for that; when they were gone, there were explanations for that. But we must remember them, for if we remembered well and reflected right, then we would be lovers, siblings, cousins, and friends in the next life. Karma, like Mother said. Yuan, like what I told Ernest.
“I know he meant a lot to you, Ying.”
He kicked the wall. “You have no idea what he means to me. He was more than a brother to me.”
“I knew.”
“How would you know? No one knew. No one. Not even Cheng himself.” He twisted his head away, but he was sobbing.
The firecracker of a man, my brother, a fearless spy, a secretive man, an enigma. I put my hand on his shoulder.
He sniffled, walked into the bedroom, and shut the door.
Whenever I raised the topic of Ernest, Ying clammed up.
He talked to me about other important events of war at least, turning on the transceiver’s switch, the volume a buzz of a mosquito. In June, the Allies had staged an attack on Normandy, and they successfully captured the ports in France. In July, the British began their fight to drive the Japanese out of Burma. Paris was free from the Nazis by the end of August. Also, the Allies had achieved momentous victories in New Guinea and were ready to take control of the Philippines.
Yet victory was scarce in my country. In the same summer the Allies landed in Normandy, the Japanese deployed more than 360,000 troops to attack Changsha, a vital city with important railroad networks that connected the south and central parts of China, Burma, and India. But months of resistance by the Nationalist army failed. Relentless, Japan swooped down to the neighboring cities. In a series of devastating defeats, the Nationalists lost thirty-eight cities in the Henan province in thirty-seven days. All over Shanghai, the few newspaper stands sold stacks of papers printed with exultant headlines. “Great Victory to the Empire of the Sun!” “The No. 1 Plan of Japan Has Succeeded.” “Mission of Controlling Central China Has Completed.” “Japan Has Conquered Central China!”
“I need bombs,” Ying mumbled one day under the bed. Yamazaki was still alive, he said, working in the military base, following his emperor’s order, actively destroying China.