He pictured the two other shipments. One was far to the north. The second was nearby. It had left Hankou already and would meet him in Nanking.
On the flat silver snake of water below, he could see the ferry approaching. They had waited hours for this fresh boat. And now the enemy was less than a hundred li away.
He strode down a steep cramped-back path, between boxes of sunlight shafting through the trees. Moss-covered rocks and ferns, loam, and gravel slipped under his feet. It was spring, the waxing crescent of the second lunar month, but the cold metal of winter was not yet ready to release its hold.
When he broke through to the river’s edge, he saw the thick swarm of people on the wharf. They knew the Japanese were coming.
His heart sank. They all wanted to get on the boat. And every one of them might as well fight to the death to do so.
His cross-strapped soldiers, in a powerful line three men deep, held back the crowd from the stacked crates. He shouldered through the crowd, stepping around the women, the men, the elderly on their piles of bundles. He dodged the boys laughing in their high thin voices, darting through the press of people as if this sharp damp afternoon were only another in a long string of their days growing up. Captain Lu thought of his own family, the children, his hometown, which had been taken eight months before. He had to force himself not to think about it. He had the genius of eleven dynasties to see to safety.
The fresh boat was tying up and lowering its planks. “Load the collection,” Lu ordered. The smell rose to him, the tarred, weathered wood of the dock; the living, decaying saltwater smell of the wharf; the pressing crowd.
Children were crying. So many women, babies. “Sorry,” he said, and elbowed them out of his way.
A woman stepped in front of him.
He pressed her to the side.
“Sir!” She blocked him with her baby. “You’ve no room. Take my baby. Just the baby.” Before he could even perceive what she was doing, before he’d even fully understood her rough country words, she’d shoved the baby into his arms.
“No!” he shouted, and pushed it back at her.
A torrent of will twisted her face. She clenched her arms down at her sides as if straitjacketed, then turned and ran, craning, dodging, into the crowd. The mass of pushing people meshed back in around her.
“Come back!” he screamed.
A mewling sound came from the infant. Lu looked down at the clear, shiny eyes. “I order you!” he screamed again. In the silence that bloomed in the afterspace, he heard the creaking sound of the ship, his men, their voices. He turned on his heel and continued shoving his way up front, the baby under one arm. Other mothers now held up their babies to him. He cursed them away in three dialects. The air around them exploded with the pressed-down groaning of the ship’s horns.
The baby was crying. He looked at it, anger gathering. Now he needed another woman: there. He pushed the baby into the arms of the closest female. Her mouth opened in a stunned circle. But she took the child.
He stepped up to the line of men. “Almost ready?”
“Sixty left, sir.”
“Good.” But the soldiers were straining at the line. He watched the crowd shoving.
“Should we fire?” his man whispered.
“No! They’re Chinese.”
But now screams and shouts rose above the wall of wailing. The crowd pushed and retreated as one, with the suck and release of a wave. His men were surging with it, gripping tight to one another’s wrists, holding, holding, shouting, how long could they hold? Lu threw a frantic look behind him. Crates were being run up the ramp one after another, men under them, heaving, sinews bursting.
A shout went up. He scanned quickly to his right. They were breaking now. They couldn’t hold.
He yanked his pistol from his belt and fired into the air. A puff of smoke rose above him. A stunned silence.
“Stop it!” he roared. “Let us finish loading and we’ll take you on!”
“Sir,” the subordinate hissed. “There’s no room.”
“Quiet,” Lu ordered.
The silence still hung.
Then suddenly a man standing near them in the crowd shouted into the emptiness: “There’s no room!”
“No room!”
The crowd started calling out again, shoving, and this time the tide gathered itself, breathed deeply in with a bobbing of heads and a last chance to stay alive, and then pushed forward in a tangle of arms and legs and backs and shoulders, one wedge, no stopping it. They streamed up the ramp and onto the boat.
“Stop!” screamed Captain Lu, but now the wind had whipped up and his voice was snatched out of his throat and tossed away. He saw the people fanning out on the deck of the boat, crowding on board until the deck itself sank, groaning and pitching, almost to the level of the water itself.
“The boat will sink!” he screamed. “Some of you must get off! One in three, get off!” At the same time he looked back at the dock and cursed inwardly. There were still crates waiting.
“One in three!” he called again.
No one moved.
“Now!” he shouted, and raised his handgun high and cocked it, to make clear what he meant.
The boat rocked in the waves. Then a woman, in silence, held up her small child above her head. Another woman raised a baby. A wail came threading up, just the thinnest single voice at first, but soon all the women had babies and toddlers over their heads, wailing, sobbing, pleading for their lives. Where was the baby he had given to the woman? But the baby would be all right. The woman would take care of it.
His man was back. “Sir, we have forty crates yet.”
Yes. He saw them. Still on the dock. And all the babies, all the mothers.
He turned to the flank of men who had assembled. “Up anchor. We leave.”
Eyes popped. “Sir!”
“Ready the boat. We leave.” His voice was crisp and hard. He walked away rapidly, concealing his terror and his shame. He could not put them off to their deaths. He ran down the plank and onto the warped, river-smelling boards. He touched one of the crates, laid his hand on it. What was inside? He glanced at the stenciled characters. Meishu taoci. Ceramics. He offered a silent reverence of apology, then he turned and ran, last man up, jumping onto the ship as the ramp rose. The boat’s engines roared and it pulled away, turning in its wide arc down the river. He watched the little stack of crates left behind growing smaller and smaller as the dock floated away into the distance.
So, she thought, raising her eyes again to the red-framed doors. Left behind, then taken off the dock, and buried under Wu land and forgotten. The land belonging to the Wus and then to the state and then back to the Wus again. And it was there all that time.
She put her hearing aids in and the world came back, abruptly amplified. A car engine roared up the hutong, cresting, fading. She finished her tea and walked out across the entry court. She passed the fountain with its spattering flow of sound and walked through the gate of ornamental rock.