Read Online Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin - Free Book Online Page B

skin,” Holly grunted.
    “They must be terrified,” I said.
    “I’m a Chinese citizen too, but I won’t say a good word about the Japanese brutes.”
    “You have a foreign face, Holly. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t dare to step off campus without your company.”
    We turned into the small alley alongside the eastern border of the Safety Zone. Seven or eight houses on the street had been razed, set on fire after being looted. Holly’s home was among them, and her car was gone too. A young man, bayoneted twice in the chest, lay dead on his side below the brick wall of her yard, his back naked, his hair scorched, and the exposed side of his face eaten by dogs. He looked like a stranger to Holly. “Savages, worse than beasts!” she cursed the soldiers, and broke into tears, wiping her face with the end of her scarf.
    “Holly, I’m sorry,” I murmured, and wrapped my arm around her.
    The neighborhood was very quiet; you couldn’t hear any noise, not even the tiny chirps made by the sparrows that used to live in many of the roofs. Then a Siamese cat jumped out of a coal shack in the next-door neighbor’s yard and meowed forlornly, as though starved. Brushing away her tears, Holly said, “I guess this is it. Now I have no place to go.”
    “You can always stay with us,” I said. That was hardly an invitation, since she was already indispensable to our school. She wasn’t just the only other foreigner on campus but was also, as a musician, needed for the chapel services. Besides, she’d been helping our nurse care for the sick and the women expecting or in labor.
    When we returned to the campus, about four hundred men, women, and children were at the front gate, begging Luhai and Miss Lou to let them in. All the women wore white terry cloth over their hair; apparently they were from the countryside. A few old men were sucking on long pipes. I was somewhat surprised, because by now we were known as a camp for only women and children, and most men wouldn’t come to seek refuge anymore.
    Minnie said to the villagers, “We accept only women and kids.”
    “Please, we can’t go elsewhere,” a thirtyish man begged.
    “Most of the other camps take in families. You should try them,” I told him.
    “We dare not walk anywhere,” an older man said, donning a skullcap, the type called a melon-rind cap. “If the Japanese devils see us, they’ll kill us and grab our wives and daughters.”
    A girl in her mid-teens shuffled over, wearing a pair of bandages on her forehead like two miniature crosses standing together, one taller than the other. “Please let me in, Aunties,” she wailed to Holly and me as we were still standing outside the gate. “I’m the only one left in my family.” She burst into tears.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “Some Japs broke into the deserted building where we stayed last night, and they cut down my dad and brothers. Then they stripped my mom and me and started torturing us. I screamed, so they punched me again and again until I lost my voice and blacked out. When I came to, I saw my mom’s body in the room. She couldn’t take it anymore and hit her head on the doorjamb and killed herself.”
    Minnie had come out of the gate by now. I realized that the girl had been raped and told her, “You must get treated. I’ll get someone to take you to the University Hospital.”
    “I can’t walk anymore. If not for these good-hearted folks, I couldn’t have made it here.”
    “Then you can come in,” I said.
    After telling a staffer to take the girl to our infirmary, Minnie decided to lead the rest of them to the university camp. Holly offered to go along, but Minnie told her to stay because John Magee had just left and we needed at least one foreigner on campus to deter the soldiers.
    Nanjing University was about a fifteen-minute walk from our college, and Minnie led the crowd away with a small U.S. flag in her hand, while I brought up the rear, bearing a Red Cross flag. Passing