The Devil of Nanking Read Online Free PDF Page A

biggest of sins. ‘It’s not an excuse, you know, it’s not an excuse. No. In fact, in my book ignorance is no different from pure, straight evil. And what you done was just that – pure, straight evil.’
    When the waitress had gone, I unzipped my holdall and took out my Japanese dictionary. There are three alphabets in Japan. Two are phonetic and they’re easy to understand. But there’s a third one, too, evolved centuries ago from the pictorial characters used in China, and it’s far more complex and far, far more beautiful. Kanji , it’s called. I’ve been studying it for years, but sometimes when I see kanji it still makes me think about the littleness of my life. When you stop to consider the lifetime of history and intrigue all hidden in a single scripted picture tinier than an ant how can you not feel like a waste of air? Kanji had a beautiful logic for me. I understood why the symbol for ‘ear’ pressed close up to the symbol for ‘gate’ would mean ‘listen’. I understood why three women clustered together meant ‘noisy’ and why adding splashy lines to the left of any character would change its meaning to include water. A field with an added water symbol meant sea.
    The dictionary was my constant companion. It was small and soft and white and familiar, bound in something that could have been calfskin, and it fitted inside my hand as if it was moulded there. The girl with the dreadlocks had stolen it from a library when she got out of hospital. She had mailed it to me as a present when it got round the patients that I was leaving at last. She’d put a card between the pages that said: ‘ I believe you. Stick it to them all. Go and PROVE IT, girl .’ Even all those years later I was still secretly thrilled by that card.
    I opened the dictionary to the front page, the page with the library stamp on it. The characters for the Chinese name Shi Chongming meant something like ‘He who sees clearly both history and the future.’ With a red felt-tip from the bottom of my bag I began to sketch out the kanji , intertwining them, turning them upside-down, sideways, until the page was covered with red. Then in the gaps, using very tiny letters, I wrote Shi Chongming in English, over and over again. When there was no more room I turned to the back page and sketched out a map of the campus, putting in a few hedges and trees from memory. The campus was so beautiful. I’d only seen it for a few minutes, but it had seemed like a wonderland in the middle of the city: shadowy gingko crowded around white gravel paths, ornate roofs and the cool sounds of a dark lake in the forest. I drew in the archery hall, then added a few stone lanterns from my imagination. Lastly over Shi Chongming’s office I carefully drew a picture of me standing in front of him. We were shaking hands. In his other hand he was holding a film in a canister, ready to pass it over to me. In my image I was trembling. After nine years, seven months and eighteen days, I was at last going to get an answer.
    At six thirty the sun was still hot, but the big oak doors to the Institute of Social Sciences were locked, and when I pressed my ear to them I couldn’t hear anything inside. I turned and looked around, wondering what to do next. I’d waited for Shi Chongming in the Bambi café for six hours and although no one had said anything I’d felt obliged to keep buying iced coffees. I’d had four. And four more melon pastries, wetting my fingers and dabbing up the stray grains of sugar on the plate; reaching a sneaky hand under the table and digging surreptitiously in my bag for some Rich Tea biscuits whenever the waitress wasn’t looking. I had to break bits off under the table and put my hand casually to my mouth pretending I was yawning. The handful of yen notes dwindled. Now I realized it had been a waste of time. Shi Chongming must have gone a long time ago, leaving from a different entrance. Maybe he’d guessed I’d be waiting.
    I went