The Flowers of War by Geling Yan Read Free Book Online Page B

petition Father Engelmann to get them into the Safety Zone one way or another
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    Fabio’s footsteps suddenly slowed, as he came to the anguished realisation that he could not steel himself to do it.
    When Fabio Adornato was a boy of six, his missionary parents had died of plague while away on a trip. But the woman who had been a true mother to him was his Chinese ‘granny’. (Though ‘granny’ was only a manner of speaking, as actually she was only a few years older than his parents.) It was she who had looked after him since birth, and carried him around all day on her back. It was her soft, flaccid breasts which had been his haven when he was a little boy, which would send him to sleep as soon as he nestled intothem. After his parents died, his real, American granny came to China to reclaim him. She was a tall woman with a mass of curly hair, dressed from head to toe in black. He hid behind his Chinese granny and refused to come out to be introduced to her. She had come to take him back to America, she said, via the painful interpreting of a Chinese teacher in the local town. As soon as Fabio heard this awful news, he made his escape.
    The rice had just been harvested and there were plenty of straw stacks to hide in. At nightfall he sneaked back to his Chinese granny’s thatched hut and pulled down some dried water chestnuts and rice cakes which she stored by hanging them under the eaves. These he took back to the straw stack to eat. The old woman had a dozen or so speckled ducks and Fabio knew exactly where they laid their eggs. He supplemented the chestnuts and rice cakes by going to the place before she went to the river to collect the eggs, stealing a couple, cracking them open and eating them raw. She complained that her things went missing and that someone was stealing them, but she knew perfectly well who it was. Why should an old widow like her not be a bit selfish? She wanted to hang on to Fabio.
    His grandmother sorted out her daughter and son-in-law’spossessions, and sold off their furniture and clothing. Then she waited in vain for Fabio to come back. Finally, she could not bear village food, houses, toilets and mosquitoes any more and gave up the idea of taking her grandson home with her. She asked the clan head in the village to tell the Chinese teacher in the local town that as soon as Fabio was found he should write to her in English and she would come back and collect him. But Fabio’s grandmother never received any further news of her grandson from the village.
    When Fabio grew up, he came secretly to regret his youthful intransigence but that was after he had been taken in as a seminarist by Father Engelmann. When his American grandmother left, his Chinese granny had thrown herself and Fabio on the mercy of one of her distant relatives. The man was a friend of Fabio’s parents and had introduced his granny to them so she could help around the house and with the boy. Now he took in Fabio’s granny to do the laundry and cleaning and brought the boy up with his own children. When Fabio, at seventeen, graduated from the missionary middle school, Father Engelmann happened to be there lecturing. The priest was intrigued by this young man, who talked and behaved like a Chinese but had the body of a Westerner, and made a point of talking to him. When heleft Yangzhou to return to Nanking, it was Fabio Adornato who carried his baggage for him because, from the moment Father Engelmann had stepped down from the pulpit and come towards him with a smile on his face, Fabio knew that the reason why he had been so lonely all his young life was that he would never be Chinese. It was as much Father Engelmann’s air of refinement and calm as his eloquence and the depth of his knowledge which, within a very short time, tamed Fabio and brought him to the realisation that he did not even want to be Chinese. He also understood that Father Engelmann was drawn to him because he was a Westerner. His new mentor hinted to