Free Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin Page B

knuckle. He looked frazzled; he suffered from insomnia these days and often complained of a headache.
    “Do you think they were hungry?” I asked both of them.
    “They could be,” he answered.
    “I wouldn’t mind if they came just to eat and drink something, but they must let us know in advance,” Minnie said.
    Big Liu shook his bushy head and spoke as if to himself. “They really love American party food.”
    Minnie chuckled. I liked Big Liu for his sense of humor as well as for his levelheadedness. Sometimes when he said something funny, he himself didn’t realize it—which made it more deadpan. We went upstairs and found the door of a small storage room ajar. Inside, half a dozen suitcases were cut open or unzipped, all ransacked, women’s clothing scattered around. One of the bags belonged to Mrs. Dennison and another to Donna Thayer, a biology teacher who was in Shanghai at the moment. There was no way to find out what had been stolen, so we closed the suitcases and placed them next to four intact ones sitting behind a tall bookshelf loaded with pinkish toilet tissue. There we saw Dr. Wu’s varnished pigskin chest opened and gutted, but again we couldn’t tell what had been taken.
    When we were back at the quadrangle, Minnie saw John Magee speaking to Luhai. Suddenly a burst of gunfire came from the southwest, and everybody stopped to listen until the fusillade subsided.
    We went up to Magee and Luhai. The reverend said to Minnie, “I just heard that the Panay was sunk by Japanese warplanes.”
    “Good Lord, what about the people on the boat?” she asked.
    “Three were killed and more than forty wounded—most of the casualties were sailors.”
    “The staff of the embassy is okay?”
    “Apparently so. They were rescued.”
    My mind began spinning, because Jinling’s portmanteau containing papers, foreign currencies, and Mrs. Dennison’s wedding silver had been aboard the gunboat. I hoped that the trunk was safe and still in the care of the embassy’s staff. If the silverware was lost, Mrs. Dennison might go bonkers. She disliked Minnie, though she was decent to me, mainly because Dr. Wu kept me under her wing. From her first days at Jinling, Minnie must have known that the founding president viewed her as a rival, perhaps because Minnie was bold enough to assume the acting presidency, which no one else dared take, and also because her ability as a leader might pose a threat to the old woman, who demanded loyalty only to herself from the faculty, staff, and even students. Yet Minnie and I agreed that Mrs. Dennison had always regarded Jinling as her home and had dedicated herself to the college. It was this devotion that united the two of them.
    ABOUT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning, more than a company of Japanese troops came to search for Chinese soldiers. Minnie told the commander, a tall man with hollow cheeks, that this camp sheltered only women and children. The head officer, who must have been a colonel and was accompanied by two bodyguards and an adjutant, wouldn’t listen and declared that the Safety Zone Committee had broken its promise to provide sanctuary only for noncombatants, so now the Imperial Army was entitled to weed out all the hostile remnants. True enough—in its original proposal, the committee had claimed that the area would be “kept from the presence of armed men and from the passage of soldiers in any capacity.” But when the letter for the Japanese authorities was composed, none of the committee members had been able to imagine such a turn of events: thousands of Chinese soldiers would come and implore them to save their lives. The foreigners accepted them after collecting their weapons, assuming that the Japanese would follow the common practice in war of treating the capitulated men with basic humanity. Now, in the name of eliminating the former soldiers, the conquerors began to seize whomever they suspected might be a potential fighter.
    The search started with the