But after three or four steps, he stops again and seems to change his mind: inspired by some suspicion, he is about to climb back up. Kim notices, then, that the door which is closest to her hiding place is not quite closed. She pushes it open gently, without making the hinges creak, just wide enough to slip inside. Once the door is back in its original position, the darkness of the place is complete. Immediately, Kim feels herself brushed by hands, two huge hands which grope their way, caressing the smooth, thin silk of her dress. She bites her lower lip to keep from crying out, while the caresses become more precise and insistent. Outside, the man has returned to the landing: he too has noticed the door which is not quite closed. (Is this because of Kim’s movements?) She hears him scratching with his nails, as if he were trying to discover some device whose functioning would open the way to him. Silently she leans harder against the door, in order to press it closed and make the man believe the bolt is fastened. But the pressure increases, at the same time, from the other side. The young woman arches her body and strains all her muscles, while the two huge hands continue to explore her armpits, her breasts, her waist, her hips, her belly, her thighs. She persists, pressing with all her weight, all her strength, so that finally the beveled bolt shoots home of its own accord, entering the lock with a dry click, like a shot which echoes throughout the house.
At the same time, the light goes on. In the foyer, Edouard Manneret comes toward her. It is he who has flipped the switch. The young Eurasian servant girl catches her breath. “I found the door open,” she says. . . . “I came in. . . .” The Old Man still has the same half-smile and too shiny eyes. He says: “And you were right. You’re welcome here. . . . I was expecting you.” Then, after a pause, during which he stares at her with an embarrassing insistence: “Have you been running? . . . Didn’t you take the elevator?” She answers that she did not, that she has merely been walking fast, and that she walked up because of the dog. And, when he asks her where the dog is, Kim explains that she has left it, as usual, attached by its leather leash to a ring, in the vestibule. We know that the animal will manage to free itself, sensing that its mistress is in danger, etc.
If Manneret has already just been murdered, this scene takes place earlier, of course. And now it is Mr. Chang, the agent, who comes to meet Kim, in the little room she has just entered. (The sound of the bolt clicking, when she has pushed the door closed, is still in her ears.) Mr. Chang still shows the same half-smile so widespread in the East, where it is probably no more than a sign of politeness. He asks her if she has been running. Silent as usual, she merely shakes her head. He does not question her about the dog. It is on this day that the agent hands her the heavy brown paper envelope stuffed with forty-eight sachets of powder. She immediately walks downstairs and finds herself back in the middle of Queens Road, in the noisy, sun-drenched swarm of rickshaws, shiny black oilcloth pajamas, vendors of fish and spices, porters with shoulders bent under the long, traditional yoke, on the ends of which are hung the reed baskets. When Kim returns to the house, the old lady, alone in her room, does not notice that the white silk dress is quite rumpled, crushed, soiled with grayish stains that cover wide areas where the material’s sheen has entirely disappeared. The pretty servant girl will merely be punished for having let the black dog go into an air-conditioned building.
As a matter of fact, the girl has been forced to confess her mistake. In order not to say that she has simply attached the precious beast to a ring somewhere, she still prefers the version—which she considers less dangerous—of the sweeper standing at the foot of the stairs: she has entrusted the dog to him, but he has let the end of the leash get away from him, out of laziness, and the animal has dashed upstairs to join his mistress, dragging the leash which flies behind him and whips the wooden steps. The municipal employee in a Chinese hat then lowers his arm, which is no longer holding anything, toward the broom handle. A vague smile hovers around his mouth and his eyes. He has nothing else to do but go on sweeping. At the end of the rice-straw sheaf, curved by use, appears a new example of the same illustrated magazine; it is at least the twelfth he has picked up since he has started working. (When?) This is certainly last week’s issue. Although he has exhausted all it contains, since he cannot read and must be satisfied with the pictures, he leans down nonetheless to pick up this one in its turn. And once again he stares at the elegant party taking place in the huge salon filled with mirrors and gilded moldings.
Under the sparkling chandeliers, young women in low-cut evening dresses are dancing in the arms of partners in dark tuxedos or white dinner jackets. In front of the buffet covered with silver platters, a little fat man with a very red face is talking, head tilted up, to an American much taller than he, who has to lean over to hear what he is saying. A little way off, bending down to the marble floor, Lauren knots the gilded thongs of her sandal around her ankle and instep. Off to one side, near the window recess with its heavy, drawn curtains, Lady Ava is still sitting on her colorless sofa; her tired eyes stray along the walls whose various panels are decorated with pictures of various sizes, all of which show her as a young woman standing at full length and resting one hand lightly on the back of an armchair, or else seated, or reclining, or on horseback, playing the piano, or merely her head and bust, enlarged to giant proportions. She is wearing feather boas, veils, huge plumed hats; elsewhere she can be seen bareheaded, with ribbons in her hair, or with corkscrew curls that fall to the hollow of her shoulders, against the white flesh. There are also statues in their niches, between columns of red or green porphyry, representing her in active poses, making huge vague gestures with her round arms and turning to one side, or else toward heaven, with an exalted expression. Voluminous vaporous materials float around her body, scarfs of mousseline, trains of tulle, veils of bronze and stone. I walk past all this without stopping: I have had a hundred occasions to examine these sculptures, these paintings, these pastels, which I know down to the very signatures, almost all of famous names: Edouard Manneret, R. Jonestone, G. Marchand, etc. The huge room is made still more impressive by the absence of any living person, whereas I am accustomed to seeing it full of people, agitation, noise; there is no one here tonight except an innumerable, mute, motionless, inaccessible woman who multiplies her studied, grandiloquent, exaggeratedly dramatic poses, and who surrounds me on all sides, Eve, Eva, Eva Bergmann, Lady Ava, Lady Ava, Lady Ava.
After the large salon, I walk through other empty rooms. It seems the servants themselves have vanished; alone, I climb the grand staircase up to the room that belongs to the mistress of the house. She is lying on her huge canopy bed, attended only by one of the Eurasian servant girls standing near her, who silently leaves as soon as I arrive. I ask Eva how the doctor has found her, how long she has slept, if she feels better this evening. . . . She answers with a remote smile of her gray lips. Then she looks away. We remain that way for a moment, without saying another word, she staring at the ceiling and I still standing at her pillow, unable to keep from staring at her wizened face, the deepening wrinkles and her hair that has turned white. After some time—a long time, probably—she begins talking, saying that she was born in Belleville, near the church, that her name is neither Ava nor Eve, but Jacqueline, that she has not married an English lord, that she has never gone to China; the fancy brothel, in Hong Kong, is merely a story people have told her. In fact she wonders now if it wasn’t actually in Shanghai, a huge baroque palace with gaming rooms, prostitutes of all kinds, fine restaurants, theaters with erotic performances and opium dens. It was called “Le Grand Monde” . . . or something of the sort. . . . Her face is so blank, her gaze so remote, that I wonder if she is still quite conscious, if she is not already a little delirious. She has turned her head toward me, and suddenly she seems to notice me, for the first time; she fixes her reproving eyes on me; her face is severe now, as if she were noticing me with horror, or with incredulity, or with astonishment, or as though I were an object of scandal. But her pupils begin to drift, gradually, to
turn back toward the ceiling. She has also been told that meat was so rare there, and children so numerous, that little girls who didn’t find a protector or a husband soon enough were eaten. But Lady Ava does not believe that this detail is true. “It’s all stories,” she says, “invented by travelers.”
“Who knows?” she says again after a long silence, without taking her eyes from the white surface above her, whose stains she has once again begun to inspect. Then she asks me if it is dark yet. I answer that it has been dark for some time. I was going to add that night falls quickly in these latitudes, but I refrain. Raising my head, I notice in my turn the reddish stains with complicated, precise outlines: islands, rivers, continents, exotic fish. It is the lunatic who lives upstairs who, when he had a fit one day, spilled something on his floor. Today it seems to me that the damaged area has grown even larger. And here is Kim, whose footsteps can never be heard, returning now toward the bed, carefully carrying a champagne glass filled to the brim with some golden-yellow medicine which from a distance resembles sherry.
And meanwhile, Johnson is still pursuing the money he cannot find, from one end of Victoria to the other: Wales Road, Wishes Road, Queens Road, Queen Street, Lucky Street, Goldsmith Street, Taylor Street, Edouard Manneret Street. . . . And in the middle of the night, he keeps running into closed doors, locked gates, chains. And even if the banks were open, what bank would accept the terms he offers? He must, however, think of something or someone, before daybreak, who will rescue him; Lauren has not given him any more time, and it would not be wise for him, in any case, to remain a day longer in the British concession, waiting for the police to arrest him for good. At the ferry dock, arriving from Kowloon, there was only one rickshaw at the stand, which was lucky, given the hour. Johnson has refused to ask himself questions about this unhoped-for piece of luck, as about the amiability of the runner who seems disposed to take him wherever he wants to go for the rest of the night and who is patiently waiting for him where he stops, when at least he manages to go in somewhere, as is presently the case at the house of that Chinese agent where he has seen a light; he has not even had to pound very long, with his fists, against the wooden shutter that walls up the booth on the street side: hurried steps are heard on the stairs, and an old woman in a black European gown has opened the door. She has nonetheless pointed out that he could have pushed the door open himself, since the screws had been removed in preparation for his arrival. Since she grabbed him by the lapel of his jacket to lead him faster up to the second floor (by a steep, straight, narrow staircase), overwhelming him with lamentations in a piercing voice, in a mixture of crude English and a northern dialect he could grasp only in fragments, but in any case describing her husband’s health, he has finally understood that she took him for the doctor whom she had sent a neighborhood child to fetch. Without telling her the truth, still in hopes that the sick man might nonetheless do something for him, Johnson has followed her to a rather large room on the second floor occupied by several pieces of French furniture of 1925 style, placed regularly along the walls and which seem to have been conceived for a tiny attic, so that considerable space is left between each piece. The man is lying on his back, arms and legs extended across the damp and wrinkled sheets of a varnished wooden bed whose entire surface he covers, although he himself is puny enough. On account of the heat, which is quite unaffected by the tiny electric fan set on a cane chair, he is wearing only a pair of white cotton drawers which reach to his knees. His skinny body and his worn face have the same greenish-yellow color as the wallpaper.
Johnson asks the woman what disease her husband is suffering from. As she stares at him in astonishment, he suddenly recalls that he is the doctor, and he immediately corrects himself: “I mean: where is the pain?” But the old woman has no idea. She must be beginning to wonder why he has neither bag nor stethoscope, if she is used to Western medicine. Or else she has hitherto had dealings only with Chinese practitioners, and it is in desperation that she has sent for an Englishman this time; if that is the case, she cannot be surprised by anything, not even at seeing him in evening clothes. Johnson also tells himself that the real doctor will soon interrupt this farce, and that he will have to hurry, before his arrival, to broach the matter of a deal with the agent, if the latter is still in a state to discuss loans and collateral. The man has not moved since the American has come into the room, not even flickered his eyelids, although his eyes are as wide open as those of a Chinese can be; nor do the skinny sides of his chest seem to be rising and falling; and when he is asked what kind of pain he feels, he does not even seem to have heard. Perhaps he is dead already. “Look,” Johnson begins, “I’ve got to have some money, a lot of money. . . .” But the old woman begins uttering new shrieks, scandalized this time, at the sight of a practitioner who does not hesitate to demand his fee before beginning the consultation, as if he were afraid he might not be paid afterward. Johnson tries to explain his situation to her, but she does not listen to him, runs toward a little wardrobe closet and returns with a bundle of ten-dollar bills which she tries to make him put in his pocket. The American finally takes some bank notes and puts them on the night table, no longer daring to continue his doubtless futile request. Moreover, it is absurd to think that this petty moneylender, even willing and in good health, could obtain the enormous sum he needs in time. Suddenly abandoning his efforts, Johnson hurriedly runs back down the stairs, pursued by the old woman’s imprecations.
The next scene takes place on the nighttime quay of a fishing port, Aberdeen probably, although it takes a long time to get here in a rickshaw. The setting is visible only in part, under the meager lighting of some lanterns, each of which sheds its yellow light only on the objects in its immediate proximity, so that nothing can be discerned in its entirety, but merely disconnected fragments: a cast-iron mooring post from which extends a taut halyard, other ropes coiled and forming a kind of loose collar on the wet cobbles, half of a ragged girl sleeping on the ground against a huge empty basket, two thick iron rings set about a yard apart and at the same level in a vertical fieldstone wall, with a chain linking them in a slack curve, hanging freely on each side, wooden crates piled up and huge metallic fish with spindle-shaped bodies arranged neatly in the top one, water rippling in silver wavelets between sampans and boats anchored in all directions, the plank pier which runs to first one and then another, rising and falling, leading from the shore to a junk, moored a little farther out. Coolies, each carrying a huge bulging sack of jute on his shoulders, follow these rocking catwalks which yield under their bare feet and sway alarmingly, without ever casting one of the porters who follow each other at an interval of four or five feet into the black water or the boats. Since they cannot pass each other on the narrow pier, they all return together, unloaded, six short men in Indian file, making the flexible planks dance all the more vigorously; and they return to pick up a new load in a dark zone where some truck, buffalo cart or wagon must be parked. An older man with a sparse long beard, wearing blue overalls and a skullcap, watches them go by and notes the number of sacks they carry in a notebook much longer than it is wide. It is to him that Johnson speaks, asking in Cantonese if the junk being loaded is Mr. Chang’s. The man does not answer, still watching the movement of the little men in shorts who are continuing their operation. Taking his silence for acquiescence, Johnson asks the sailing time and the boat’s destination. Still obtaining no reply, he adds that he is the American who is to be taken as far as Macao. “Passport,” the supervisor says without taking his eyes off the improvised catwalk; and he merely glances at Johnson, who, rather astonished by this official formality with regard to a clandestine passage, nonetheless holds out the document. “Departure this morning at six-fifteen,” the overseer says, handing back the passport. As he replaces it in his inside right pocket, Johnson wonders how the man will be able to recognize his passenger, whom he has not once attempted to examine. But now there is nothing left in the silence but the water washing between the sampans,
the bare feet slapping in cadence on the cobbles, or on the wet planks which bump against the gunwales.
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn Page 20
