A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  “Does he treat you well, your gentleman friend?” I ask. Ma Ling meets my gaze in the mirror and smiles.

  “I am lucky,” she says simply. “And I have you to thank for everything.”

  Ma Ling seems as if she is about to say something, but only continues to look in the mirror, her eyes now focused back on her own reflection, silently combing her hair.

  “What does he want? Your gentleman friend. What does he want from you?”

  “We speak English, we read out loud. I read to him, he reads to me.”

  “And love?” I ask. “What about love?”

  Ma Ling’s jaw tightens. I try to catch her eyes again in the glass, but she fixes her gaze on herself.

  He’s still there, the man, lurching with the room. He says something to me in that same indecipherable dialect. From the tone of his voice, I can tell that he is saying something nice. With the passing seconds, his voice becomes more cheerful. It reminds me of someone calling out at a picnic—“More wine. Would you like some more wine?” I see the banks of the River Cam. Young men in white suits and straw hats, rowing a boat. A woman strolling by the water, book in hand. Another sitting on a blanket spread on the grass, earnestly making a point; a male companion pours something frothy into her glass. A cloud rolls overhead, rolling somewhere very fast.

  The man with the pockmarked skin is on top of me now and he grunts. I know this is happening, I can feel him inside me, but it is distant, as if I am remembering the moment rather than living it. He seems to be taking a very long time. His face is clenched with a look of great effort. A child’s face floats above me. I am surprised to see that the child is not Chinese, but a blond boy with ruddy cheeks. He is crunching an apple. The child waves something over my head. It looks like a fishing rod. He wears a serious expression. Lying in the fog of putrid-smelling smoke, I wonder what the boy is doing here, and feel a wave of shame. I try to say something to him, but find I am unable to move my jaw. He seems to be studying my face; he is crisscrossing my face with his steady blue eyes.

  “Do come with us,” the child says. “I’ll do the worms. I promise to do the worms.”

  The room spins giddily. Then, for an instant, my mind clears. The fog is gone, and in its place, a crystal light.

  I know I won’t find another girl to replace Ma Ling. I haven’t the heart.

  “The chicken coops,” I say.

  The boy has disappeared, and the man does not seem to have heard me. His grunting escalates for a short time and then abruptly ceases. A weight is lifted from my body, and I draw in a lungful of stale, smoky air.

  “My friend,” the man is saying, in English now. A horrible smile breaks his face into two slabs of scaly rock. “He wants too,” and he points first to my crotch, then to a man towering above the cot, a man with the indigo tunic and short baggy trousers of General Piao’s raggedy army. “For Englishwoman, my friend give pipe.”

  The recent arrival is clutching something. I reach up, snatch the thing, and find in my trembling fingers an oilskin pouch. I open the drawstring and pull out a pipe and a second, smaller pouch. I fumble at the tiny oily strings of the second pouch but they are tightly knotted and will not give.

  “Damn it,” I say, feeling hot tears in my eyes.

  Both men are grinning now. The new arrival is stroking himself through his baggy trousers. Neither makes a move to help me with the pouch but watch, as if my struggle amuses them. I prop myself up against the wall, concentrate on the strings, and slowly manage to loosen the knot. The pouch open, I carefully remove a small piece of opium.

  “The lamp. Where is the lamp?” I ask desperately.

  Again, the men laugh. “Lamp. Yes, lamp.”

  One of them produces a box of some kind, crudely made, and filled with something that gives off a rank odor. With one hand still on his groin, the man pulls a match from somewhere and draws it across the wall. He teases me for a moment, holding it just out of reach, and then, laughing, sets the flame to the stuff in the box and throws the spent stick to the ground. A small flame leaps from the box, giving off an odious stink. Shoving it before me, I realize he intends me to heat the opium over the burning stuff. I have nothing to use as an instrument, so I just hold it over, feel the flame bite my fingers as the opium loosens to slime. I paste it over the hole in the stem of the pipe and with all of my strength, suck in the smoke.

  An awful sound brews in his throat as he mounts me.

  I suck again at the pipe, only vaguely aware of his coarse movements.

  The feel of the yellow chiffon as I leapt from Robert’s divan, the swish a frothy sound that matched the heightened girlish joy I felt. Yes, I would find a note card or leaf of stationery—it didn’t matter what. If I could not bring myself to say those words, I would simply write them down.

  I had thought myself barred from such pure happiness.

  We each have our birthright—mine was the legacy of the cramped Manchester flat: paste stones, watered-down cologne, counterfeit declarations of love, and me, succumbing to the fool’s gold, a child desperate to please.

  Later, the crash from grace, my eyes opened onto the truth. And then, the stark knowledge—that above all else, my birthright was this: a denial of the possibility of ever really loving.

  Until that moment.

  Me, in yellow chiffon, my bare shoulders prickly with cold and thrill both; me, rummaging in the tiny drawers and slots at the back of Robert’s rolltop desk, which typically he took care to lock, but which he had, in the fluster of his own desire to make some kind of declaration, left open. Rummaging for the note card or sheet of engraved stationery on which I’d write words I never thought would be possible to utter in truth. My heart sang with it, I’d taken flight—unaccountably, at last—on a love that Robert shared. I was more certain of it than anything I’d ever known.

  Letters and documents, their seals broken, all kinds of papers and neatly arranged bills, snug in their slots and little wooden drawers. He must have some writing paper somewhere, I thought. In this last drawer, surely he must. But no, only stamps and sealing wax.

  This slot? Something jammed in here, at the back. Too tight to properly reach.

  Some premonitory sentiment. I pulled back my hand, cradled it with the other, as if it were hurt. The girlish excitement at the idea of finding the paper I was looking for suddenly froze to something else.

  Do we know when the perilous moment is upon us? When the great hand is readying to slap us forward, into the maw?

  The search for paper forgotten, I worked my two fingers into the space, tugged and jostled and poked until I was able to draw out the desperate contents wedged deeply within.

  The man has finished with me. He rolls off the cot, reclaims the candle from where he set it down on the floor, and disappears.

  “Mama,” I croak aloud. To nobody. To everybody. “Are you proud of your girl? Have I made you proud?”

  Aware of the smoke—and then, of a sickening realization that spreads like the rays of a black sun. It was for this that I had ached and yearned. Not for Ma Ling, not for anything human, but for this.

  “Robert,” I whisper, my voice brittle. “Don’t you see? We were made for each other.”

  Not sleep, but a blank dissociation from light and sound; a ghastly taste of the grave. A faint slapping noise penetrated the airtight seal. A sensation of something impossibly heavy, a slab of marble ten feet thick sliding open and, in the crack, that soft slapping sound: fervent little waves lapping at the shore. I opened my eyes. The room was dark and filled with a stench of fish oil and human grime. The sound, coming from the corner, growing louder. I raised my body tentatively, swung my feet onto the floor, and squinted through the darkness. My eyes adjusted quickly, revealing the outlines of a human form rocking unevenly back and forth. An old woman with stringy gray hair, her crinkled face and opaque, bleary eyes arranged into an expression of idiotic glee. Her toothless jaws gummed noisily; this was the sound that had roused me. As I drew nearer, the old
woman clapped her hands merrily; a channel of drool formed at the corner of her working mouth and made its way down her stubbly chin. I stumbled toward the door.

  Outside, the air was even more putrid than it had been inside. The streets were coated with an oily film—muck from the port deposited by the pummeling rains. My cracked shoes made the going treacherous. I slipped and slid and, though I did not fall, each step threatened a tumble. I thought about the pipe that had miraculously appeared at some point in the middle of the night. But sharp needles were already whirring in my skull and I cursed the inferior offering. Around me, the air thickened the way it did before a renewed onslaught of rain. I quickened my pace, moving now on the balls of my feet, which lessened the feeling that I was about to topple, and it hit me: I had lost an entire day. It had been night when I drifted off in the stranger’s putrid room and night again now. Not the same night, surely: too much had happened. No matter, I thought. The days may as well shrivel up and disappear.

  A faint breeze, tinged with salt, reached my nostrils. Had the flutter of air come from inland, it would have been tainted with the smell of goat dung and human waste. I turned in the direction from which it blew, hoping this would lead me back to the sea. My North Star, I thought bitterly, this scrap of salty air. Although I knew it was hopeless, the idea of finding Ma Ling beat in my mind like a trapped moth until it felt like it would knock a hole in my skull. I turned into a side alley and, for a moment, everything went black. Then, the impression of a heavy, tarred cloth being pulled back, and of light slowly entering some vast humid room. I found myself curled on the ground. As I picked myself up, a puffy sensation of pain swelled in my left knee. Limping along the alley, I felt a burst of determination.

  I’m going to find Ma Ling.

  The alley turned to a street and back to an alley again, and then ended abruptly at a crumbly brick wall. I sensed rather than heard human motion, and picked my way slowly over the uneven stones. Sure enough, a man, moving up against a wall. His back was toward me—a broad back, and the man too tall to be Chinese. Faint moonlight drizzled through the flat, water-heavy sky, making the smooth material of his shirt dully gleam. Silently, I tiptoed toward him until I was right beside him. It was only then that I saw the little face pressed sideways against the wall. What struck me most was the look of forbearance in the child’s face. At that instant, the girl slowly moved her eyes, and I found myself peering into two steady, blank pools. Without thinking, I leapt upon the man and, possessed suddenly of uncommon strength, tore him away and flung him to the ground. The child stayed pressed against the wall, still holding the rags of her dress around her waist in delicate dirty fingers, regarding me with a calm unblinking gaze. A flicker of fear crossed the girl’s face. Something had scared her. And then I realized that I was uttering a peculiar, sustained scream.

  I turned around. The man, having righted himself, withdrew into the shadows; I could just make out that he was fastening his pants. I lunged at him, and found myself again sliding into muddy blackness with nothing to catch me, and nothing to grip. Next thing I knew, I was running—sure-footed, now, despite the broken heel of my shoe and my swelling knee. But I was not moving as fast as I might have been and, in a flash, realized why. There was a small hand in my own, someone beside me, trying to keep up but slowed by a child’s stride and the slipperiness of bare feet on wet stone. I moved my grasp to her wrist and continued in a half-run, half-stumble, the girl flying weightlessly alongside me.

  I continued to stumble and the nausea hit. My nose and eyes streamed; the little hand was limp in my own. I stopped, and turned to look at her. In place of the blank eyes, I saw flat terror. My own eyes were flooding, my chest heaved with sobs. For a moment, I faced the girl. I let go of her hand. She looked at me, bewildered.

  “Go,” I said harshly, using the street-slang word and shoving the child who stumbled, almost fell, then raced away, a gray streak of energy in the dark.

  * * *

  Somebody is banging on the door. My hand flicks jerkily before my face, shooing away mosquitoes and flies that do not exist. The door bursts open. My eyes are dry but I manage to crack them open. A dim figure stands in the door frame: Han Shu, his round face distant and otherworldly as a moon.

  “Just wait until you see who I’ve brought you!” he booms. I watch Han Shu’s large frame thrusting toward me in a series of strange little jerks. He is moving that way, I realize, because there is somebody with him, someone he is prodding before him. I raise my head, squint my eyes in an attempt to focus my gaze.

  “Ma Ling,” I manage to croak, and I reach a bony arm in the girl’s direction.

  “Yes,” Han Shu gaily declares. “You see? I’ve found her! I’ve brought her back! Can’t say it was easy, all the sleuth work and scouting about. And the little rascal did put up some resistance. But no matter, now that we have her back home!”

  At this Han Shu, in a spasm of joy, reaches down and clasps Ma Ling to his chest, raising her so that her legs dangle in the air. He sets the girl down again and turns her by the shoulders to face me.

  “Well?” he says breathlessly. “What do you say?”

  I look hollowly at my employer.

  “Christine, don’t you see? Our plans! It’s all still possible! … Don’t worry,” he continues, apparently to Ma Ling. “She’s a little under the weather, your teacher. Has been for some time. But she’ll come around.”

  I crane toward Ma Ling, my neck aches from the effort. I take in the way the girl has draped her scarf over her shoulder—was that the olive and yellow Hermès?—in an only partially successful effort to hide a large tear in her dress.

  What have you done? I want to shriek at Han Shu, but in my daze, say nothing. Ma Ling, too, remains silent. Han Shu fondles the girl’s hand lovingly, then plucks at the torn silk flap of her bodice with thumb and forefinger.

  “We’ll fix this, my pet. You know Christine’s skill with a needle. We’ll have you all fixed up again in no time.”

  My eyelids droop. I again try to speak, there is something I want to say, but the tongue in my mouth is no longer my own, it belongs to some foreign and mechanical realm. I fumble at my side for the pipe, my hand a blunt bulbous object not wholly within my control.

  “Your afternoon refreshments, my dear, that’s what you want,” Han Shu says.

  He pulls from his pocket an enamel box, then picks up the pipe I’d been groping for. Using a tiny gold spoon, he scoops out a brown pellet.

  How did you get her back? I want to say, but the effort is too great. And besides, I think dimly, the thought floating away from me at the very instant it appears, that isn’t the point, the blur of Ma Ling’s fierce eyes make that clear.

  Someone is holding the pipe to my lips. I feel the small close heat of the sticky, swollen lump, perched above the hole on the stem of the pipe. If there is a point to it all, I sense it is somewhere in the room: somewhere between the cracked boards of the floor and the peeling paint of the ceiling; in the spaces beneath the metal frame of my cot, perhaps, which squeaks pleasantly as I lean forward to allow Han Shu to slide the slim tip of the pipe’s stem into my mouth—or off in a dusty corner, fleshy and inquisitive as a mouse. I suck in the smoke, close my eyes tightly, and lower my head back down to the cot.

  How desperately I had wanted to see Ma Ling again; how I had longed to encounter her, if only for one last, brief moment. Something stirs briefly within: that beautiful oval face, those clear dark eyes narrowed with loathing. I can feel my mind glazing over. I hear Archibald’s voice, as though he were there in the room. “What do the English know about opium. Ha! Visions of wicked Chinamen, exotic Eastern scenes run amok! No subtlety. No imagination. A child’s playroom equipped by a dull-witted adult. To strip the great treasure of Egyptian Thebes of imagination—its very essence! A crime, I tell you, a punishable crime, by my lights.”

  A violent clapping threatens to splice my eardrums, a thousand or more hands drawn together in a cacophony of cheer. I crack o
pen my eyes. It is only Han Shu clapping his hands, smiling at Ma Ling who is standing, listless, beside him.

  “How charming,” I hear him declare. “Our family, reunited at last!”

  There is no reason to leave my room. Everything I need, everything I want, is here.

  When did Han Shu change his tactic? Arrange it so that every morning one of the girls would tap on the door, enter quietly, and leave a small bulging cloth bag. No more tiny turquoise box with its limited cache. It is a marvel. No more waiting, no minutes to count on the ornate face of the clock around my neck. No infuriating ticking. From time to time, the door opens; another girl appears holding a bowl of soup or a mound of rice, a glass of sweet red syrup or a goblet of wine.

  A cloisonné bracelet rattles on my wrist. I straighten my arm by the bed, and the bracelet clatters to the floor. I watch it spin to rest. Living is a horizontal fall. Who said that? Someone Archibald was fond of quoting.

  “To hell with him.” I say it aloud, and I wonder who I mean. Archibald? Or Han Shu, who is giving me what I want, serving it up in great dollops? I live in an igloo of cold black bricks, I think. Or Robert. Is that who I mean?

  Yes, I found it there, wedged in the back of Robert’s rolltop desk that should have been locked but wasn’t. I never gave Robert a chance to explain. What if—? What if—there were some explanation, other than the one I’d presumed?

  I look down at my thin hands, notice, on the back of one, an unseemly scab.

  I remember Ma Ling up in her room; recall the look in her eyes, last night, of loathing.

  I didn’t wait for Robert to come back; I remember only a frenzy. No thought, just blind animal action.