by Basu, Kanal
“Xu is my wife’s elder brother. I met her through the Horseman. You can say he arranged our wedding.”
The sound of running feet came from the courtyard and stopped in front of the door. Wangsheng stuck his head in. The Savages had started to fight among themselves, uprooting trees and setting off bonfires. More trouble was expected when night fell, and he pleaded with Antonio to return to his pavilion because they’d need to bolt the gates from inside to stop the soldiers from entering. An explosion shook the house, and caused the patient to cry out.
Xu’s sister! Antonio was thrilled. It was the closest he’d come to unlocking the mystery of his teacher. She must know everything about him. He could probe her too about Fumi, get her to tell him about Xu’s assistant. He ignored Wangsheng and kept on talking.
“Did you live in the monastery with Xu after your family had fled the grasslands?” he asked Lixia. She kept her eyes on the girl, and shook her head.
“We were separated when we were young. He was sent to live with monks and I with a troupe of dancers and musicians. It could easily have been the other way around.” Lixia smiled.
“Thank God for that!” Oscar bellowed. “Otherwise we’d have spent half our life arguing over yin and yang.”
“Did he ever tell you what he does for the empress?” Antonio thought he must be brave enough to ask. It was time for him to learn everything he could about Xu. Maybe Lixia would know where to find him; she could tell him if he was still hiding in his peasant’s hut.
“Of course, he didn’t!” Oscar answered for his wife. “Once you enter her stable, you lose your tongue and become a loyal pet.”
Lixia gestured helplessly as the girl started to howl, throwing her arms and legs about like a buck felled by a hunter’s shot. Oscar rose quickly and called his servants to fetch his surgical box. Filling a syringe with morphine, he injected his patient, holding her down with his weight. It took the joint efforts of the couple to calm her, bathing her head with ice-cold water and wiping her sores with a soothing tincture. Then Lixia invited Antonio to join them for late rice, tempting him with the rare delicacy of snipe brought over by Wangsheng and Tian.
While they ate, Oscar cursed the soldiers and the eunuch attendants let out loud moans and gasps as explosions rocked the pavilions. “Shitheads! They’re brave only when it comes to a friendly fight among themselves. The great imperial army is no more than a bunch of wimps. They’d lose easily to an enemy less than half its size, like the Japanese navy. They’re afraid of the Kaiser, who’s threatening war unless the Chinese yield to his demand of a naval base in Shandong. Even the Italians can bully them simply with their mannerisms! The Savages are savage only in name.” He mocked the eunuchs for being foolishly nervous about the soldiers, when the likes of Fumi moved about the palace without fear.
Antonio stopped eating. “You mean when she brought the girl over?”
Oscar nodded with his mouth full, and Lixia spoke for him. “She passed the very spot where the soldiers are camping. She must’ve seen them fighting when she went to fetch the patient from the concubines’ hall near the marble bridge full of gun turrets.” Washing down the snipe meat with wine, Oscar added, “Mind you, she herself was as sick as that poor girl, not very long ago.”
“Fumi?”
“She suffered from chronic depression after her friend the Dutchman was killed. A classic case of nervous breakdown attended by hysteria. Almost starved herself to death, hiding inside her home, afraid for her own life, till Xu saved her.”
Lixia urged Antonio to eat, taking his silence for an aversion to the snipe. “You’ll miss your late rice at midnight if you eat so little.”
“How did Xu save her?” He asked his hosts, trying hard to keep his mind perfectly still.
“She came to see our Horseman and he cured her of her depression and hysteria,” Oscar replied. “Then he taught her Nei ching and brought her into the palace were she’d be safe.”
“He married her and brought her here as his wife, made her look after the empress,” Lixia corrected her husband.
He must’ve misheard Lixia, Antonio thought, clearing his throat to ask her a question, interrupted each time by Oscar plying him with more helpings and offering generous advice on the eating habits of the Chinese.
“It’s what they eat that keeps them healthy, not the Canons.”
“Who was married to whom?” Antonio spoke each word carefully.
“Xu and Fumi, the Horseman and his assistant. We too got married soon after, but it wasn’t a double wedding!” Oscar replied.
“Xu and Fumi were married before us, but it was a proper Chinese wedding,” Lixia said, her eyes growing fond.
“You bet it was proper! With gongs and fireworks, the groom marching in procession, accompanied by his Good Luck Man to fetch the bride from her house and all that.” Oscar slurped on his bean-curd noodles, and added the details.
“Oscar was his Good Luck Man, his ‘best man’ as you’d say.” Lixia stirred the soup pot, “But he forgot to wear red as per custom, and dressed in a white silk mandarin robe, which is the sign of mourning!”
“Did they come here afterwards to live in the palace?” Antonio asked in a choked voice.
“No.” Lixia exchanged a quick glance with her husband. “Fumi came here, and he went back to his home in the village.”
“And they’ve been coming and going ever since.” Oscar patted Antonio good-humoredly, and pushed over the pot of dark guilinggao jelly made from the bittersweet shell of box turtles, with reputed powers to clear up the skin after an attack of smallpox.
Antonio left before dessert, feigning a full stomach and a seasonal cold. He walked briskly back to his pavilion past the lake that was freshly spawned and brimming with fish.
The songbird fell silent as he entered the kitchen. A green lizard circled his early rice left by the attendants, observing the wormlike rice noodles with curiosity. The wood oven was cold. He sat under the plum tree as if waiting for someone to appear in the courtyard, then went inside the lodge. The stillness of the pavilion set his mind racing. Where is she now? He imagined Fumi in Xu’s hut, looking like a peasant in a broad-brimmed hat, feeding the buffaloes in the sheds. How did they manage to fool him? Your new teacher is the same as me … she has learned the Nei ching the hard way too. The vision of Fumi, kneeling in the courtyard as Xu taught him his lessons, filled him with an uncontrollable urge to scream. They must’ve schemed behind his back, laughing their heads off at the Portuguese doctor as he lost his mind and fell hopelessly in love. Why …? How could she have fooled him, feigned to be his lover for three full seasons? The early rice swelled up to his chest and he felt he was choking under the hard shell of a tortoise exacting its revenge on its gluttonous enemy.
Unable to sleep all night, he rose early and ran up the one hundred and fourteen steps of the Tower of Fragrance, where the empress came on the third month of every lunar year to worship ancestors. Fumi might be there, he thought, as a member of her entourage. The eunuchs would be startled to see him among the palace ladies; they’d raise a cry as if an eagle had descended on a dove’s nest.
The empty temple turned his mind toward the Garden of Pleasures. Forbidden to foreigners, it was a favorite among the royals, where they came to hear Confucian tales from palace scholars. He’d be stopped at the entrance, he knew, shooed away by the guards then wrestled to the ground if he insisted on barging in and taking a close look at the visitors.
Gardeners glanced at him quick, then went back to polishing their sickles. Women played cards under a cherry tree. The sound of laughter grew as he inched up behind them. His mind raced through the possibilities. If not in the garden, she could be chatting with the dowager’s eunuchs; or strolling under the weeping willows at the Island of Immortals, waiting for the sun to set before she joined her mistress on the marble boat. Perhaps she’d be on the Bridge of Floating Hearts, among the anglers who fished for pleasure and returned their catch to the lake.
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sp; It took him all morning to realize his mistake. She wouldn’t be at the palace but at the soldiers’ camps, treating the sick and those injured in the friendly fight. Chinese doctors and their assistants must be busy caring for the camp wives and their scraggly children. Reaching the lakeshore, he walked boldly toward the bell tower that had been turned into a small village full of sounds and smells. Sleepless faces greeted him, weary and battle scarred. It didn’t seem like a part of the palace, but a jumble of huts uprooted by force and planted haphazardly around the tower.
The Savages haven’t seen a foreigner before, might skin one alive taking him for a rare animal. … Ferguson had warned everyone during John Harris’s briefings. Many of the soldiers were Boxers in disguise, Wangsheng had told him. It was their job to start a fight between the Savages and foreigners. Even Joachim Saldanha avoided the soldiers, who didn’t believe in give and take, but grabbed everything they could, sparing none, not even beggars and priests.
Hell-bent on finding Fumi, he ignored all warnings. Luckily, the soldiers were dozing after early rice, and few noticed him picking his way past their sprawling bodies, lying like corpses in a battlefield. The women peered out of the tents to watch him; stopped fanning their ovens and nursing their babies. An old woman made the sign of crossed swords, forbidding him from approaching her tent, and barked out sharp orders to the children playing nearby. He quickened his steps, and peered inside the huts. She must be here. … From all that he knew about Fumi, he couldn’t imagine her hiding with the empress inside the palace, while the tents groaned and moaned with sufferers.
The sound of chanting drew him to a hut, and peeking through the flaps he saw a doctor bent over her patient. A soldier with a nasty gash on his head lay on the ground surrounded by his anxious camp wives, while a frail and elderly woman swirled around him. Her lips moved, and he heard a wail. Holding a knife in her hand, she made as if to cut the man’s head open.
Not a doctor, but a quack … Maybe she’d know about Fumi. Perhaps she’d visited the injured soldier and left, knowing that his wounds were untreatable. I must ask … He parted the flaps and entered, covering the opening and darkening the interior. One of the women noticed him and screamed, followed by the rest. The doctor drew her knife quickly back into her robe. The wounded soldier opened his eyes and glared at him. Word of his presence seemed to spread from hut to hut within moments, the sleepy camps suddenly coming alive. A rush of voices followed him as he withdrew quickly and strode out, heading toward the bell tower. The soldiers called out to him; he could hear guns being loaded and a rock landed at his feet. Breaking into a run, he saw a dark form flit across the tower, dressed in a peasant’s smock. “Fumi!” he called out to her, then watched her disappear into the gardens. Someone tugged at his sleeves, and Antonio raised a hand to strike him, taking him for a Savage. It was a child. He smiled at Antonio and drew his gaze down to a handful of birds’ eggs, holding them like pearls on his grimy palms.
Back in his pavilion, Antonio called the eunuchs over. They stood in front of him glumly, expecting a dressing down on account of the poor meals they’d been forced to serve without their daily visit to the market. Wangsheng had an explanation ready on his lips for the rancid meats that the donkey cart seller had brought over.
“My little nephew will go to the market from tomorrow. He’ll risk his life to bring you fresh food.” He looked at Tian for support.
“I don’t want him to go to the market. Both of you must go immediately to find Fumi and bring her back here.”
Wangsheng shrugged. “But we don’t know if she’s here at the palace.”
“Then go and ask the empress where she is.”
“But it’s forbidden to speak to the empress without her permission.” The older eunuch made a gesture of helplessness. “It’s forbidden to enter her quarters even.”
“It’s forbidden to disobey your guest.” Antonio spoke to him sternly. “You can go search for her in the palace, while Tian goes to Xu’s home to look for her.”
“Xu?” The eunuchs looked at each other.
“She’s his wife. You knew that, didn’t you?” He circled them like a caged tiger, spitting out his words. “Why did you hide that from me? Why didn’t you tell me who she really was when I asked you? Why did you lie? She’s a better doctor than Xu …” He mimicked Wangsheng, then stared hard into his eyes. “I thought you were my friend.”
His attendants looked confused, then Tian spoke up. “Dr. Xu told us not to trouble you when we spoke to him about our problems. He said we mustn’t worry if you didn’t wake up in time for your porridge after spending late nights with your teacher; we mustn’t complain if the vats couldn’t be cleaned properly because we were too shy to disturb you when you were together. We mustn’t be surprised if we found the bed soiled and pillows ripped up.” He walked away towards the kitchen and called his uncle over to join him, throwing his parting words to Antonio: “We thought everyone knew everything – Xu, Fumi, and you.”
She has deceived me for her husband, Antonio thought, sitting alone in the courtyard. He recalled Xu’s words. Maybe the soldiers are on their way to Peking … there’ll be war when they come. You’ll know before us. You can tell me then. … And he felt Cedric Hart’s arm around his shoulders. … You, more than us, will know when the real trouble starts. … When you leave the palace and come over, we’ll know the attack on the Legation is soon to begin. … As long as you are there, we’ll know we’re safe here!
He regretted ignoring Joachim Saldanha’s advice. You mustn’t carry the palace with you when you visit the Legation, or give away the foreigners’ secrets to the Chinese. He’d be pressed to take sides, his padre friend had cautioned him, and he chided himself for acting so foolishly. Rising, he paced the courtyard, stomped on the spring roots and scattered the sacks of birdseed brought by the eunuchs. The rustling plum tree drowned out the footsteps approaching the pavilion’s gates, and it took him a while to notice Fumi. Hushing him with a finger, she entered the lodge and called him over, shutting the door firmly behind her.
“You must leave.”
“Then you must leave with me,” he matched her pressing voice. “I can’t leave you behind with the soldiers all around us. Or do you not need me anymore?”
Standing with her back to the door, she ignored his words. “The empress is powerless now. She can’t stop the Boxers. They’ll strike the Legation any moment. You’ll be cut off from your friends, and there’ll be no way for you to leave China. The palace will turn into a battlefield. Pavilions will be destroyed, the houses set on fire and gardens uprooted. … It’ll be like the opium war all over again. No one will be able to escape.”
“What’ll happen to you then?” Antonio stepped closer to her. “Will you run away to your husband’s home when the war starts?” He waited for her to answer, then spoke slowly, “Why didn’t you tell me you’re Xu’s wife?” She didn’t speak, turning away toward the open window.
“Why did you lie when you said you loved me?”
She shook her head, her lips started to tremble.
“You mean it wasn’t a lie? That you loved me even though you were married to someone else?” He spoke as evenly as he could. “Why did you hide the truth from me?”
“You mean the truth about syphilis?” She sounded defiant. “The one and only thing you think about day and night?”
“The truth about you and me.”
“How does it matter who I’m married to?” She avoided looking at him, the spring breeze blowing her hair through the window.
“It matters because you can’t be mywife. Because it means we can’t both leave China and go away, that we couldn’t marry as we’d planned.”
She tried to stop him, raising her hand to cover his lips. “As you planned. When did we decide to leave China?”
“But I thought …”
She interrupted him, “If I asked you to stay, would you have stayed?”
“You mean stay here as a prisoner, waiting
for you to come and go as you pleased, whenever your husband set you free?” A strange note entered Antonio’s voice, a note he didn’t recognize as his own. “With you I thought I’d have more … more than I’ve ever had or wanted before.”
She turned and stepped out into the courtyard, followed by Antonio. He called after her, “Stop! If we go, we must go together.”
The breeze turned her into a kite fleeting across the courtyard and he tried to catch her in the mist rising from the lake. The last of the snow cranes flew over their heads, crying out for its lost flock. Fumi followed the bird with a desperate look.
“To leave now would mean the end.”
“End of what?” He raised his voice over the rustling trees.
“It’s the only chance … don’t you see?” She gestured with her hands to make the argument that seemed plain to her. “It’s only now that they’re afraid of being trapped. After years of waiting, it has finally come to this.”
He caught her at the edge of the boundary wall, just before she could leave through the arched opening. Her eyes glowed like that of the peasant girl he’d seen at the empress’s antechamber.
“Only chance for what, Fumi?”
In seconds they’d turned icy: “To kill Jacob’s killers.”
He had lost Fumi, Antonio was certain. He had seen it in her eyes, the eyes of the wild crane that had broken free and flown past their pavilion. Who could tell him what she might do next?
“Fetch Xu!” he called out to his attendants next morning. Wangsheng scowled. “The doctor has disappeared, and no one knows when he’ll be back. It’s too dangerous to go out with Boxers everywhere.”
“Liar!” Antonio cursed him and shouted to the chair bearers to get ready, making known his intention to go himself and trace Xu down. The older eunuch went out grudgingly and returned with more bad news: the bearers had disappeared as well. Perhaps the soldiers had commandeered them to go on a joyride. His anger grew as he heard the eunuchs chatting and yawning all day.
