The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  The man removes his glasses, wipes one round lens and then the other with a white cloth. He is pale and looks uncomfortable. He has slender, nervous hands.

  “Might I suggest, Your Excellency, that you try this lovely person, whose name is Qingyue. She is very skillful, if you understand my meaning.” Lao Mama poses for the man, hands clasped. Her smile is sly and red.

  “A girl like this is good for your vitality. She knows more than thirty positions that help the yangqi to arrive and stay strong,” she is saying now. “Qingyue has memorized the methods of each one of them. She has her favorites, but the choices are yours, Honorable Gentleman. Choose one position—choose thirty. Up to you, Venerable Sir. Your decision, your honorable selection.”

  Lao Mama is walking back and forth. Taking tiny steps. “Take all the time you need,” she says. “A gao guan like yourself deserves to have what pleases him. He deserves the best that money can buy.”

  The man holds one hand up, palm flat, indicating, No, not her. Not that girl. The expression on his face cannot be read.

  “Or perhaps the subchancellor would prefer a girl of less experience.” Lao Mama tries again. “Take a close look at Sibao. She is ba mian linglong. Charming on eight sides—and exquisite. She has almost never been touched in all of her life.”

  The man rises from the stool. He isn’t smiling or telling jokes or cracking seeds with his teeth. He isn’t licking his lips the way some men do while they decide, and what Lao Mama says is not true. Sibao is not charming on eight sides—or exquisite. She has teeth like a mule. She has been touched a great many times in her life.

  “No,” the man says. “She is not the one I am looking for either.” For an instant Jinhua thinks it is sadness she hears in his voice. He looks away from Sibao, away from the line of girls. It is as though he were remembering something.

  “The girl I seek,” he says, coming back to Lao Mama, “is beautiful and virtuous, and I love her.” Qingyue giggles out loud. Lao Mama’s painted eyebrows lift an inch or two into her forehead and Jinhua thinks briefly of Nüwa. “I have only girls of the finest character,” Lao Mama says, “and every one of them is beautiful and virtuous, and they have many other fine qualities that would lead a gentleman such as yourself to fall in love.”

  There is a black smudge under Lao Mama’s left eye, and surely everyone in the room sees it, but no one says, Your eye is smudged—you should wipe it clean.

  The man is looking now at Cuilian, who is wearing a new blue tunic embroidered with butterflies. He is frowning, trying to choose. He moves on with his eyes, quickly, and it is Jinhua he is looking at now. The foreign clock Lao Mama has just purchased from a Shanghai merchant is ticking—di da, di da. It has golden needles that turn around and around but only very slowly. No one knows why Lao Mama bought the clock, and no one knows how to read the mysterious writing on the front of it.

  “The most beautiful flowers grow at the back of the garden,” Lao Mama is saying now. It is what she always says when a man comes to the end of the line and she doesn’t want him to go without choosing a girl. Jinhua is trying to clear her mind, to give nothing away, to wear her empty-rice-bowl face. And the man is still looking at her, looking for a long time without saying anything. And then he nods, and she knows what she must do. She bows her head. She walks to the door. She leads the man up the stairs. Her hips sway. She knows his eyes are on her back, and she knows that Lao Mama’s eye is watching.

  He wants to drink tea. “Longjing, if you have it,” he says. Sipping, he asks her questions. What is her honorable name? And the year of her birth? How long has she been in the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love? What is her favorite color? Her favorite fruit? Her favorite song?

  She has been here six years, Jinhua recalls. She has been a money tree for one, but she doesn’t tell him this. Her favorite color is green. Green like a magnolia leaf, not like an emerald. Her favorite fruit is the kumquat. When she tells him that she was born in the Dog Year, his eyes widen, and he murmurs, “Of course.” She answers his questions slowly, and he nods at everything she says to him as though he has known the answer all along and before she said it. She tells him the truth, and she is speaking to him about things she has not thought about in a long, long time. No one has asked her what she does or does not like. No one cares who she is or where she comes from. No one except for Suyin, who doesn’t ask because she says we must abide with what is real in the life we are living now, and there is no place in this world for likes and dislikes.

  Sitting straight-backed on a bench, the man asks about Jinhua’s favorite poet.

  Her favorite poet is Zhang Ji, and this she can tell him without pausing to think. He begins to recite. “Yueluo wu ti shuang man tian.” The poem is familiar; just hearing it makes Jinhua sad and then sorry. It is Suzhou’s favorite poem by Suzhou’s favorite poet: “A Night-Mooring Near Maple Bridge.” They both know the poem by heart, Jinhua and the man, and they continue reciting together. The second line of Zhang Ji’s poem, the third, and the fourth.

  Under the shadows of maple trees a boatman moves with his torch;

  And I hear, from beyond Suzhou, from the temple on Cold Mountain,

  The midnight bell ringing for me, here in my boat.

  “Ah,” the man says. “You know the poem.”

  His questions seem odd. Everything he says to Jinhua is strange and has never been said before. “Have you been there, to the Maple Bridge? Have you seen the boatman? Have you heard the bell?” he is asking her now. Jinhua bows her head, and her throat feels tight. She has been to the Maple Bridge with Baba, and the memory of it is carved in her bones and engraved on her heart, and the boatman, her boatman with the pussy willows, is on her mind now too, and so is Timu without any hair. Jinhua looks past the man, at the place on the wall, and Lao Mama’s eye is there, peeking through and watching.

  “Do you have other memories?” he asks. “Do you remember me?”

  “I do remember,” Jinhua says, and what she remembers now is Lao Mama telling her, “Whatever a man wants you to do, do that.” And she releases the sash from her waist and unfastens the clasp at her collar, and she remembers that Longjing tea was Baba’s favorite. She remembers the way he held his cup in his two hands—the cup with the rice grain pattern—and she remembers that the porcelain was so fine that his fingers made a shadow on the inside, and Baba would say, “Ahhhhhhh. Better a week without rice than a day without my Longjing tea.”

  Thinking of Baba’s shadowy fingers is making Jinhua’s eyes burn, and the man’s eyes, now, are on her throat, and that burns too. He is so close to her that he must surely see the thin red line that she painted there before she dressed herself, and yes, she is sure that he sees it. Strangely, she doesn’t mind at all.

  The man has begun to weep, and that, too, is strange. He is saying, “I have been searching for such a long time, and now, finally I have found you,” and he is looking down at his calm hands folded in his lap.

  Jinhua has never seen such a thing before—a man who asks questions that make her remember and who cries and looks down like this as though he were ashamed. Tears flow, his and now hers, and she tells herself it is a game he is playing, one that has nothing to do with her because she remembers nothing about him. She has played games like this one before. She has pretended to be a man’s daughter, his mother—a virtuous, long-dead wife. It is what some men want, for her to pretend, and she has had to do these things. But now it is Maple Bridge Jinhua is thinking of. Being there when it is late at night; looking at the sky, the moon and stars; the outline of the maple tree, the water shining like ink, freshly ground. Hearing Baba’s voice recite Zhang Ji’s poem. Hearing the toll of the Cold Mountain bell, and feeling happy to be alive with Baba beside her.

  “Please forgive me for what I have done to you,” the man is saying now.

  “I forgive you,” Jinhua tells him, and she lays a hand on the man’s sleeve and knows that this is enough for him. It is all he wants her to do, and it is
easy to pretend for him.

  17

  SNARLING AT A SHADOW

  Jinhua

  It happens in the briefest of moments. Jinhua is sleeping—dreaming—and then she is awake. It is an ugly shriek that has woken her.

  “Fetch Jinhua.”

  Lao Mama’s voice. Jinhua hears the night-soil man outside, coming closer, crooning his same old song as he passes below her window. His song is a story, a small one, about an old man’s fingers and a young girl’s tiny feet, and Jinhua can smell the reek of the night-soil man’s profession wafting from the street, out of his bucket and in through the papered window.

  She knows how the song will end.

  Downstairs in the parlor, Lao Mama’s lips have vanished into her angry mouth. “So,” she says, and Lao Mama says the word the way her finger would stab at Jinhua’s chest, or an arrow might point at her eye—or a hand could grab at her throat.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Lao Mama is pacing up and down, waving a letter in her hand. She stops to look at the foreign clock, and she shakes her head and puts a hand on her hip. “Even the paper it is written on stinks of scheming wife,” she says, and then she looks at Jinhua. “Or is it scheming little cunt?”

  Jinhua is untidy from sleep and confused. “I don’t—”

  “Xü!” Lao Mama says before she can finish, and the spit leaps from her mouth. “I have no interest,” she says, “in knowing what you do and what you don’t. I knew the moment I saw that man that something was not right with him. And now I can smell it, a hoax in the making. Do not ever think that I will allow—” Lao Mama raises a fist, and the paper crackles in her hand, and she is beside herself with what is even worse than her usual kind of anger. It is rage and scorn and indignation, all at once.

  “Who has written this letter that has so upset you, Lao Mama?” Suyin in a gray gown is there in the doorway, broom in hand, and it is unlike her to speak so boldly when Lao Mama is angry.

  Lao Mama holds the paper out. She holds it far away from herself with a stiff arm outstretched as though to remark, This disgusts me, and Jinhua wonders, who is Lao Mama to be disgusted by a mere letter written on a fine piece of paper?

  “It is the work of that man’s wife; that is who has written this letter. She addresses me as ‘Old and Esteemed.’ She calls me ‘Zhangban.’” Lao Mama makes a sound that comes from her throat and her nose at the same time as though she were both choking and blowing her nose, and it is she who is disgusting. “She is a polite woman, it seems, this Madam Hong, this wife of a subchancellor. So very refined, she is. Such tiny, tiny characters she writes. Perhaps her brush is made with pubic hair. Just thinking of this makes me want to vomit.”

  Lao Mama makes that choking-blowing sound again, and Jinhua winces. “‘You have a girl in your establishment,’ this woman tells me. And then she says, ‘I will send my sedan chair this afternoon. This girl must come to me. She is the one with the mark of death at her throat.’”

  Lao Mama’s mouth is as hard as glass and her face has turned white when she says this last thing that is a secret that no one knows anything about. It is such a small, thin line that Jinhua paints when she is lamenting her father’s death, and no one ever sees it, except for Suyin, of course, and except for that man whose name is Subchancellor Hong.

  “This is a woman,” Lao Mama says, “this Madam Hong, who believes that she can tell me what to do by pointing her virtuous, contemptuous chin and by tossing her head with its fine hairpins. Just like that, she will send a sedan chair, and I am to collapse into a bow and do as she says. Just like that she expects—”

  Lao Mama looks at Jinhua and doesn’t say what it is that Madam Hong expects.

  “So,” Lao Mama continues, “it is time, now, for you to show me this thing that I know nothing about, this thing that is so fascinating to Madam Hong and to her foolish husband, this mark of death on your throat. Go on, open your collar. Undress so that I can see it.”

  Lao Mama looks accusingly from Jinhua to Suyin and back to Jinhua, who is thinking, I have not yet drawn the line today; there has not been time, and Lao Mama is saying, “Suyin, you have known about this all along. You, whom I have adopted as my daughter—you have betrayed your own mother.”

  Suyin moves a single muscle at the crook of her jaw, and a pink splotch has formed on her cheek, and she lowers her eyelids—which is her confession.

  Lao Mama turns back to Jinhua. “All that mule-piss talk yesterday, and drinking tea, and bridges, and bells, and boatmen. And crying. What was it about? He never even dropped his silken trousers. He paid but didn’t climb into your bed. Now and for the last time, Jinhua, show me your neck.”

  Jinhua’s stomach is clutching empty spaces. She waits and doesn’t know at all what this is about. Lao Mama is waiting, too, for her to say something—but she doesn’t know what she can say. Lao Mama is not the kind of person who could ever understand bridges or boatmen—or a father who is dead, or any of these things—except for bed business and money. And so Jinhua waits, and she is forcing herself to breathe and not speak—to wait and to think—to look straight into Lao Mama’s angry eyes and not to look away.

  “I will not tell you about this man,” she says, finally, and she herself is angry now. “I will not explain ‘A Night-Mooring Near Maple Bridge,’ or tell you why I cried or why he did, or how it is to drink fine tea with a man who is a scholar. And,” she continues in this new way of speaking to Lao Mama—and she is not afraid because she is saying what she absolutely has to say—“I will not undress for you, and I will not open my collar.” She touches the place where the line is not even there and turns around. Walking past Suyin and out the door, Jinhua’s shoulders shrink a little. She listens. Behind her there is only the di da sound of the clock that no one can read, and the soft scratching of Suyin’s broom, and Lao Mama saying nothing at all.

  18

  THE POINT OF A NEEDLE

  Jinhua

  Thin-lipped ancestors stare down at Jinhua from the portrait on the north wall. The room is huge, and they are richly dressed, and because of them—because they are so like her own zufumu in a painting she remembers from a long time ago—Jinhua kneels. She places her palms on the floor of polished brick and bows down to touch her forehead to the ground.

  “You are clever”— a woman’s voice comes from nowhere— “to do this filial act as though it were your true nature—as though you were in the hall of your own ancestors.”

  Jinhua looks up from her koutou. Madam Hong is sitting by a window, a threaded needle in her hand, her face half in shadow. A brindled cat sits at her feet, its snake tail curled, both delicate and muscular.

  “I am not worthy,” Jinhua says, still kneeling. It is the way she feels before the ancestors and beneath this perfect person’s gaze—unworthy—and she is wondering why it is that she is here. The cat’s eyes are round like glinting mirrors, and it is the cat who looks clever, and it mews, and Madam Hong is beautiful but not young—and Jinhua understands less and less of what is happening. She wishes that Suyin were here to tell her what to do in that way she has of being calm and wise and always knowing what is to be done.

  “Indeed.” Madam Hong puts aside the needle. Her voice is low and smooth. She gets up from the zuodun on which she was sitting, and the embroidery slips to the floor, where it prompts the cat to dart away. She is tall. Taller than her husband, Jinhua thinks, and very, very stern. Madam Hong crosses the room, taking tiny steps on tiny feet, her eyes on the ancestors’ portrait. Her skirts make a rustling sound. She is dressed in somber colors.

  “I know everything,” she says, turning now to face Jinhua. “He has told me that you recall that past life you lived.” Madam Hong waits, and Jinhua says, “I have had and lost one life, Daniang, and now I have another.” And this is the truth.

  Madam Hong raises a hand to stop her talking. “My husband has told me, too, about the mark at your throat, and he believes it is the mark of your death by your own hand in that other life. H
e believes that you are that courtesan, his erstwhile lover who has been reborn.” Madam Hong’s earrings dangle next to her own slender throat; a long strand of gleaming pearls and lustrous jade hangs from each finely shaped earlobe. Her hair gleams too, and Jinhua cannot find the words to say what ought to be said next—that it was she who told Baba to disobey the emperor, that the mark at her throat is for him, that she has never been anyone’s lover in this life or any other. Although she is fully dressed, Jinhua feels naked. Her throat burns where she has painted the line.

  “He said that you forgive him”—Madam Hong’s voice falters for an instant and recovers—“for what he has done to you in that other life. But,” she continues, “he is a man who finds what is for him the perfect truth whether or not it is real, where I am one who seeks truth from that which I can know. This is why I have sent for the Master of Wind and Water.”

  Madam Hong’s earrings move, and the fingers of her hand are pinched as though she were still holding the embroidery needle. “The Master of Wind and Water will tell me what is real and what is true,” she adds, “and only then will I make my final decision.”

  Madam Hong says one more thing that Jinhua cannot understand, and it is as though she were speaking to the ancestors and not to Jinhua at all. The look on Madam Hong’s face cannot be fathomed, and then she says, “Beauty is the troubled water that brings calamity. I have seen this before in this life that I am living,” and for Jinhua it is as though sky and earth were turning, leaving her with no sense at all of what is up and what is down and what is true and what is not—and she is terrified, because she is not the person she is pretending to be. She is someone else entirely.