The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  Huizhong is plucking the bad and crinkled strands from Madam Hong’s hair—the white ones too—coiling them up, placing them in a jar, where she keeps them with great loyalty, and Madam Hong feels almost safe, even though the courtesan is in her house.

  “There is one more thing,” Huizhong says now, and Madam Hong sighs—will she never be still? “And this is the very last thing I will say. I will not leave you in peace to do what you will do until your hair gleams and your skin and your pillow are soft and until you drink every drop of the tea that I have brought to make you warm. And even though I am only a worthless maid, even though you are high and I am low, I understand much more than you think, Madam Hong. I understand that you believe there are no choices for you, and maybe that is true and maybe it is not. But as you say, you will do what you will do, and you will think what you will think, and the same is true for me.”

  When her hair gleams and her skin is soft and when Huizhong has gone, Madam Hong sits in her garden wrapped in fur against a bone-chilling wind, and she contemplates a screen of bitter bamboo. An owl hoots. She thinks of demons. She thinks of what it is that she and her husband have shared and will never share again now that the courtesan has been reborn. How when she was married her shoulder touched his; how he and she drank from two cups tied together with a single cord of red silk. How they joined the yin and the yang on the night of their wedding, and it was the one truly tender moment of their marriage; how she hoped for many sons and for a mother-in-law who would treat her well and kindly.

  There have been no more nights like that first one. There have been no sons for Madam Hong. And now it seems that her mother-in-law was right. It is something to fear—the ghost of a hanged person haunting her husband, sending him back to a courtesan’s bed.

  She uses this word to describe the girl—courtesan—and not the other, worse, more apt expression that darts in and out of her mind—biaozi.

  Yes, Madam Hong is thinking now, and she smells the scent of camphor, strong and tart, almost singeing her nostrils, I am my husband’s shadow and I will never be anything more than that. I will do what I must do to repay his debt. It is as high as a mountain, as wide as an ocean, and as heavy as a monument. It is a debt of betrayal and killing, and I know this contemptible person must be here and nowhere else. But I will not be kind to her. She has taken far too much from me, and I, too, have been abandoned. I, too, have been betrayed, and who knows, perhaps Huizhong is right. Perhaps this person, this biaozi, will have her revenge, and perhaps the scent of camphor will surround me in my coffin. If this is to be, she contemplates, I fear it will be soon.

  21

  WHEN THE UNREAL IS

  TAKEN FOR THE REAL

  Jinhua

  She found the book tucked at the edge of a shelf in the room where she sleeps, and it is thick with pages and words and characters, and reading helps Jinhua to remember and it helps her to forget—and it has been such a long, long time since she has held a book in her hands.

  When she is not reading Jinhua is sad, and she thinks of Suyin and how she misses her and hopes that Lao Mama has not been cruel with beating her and saying hurtful things.

  The book is called Hong Lou Meng—Dream of the Red Chamber. When Master Hong saw Jinhua reading it, he said that Hong Lou Meng is a masterpiece of writing. It is the chronicle of a great house and a great tragedy, he told Jinhua, and a love that entangles three people. “It is about love out of balance,” he said. “If you are clever, you will find meanings hidden in the story. What is real, one might say, disguised in what is not.”

  Jinhua is sad but not unhappy in this house. Master Hong visits her every morning and every evening at bedtime. It is, she remembers, what Baba did when she was a child and he was alive. He came in the morning to teach her about the world and in the evening to tell stories. In the morning Master Hong talks to her, and it is comfortable to have him here. They read poems. Some of them, like “A Night-Mooring Near Maple Bridge,” she knows, and some are new to her and she learns them by heart, and she does this so quickly that Master Hong is astonished. He tells her about his work and shows her the maps he loves to paint that are filled with curves and lines and delicate colors. He is teaching Jinhua the shapes of things: the twists and turns and names of China’s mighty rivers, the vastness of the great Qing Empire, which looks like a blossoming peony on the maps; the outline—snakelike and all powerful—of the Great Wall to the north. With his elegant fingers Master Hong shows her the paths that emissaries travel to pay homage to the emperor; he shows her the tributary states of Korea and Laos—and then there are Annam, Cochin, Tonkin, Cambodia, “which have regrettably been seized by France,” he notes, and Burma, “which has been forcibly taken by the British.” When he talks about the empire—and what has been lost—Jinhua hears Master Hong’s voice meander from pride to a very real distress and then to silence.

  She is curious about everything. About the names of places and their shapes. About rivers and vassal states and emissaries. She is curious, too, about the foreign devils who have come with ships and guns—who have seized Annam and Burma and whole cities in China—and are their kingdoms on these maps? She has never seen a foreign devil. Yesterday she asked Master Hong: “How do they speak? What do they look like, these barbarian people who are stealing from the emperor? Have you ever seen one?”

  He has seen them often, he told her. “There are few of them in Suzhou, but many in Shanghai and Canton and even in Peking, where they have seized land to build their legations. There have been battles. There have been wars and treaties that allow them to go where they wish and do as they will. It is a sad state of affairs.”

  And then she asked him—and Jinhua was thinking of the sword with sharpness on two sides—“The emperor is strong, why does he allow this?” And Master Hong paused for quite a long time before answering. “The land ruled by the great Qing dynasty is unprecedented in its extent.” She has heard him say this once or twice before, reciting from an inscription on one of his maps. “Nevertheless,” he continued, “we have lost too many wars against the armies of Yingguo and Faguo—England and France—and the other barbarian nations. They should not be here in the Middle Kingdom, where we adhere to the principles of faithfulness, sincerity, earnestness, and respectfulness. They should not be here, and still this cannot be prevented. They are small but powerful, and we Chinese are great, yet weak.” This—that China is weak—Jinhua has never heard before. “But these are not suitable subjects with which to worry a sweet young girl,” Master Hong added, and there was a tired look on his face. “You must entertain yourself with poetry and stories about love. You must do embroidery and keep your mind free from worry.”

  These are the things that they do each day in the morning, Jinhua and Master Hong. He teaches and she listens, and she works to remember everything he tells her and she wishes that he would tell her more—and she does worry from time to time. About guns and China’s weakness. About the emperor’s sword. She worries, too, when Master Hong says that he loves her, that he has loved her for many lifetimes and for more than ten thousand years, and when he asks whether she loves him, Jinhua replies, “My love for you is great,” because Lao Mama has taught her to flatter a man, and it is what she knows to say, and yet it does not feel like the truth. She wonders what it means. What it is to love a man who is not her father, a man who teaches her daily in the mornings and touches her at night in the way of bed business—and yet it is not in the way any man has touched her before, because he says, “I do not want to hurt you.”

  He hurts her sometimes, but there is never any blood—and she wants to please this strange man whose wife has purchased her for him.

  Today Jinhua is reading for the third time the first page of chapter one of this book, Dream of the Red Chamber. It is the story of the goddess Nüwa and the day she mended the dome of heaven, but it is not the story that Suyin used to tell about that day, or the story that Baba told about Nüwa. In this book, after she has mended the sky, N
üwa leaves a giant stone in the shadow of the Green Meadows Mountain, and the stone has the spark of life, and the Buddhist of Infinite Space and the Taoist of Boundless Time transform the stone into a small oval amulet of translucent jade. They carry the amulet to the Land of Red Dust, which is another world far away, and they place it in the mouth of a boy named Baoyu. This stone in his mouth is Baoyu’s fate.

  Now Jinhua is reading chapter two, in which a young girl’s mother dies and her father cannot keep her. The girl, whose name is Black Jade, goes to live in the great house of the Jia family, where Baoyu dwells. Black Jade grows to love Baoyu, but Precious Virtue, who is Baoyu’s cousin, grows to love him also—and this is love out of balance, just as Master Hong described. Jinhua reads page after page, and the book is magical.

  Now Jinhua hears the sounds of Master Hong’s slippers sloughing the paving stones outside. She hears the bark of his cough. It is the kind of cough that knocks a person’s bones together, and Master Hong tries to stifle it. She hears the tap of his fingers on the door and wonders whether he will call her by her name tonight, or whether he will call her by that other name as he often does, the name of a person who has hanged herself, and she wonders, too, whether he will stroke the base of her throat, the place where she paints the red line—and whether the tears will come to his eyes.

  She asked him once, “Shall I wash away the line?” and he said, “No, do not do this. It is necessary both for you to paint it and for me to see it.” And so Jinhua paints the line every day as she always has and always will.

  Tonight it is cold, and Master Hong is lightly dressed in an unlined autumn gown, and when he enters the room the scent of his tobacco enters with him in the folds of his clothing, as pungent as a bed of hay, and there are streaks of gray in his hair and thin lines across his forehead.

  “I must travel to the capital,” he says, touching her arm, and she thinks of him, suddenly, as an old man. “I will leave tomorrow, early, and you will stay here with Madam Hong, and I will be overcome with sadness until I return to you.”

  “Ò,” she says, and his hand stays there on her arm, and then she asks him, “Will you see the emperor in Peking?”

  “No,” he replies, “there has been a postponement in the official accession of the young emperor to the precious throne. In his marriage, too, there has been a postponement. It is the Current Divine Mother Empress Dowager Cixi with whom I will have an audience—and with the wisest of her ministers.” And then Master Hong adds, “It is my fervent wish that you and Madam Hong may find an easy way of being together in this house in my absence. She inhabits a world of sadness and has no peace of mind, but in her heart and actions she is beyond reproach. I hope that one day soon you and she will play mah-jongg and sit, as women should, stitching your embroidery, like mother and daughter, or perhaps like two sisters, elder and younger.”

  Jinhua has been here in this house for more than two cycles of the moon, and she has not seen Madam Hong at all. She cannot imagine, quite, that she and Madam Hong will be like mother and daughter, or that they can ever be like sisters. “I will gladly play mah-jongg,” she replies, “but I know nothing of embroidery. And I hope that you will have a safe and tranquil journey to the capital and a safe and tranquil return to this house, where I will wait for you. I hope, too,” she adds, “that you will please the Divine Mother Empress Dowager in everything you say to her.”

  This last thing that she says comes slowly and carefully from her mouth, and Master Hong seems pleased that she has said these things, and she feels better for the saying of them.

  “On my return you must call me Wenqing,” he tells her. “It is what you called me always before, in that other life. It is what you should say, now that you are my concubine.”

  When the bed business is finished, when Master Hong has gone, Jinhua goes to the mirror. She is naked, and the air is cold around her, and she sees that she is pale, with worried eyes—the line at her throat is a brilliant, thick red today—and her thoughts turn to the boy in the book, Baoyu, and she imagines, just for a moment, what he looks like. She wonders what it would be like to love a boy like this in the way that Black Jade and Precious Virtue love Baoyu. She cannot imagine how this would feel.

  22

  THE FOUR VIRTUES

  Jinhua

  The red scroll is in the hollow of her fist when Jinhua wakes. It is tightly rolled, no bigger than a toothpick, and tied with a piece of embroidery thread. She sits up quickly, her first thought: How did this come to be in my hand?

  Master Hong, whom she must remember to think of as Wenqing, has gone to Peking—he left yesterday, and so it cannot have been he who came and took her hand while she was sleeping and pressed her fingers around the scroll. When she uncurls it, the scroll coils back around itself. It is a note written in a woman’s hand, in characters so small that the writer herself surely longs to disappear.

  To the Courtesan.

  You have much to learn.

  Come to the Courtyard of the Virtuous Lady. You will not find your way.

  My maid will fetch you at the Hour of the Rooster.

  The note is signed First Lady—and these characters are drawn larger, thicker, and darker than the others.

  Powdering her face, listening to the sound of the doves outside, Jinhua sees that something else has been touched in the room. The wedding ducks on her dressing table are not the way they were. They are a gift from Wenqing. “The meaning is,” he said when he gave them to her just as he was leaving for Peking, “that we will stay together forever.” That he said this made Jinhua feel uneasy for no reason at all. It was Wenqing who placed the ducks on the table. “They must always face each other,” he told her, moving them closer together so that beak touched beak. “It will mean that there is harmony between us,” he said, “if they stay like this.”

  Now the duck with wings that are blue, the male, has turned his back to the female. The maid arrives, carrying a tray of breakfast foods. She is fat and quick and always angry—her face is as pale and as flat as a plate.

  She is not like Suyin in any way.

  Huizhong lights the brazier, but the fire is small and the room is cold. She hasn’t said a single word. Jinhua swallows; she is sure that Huizhong doesn’t like that she is here, and this, too, makes her uneasy. “Was it you who turned the duck around,” she asks, “while I was sleeping?”

  Huizhong’s eyebrows arch in surprise. She shakes her head. “I did not touch that thing,” she says, and that is all—and Jinhua knows that it was Madam Hong who was here in the night while she was sleeping, touching things and touching her.

  When Huizhong is gone, Jinhua reads the note again. You have much to learn. It is hard to know the meaning of this, and in reading it a third time she remembers the fortune-teller, who said that she will lead both one and many lives, that she will be both one and many people. That she will lose her way, and if she is lucky she will find it.

  She has already had many lives. In her first life she was Baba’s daughter, and it was a life of pleasure and happiness in a great house where she was loved. Then she was Lao Mama’s money tree, and no one loved her, except for Suyin, and she felt sorry and sad every day and every night.

  And now she feels—she doesn’t know. She feels like nothing and like no one. She feels as though she will never leave this house, and she feels as though this is something that will become unendurable.

  Jinhua cannot eat the breakfast that Huizhong left for her. She cannot think what Madam Hong intends that she should learn, and it is this that she is pondering. She moves about the room, picking up a bowl, a box, a hairpin, and putting each thing down, sometimes in a different place for no reason at all. She opens the book, Dream of the Red Chamber, and tries to read and tries to understand the triangle that is Baoyu, who is young and handsome and foolish, and Black Jade, who is beautiful and full of life but frail, and Precious Virtue, who is so named because she is learned and filial and perfect in every way—and who loves Baoyu but i
s not loved by him.

  Reading about love out of balance, Jinhua suddenly feels grief that is as heavy and as real to her, almost, as the grief she sometimes feels for herself, and she cries and then sobs and wonders why she cannot stop her tears. She puts the book aside, tucking it under the quilt of her bed, and she ponders what it is that she will say to Madam Hong, who is not her mother and not her sister either.

  Please, Madam Hong, will you buy Suyin and bring her here to live?

  And then her thoughts return to Baoyu and Black Jade and Precious Virtue—and to Great Love, which the fortune-teller said is waiting.

  It is the Hour of the Rooster. They cross the Courtyard of the Virtuous Lady, first Huizhong and then Jinhua. They enter Madam Hong’s chamber, and she is standing there in the center of the room. Her eyes are the duskiest, the blackest eyes that Jinhua has ever seen, and she is so very tall.

  “You were in my dream last night,” Madam Hong says. “In my dream you wore no clothes. You were quite naked and unashamed standing there in front of me. How strange that is, that the courtesan should feel no shame when she is naked in the presence of a virtuous lady, do you not agree?”

  It is not at all what Jinhua expected Madam Hong to say. She drops to her knees and does not like the thought of being in this person’s dream, and she remembers the words she has rehearsed so often that they are there at the edge of her lips. Please, Madam Hong, will you buy Suyin? She cannot say the words aloud; it is not the moment to ask this now, but she bows, touching her head to the floor. When she looks up she says in a voice that is very, very quiet, “You are quite wrong, First Lady, in what you say. I do feel ashamed. I feel very ashamed, but it is not because of what you have dreamt.” And then she sees that from the floor to the rafters—from east to west and north to south—the walls in the room are covered with pictures: small ones, tiny ones; none of them is large. There are hundreds—even thousands—of pictures on the walls. The colors are bright, and the room is sunless, and with her smooth black hair and her dark silk gown Madam Hong looks the same as she did when the fortune-teller came. She is beautiful—and ugly—with both pleasure and displeasure on her face.