He is avoiding her gaze, and she is seeking his. It is a long time. Two years. “And Madam Hong?”
“Madam Hong,” he says, looking at her now, “will stay here in Suzhou. She is a virtuous person. She cannot possibly live among the barbarians.”
“It is right here,” Wenqing says, and he is showing Jinhua a map. “It is far, far to the west, in the lands of Austria-Hungary.” His voice is quiet. His face is pale, and she has not seen this map before. “Weiyena is the imperial capital of the emperor of that place. It is a remote spot, an ancient city, as old as our own city of Suzhou, but a barbarian place cannot be compared—”
Jinhua is uncertain. “It is an honor, then—that the emperor has named you his emissary to this remote, ancient, and imperial land?”
It is a while before Wenqing answers, and it occurs to Jinhua—she should not have said this.
“No,” he says, finally. “It is not an honor—to be sent away to the land of the barbarians. And were the choice mine and mine alone, I would stay here with you and Madam Hong in Suzhou and draw my maps, and I would never travel there to Weiyena. But the Guangxu emperor has decreed it, and I am his subject, and therefore I will go and you, Second Lady, will go with me.”
It is the first time he has called her this. Second Lady. And now there is the sound of Wenqing’s fingers tapping on the writing table, and he is murmuring about a time long, long ago when the barbarian people of Europe paid tribute to the Chinese emperor and when they observed the Comprehensive Rites of the Great Qing. “But much has changed,” he says. “The barbarians have become greedy. They no longer respect the rites. They do not respect our emperor.”
As he tells her this, it is as though there were not enough air in all the world, and it is as though Jinhua were not even in the room as Wenqing speaks—and there is no doubt, absolutely none, but that Jinhua would rather go to the lands of the greedy foreign devils with guns and warships than stay here in this house alone with Madam Hong. “They are our enemies,” Wenqing continues, “and it is just as Sun Tzu has written—know yourself; know your enemy. This is why I must travel to this place called Weiyena: to observe our enemies’ ways and strategies. Their methods must be used to strengthen China. There are factions at court who say we must change ourselves in order to emerge victorious—”
And now they hear screams and a pounding on the door, and the pounding on the door is Huizhong who has come, who bursts into Wenqing’s study, wailing, sobbing, gasping.
“It is my virtuous, my ever-kind and always generous mistress,” she cries. “My mistress whom I have loved and who has treated me kindly, lovingly, generously. She is—she is dead. She has—she has hung herself from the eave of the veranda in this person’s courtyard.” Huizhong points as she says this. She points with two hands and two forefingers aimed like arrows in Jinhua’s direction.
The cord around Madam Hong’s neck is white; her clothes are red, her face powdered and painted—and Jinhua thinks of what Lao Mama said to her on that day when she left the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love. “If you are miserable in that house you can powder your face and then hang yourself—wear red,” she said, and Madam Hong has done these things, just as Lao Mama instructed.
The morning breeze shows no pity. The body is swaying from the white cord, and dragonflies are buzzing, and servants are wailing. Madam Hong’s neck is much longer than it was before, and the hanging has left her chin stiff and tilted strangely upward. Her face is hideous now and strangely colored—and Jinhua cannot help but stare at her.
Worst of all are Madam Hong’s dusky eyes, so wide, so round, so unblinking—and Huizhong, who is wringing her hands and saying over and over again, “Who is the person who made my beloved mistress do this awful thing?” And Jinhua is thinking that this face of Madam Hong’s will stay in her mind for a very long time. Like a picture she can never take down from the wall. Like Lao Mama’s eye that comes again and again to her, reminding her always of where she has been and what she has done. Reminding her of eating brothel rice. Of animals and positions. Of men. Of shame. Of that other life she has lived.
Madam Hong has left two notes. Jinhua notices the flush that appears on Wenqing’s face when he reads the note that is addressed to him. He does not read it aloud, he shows it to no one, and a wail comes out of his mouth. He covers his face with his hands when he has finished reading—and all of the servants are wailing with him, but Jinhua cannot.
How can she wail for such a person?
And how can she not?
The second note is red and tightly rolled, tied with a piece of embroidery thread—in just the way that Madam Hong’s other note was rolled and tied. “The last words of a dead person must be carefully noted,” Huizhong hisses between one wail and the next, and she presses the note into Jinhua’s hand—and Jinhua cannot refuse it.
To the Courtesan, she reads, and the note coils back around itself, and in this it is like that other note that was three things—an invitation, a command, and an accusation. This one reads:
As Lady Ban has admonished, there are Four Virtues for Women. As long as you shall live in my husband’s house do not forget Moral Behavior, Proper Speech, Modest Demeanor, and Diligent Work. And as Lady Ban has also written, do not forget Obedience. Do not forget Chastity.
Each of these is your Duty.
The note is signed Elder Sister.
“She was beyond reproach.” Wenqing is wailing, sobbing, weeping.
“My beloved mistress was indeed beyond reproach,” Huizhong repeats. But Jinhua can neither weep nor wail, and she is thinking of embroidery, and thinking, too, that Madam Hong is dead but not gone, that she will be with them, with her and Wenqing, for a long time to come.
When the cord has been cut from Madam Hong’s throat, and she has been laid in the Hall of the Ancestors on the Yellow Robe of a Thousand Prayers, when night has come, Wenqing knocks at the door to Jinhua’s bedchamber. He is still weeping. He is here for comfort.
Jinhua dries his tears. She murmurs words that mean nothing, that neither she nor he will remember later. This does not matter, because it is the sound of her voice that he needs, and Jinhua knows this. She holds his hands and strokes his cheek, and he needs this too. But when later Wenqing reaches out to her for comfort of a different kind, she turns away and says to him, “We may not do this thing. Madam Hong is with us both tonight.” And later still, when his breathing deepens, she whispers to her husband, “Nu-nu?” a term of endearment she has never used before. She dares to think about a barbarian city where she will live, for a while, for two years or maybe three. She dares to be glad that they are leaving Suzhou.
PART FOUR
Palais Kinsky
THE TWELFTH YEAR OF
THE GUANGXU REIGN
1887
Vienna, Austria
25
A SINGLE STEP
Jinhua
The train is slowing down. “It is a cart that runs by fire,” Wenqing said when they boarded at the Genova Piazza Principe railway station. Clambering up the steps from the platform into the carriage he became dizzy and almost fell, and it is the long, rough journey and his sorrow at leaving China—and it is the death, too, of Madam Hong—that have made him so frail, although he says nothing about any of this. When it was her turn to board, a foreign devil man in a pine-green suit gripped Jinhua by her armpits and hoisted her onto the train as though she were a sack of rice. Now, many hours later, the train is gasping, and there is a squealing, grinding sound and then a tremendous, unexpected jolt that shakes the air. The ground is suddenly still. Veins of frost gild the windows like cracks in the glass, and outside on the platform the dark and bulky shapes of barbarian people are passing.
Vienna—the stop is Vienna’s South Railway Station. It is the end of the journey, and they will stay here, and Jinhua and Wenqing are on the opposite side of the world where nothing is the way it is in China, and almost everything is the reverse of what they know. This is what Wenqing said to
Jinhua as they traveled across the sea. That here the soles of men’s boots are black instead of white, that vests are worn inside a man’s jacket instead of outside; that women bind their waists instead of their feet, and people read from left to right. And yes, it is a fact that when the golden bird of the sun is rising here, it is the jade hare of the moon that lights the Suzhou sky.
Wenqing told her also that much of what is true in China is no longer true now that they are here, in Europe, and Jinhua does not believe this because Madam Hong is dead and buried in a coffin of the finest nanmu, and even here, in a place so far from Suzhou—even here this is true. The picture of Madam Hong’s dusky, staring eyes, her neck so long, her chin sharply tilted, has traveled across the sea in Jinhua’s mind. Do not forget Chastity—Jinhua thinks of this, and she thinks about Suyin, who loves her still, she is sure, although she herself thinks less often about Suyin than before. There is so much that is new to occupy her thoughts, so much to be learned.
Jinhua has now seen for herself the dark-soled boots that Wenqing spoke of—these and the women with large shoes and pinched waists in tight clothing. That night and day are opposite is impossible to believe, and the names of these places are, she finds, unpronounceable. Genova, where they boarded the train. Europe, which is a small place among the great continents. Vienna, the city of the barbarian emperor whose name is Franz Joseph.
Jinhua feels small and cold among the strange sights and sounds and smells. Wenqing is sleeping, as he has for most of the journey, with bits of paper in his ears to stop the noise, and the jolt of their arrival has not woken him. His eyes are closed, and his eyeballs pulse like a nervous heartbeat beneath the folds of his eyelids. He has been oblivious to the great, foreign-glass windows of the train, the images streaming past at speeds that made him ill, he said. When the train entered into one side of a mountain and came out on the other side after many moments of darkness, even then he slept. And when he woke, he would touch Jinhua’s arm, her shoulder, her leg, as though to reassure himself, and she would squeeze his hand.
Her questions have exhausted him, she knows. What is this? What does that mean? When will we get there? Why do the foreign devils do this or that or the other?
“I don’t know,” he said, again and again, closing his eyes, leaning back against the seat. She is insatiable with these questions. And yet she has had to let him rest, to recover from the shock he has had.
The journey has been long. From Suzhou it was the river barge that took them to Shanghai, where Jinhua saw for the first time the strangely shaped and strangely colored foreign barbarian people.
From Shanghai it was a great steamship with an unpronounceable name—the SS Agamemnon—that bore them across the vast and churning sea under tile-blue skies and pummeling, exuberant winds. It was cold on deck. The planks beneath their feet heaved in many directions. This wildness did not suit Wenqing. Leaving, his eyes were fixed on dwindling China. He avoided other, closer sights. His fingers clutched the handrail. The wind forced strands of his hair to abandon his always perfect queue as though it had no regard for his dignity, no proper sense of his shame. Without looking down, he pulled a fistful of paper money from his sleeve and flung it into the ocean. “To appease the dragons of the sea,” he said.
For Jinhua, it was not like this. She did not fear the sea. She was astonished by every moment. When the steamship left Shanghai she did as the other passengers did; she waved—to people who were not there, to Suyin, to the boatman with his pussy willow, to Baba and Timu, to Lao Mama, and to no one in particular. She waved vigorously, joyfully; she moved in ways she had never moved before. She stood among the foreign devils. She stared at them. She had never felt a wind like this, so powerful, so impulsive, so unrestrained, pushing and pulling at her body. It was like riding on the back of a dragon, its muscles flexing, scales glittering, spine heaving and thrusting. There was no controlling this dragon of the sea.
She wanted Wenqing to share in this, but he could not, and she herself was astonished by her joy and her excitement. She was astonished, too, at how easy it was to forget what she did not care to remember.
The ship had not gone far when all he had eaten came out of Wenqing’s stomach, and he took to their cabin on the second-class deck, where the Chinese passengers traveled separate from their servants—and separate, too, from the foreign devils. They stopped in Hong Kong, Manila, and Singapore. In Colombo and Port Said. They had glimpses from the cabin porthole of sails and ropes and men with naked feet and naked thighs and rippling muscles, hoisting jute bags full with cargo, and Jinhua could not stop looking, and Wenqing’s eyes were barely open.
When they reached Colombo, Wenqing said, “We must not leave the ship. It is dirty and dangerous in this place. It is uncivilized.” Jinhua stayed with him, and he vomited again and again, and when he felt well enough he showed her the path that they were traveling on a map. Seeing Suzhou marked there as a small, dark dot on a large map, she thought fleetingly of Suyin, and then when Wenqing began to tell her more about the foreign devils, those thoughts floated away. “They are not moral people,” Wenqing said, and he sounded bewildered and not a little angry. “They do not revere their parents, or concern themselves with rightful conduct. They do not cultivate virtue and respect as we do, and they value only material possessions. Worst of all,” he said, “they are altering the shapes of our ancient maps. They taunt us into war time and time again; they carve our lands into pieces to be chewed and swallowed like meat. And the maps are changed, just like that—and these are things that I have read and I know to be true. These things are not hearsay.”
It is Wenqing’s way of seeing what is wrong, to speak of the maps. To speak of Sun Tzu and knowing one’s enemy. But when they reached Genova and were surrounded in all six directions—north and south and east and west and up and down—by these people with pink faces, Jinhua was more and more enthralled and Wenqing’s worries seemed tedious and uninteresting.
And now, at last, they are in Weiyena, where they will live—for a while—for two years or maybe three. A man is blowing a whistle and screaming—words that cannot be understood. Wenqing is awake; his eyes are open, plump from too much sleep, with circles as large as coins under his eyes. She pats his arm. Yijing daole, she tells him. We have already arrived. He nods. His cheeks are shallow from eating only foods he does not know or like. He is trying his best to look substantial in his silk coat and his fur-trimmed winter hat that have made the journey from Genova like ornaments, perched on an empty seat across from him on the train—and Jinhua is thinking that her husband appears as insubstantial here in Weiyena as a single grain of rice would look on the bottom of an empty barrel.
Interpreter Ma is here to meet them on the platform, nodding and bowing deeply in the Chinese way, his gloved hands clasped, saying, “Huanying. Huanying.” Welcome, Excellency. Welcome, Madam. He says this a dozen times or more, and Wenqing looks overjoyed to see a Chinese face, and it is as though he might topple to the ground from so much bowing and thanking in Interpreter Ma’s direction.
Jinhua is clutching Wenqing’s arm, and she does this for his sake as well as for her own. She is dressed in the new padded coat that he bought for her in Shanghai, and she is worried, just a little, that her hair is in disarray after the long, long journey. The foreign people on the platform, she notices, are looking at Wenqing. They are looking at her. Looking and staring and saying things in the strange language that they speak.
“The coachman will take you to the Palais Kinsky, where you will reside while you are in Weiyena. His name is Suo Bo Da.” The interpreter speaks quickly, but he pronounces the foreign devil name slowly and as though it were a three-character Chinese name. Then he repeats it a second time as though he had swallowed it into a single syllable.
Swoboda.
Jinhua feels exhilarated and faint, surrounded on the platform of the station by movement and trunks and pink faces and fur. On her bound feet she cannot walk as fast as everyone else is walking, a
nd her feet are small and theirs are not—and the winter air moves through her, parting the slit at the side of her coat, snatching the breath from her mouth, freezing her cheeks. Interpreter Ma says he will follow later in another carriage with the servants and the luggage. “Herr Swoboda is waiting over there,” he says, leading them, and the barbarian people are still staring.
The carriage has wheels the size of moon gates in a Chinese wall. The horses are massive and have dangerous, bloodshot eyes and impatient hooves that with a single step could crush a Chinese person’s foot. Herr Swoboda has teeth the size of Jinhua’s thumbs, and a black hat that is tall and round and shaped like a drum, and his hair is astonishing, the color of an overripe persimmon. Interpreter Ma is speaking with him now, and this barbarian language is full of guttural howling, barking, hissing noises. Wenqing whispers into Jinhua’s ear, “The interpreter speaks the language of the barbarians with great skill. He has been here for just one year. Before that he was a student at the Dong Wen Guan in Peking, where he studied their language,” and Jinhua is amazed by this speaking of a language that is totally new, and by all that she sees in every direction.
Wenqing keeps his eye on the huge, foreign coachman named Suo Bo Da, and standing near him Jinhua feels like a child; her chin is no higher than the coachman’s elbow, and Wenqing looks as small as a boy, and everything is large here, larger than in China; larger, louder, stranger even than in Shanghai, where they saw many barbarian foreign devils. The sounds of passing carriages, of clapping hooves on cobblestones, are hollow sounds, quite unlike anything one hears in Suzhou, where the roads are made of dirt. And Jinhua murmurs the coachman’s foreign name to herself just to hear herself say the sounds—“Swoboda.” Wenqing turns to her and says, “What did you say?” and there is so much to take in, to see, to hear. So she doesn’t answer him.
The Courtesan Page 15
