From Resi, Jinhua is learning things beyond her imagination. She calls Jinhua gnädige Frau—which means “gracious lady” and is a politeness between servant and mistress in the barbarian language. And sometimes, when she is in a hurry, Resi just says gnä’ or gnäd’ge, which mean the same thing.
It feels strange to be spoken to like this, to be called such a thing as Gracious Lady in a foreign language.
Resi doesn’t ask Wenqing what he would like, but she does her barbarian bow—her curtsy—next to his chair. He will have Biluochun tea, which he drinks every morning, just as he would at home in Suzhou. The tea, from the baskets of the finest tea growers in China, and Wenqing’s blue-and-white cup, from the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, both traveled in the camphorwood trunks that sailed with them, and even now that they have been here for more than one month, Wenqing clings to these things that are from China. When Resi pours his tea he frowns, although Jinhua has asked him, “Please, don’t frown at her like this. She can see it, and she knows you are displeased, and she is not at fault.”
Wenqing says, “I do not frown.”
The Chinese cook who came with them from Suzhou lasted less than a week before packing his wife and his things and leaving to go home. “Too hard,” he said. “Too cold.” The other Chinese servants went with them, one of them saying, “I am afraid to stay here among the barbarians,” and the others agreeing. So now Wenqing eats rice and noodles and other dishes that the Viennese cook tries and fails to prepare in the Chinese way, and Wenqing frowns often. He says that “even in this foreign place we Chinese must preserve our customs or lose all self-respect,” and he shakes his head from side to side when he says this, and probably doesn’t notice that he is doing this either.
Wenqing won’t allow the windows to be opened in his room, which Resi likes to do to let the healthy, outside air come in; she calls this lüften. Wenqing says that windows should be papered shut to keep out the drafts and the cold and to prevent people on the outside from looking in. He says that the air of Weiyena is a danger to one’s health. “One can become ill and die in air like this,” he says. “With our health we must be careful in this place.” Jinhua has not left the apartments to go outside since coming here, because Wenqing won’t allow it. “It is not suitable,” he says. “You must stay in the inner realm, just as you would in China.”
It has become their habit to eat breakfast here, she and Wenqing together in what Resi calls the Speisesaal, a room filled with white air and crystal, velvet and wood, dark and heavy paintings on the walls. The table is set with stiff white napkins folded like Manchu ladies’ headdresses, ivory-colored dishes from Hungary that have tiny clusters of pink and violet flowers on them. So many dishes on the table. So many pieces of silver. So many politenesses to remember. In Vienna there is a different spoon, a different knife, a different fork for this and that and the other food, and the fork must be held in the left hand and the knife in the right and the spoon, well, Jinhua isn’t sure. One must not touch the serving dishes with the eating implements, nor may one drink from the small bowl that is for washing fingers.
All of this is noted in the Diplomatic Handbook, every page of which Jinhua has read and committed to memory. Wenqing uses only chopsticks to eat. He says these other implements are confusing and unnecessary. He seems very far away in this room; it feels as though the distance of an entire courtyard is separating him from Jinhua when they sit like this at opposite ends of this long table. Perhaps the distance is also in his head, a dispatch that he is pondering. Or maybe he is thinking of what he will write next in the diary he is keeping with such diligence.
He seems content, but not happy. He hasn’t been to Jinhua’s bed since the first Vienna night. They haven’t spoken of his fears. He did once ask, “Might there be joyful news?” Jinhua paused for just a moment, tallying moon cycles in her head, thinking of red dragons, and told him, “No, there is not.”
The red dragon comes and it goes, and Madam Hong has been between them since the day of her death—and about this, Jinhua is not unhappy.
Now there are just two sounds in the room: the tick of the clock on the mantel, which leads Jinhua to think briefly of Lao Mama’s clock and how she can now read the numbers and say that it is five o’clock in the afternoon instead of saying it is the Hour of the Rooster. And the second sound is that noise that Wenqing makes when he drinks in the Chinese way, two-handed, sucking through his teeth to cool the tea. He takes a bite of fried cabbage. He chews and then he stops.
“We cannot live like this,” he says, and Jinhua holds her breath.
“We cannot live by eating this kind of food. I will write to the Foreign Office and tell them to send a new cook from China. I will do this today. I will tell them to attend to it as soon as possible, if not immediately.”
She breathes. Jinhua takes a bite of her Semmel. It is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, fresh from the oven and delicious with butter and apricot jam, and she eats one for breakfast every morning—except on Sundays, when the baker is in church.
Resi has come with the silver pot for coffee in her hand, and she is waiting to pour. The curves of Wenqing’s nose tighten. He says, “It smells like river water,” and he has said this before. Resi looks, but of course it is only Jinhua who understands. Wenqing has never tasted Resi’s coffee. He removes his eyeglasses and reaches for one of the tough, sticky plums he brought from Suzhou to aid his digestion. He pops it into his mouth, and his jaw line pulses as he chews. He punches his newspaper to straighten it, and then he says, looking at Jinhua over the tops of his glasses, “Do not forget that you are Chinese.”
Her reply comes quickly. “I do not forget,” she tells him, “but we are in Vienna and I would like to enjoy what is here in the time that I have.”
Two years—or maybe three.
Jinhua talks to Resi every day when she comes to light the fire and make the bed and tidy her room. Resi bustles like a great winged bird with her ribboned cap, flinging back bedding, shaking and punching the pillows and the feather quilt. It is a noisy ritual. Every morning she opens the windows to air the room, which Jinhua loves, and Jinhua asks her questions. “How do I say this—and this—and this?” They draw pictures and point and use their hands and arms and heads and feet. A shoe, a broom, a painting of a girl with golden hair. Foot, arm, leg, neck. Tree and flower. Through the open windows Jinhua listens to the singsong voice of the flower seller calling out, “Lavendel, Lavendel, kauf’ mein Lavendel.” She learns the words for sing and buy and sell and walk.
And love. Resi teaches her that word too, putting her hand on her heart. The word in German is Liebe.
Resi brought Jinhua some Lavendel yesterday. The flower seller’s name is Frau Anna, she said. Frau Anna has four children and no husband. “A sweet person,” Resi said. Jinhua recognized the tiny purple buds, the narrow gray-green leaves. It is xünyicao. “We use it for medicine in China,” she told Resi, acting out the part of a sick person and pretending to eat the flowers.
“We use lavender to scent our clothes and our bedding,” Resi replied in gestures and in words. “We think it smells nice.”
VIENNA, THE 25TH OF FEBRUARY, 1887
Resi
Das arme Hascherl, Resi writes in her monthly letter to her mother in Spannberg—the poor little thing. This is how she thinks of the new mistress who is so tiny and hardly more than a child.
Ever since the Herrschaften arrived from China, Resi has had much to tell in her letters about her new employers. How they have hair that is blacker than the blackest coal, and yes their eyes are narrow and slanted, a bit like the eyes of the Great Chinaman statue in the Prater that she told of in her last letter, but not exactly like that; and their skin is nicht ganz gelb—not quite yellow—but not like ours either. In her last letter Resi wrote that the apartment in the Palais Kinsky is slowly becoming a Chinese place. She wrote that the Little Chinaman, which is what she calls the new master but only to herself, has arranged a gaudy altar in
the salon with a fat Chinese god—a heathen god with a loud pink face, and a huge belly, and real hair for his beard, can you imagine that?
Sie sind keine Christen, she told her mother. They aren’t even Christians. They don’t go to church on Sunday.
Every day that she is here she looks more peaked than the day before, Resi writes now about the new mistress, laboring over her script and spelling, not that her mother would know, writing in the smallest of letters so as not to be wasteful of the writing paper. She is careful not to smear the ink, and when she has written a whole page on both sides she turns the letter a quarter turn and writes the next lines crosswise.
There is so much to tell.
It is the lack of fresh air that ails my mistress, Resi writes. She spends the days locked in these apartments like a creature in the jailhouse. She should go out into the clean, fresh air and take some exercise, take a ride in the carriage. Go to the Vienna Woods or the Prater. The snowdrops are out already. I am sure she would like to see them. But the arme Hascherl, the poor little thing, says her husband won’t let her go out. It seems that proper Chinese ladies must stay always inside the apartments.
Did I tell you, Mother, that I am teaching her German? She is an excellent pupil and asks me all day long—was ist das? Und das? Und das?
Resi has to search to find a place to write—From your loving and obedient daughter, Resi. The letter will be hard to read with all this crossways writing and the small letters, and now there is a bit of a smear where the ink was not dry. She didn’t mention Bastl, the chimney sweep with the black hat and the beautiful smile—and what a strong and handsome fellow he is. There isn’t room, but soon she must approach this subject. Mother still has hopes for Sepp, the neighbor’s boy who stinks of his mother’s Gulasch and sometimes of her washing rags.
28
BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE
Jinhua
According to the Fourteen Points of Regulation of the Comportment of an Emissary—which Jinhua read once when Wenqing left it on the dining table—no detail is too minute to be Observed, Considered, and Reported.
Jinhua opens the Diplomatic Diary that Wenqing is required to keep in accordance with one of the Fourteen Points. She has been reading the diary in secret. Wenqing is out today, away somewhere, visiting a school or a cannon factory or perhaps a church.
She cannot remember which it is.
It is the 10th Day of the Second Month in the Twelfth Year of the Guangxu Reign. Today the weather is cold and foggy. According to the Western calendar it is the 4th day of March and the year is 1887. I have spent the day in the Imperial Library at the Hofburg and have been reviewing documents and maps regarding the Russian seizure of Heilongjiang in 1858, the Eighth Year of the Xianfeng Emperor. The region is known to the Russians as Amur Krai—
Jinhua turns to another bone-colored page filled with the perfect columns of Wenqing’s writing.
The 11th Day of the Second Month—
Today I met with Graf Kálnoky, the Austrian Foreign Minister. We discussed the European system of treaty alliances, which includes the League of the Three Emperors. This is a complex and seemingly ineffective method of preventing wars. Graf Kálnoky said—You Chinese must open your doors to the West or else the English will come yet again with their battleships and force the taking of more and more of your territory and your sovereignty. And the French, the Germans, the Americans, the Russians will not be far behind, he said. He says he regrets to mention that the Austrians too, for reasons of trade and strategy, may wish to participate—
My response to the Foreign Minister was that he and his Counterparts from other European nations might be wise to consider Other Possibilities, by which I meant, and I do believe that Graf Kálnoky understood my meaning, that the Foreign Intruders might one day be forcibly expelled from the domains of the mighty Qing—
Another entry reads—
Today in Vienna snow has fallen to the depth of the sole of my boot. For the edification of my Esteemed Colleagues in the Foreign Office, I will write about the nature of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It is comprised of many smaller lands inhabited by people of many races, some more civilized, according to the European standards, than others. In the southern region there are the Latins who speak the Italian language. In the north are the Teutons, who speak German, and in the east are the Slavic and Magyar peoples—it is not clear to me what it is that binds these lands together in a so-called Empire—or how they mutually understand one another.
Jinhua keeps reading. Wenqing would not allow this, of course, but the diary in her lap is a window into the outside world that Wenqing visits but that is forbidden to her. And so she reads when he is not at home and when no one is looking, and she reads with great appetite.
Not even Resi knows that she is doing this.
The most important aspects here are religion and trade and the desire for material and military progress. I observe this daily in my efforts to understand the ways of the Europeans.
In Europe, to elevate themselves in wealth is what all men strive for. From this way of thinking comes competition—and war—and nothing that is civilized to our way of thinking.
Sitting curled in a chair by the window, Jinhua has lost track of time. The chair is fat and thickly upholstered. It swallows her up, and it swallows up time, and she is the way Wenqing is when he writes in the diaries; his concentration is perfect; he sits straight-backed and quite still, and so does she as she reads.
I believe that there is much we each do not understand of the other, we Chinese and the men of Europe. Each side has a way of thinking that is reasonable only to those of their own kind. The Europeans speak of Blut und Eisen, blood and iron, and this they think of as the language of peace. I do not yet understand the nature of their quarrels with one another, but everyone is afraid of war from this side or that side or both sides—and still they speak of blood and iron.
She finds the note tucked underneath the chair cushion. The paper is red, and it is creased and crumpled. She spreads it flat, and the characters written on it are very, very small, and this note has traveled a great distance.
Jinhua reads and knows she should not.
To My Husband on the Day of My Death,
When She died you were Chaste. Think of this.
The note is signed, Your First Wife, Who Loves and will never Betray You, and Jinhua says, “Ò,” aloud and only to herself, and as she reads the note that is not hers to read, Madam Hong’s dusky, staring eyes have returned to watch her.
Today Wenqing is traveling. North to Berlin, which is in Prussia. He left just moments ago—Herr Swoboda is taking him to the train—and when she can no longer see the carriage from her window, Jinhua goes back to the room with the deep green walls—his barbarian library, Wenqing calls it; he says that overbearing color spoils his mood, something must be done.
The invitation to Berlin came several weeks ago. Interpreter Ma had written a translation on a fine piece of paper, rimmed in gold. The original was a card, also fine, and it had a black bird on the front that looked more like a dragon than a bird, with frayed wings and clawed feet and a tail shaped like a spear. “It is an eagle, a ferocious-looking creature,” Wenqing said. “The symbol of the German Empire of Wilhelm I.”
On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, Interpreter Ma’s translation read, His Imperial and Royal Majesty Wilhelm the First, by the Grace of God German Kaiser and King of Prussia, will grant a diplomatic audience to His Excellency Hong Wenqing, Emissary of the Second Rank of the Emperor Guangxu of China. The audience will take place in the Stadtschloss in Berlin—
The eagle on the card had a golden crown above its head. “Will I be allowed—?” Jinhua asked, and Wenqing didn’t let her finish the question.
This happens often now. He interrupts what she is saying.
“Of course you will stay here,” he replied on this occasion, leaving no room for discussion or pleading or changing his mind. Jinhua remembers the taste of her coffee
that morning, and how it was sweet but not sweet enough; how she reached for another spoonful of sugar to sweeten it more. She remembers the crystals sliding so easily into the cup and then vanishing, and how the spoon jangled when she stirred the coffee—and how Wenqing first frowned and then looked unsure.
What she wanted to say was, I can help you see a thousand things if you allow me to come. And then she said it, just like that, out loud.
Wenqing didn’t answer right away.
“Remember,” he said, and his tongue made small, dry sounds in his mouth, and about this he sounded very, very sure. “We are Chinese, descended as we all are from the great and glorious Huangdi—the Yellow Emperor. We are the children of the sages.” He paused, and then he said, “Do not forget decorum,” and Jinhua thought of the note that Madam Hong had left for her, but only for an instant, and she wanted to go to Berlin more than anything.
“Perhaps Madam Ma can visit you again while I am gone. She is a suitable friend for you,” Wenqing said, “and she, too, is lonely. The two of you can sit and chat and do embroidery to pass the time, and then I will return to you.”
Madam Ma is Interpreter Ma’s concubine, and she, too, has come to Vienna to live—for a while. This morning as he was preparing to leave, Wenqing said, “It is a calamity of enormous proportions.” What he meant is that the birthday gifts for the German emperor had not arrived. There are fifty trunks at sea filled with treasures of the Qing and Ming and Tang and Sung and all the other less momentous dynasties. It was to have been a display—a spectacle, Wenqing said—of five thousand years of Chinese culture, with gifts of porcelains from the imperial kilns, and bronzes from the time of the ancients, ivories carved more finely than the finest European lace; precious jades of every color and design; cloisonné and paintings, ceramics and calligraphy and lacquerware, all of unsurpassed beauty.
The Courtesan Page 17
