The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  “Permit me, please, to choose for you.”

  Jinhua nods, and a breeze ruffles the count’s wavy silver hair. “Madam will have a Kracherl,” he says to the waiter, “und für mich ein Gläschen Wein.”

  The waiter is the man on the placards. He is exactly the same as both of them, with the scrolling mustache and the bright white apron and the large, round belly.

  “A Kracherl for the young lady,” he says, and he dips his head by way of a bow, and there is the smallest flicker of strangeness in the way he looks at Jinhua. This time—now—it doesn’t matter at all to her that he looks this way, because she is with the count, and she sits a little straighter and feels safer than ever before. “And a glass of wine for the gentleman,” the waiter adds before he moves away.

  Jinhua has never tasted a Himbeere before—she doesn’t know what it is—but she chooses the deep and very red syrup from the rainbow of bottles on the trolley because she likes the color and because she has just seen the child at the next table choose it. He is dressed in dark blue knickers and a matching short jacket, and he is slurping his drink through a ryegrass straw, and he is with his mother, who laughs easily with him, and that makes Jinhua smile.

  The waiter pours the syrup into a glass, a tall and slender one; he pours with a flourish; he checks the level with a serious eye and places the glass in front of Jinhua. And then he fills it full to the brim with bubble-studded liquid that fizzes and hisses and breaks into layers of pinks and reds that are dark and pale and almost white. A mound of froth forms on the top, and this Viennese thing that the count has chosen for Jinhua—this Kracherl—is beautiful to look at.

  “I imagine that there is not such a thing as this in your native land,” the count is saying, speaking slowly in a way she understands. “Only in Vienna, I think, does one find such a gay and spectacular beverage.”

  That rich voice. That smile. Those blue, blue eyes that shift to gray and back to a deep lavender.

  “No,” Jinhua tells him. “We have nothing quite like this in China.”

  “Nothing like this in Prussia either,” he says. “For I am from Berlin and not Vienna.”

  The word Berlin stops her for a moment, and then Jinhua takes the straw in her mouth and takes a sip, a small one first, aware that he is watching her. Prickles of ice and fire and hot and cold burst in her mouth, and the prickles reach her throat and rise to her nose, and the count is laughing, and she swallows and then laughs too. The drink astonishes her. She takes another sip, and she has never tasted such a thing before, and the count is asking her, “Do you like it?”

  Oh yes, she likes it very much. And she has forgotten her fears and all of her worries.

  The waiter has returned, bringing the count a second glass of wine. The count lifts the glass to his lips, and the dark-blue-knickered boy at the next table begins to shriek. “Musik. Musik, Musik,” he screams, and yes, now there is music, and it is making the air swirl and the leaves and the ground swirl too, and people are getting up from their chairs. They are getting up to dance, and they are dancing in just the way that Wenqing has described in his Diplomatic Diary.

  Men’s hands touching ladies’ waists. Ladies’ hands on men’s shoulders.

  But there is so much more than what Wenqing has written. It is people laughing. It is men and women holding one another close—in a way that Jinhua imagines lovers would—holding each other and pulling away. Both at the same time. It is feet moving quickly, nimbly; tapping, skipping, leaping over the ground. It is skirts flaring, dipping, swooping; spinning in circles, moving with the music. It is beautiful love, and it is Jinhua’s body longing for this. Longing to dance and to love and to move with the music. Wanting more and more and more of this.

  And there is more. Another song and then another, and the sun is sinking in the sky. And the count is leaning toward Jinhua, reaching across the table, touching her hand, whispering into a brief and quiet moment between one song’s end and another’s beginning. “You look so happy,” he says. “It is the music of Johann Strauss; it is the music of romance, and you will hear it better, stronger, louder in Vienna than anywhere else in the world. This music is Vienna. It is the Viennese. It is the side of their temperament that is light and gay and frivolous and that loves the pretty words, the beautiful melody, the passionate woman. It is the side that covers up the darker side, but only in Vienna.”

  Driving home in the count’s carriage under a darkening sky, Jinhua is sleepy, and there is music in her head and music in her body, and she is remembering how she felt, standing on the deck of the SS Agamemnon, waving and moving and feeling the world change around her. And the way she feels now is like that but more and better, and she is not the same person—not the same at all—as Wenqing’s concubine who traveled with him across the ocean with a box of embroidery and trunks filled with only Chinese things. She is not the person, either, who has read a book about love but has never felt it herself.

  Resi is waiting at the top of the stairs—Herr Swoboda has carried Jinhua up—and Resi is yi ta hu tu—in a terrible muddle—and cannot stop talking. Resi is saying, “Jesus-Maria,” over and over, and “um Gottes Willen,” again and again. Her voice is ringing in Jinhua’s ears—and the count—

  The count has kissed Jinhua. Sitting in the carriage under a dark sky in the Freyung, hearing distant thunder, with the two men of stone at the Palais Kinsky gate, half naked, muscles rippling, hair flowing, looking down at them—he kissed her. His lips were warm and full and strong.

  Jinhua has never been kissed like this before.

  “I have been sick with worry, gnä’ Frau. And Bastl, too, he has been sick as well. It is all my fault,” Resi is saying now. “What if a scoundrel had carried you off and we had never found you? I would never have forgiven myself, gnä’ Frau. Jesus-Maria,” she says, “I would have died of the guilt. Um Gottes Willen, I would have died, or been sent to the jail, or worse yet the gallows.”

  Resi has pressed Jinhua into a chair and brought blankets and pillows, and now she has taken over the kitchen, and it is steaming hot under all these blankets. Resi is preparing Frittaten Suppe—the way her mother prepares it, she says, arranging yet another pillow under Jinhua’s feet. “Eating this is just the thing to calm and soothe a person.”

  “Then it is you who must have some,” Jinhua tells her, kicking blankets aside. “It is you, Resi, who needs the soup so much more than I.” What she herself is feeling cannot be calmed by a bowl of soup prepared this way or that way. What she is feeling at the end of a day like this cannot be soothed and put aside—forgotten or ignored.

  Resi is ordering Gao Chuzi about, in his own kitchen, instructing him in the preparing of Erdäpfelbrei—mashed potatoes—speaking to him in German, which he doesn’t understand at all.

  Not a word.

  “Hè,” Gao Chuzi is muttering, and Jinhua can hear him from across the hall. “This is not what a cook of my stature should have to do. It is beneath me, an insult, an outrage to a man like me who has ruled the venerable kitchens of the Marquis Zheng, who has ruled them with the hands of an artist, and gladdened His Excellency’s palate with the whitest, most perfect braised—”

  Gao Chuzi’s voice tapers off. “And now it comes to this,” he says.

  “Mashed potatoes for a warm compress,” Resi replies, as though she knows just what he has been saying, as though she knows that she has won this battle against him. “A compress of potatoes is the best thing for the mistress’s poor, tired feet.”

  Later, when the soup has been made and when she is calmer, Resi says what is on her mind, what has been causing all this turmoil. “Ich fleh’ Sie an, gnä’ Frau. I beseech you. Please don’t tell the master that I took you there. You won’t tell him, will you, about Wurschtlprater, or Kobelkoff, or Langosch, or beer? He will be so angry. He will send me away without a reference, and I will have to go back to my village and marry Sepp and be a farmer’s wife for the rest of my days.”

  “You need not worry,”
Jinhua says. “I will tell him nothing. He will not know a single thing about this day, I promise you. He will not be angry about what he does not know, and you must not marry Sepp when it is Bastl that you love.” And while she is saying this, Jinhua is thinking not about Resi and her guilty worries, or about Wenqing and what he will never know, or about Kobelkoff, or people staring, or Langosch, or beer. She is thinking rather about what the count has said to her. She wants to remember every word he said, every movement he made, the feeling of his every touch. How he said, moments before Herr Swoboda lifted her out of the carriage to carry her upstairs and moments after the kiss, “I am appallingly happy to have had you all to myself on this day. You have been the most delightful companion,” he said, winking at her. “His Excellency, your husband, is depriving me and all Vienna when he hides you away. You must tell him not to do this. You must tell him that I said so.”

  And now there are mashed potatoes in linen sacks on Jinhua’s feet, and she is wondering about the wink of the count’s blue eye, and she is eating Resi’s soup. Steam from the bowl is touching her face, and outside a great storm is coming, moving closer, and the sky is getting darker still. Jinhua reaches for another spoonful of soup. Shreds of pancake, not quite crisp, dots of chive, collect in the spoon, and she sips and chews and swallows, and the broth is rich and almost syrupy. She eats and eats and eats some more, and when the bowl is white and empty and her belly is not quite full, her eyelids start to falter. She tells Resi, “It has been a beautiful day, and I am appallingly happy,” and using the count’s words makes her feel close to him. She is not quite asleep, and then she is dreaming. Good night, dear Resi. Sleep well, and dream of Bastl, and I will dream of—

  34

  THE PALEST INK

  Jinhua

  In Jinhua’s dream, a huge storm occupies the sky but dispenses not a drop of rain. There are stains on her skirt, and she is perched at the edge of a large pond, balancing on a smooth stone, rubbing her skirt to clean it. The stains are nothing more than mushroom sauce, and the pond water is thick with algae, and it is urgent that she wash the stains away before the rain comes, because the rain will come, won’t it? A crack of silver divides the sky, and the sky is an angry color, and it is the yin and the yang rubbing together that make this vengeful storm. A roll of thunder follows, the sound of the god Lei Gong, who has a mallet in his hand and is beating his drum. And in his other hand, Jinhua knows although she cannot see it, Lei Gong has the chisel that he always carries, and this chisel is a terrible weapon—for punishing secret crimes.

  The stains in her skirt will not come out; Jinhua rubs harder and harder and they become darker and there are ridges on her fingertips from all the water. Soon the rain will be here, and if she cannot wash the stains out Lei Gong will come down from the sky, and he will punish her. Her reflection wavers in the pond, and now she sees Baba, his reflection behind hers in the water, and he is saying, “My darling little pearl, what have you done?” She spins around to look at him, and she calls out, and it is not Baba’s face at all, but the huge face of the man in the fur hat and the purple vest. It is Kobelkoff, the head-with-no-body, the freak, the Russian Monster. She screams at him: “Where have you put my father?” She screams this over and over—and it is Suyin’s voice that answers, coming from Kobelkoff’s mouth. “Cry one tear. Cry ten thousand; it makes no difference. Your Baba is gone, and you have lost your way, and you are another man’s wife.”

  In the dream Jinhua weeps, and she is angry with Suyin—and she calls out to her. “Why must you always?”—but Suyin is not there. Suyin, who knows nothing of love. Who always knows what is real and what is not. Who calls a deer by the name of deer and a horse by the name of horse—and who never confuses the two.

  It is the dappled sound of a calm rain that wakes Jinhua. Resi comes, and she looks her black-and-white self again today; the ribbons on her cap dangle down her back, and her apron ruffles are newly ironed, crisp at the hem and crisp at her shoulders, and she has brought a tray: a cup of milky chocolate covered with whipped cream and a Semmel with butter and apricot jam.

  Jinhua is hungry.

  “Breakfast in bed this morning,” Resi says, and the brightness in her voice is half true and half false, and Resi is Resi the way she always is, but the memory of the Wurschtlprater is there too, left over from yesterday, making her seem uneasy.

  The smell of chocolate is good. The Semmel is fresh and fragrant.

  “It is raining hard today,” Resi says. And then quickly—“I have cleaned your skirt, and there is not even the tiniest hint of a stain anymore. The beer smell is gone. And there are some letters for you, gnä’ Frau. Two of them. I will go and fetch them.”

  The thought of letters surprises Jinhua. She drinks a sip of chocolate and licks the cream from her lips and tells herself that a dream means almost nothing.

  The first letter is from Wenqing. Jinhua puts it aside, the seal unbroken, and opens the other. The paper is smooth. Creamy white. Lovely to touch. When she unfolds it, a single pink rose petal falls to her lap. At the top of the page are three letters stamped thickly in gold. The letters A v W. A tiny crown above them.

  Alfred von Waldersee.

  The count.

  She cannot read the letter herself. The script is too fine, too tight, looping and scrolled and difficult and beautiful.

  “Resi?”

  Resi takes the letter. She reads aloud. Her voice is deep.

  Dearest Madam,

  There is someone who wishes most urgently to see you. My carriage will come for you tomorrow at two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Your Admiring and Obedient Servant, Count Alfred von Waldersee

  Outside the rain is falling harder and faster, and the bells in the tower of the Schottenkirche are ringing the way they ring at midday. They ring and ring and ring, summoning the Christians to church, and the bell sound comes in rich, booming waves, and it is exquisite and untidy and different from every other time Jinhua has heard them, and she feels the ringing in her heart and her head and all the way down to her feet.

  She breaks the seal on Wenqing’s letter and it crumbles. She thinks of his hand holding a pen to write in his Diplomatic Diary, an entry perhaps about the weather. And she thinks of his hand painting color on a map that shows the lands of the mighty Qing that are “Unprecedented In Their Extent,” and then she imagines his hand on the doorknob to her room. Resi is saying, “You cannot possibly go with this man, this Count Alfred von Waldersee?” She is saying this, Jinhua notices, in the manner of a question and not a declaration. And she touches her forehead, Resi does. In nomine Patris. She touches her breastbone, her shoulders, left and then right, and Jinhua now reads what Wenqing has written.

  To my Dear and Virtuous Wife in her Chaste Chambers,

  A thousand li separate us, you in Weiyena and me in Saint Petersburg, where the weather is cool and rainy. Be assured that I will return as soon as I have fulfilled the duties that have brought me here. I think of you immersed in womanly pastimes. Perhaps as I write this you are working at Embroidery. I cherish the day that I can witness the product of your labors in my absence.

  Your Foolish, Clumsy, and Unworthy Husband, Wenqing

  Jinhua looks up. “I cannot possibly,” she says to Resi, who looks more worried than before, “not go with this man, Count Alfred von Waldersee.”

  35

  A THOUSAND NEW PATHS

  Resi

  Jesus-Maria.

  Will the mistress really go? Or won’t she?

  Of course she will go. She is determined in a way I have not seen before. Not when she learned her German words by heart: twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty of them each day. Not when she went down all those stairs without any help. Not even when she begged me to take her to the Prater.

  Now she is even more determined.

  All morning Resi has been hovering and dawdling and fidgeting and pottering. She can almost hear her mother’s voice, strung like a farmhand’s fiddle, scolding her,
almost mooing—Warum wurschtelst Du so herum, Resi? All morning she has been like this and hasn’t finished anything—and this on washing day, on Tuesday, when there is not only laundry but at least five other things to be done.

  It is as though by staying near the mistress and by bringing tea and putting whipped cream on the Gugelhupf and flicking raindrops from the windowsill, Resi can make the mistress change her mind. She feels responsible. She took the mistress to the Prater. She left her there alone. Resi’s lips are sore from pursing and licking and biting, and remember your place, she tells herself.

  It is—probably—an affair of the heart, and this is something Resi understands.

  She is thinking—again—I must remember my place. I am only the maid. And she is thinking, What will the master say when he returns, and who is this man, this count, anyway?

  She makes the sign of the cross every time she thinks these things.

  He could be a cad, a rogue, ein fürchterlicher Schurke with flirtation on his mind, a quick Vienna dalliance for a scoundrel from Berlin, a tryst, a Liebelei—and no worry at all for a lady’s reputation. A man like this, a shallow-minded cad with a sweet young girl—who hasn’t a clue what men can be like.

  Um Gottes Himmels Willen. Resi’s hand moves to touch her forehead yet again, and then her breastbone.

  Of course, Resi was grateful on Sunday when he brought the mistress home. She was relieved. He seemed a respectable gentleman, a fine-looking man. Handsomely dressed. A little bit old for the mistress, but nonetheless a count.

  But—Resi smacks herself on the cheek—what am I thinking? The mistress is married to the Little Chinaman. They are from China, where virtuous women do not go out. Ever. The master has forbidden this.