The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  The poor little thing is sitting by the window, has been sitting there all morning, a book in her lap—a Chinese love story, she told Resi, sighing deeply. Dream of the Red Chamber, she said, gazing out the window. There is no doubt. The mistress is in love. She cannot possibly love the Little Chinaman, can she?

  Too old, too dull, too much lacking in—

  And who is she, Resi, to begrudge a sweet young thing her very first love?

  A love like the one she feels for Bastl. Like the one that the empress feels for Count Andrássy.

  And now she asks, “Does the book end happily? The love story, I mean.”

  When the mistress says, “No, it does not. It ends in a tragedy,” Resi feels anxious again—and a little bit disappointed.

  The church bells ring once and then a second time. It is two o’clock. The mistress has been reading and not really reading her Chinese love story, and she has been eating but not really eating her Gugelhupf with the whipped cream. She looks up, and her cheeks are tinged with pink, and Resi hurries to the window. The roof of the carriage is a dark rectangle waiting down below, just outside the front gate. The rain has stopped.

  “Anarchist plot to burn Vienna. Read all about it. Anarchist plot—”

  The Ausrufer is calling out the headlines, and how can it be that his voice is so cheerful when the news is so grim?

  “It is exactly two o’clock,” Resi tells the mistress, who is beautifully dressed in bright colors. “And the carriage is waiting. Are you sure, gnä’ Frau, that we should go?”

  The expression on the mistress’s face makes everything clear. She doesn’t want a chaperone. “I will go,” she says, “and you, Resi, will stay here.”

  Jinhua

  After all the rain, the air is thick and sweet over the Freyung, and Frau Anna is calling out in her tremulous old woman’s voice that sounds as though it might crack at any moment: “Lavendel, Lavendel, come and buy my lavender.” Her song and her voice collide with the newsboy’s sweet and gleeful chant: “Anarchist plot to burn Vienna—Anarchist plot—”

  No one seems to care about the plot. But people are stopping to buy Frau Anna’s lavender, and they are all smiling and laughing, and Frau Anna is too.

  “If Madam is ready,” the footman says, his hand cupped on Jinhua’s elbow, his eyes barely visible beneath the brim of his hat.

  There is no sign of a person inside the carriage. No sign of the count.

  Turning back, Jinhua sees the shadow at the third-floor window—Resi watching and worrying—Resi, who is, she knows, terribly, anxiously, guiltily afraid of what might happen, and shi hua shi shuo—to tell the truth, she herself is a little bit anxious, a little bit afraid, a little bit guilty.

  36

  COME, SIT THEE DOWN—

  Empress Elisabeth (Sisi)

  Standing next to Ida, who is herself of delicate stature, the wife of the Chinese emissary looks as dainty as a child.

  Count Alfred was right. “You will be enchanted, Majesty,” he said. He called her the little Chinese princess and told Sisi, “You must meet her, and you will see for yourself what I mean. I will arrange it.”

  And he did.

  She is not what Sisi expected. And then again she is. Her clothes are colorful and intriguing and heavy with embroidery. The coat she is wearing—the shape of it hides everything and reveals nothing, and yet it is becoming on her. She is small and pale and hesitant; exotically exquisite with her wide and slanted eyes, her dark, dark hair bound fetchingly in a knot at the back of her head.

  And there is one more thing. There is no doubt but that the little Chinese princess knows that she is alluring.

  Sisi has questions, lots of them, for Count Alfred’s newfound friend. And she will ask them all, one by one, and she will doubtless think of many more.

  Darling, loyal Ida doesn’t quite approve. She has that deep, stern look she gets, but if she did say something, anything, it would be, If it makes you happy, Majesty, then we will do it, and Ida would whisper it in the language of the Magyar that she and Sisi share for secrets. Ha Öfelsége ezt óhajtja, akkor így cselekszünk—

  She would say this, Ida would, and she would mean it faithfully and with all of her heart. Ida, always protective, pretty today in cloud gray, is suspended in her deepest curtsy.

  “Your Majesty,” she says, and the dress she is wearing is fetching on her, rich with ruffles, newly arrived from Worth and Bobergh in Paris. “I present Madam . . . Sai Jinhua . . . wife of His Excellency . . . Hong Wenqing, emissary of the . . . Guangxu emperor to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.”

  Ida has stumbled over these unpronounceable foreign names, and her cheeks have colored, and the emissary’s wife is standing next to her, eyes wide, lips parted—teeth like pearls—caught in emotions that Sisi knows very, very well. It is awareness that all eyes are on her—it is bewilderment, embarrassment, and the hesitation, that terrible feeling of What is it that is expected of me? What shall I do?

  And yet, she knows that she is beautiful; of that there is no doubt.

  Strangely, very strangely, it is herself that Sisi recognizes in this exotic Chinese creature, the way she was before becoming the way that she is now.

  “Ida, you may leave us,” she says. “Ask Schmidl, if you would, to bring us—”

  Sisi was about to say, “Ask Schmidl to bring us mint tea and oranges,” but the tiny Chinese lady has descended to her knees and is bending down, touching her forehead gently to the floor, once—twice—three times, and this can only be the strange prostration, the Chinaman’s bow that one hears about at court.

  But what the little Chinese princess has just done is so much more than what they talk about and ridicule. It is surprising and exquisite and as graceful as a fencer’s lunge, and yes, it is a faux pas, a blunder, and not at all the etiquette for an audience with an empress.

  Dots of light in Ida’s eyes. The merest hint of her disapproval changing to amusement. Sisi finishes her own sentence. “Tell Schmidl,” she says, speaking now in Hungarian, “to bring some tea, and while we wait I will ask my guest to teach me how to execute this bow that is so lovely.”

  And now it is indulgence on Ida’s lips and in her eyes, and Sisi knows what she is thinking. Dear, sweet Ida—Reader to Her Majesty, the court of Vienna has titled her, idiotically, as she has never in twenty years read a single line of a single book to Sisi—she calls these special interests Your Majesty’s fascinations. And it is true—Sisi is obsessed. She is fascinated by women. Beautiful women. She likes to be with them. She collects photographs for her Album of Beauties. These things make her happy, and she is not often happy in the life that she is living.

  The little Chinese princess is a patient teacher. She explains in not-quite-perfect German, accented and charming, and then she demonstrates. They practice in front of a full mirror. She corrects—“Nicht so, aber so.” Like this and not like that. “It is called the san gui jiu kou,” she says.

  The three kneelings and the nine knockings of the head. “It is what we do,” she tells Sisi, “in the presence of those we must venerate.”

  It is thrilling to learn this Chinese bow in the company of this beguiling person. They practice over and over, standing side by side, watching themselves and each other in the mirror. And Sisi is obsessed. She is fascinated by the movement, the grace, by something she has never done before. And never seen.

  And this woman who is little more than a child—or is she more woman than child after all?—she will be one of Sisi’s beauties. She will have a page all to herself in Sisi’s album. And in the meantime, “May I touch your hair?” she asks.

  Jinhua

  The empress smells of—something sweet, and her hair is wavy and magnificently thick and ornamented with diamonds, and it reaches almost to her ankles. She is lying now on top of all that hair and on top of a flowery carpet on the floor, and she is saying, “Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed. Lie down here next to me. It is the best way to see the painting,” s
he says.

  This is not at all what Jinhua expected. She expected the count and did not think of lying here, side by side on the floor in a hushed room with shimmering rose-red walls and sparkling lights and velvet curtains that match the walls, and much that is gold and much that is silver. Lying here next to the empress—Resi’s beautiful, extraordinary empress who is also the queen of Hungary and who is in love with the Hungarian count.

  And Jinhua did not ever think of looking up—up like this at a painting on the ceiling. She wants to ask the empress about the count, about Count Andrássy and Count Alfred von Waldersee, but the empress is talking of other things.

  “It is a story about a lost child and about infatuation and trickery and love,” she is saying now, and she is murmuring more than speaking. “About requited and unrequited love, about true and false love, about love that is out of balance. It is by Wilhelm Shakespeare, who is a great poet and a writer of plays.” The empress’s hand drifts across her forehead and jewels twinkle, and there are fine lines that Jinhua sees right at the edge of the empress’s eye.

  Fishtail crinkles.

  “The painting is a gift,” the empress says, “a gift from my husband. An adornment for my Secret Apartments. He thought that it would please me, and it does.” And then she laughs. “Titania and her lover. You know,” she says, “he—my husband, the emperor—has never even seen the painting. I do not allow him to come here.”

  Titania and her lover, who is a man with the head of a donkey.

  “The name of the story,” the empress says, “is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  She has asked Jinhua what it is that she uses to make her black Chinese hair so fragrant and so shiny, and with what does she treat her skin? “At court it never, ever stops,” she says. “I am fodder for their idle chatter: What is Empress Elisabeth wearing? How is her complexion? She looks fatter or thinner or older or younger. Is the empress clever enough for us? Is she charming enough? Is she beautiful enough? I wonder,” she says, “may I ever be myself? The way that I am? May I ever love the person I love?”

  She must try magnolia oil herself, the empress is saying now, and the conversation twists and flows like water, here and there and back again. “Can you get me some?” She means magnolia oil. And now she is telling Jinhua the story of Titania, the woman on the ceiling. And yes, it is as the empress says: The best way to see the painting is when you are lying on the floor. A forest scene rich in blues and greens and reds and violets and dotted with many other colors; it is vivid with trees and vines and fruits and flowers, and tiny people with wings—and they are the fairies, the empress says. The woman in the center of the painting is Titania, and with her long, amber hair and smoldering, unhappy eyes, she really is the empress Elisabeth, isn’t she?

  “And yes,” the empress tells Jinhua, “the object of Titania’s love is really the man with the head of a donkey, but this is not a true love. It is only a story,” she says. “But a story can contain both trickery and truth. At least I find it so.” The empress’s eyes are sparkling, and then they change and they are smoldering like Titania’s eyes and like her own eyes in the photograph that Resi gave Jinhua. The empress touches Jinhua’s hand, and the donkey’s head is vast and furry on the ceiling, and ornamented with flowers, which, the empress says, Titania has arranged to make her lover seem more lovable than he really is. And now the empress’s eyes are sparkling again, and she is getting up from the floor and holding out her hand, and her dress is beautiful in buttery swirls of color.

  “Oh no,” the empress has just said, half singing the words. “Count Alfred won’t be joining us.” She takes a sip of weakly colored broth.

  “Zur Stärkung,” she says. To strengthen herself.

  “The count has gone to Saint Petersburg to visit with the tsar. He left this morning, by train.” The empress takes another sip of broth, and Jinhua says, “Ò,” and she pauses, and her first thought is disappointment—the count will not come and he will not kiss her, and next she thinks, He is in Saint Petersburg, where Wenqing also is, and this is a complicated thought, and one that matters greatly, and then, moments later, it doesn’t seem to matter at all.

  Rice, once cooked, will never again be raw, she thinks, and this is so.

  Jinhua is sipping sweet mint tea, and the empress is urging her to try a taste of cake although she herself is not eating. “It is,” the empress says, “newly invented by a Hungarian confectioner for the exhibition in Budapest. Dobos Torta,” she says, “is all the rage in Vienna. This in spite of our heavy-handed politics toward the Hungarians. They accuse me, you know, for my sympathies. They say I am infatuated.”

  And then the empress says, putting down her empty cup, “It has been such a lovely day. And now before you go you must tell me how it is with your family in China.”

  Jinhua’s mouth is full of cake, and the cake has seven sweet, buttery, chocolaty layers, and the layer on top is crisp and sugary and golden brown, and eating it is like cracking the merest sliver of brittle ice between your teeth.

  “My family,” she says. My family.

  And now Jinhua is telling a story to the empress: “My father’s name is Sai Anguo, and he is alive and well and he lives in a great house in a great city. He misses me very, very much now that I am away from home—and I miss him, and I am sorry and sad that I have left him.”

  The empress is nodding, and Jinhua continues with her story.

  “My father’s eyes sometimes look dark,” she says, “and sometimes they look almost blue. And yes, it is true, Your Majesty, that eyes like this are very rare in China. I miss my father terribly,” she says again, “and his coat has the character for shou, which has the meaning of ‘a long life,’ woven into the fabric in at least one hundred places. And this is why,” she says, “my father will live for a very long time, and he will wait for me to come back to China.”

  Jinhua’s eyes are filling with tears, and she tells the empress that, yes, she has a sister too, and her name is Suyin, and these things that she has said are not lies but they are stories—and she wishes they were real. And then the empress says—and her eyes, too, are glistening—“A father is a precious thing. I see too little of my own, and one day I suppose he will die and I will mourn him always. He went to Egypt many years ago, to climb the Pyramid of Cheops, and when he was there—”

  Now both of them are crying, Jinhua and the empress, and Jinhua begins to recite, through tears—

  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.

  When she has finished reciting, and when she has translated for the empress, when they have both dried their eyes and blown their noses, the empress says, “I will always remember this day as a day of great happiness; the two of us sitting here, drinking tea, telling each other stories. You must go, soon, to see Herr Angerer and he will take your photograph for my Album of Beauties.”

  There is a small parcel on the seat of the carriage that takes Jinhua back to the Palais Kinsky. “It is a gift,” the coachman said, “from Count Alfred von Waldersee. Als Erinnerung—he instructed me to say. A small trinket to remember a beautiful time,” he said.

  The small trinket is a round ball of glass, and inside the ball is a pair of tiny dancers, and when Jinhua shakes the ball the dancers spin and turn, and tiny flecks of gold fall and shimmer all around them, and the lady’s pink skirt flares and has roses on the hem.

  37

  THE WAY A WOMAN

  SERVES HER HUSBAND

  Jinhua

  It has been ten days. Just ten days since everything changed. Since Jinhua went to Resi’s Wurschtlprater, since she covered her face with her shaking hands at the sight of Kobelkoff’s head-with-no-body, and since the count with his bright gold buttons and his blue, blue eyes lifted her into his carriage—and since Jinhua’s first kiss of true, romantic love.

&n
bsp; It has been eight days now since Jinhua traveled willingly, blindly, to the empress’s Secret Apartments. Since she heard the story of Titania and her midsummer night’s dream and ate Dobos Torta with its seven sweet, buttery, chocolaty layers, and wished that the count were there too. Eight days since she talked of her family as though she had one.

  And now, today, it has been seven days since Wenqing’s message arrived. It was the briefest of messages to say that he was leaving Saint Petersburg unexpectedly and urgently—returning to Vienna immediately and without delay. The note was not addressed To my Dear and Virtuous Wife, as Wenqing’s last note was. It was not addressed to anyone, and after reading it Jinhua retrieved Madam Hong’s embroidery box from the trunk where she had stowed it. She left it sitting on the table for a while that afternoon. And then at dusk she opened it. She pulled out the white square of silk and looked at the Ye He Hua in dwindling light. And then she returned the embroidery box to the trunk and folded the silk with the Flower of Noctural Togetherness and put it underneath her pillow. On that day, seven days ago, she did this for the count and not her husband.

  And now it has been six days since Wenqing’s return. He was pale when he arrived, and his face was tight, and his lips were wooden. He did not speak to her at all. He told her nothing of the tsar, whose name she knows is Alexander Romanov, and who has, Jinhua recalls reading in the Diplomatic Diaries, a most fearful cyst on the left side of his nose. He said nothing of the cyst that cannot be cured, or of maps or wars or stolen territory—or of the urgent matter that brought him back to Vienna so quickly. He locked the door to his barbarian library, and in the six days he has been back he has not looked at her or spoken a single word to Jinhua—and it is as though winter and a deep freeze have settled suddenly and without warning on the Palais Kinsky, right in the middle of Spring Begins.