The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  At first, Jinhua told herself that Wenqing was merely tired from the long journey, and that surely he knows nothing. That his icy silence is a temporary thing, and that surely he did not meet Count Alfred von Waldersee while he was in Russia. And all the while Jinhua has been speaking to the count in her imagination. She cannot help herself. She revisits everything he said to her and what she said to him. She invents new places, new conversations. She imagines his return from Saint Petersburg, seeing him on the Freyung below her foreign-glass window, waving to him in the way that she waved on the deck of the SS Agamemnon. She imagines him coming up all those stairs, entering the apartments. She imagines Wenqing gone for many months, to Paris, to London, back to Saint Petersburg. And sometimes she imagines Wenqing dead, having leapt from the Crown Prince Rudolf Bridge into the Danube, leaving his scholar’s hat behind. She imagines the count embracing her. Consoling her. Taking her to Stephansdom, to the opera, to the Stadtpark, to all the places she has read about in the Diplomatic Diaries. She imagines him dancing the waltz with her. Her body tingles. The count kisses her again and again. These are not dreams; they are stories, and she is obsessed by them, and they are very real to her and so much more than stories.

  Long, long ago in ancient times, when just wishing a thing made it so—

  Now Jinhua sees the bright brass knob on her bedroom door angling down. She hears the clank and click of the latch, and it is the same clank and click she heard when she first went to the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love, when Old Man locked her inside Aiwen’s room.

  But Wenqing is opening her door and not locking it. He is entering her bedroom. He is wearing his nightclothes, and his face is strange to her, as pale and tight as it has been these last six days. His queue is neat, hanging over his shoulder and down the front of his chest.

  “You have not been chaste,” he says suddenly, loudly, harshly, blurting out the words. His eyes are black, and he is standing just inside the door, and Jinhua knows the meaning of a look like this, although not from him, never before from him. “You have not been chaste in my absence, and you have never been chaste,” he says. “You, Jinhua, have disobeyed me. And now,” he says, and he is almost snarling, coming closer, “I will have what I must have and you will obey me because I am your husband and you are my concubine. You will submit today to me as you have submitted to others on other days. And tomorrow you will submit again, and you will do this every day after that until you have given me a son. And then I will say, ‘No more,’ and you will be nothing to me.”

  Step by step Wenqing is coming closer. A slight breeze makes a curtain billow, and Jinhua is glad that she has left the window open. Wenqing shudders. “I will not forgive you,” he says, “and I will not allow you to forgive yourself for losing your virtue among the barbarians.”

  While Wenqing does what a man does, and he does this in a way that Jinhua remembers from the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love, and most especially from the nights she spent with Banker Chang—while he does these things to her she tells herself a new story, and in the story Jinhua says to Wenqing what she is not quite able to say to him now. That her body will not give him a son. That she will drink tadpole soup, or stab her womb with needles—or hang herself from the rafters—but she will not carry his child. She does not own herself, as Suyin always reminded her, and yet in these ten few days Jinhua has begun to feel for the first time that there is a piece of the life she is living that is hers and hers alone—and it is because she has sent Madam Ma and her embroidery away; she has descended one hundred stairs; she has gone to the Prater with Resi and met an empress and allowed a man she does not know, a count, a man she loves, to kiss her. And if she can do these things, if she can disobey Wenqing and go out into a world that is large and foreign, and allow both good and bad things to happen, then she can refuse to bear her husband’s child. For now, for tonight, this new story of owning herself will sustain Jinhua while Wenqing climbs on top of her. And for now, for tonight, this is enough and she is strong enough to endure what is happening.

  When he has finished, Wenqing takes Jinhua’s face between his two hands. He is forcing her to be close to him, and he is forcing her to look into his rage-filled eyes—and this is an even more painful way of being together than submitting to him when he forced himself onto her body. And then, when he has grasped her so tightly that she cannot look away, he tells Jinhua her true punishment. “For these next two years that we are in Weiyena,” he says, “you will live a greatly altered life. There will be locks on the doors. I will have the only keys. And as for you, Jinhua, you will not ever leave these apartments, and your companions—your only companions—will be Madam Ma and her embroidery.”

  Hearing this, Jinhua howls. She is breaking into pieces, and then Wenqing says one last thing. The last thing that will make this new and altered life unbearable. “I am sending Resi away,” he says. “You will never see her again, and perhaps in this way you will learn. You are Chinese. You are my wife. You must behave with decorum.”

  PART FIVE

  Hall of Midsummer Dreams

  THE TWENTY-FIFTH YEAR OF

  THE GUANGXU REIGN

  1900

  Peking

  38

  DREAMING OF PLUMS

  Suyin

  She has been doing the accounts and thinking of Suzhou—and the buzzing of a fly she cannot seem to swat leads Suyin to consider her list of twelve unpleasant things about living in Peking, the first of which is that there is no water here—except for that stinking sewer they call the Jade River—there are no canals with their humpbacked bridges or rivers with drooping willows along their banks. No boats and no boatmen. The swarming, buzzing, prickling flies are another of the twelve unpleasantnesses, and then there are the bitter winters that freeze your bones, and the great pink dust storms that come at the time of Spring Begins, the high ones that hover ominously in the sky and drop red Gobi Desert dust on every roof, every wall, every tree, and every leaf in the city. Every table, chair, and plate must be cleaned, and every eyelash must fight this Gobi Desert filth.

  But sitting here in Peking and thinking of Suzhou while swatting at a fly, Suyin is quenching her thirst by thinking of plums, which is of course pointless.

  It has been a busy night. One table. Ten men. Japanese, like dogs pursuing a bad smell. There has been yet another war, and this time it is the Japanese who are the victors, and now they are here in Peking in ever-growing numbers. Along with the Englishmen and the French, the Germans and Italians. The Americans. Foreign devils who have come to Peking to visit, to steal, to live, to make wars and make money—some to preach their barbarian religions and some to be careless in China. A dangerous mix of people, Suyin finds, and they come here to the hall, many of them do. They are drawn here, Suyin supposes—and she does not approve—by the strange and foreign-sounding name of this establishment, the name that Jinhua insisted upon above all else: the Hall of Midsummer Dreams. And some of them, like Mr. Bao Ke Si—the Englishman whom Suyin counts among the twelve unpleasant things—some of them come because of Jinhua, because she understands the ways of the barbarians. She understands their languages. She has a reputation.

  The foreign gentlemen have a name for her. The Emissary’s Courtesan.

  Suyin calculates quickly in her head. Wine. Tobacco. Tea. Opium. Dishes—main and lesser. Soups. Girls—two of them with guests for the night—which is five taels times two.

  Has she remembered to count everything? Suyin writes slowly, carefully, her wrist cocked, her fingers firm on the wooden stem of her writing brush, the tip black with just the right amount of ink and tapered to a perfect point. The columns of numbers in the book of accounts are neat and legible—and Suyin pauses to check her total. That it is correct makes her happy for a moment or two. She doesn’t often need an abacus. Jinhua says that Suyin’s head is exquisite for holding numbers, that she is an excellent partner. Even Lao Mama knew, eventually, that Suyin was strong with the affairs of a business.
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br />   “As strong as a boulder, Suyin is,” Lao Mama would say.

  That was later. When Lao Mama herself was not so strong anymore. A year or so before she died. “Deviate an inch and lose a thousand miles,” she would say, and her voice, by then, was ill-tempered but not cruel. “I have taught this to Suyin, and it is because of my teaching that my ever-filial daughter can count so well.”

  So why is Suyin here in Peking with this fly that will not stop buzzing—and the pink dust that will come again and again—doing what she would rather not do in a place she would rather not be? It is because, Suyin answers her own question, I cannot say no to Jinhua. If she asked me again to sell the emerald ring that Lao Mama left to me because I was filial, if Jinhua asked me to follow her to Peking, to buy four girls and then two more, to open a House with a Wide Gate—I would do it all again. And if she asked me to step on a naked blade with two bare feet—I would do that too. I would do it because she is my sister. Because I neither have nor want anyone else. Because I love her.

  Sometimes—rarely—Suyin wonders whether Jinhua would do as much for her. Would she step on a naked sword with bare feet?

  It was ten years ago. Suyin was on her way to the coffin maker’s shop on Guancai Lane to order a coffin for Lao Mama. She had stopped on Pingjiang Street to watch a small boy bargain for a kite. The old kite maker was teasing the child, smiling the kind of smile that a grandfather has, a smile that makes an old man’s cheeks plump and round and pink and turns his eyes to twinkling, crescent slits. “I want it more than anything,” the small boy said, and his eyes shone like moonstones. The kite was made of bamboo and silk, a huge, shimmering dragonfly with wings that were painted in blues and greens and purples and silvers—by the hand of an artist, Suyin could see, and she told the old man so and that made him smile even more widely.

  Standing there, watching the small boy with ragged trousers and too few coins clutched in his fist, Suyin said to the kite maker, “How much is the dragonfly kite? I would like to buy it for the boy.” Even now, she remembers the smell of burnt sugar from the sweet seller at the neighboring stall. She remembers the joy on the small boy’s face and thinking that she would buy him a piece of cake as well, and that maybe, now that Lao Mama was dead, she would sell the emerald ring and open a cake shop right on the canal—by the West Gate—with the soothing sound of water always near and the aromas of only good and wholesome things—where joy-filled children like this boy could eat cakes that make them smile. She remembers the scream of a crow and then a second crow landing on a wall; she felt someone grab her by the hand, and she turned to look. It was Jinhua standing there on Pingjiang Street holding tightly on to Suyin’s arm. Jinhua with wild eyes and tear-streaked cheeks and clothes in disarray. Jinhua from whom Suyin had heard nothing at all since the day she left, dressed in red, to be a rich man’s concubine, who had disappeared but not been forgotten. She began talking right away, and Jinhua’s voice was desperate, and she was clutching a small bag containing everything she cared to own. “Another of my lives has ended,” she said. “I have run away, Suyin, and I have come here to find you because you are—”

  Suyin remembers thinking that she did not understand a single thing Jinhua was saying. Thinking that in the four years, or was it only three, Jinhua had changed beyond all recognition. She remembers seeing the small glass object that made golden snowflakes fall and dancers twirl that Jinhua pulled from her bag and how she felt, standing there on Pingjiang Street, when Jinhua clung to her and cried, “You and I are like skin and bones, Suyin. I cannot live without you.” Suyin paid the kite seller and pressed a coin in the small boy’s hand. “For sweet mung-bean cake,” she told him, and felt just a hint of regret that she would not have time to watch him eat it. Then she took Jinhua’s arm and brought her back to the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love—and yes, of course she would help her, and of course she was happy that Jinhua was back.

  Suyin washed Jinhua and noted the red line that was still, after all these years, painted at her throat. And she noted, too, the slight swelling in Jinhua’s belly. She fed her and put her to bed, where Jinhua tossed, and she turned, and her skin was hot, and her mind was feverish. Jinhua raved about locks and keys. About men without clothes or bodies or heads. About love out of balance, and palaces with golden roofs and high walls. She wept when she talked of crossing an ocean, and she wept more when she ranted about babies that could not be born—and does this one have dark eyes or blue?

  Jinhua cried when she was awake and she cried in her dreams, and Suyin sent for the zoufangyi. While they waited for the doctor to arrive she asked questions, and Jinhua answered, sometimes screaming nonsense, sometimes speaking softly about things that seemed real. Suyin asked Jinhua about her husband, who had seemed a good and decent man on that day when he chose her from the lineup of Lao Mama’s girls. “Where is he and why are you not with him?” she asked. This question, Jinhua did not answer, and Suyin tried to soothe her, to heal the injuries—of which she could see there were many, both old ones and new. She suspected an affair of wind, flower, snow, and moons. She suspected a heart that was wounded and ashamed, and Jinhua ranted then about dreams in the middle of summer and the Nine Postures and Three Obediences—and waiting, waiting, waiting, in a place where she was blind and wanted to see.

  The zoufangyi arrived in a boat rigged with a pennant, and from the pennant dangled an assortment of teeth and bones and leathery lumps. “Evidence,” the itinerant doctor said, “of his vast experience in matters of medicine.” He entered the room where Jinhua lay and wore curious, curl-toed shoes. He checked her pulse and examined her tongue and checked her pulse a second time. He said that her pulse was floating, that it sometimes fluttered, and then from his bag he pulled a book that was thick and worn and tattered.

  Treatise on Various Damage Disorders.

  He retrieved a second volume from his bag, and it was no less thick or worn or tattered than the first.

  Canon of Eighty-One Difficult Issues.

  The doctor consulted first one book, then the other, slouching over the pages, licking his middle finger to turn them one by one. He was a thin man, and while he read he mumbled in that dark and special language that only doctors understand. He took his time. Said, “A,” and then, “Ò.” Pages crackled. Jinhua by now was speaking in a grief-stricken voice about the baby in her belly—how it could not and must not be born. The doctor lay his hand on her, and Suyin held her breath and told Jinhua, “Better by far to see a child live than to watch it die.”

  “The patient’s condition is most severe,” the doctor said finally. “And although there is a swelling of her abdomen, there is no baby to either be born or not,” he added. “There is confusion here,” he said, “and it is confusion that ails this patient so severely.” And then the doctor told Suyin that in his experience bee products can cure a thousand ailments.

  It was six days later that Subchancellor Hong came to the hall to look for Jinhua. He rang the bell at the red gate, just as he had done on that day long ago. He looked old and tired, and he walked with a cane. He was not the fine gentleman that Suyin remembered. She had been expecting him, but she expected him sooner.

  “Is she—?” he asked.

  Suyin nodded.

  “Is there a—?”

  She shook her head. There is no baby. She invited Subchancellor Hong to come inside, just as she had done before. She brought him tea and steaming, scented towels, and he sat there hunched in a chair. Silent for a long time, deep in thought, and greatly changed. “She must come back,” he said finally, sipping tea, his voice unsteady. “I love her. I need her with me. There will be harmony between us now that we have returned to Suzhou. Will you tell her this, Suyin? Please, tell her this for me. I will treat her well and kindly.”

  When Subchancellor Hong had gone, Jinhua tried to leave her bed. “I cannot ever go back,” she told Suyin. “I am not virtuous enough—and I do not wish for him to own me. He has parted me from Great Love. He has force
d me to be blind.” And it was then that Jinhua began to talk of going to Peking, going now, going right away.

  Suyin asked her, “Why? Why under heaven would you want to go to Peking, where you have never been before?”

  “It is because,” Jinhua replied, “of the golden roofs and palaces.” She paused before finishing—“and because of blue eyes and bright gold buttons.”

  Suyin held a cup of bee-pollen tea sweetened with honey to Jinhua’s lips. “You are not strong enough to leave your bed,” she said. She remembers tea spilling onto the quilt. She remembers holding Jinhua down and thinking that this talk of buttons and roofs made no sense at all. “Peking is far, far away, a vast and dangerous place. You cannot go there now,” she told Jinhua. “You cannot go there alone. And as for me, I must bury Lao Mama. I must tend to her affairs. Why don’t you rest for a while? Wait until you are strong, and then we will see where we will go. We will decide what we will do.”

  Lao Mama’s death had been a slow thing. Suyin suspected that she held on because she didn’t want anyone to touch what she would leave behind: her emerald ring and her gold hairpins, her jade bracelets, her water pipe, her embroidered clothes in the chest of blood-ju wood with the pagoda-mountain pattern. And then there were the girls, of course—Lao Mama’s money trees—ten of them by this time.

  In the end, Lao Mama lay for many days looking dry, always awake and always watching. Her head was still but her eyes edged left and right and up and down. Her hair was a gray and tangled mess, not black and oiled and sleek the way it always was before. Her eyebrows flinched continually as though there were a thousand tangled worries dashing in and out of her head. Her lips worked silently. Lao Mama had things to say, Suyin thought, but at the last it was phlegm and nothing else that coughed its way out of her mouth.