It was easier to look at her when Lao Mama was strong and cruel and cared only for money, when she was someone to be afraid of.
On that last day Lao Mama closed her eyes. Her lips stopped working. Her eyebrows rested, finally, and what she had been unable to say would be left unsaid forever. And when Suyin found that she couldn’t cry a single tear, she wondered whether her own heart had died as well, right there inside her rib cage. She was, she thought, a drifting boat cut loose from its anchor. Where would she go, and what would she do—and for whom would she care? She had no answers. Suyin worried, too, about the god of walls and moats. She worried about where he would take Lao Mama’s spirit now that she was dead.
But Lao Mama had thought of that as well. She left a list inside the blood-ju trunk. She bequeathed Suyin her emerald ring. Everything else—the clothes, the hairpins, the trunk and furnishings, the coins in her purse—all of this went to the Cold Mountain Temple to sow goodness for her next life. And as for the girls—all ten of them—Lao Mama gave them their freedom, and for them it would be, Suyin feared, the same as it is for the birds.
A caged bird is sold. It is set free, and then it is caught, only to be caged and sold again.
It is, Suyin thinks now, the circle of a life. It is the way things are.
Later, when Suyin saw the boy on Pingjiang Street and Jinhua came and touched her arm, she knew her heart was still alive. When she had purchased a coffin for Lao Mama and burned incense, and prayed and made offerings, then the tears finally came. Suyin no longer felt like a boat drifting with nowhere to go.
Now, these ten years later, after a long night in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams, Suyin’s head feels heavy and tired and a little sad. She is almost finished with her work for the day. A few more entries to make in the book of accounts and then she will put down her brush and go to Jinhua, and she will tell her that profits for the night have been good, and this they will share with each other and feel glad about together. There are, Suyin thinks, things that she knows and need not doubt, and this is one of them—for now. There is money, and it is enough. There is enough to eat and enough to pay the landlord and enough to treat the six girls well. No one is forced to eat maggoty rice. No one is beaten, and no one is threatened, and doors are not locked. She and Jinhua are together in all of this—and they are not for sale. These things that Suyin knows are blessings, and for these she is grateful. But then there are the things that Suyin does not know and the things that she doubts. It feels sometimes as though they are here in Peking, she and Jinhua, waiting . . . waiting . . . and waiting more . . . for someone who may never come.
And when this person—this man that Jinhua loves—when he comes to the city of golden roofs and palaces and twelve unpleasant things, will Jinhua go away—again? Suyin doesn’t know, but she does know that heaven’s net is wide.
Jinhua
Suyin is frowning, speaking through a veil of steam.
“Lao Ye has made it much too hot,” she scolds. “He has filled it much too full.”
Jinhua lowers herself slowly into the Soochow tub. She likes the water scalding hot. As hot as torture. Too hot—almost—to bear at the end of a long evening.
She tells Suyin, “Too hot or too cold, it is the one who bathes in it who should say. You worry about every small thing. Always this and always that.” She hears the sharpness in her own voice. Suyin’s eyebrows crimp with hurt, and a flush flies to her face—and stays there. The tub is full to the earthenware brim, and Jinhua feels vaguely sorry but says nothing to repair the harm she has caused.
Yiiiii—yiiiiii. Outside, copper hinges work. The sound lasts forever, rising . . . rising . . . rising, making Jinhua shudder. Then the heart-smacking deng and dong as the front gate closes and the deadbolt slides into place. Laughter ornaments the street. These are familiar sounds. Much too familiar, it now occurs to Jinhua. She hates these sounds that mark the comings and goings in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams, where a single evening feels endless. Where night after night has become an eternity.
A line of water at her chin, steam touching her face, Jinhua lifts a hand slowly. They watch, she and Suyin, and listen to the di . . . da . . . di . . . da—the small sound of water falling from her fingertips, drop by drop by drop, and Jinhua is thinking of Edmund Backhouse—Mr. Bao Ke Si—and she is thinking, too, about the count, who has been in her thoughts this evening.
Suyin looks tired. She makes her discontent known. She has her ways—some are subtle and some are not.
“It is late,” Jinhua tells her. A new subject in a lighter voice, wanting peace between them. “Our Japanese guests will have to bribe the Manchu guards to get back through the gate to the Legation Quarter.”
Suyin pushes up a sleeve and dips her hand into the tub. Her skin is instantly as red as a radish. “Foolish, foolish men,” she says. She laughs. “Serves them right,” she adds, “for staying so long and for drinking so much. For giving us so much of their money.” And then she adds, “With such a night Lao Mama would be happy.”
It is good to hear Suyin laugh, not easily, but still it is a laugh. It is good to know that almost all is well between them. And as for Lao Mama, the mention of her name gives Jinhua pause. “We are not,” she says, “like Lao Mama.” And then she says, “Are we, Suyin?”
Jinhua’s skin is soapy, slippery with sandalwood oil. Suyin’s fingers are rubbing her back, traveling up and down the aching knots of her spine. It feels good to have these moments of closeness. Suyin stops for a moment, and it is clear that she is thinking, and Jinhua needs to hear her answer now. “Please, Suyin, tell me that we are not like Lao Mama.”
“I have come to know,” Suyin replies, and she is sighing as she says this, “that some things are inevitable. And in such cases,” she adds, “we do what must be done—and no, Jinhua, we are not like Lao Mama.”
Suyin’s fingers return to Jinhua’s spine, and her touch and her words bring relief. She shifts her weight on the stool and clears her throat, and now it is she who has a question to pose. “Will the foreign gentleman be coming this evening?” Jinhua turns to face her, and water slaps the floor, and she sees that the flush has returned to Suyin’s cheeks. It is because Suyin does not like Edmund. “He is,” Suyin says, “a foolish, careless man who may be dangerous. Mr. Bao Ke Si does not belong here in China doing what those foreign people do.”
Edmund’s houseboy came early in the afternoon. He is pretty like a girl. He has wide eyes that are full of trust, and Suyin says they make her ache, those eyes he has.
Edmund’s note said, I will come to see you this evening. It was signed, Eternally yours, Edmund Trelawney Backhouse.
Jinhua wrote her response in German, which Edmund speaks fluently, along with Greek, French, Chinese, Latin, and English, of course. While she was writing, she heard Suyin talking to the boy. “Go and buy yourself something nice, like skewered crabapples coated with honey and sesame seeds.”
A pleasure of childhood that clings to a person’s teeth—and his memory.
Suyin gave the boy a string of cash and said, “Go quickly before I change my mind,” but she was only teasing him, and her voice was gentle.
Jinhua told the boy, “Don’t eat too many or your tummy will ache.” He dashed off as quick as a rabbit, pigtail flying, trousers flapping, peeking back at them over his shoulder and laughing. Jinhua called out, “Don’t forget to deliver my note,” and Suyin turned to her and said, “I hope that your Mr. Bao Ke Si is good to that child.”
Jinhua doesn’t know about that. Edmund is unreliable. He does as he pleases, and Jinhua tells herself, Be careful. He is not who you want him to be, even with those blue, blue eyes he has.
Maybe he will come this evening, and maybe he won’t.
She feels warm and moist and clean after her bath. Eager to see Edmund. When Jinhua walks into the room—her bedroom—he is sitting on the pink and foreign divan; he has one leg crossed over the other, his buckled shoe is wagging back and forth, and his fine hands are r
esting on his narrow thigh. It is a pose no Chinaman would ever strike.
Edmund has ignored the midnight rule—again. Jinhua’s hair is wet and dripping down her back.
“Tu arrives enfin, ma chère luotangji,” he says, calling her his darling and bedraggled little chicken in the way that only he—Edmund—could, blending what is Chinese and what is French in his mouth, tasting the words and spilling them out as though—of course—they all belonged together.
He is affectionate with her. He speaks the Chinese words as though he were part Chinaman after all, and Jinhua doesn’t mind about the breaking of the midnight rule—or the lateness of the hour.
“I have been craving your company,” he says, “all day,” and his hand moves to his throat with a glint of gold; his fingers stroke his silk cravat, the one with the yellow-, blue-, and red-striped crest of his college back in England. A place he talks about called Oxford. He mentions a man named Oscar Wilde as though she should know who that is, but she doesn’t. “He is a great friend who has made me very happy at times,” he tells her. The opium tray is on the table next to him. The lamp is lit. Edmund unties his cravat; he unthreads it from his collar and allows it to drop to the floor.
“Smoke with me,” he says, pleading, his blue eyes narrowed, speaking English, which he is teaching Jinhua.
Sometimes Edmund wears a Chinaman’s robes and quiet, felt-soled boots.
“Opium destroys the will,” Jinhua replies. She has told him this before. She has watched it happen and has learned to believe that a strong and vibrant will is essential. It is how she has survived.
“Why do you do it?” she asks. “Why do you smoke?” This, she has never asked Edmund before. Once, when he was very drunk on hot baijiu, he told her, “I am the black sheep of a proud family. I suppose I have a lot to be ashamed of.” He translated into Chinese to help her understand. The harmful horse of the herd is what he called himself.
“Smoke with me,” he tells her now, “and you will see exactly why I do it.”
Again, English, and she understands. He says that she has a rare gift for languages, that she is quite as talented as he is. She likes that he says this, that he is teaching her. He makes her happy, sometimes.
“You will have magnificent dreams,” he says. “Dreams that return you to your memories; dreams that let you see what is true; dreams that take you to your destiny. Il sera superbe. You will see everything.”
Edmund takes the silver needle in his hand.
In French it is called opium. In German, Opium, with the o written large. “Comes from the Greek word opion,” Edmund tells her.
She has always wondered what it is that Edmund has done to shame his family. And now she wonders what it is that Edmund sees when he is smoking da yen.
The big smoke.
She nods and tells him, “Yes, Edmund, tonight I want to dream and remember. To see my destiny. I will smoke with you. But I will do it only this one time and then never, ever again.”
Edmund’s skin is yellow in this light. He is naked; so is she. They are lying on the bed facing each other, the opium tray between them, the lamp burning.
The dark deed is done, Jinhua is thinking, the taste of da yen on her tongue. Edmund is coaxing a pellet of shiny, gooey opium onto the tip of the needle and then into the bowl at the end of the pipe. He positions the bowl over the flame. His lips tighten around the mouthpiece, and a wet, crackling sound comes from the pipe. Strands of opium look like burnt cobwebs. Blue smoke blooms, and time is perfectly still.
They have been talking about the empress dowager—China’s empress, the Old Buddha, they call her—how she will not relinquish power to her nephew, the Guangxu emperor. How she is influenced by the old guard. How she despises the English and the French. “It is because of the sacking of her beloved Summer Palace,” Edmund says, “the Garden of Perfect Brightness.” He likes to talk about politics. He is interested in the empress. Strangely, almost obsessively so.
“Victor Hugo said it best,” he tells Jinhua, leaning back, handing her the pipe. “About the Summer Palace, I mean. ‘Two robbers breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures; one of the robbers is called France and the other Britain.’ It was wrath and greed,” Edmund says, “two of the seven deadly sins at the end of a war they had already won. An unjust war, some might say,” he adds, and Jinhua is thinking—so much has been against my will.
“Hold the smoke in your lungs, old girl. Carpe diem.” Edmund’s voice, his lips at her ear. “Hold it as long as you can.” The mouthpiece tastes of damp wood. Jinhua’s throat is burning. She waits. Her mind is calm. Carpe diem is the language of the Latins and it means, she remembers, that you must do what makes you happy now, and thinking of this Jinhua thinks of Empress Elisabeth lifting her skirts, bending her knees, bowing, learning to do the san gui jiu kou—the three kneelings and the nine knockings of the head—for no one in particular. She remembers the empress laughing, touching her hair. She thinks of Resi in a pink dress, smiling, laughing, holding Bastl’s sweating hand, looking at him with love. And then she thinks of bubbles in her mouth and Johann Strauss and dancing—of being in the count’s carriage, of his lips touching her hand.
Madam Hong’s note intrudes, and Jinhua’s mind is clear and bright. Yes, she is thinking, carpe diem. All these lives that she has watched and the lives she has had and the lives she will have tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that. And she is thinking, I will wait for my Great Love. And then she thinks, Madam Hong was a sad and jealous person who had no joy—and I miss my father so.
“I need to get up,” she says, knowing that she cannot possibly do this by herself.
“It is a game,” Edmund says. “One that children play in England. Called cross your heart and hope to die.”
Jinhua’s half-closed, aching eyes open wide. Edmund still hasn’t lifted his head from the quilts that halo him on the bed. The pipe is limp in his hand.
“A game,” she repeats. “I do not know this game.”
The flame on the opium lamp wavers.
“You have no game like this in China,” Edmund says. “But it is easy—harmless, just a game—for fun—to pass the time.” He lifts a shoulder and his mouth expands to a smile. Jinhua notices the jumble of his teeth, like an abandoned game of dominoes, his well-shaped lips. He is a handsome man. He has blue eyes. Blue like the sky when a storm is coming. She takes another sip of opium into her mouth and wishes she could dream as Edmund said she would. Magnificent dreams. Dreams of her destiny. Of what will happen next. Of the count coming to Peking. And then she warns herself, A harmless game with a man who is the harmful horse of the herd—is not a harmless game.
“How does one play this child’s game with crossing hearts?” she asks, and it is the opium deciding that yes, she will play, and the opium tells her, too, that she herself has not been harmless. Has she? She has not been harmless to Suyin.
Edmund props himself upright on one elbow. His head is tilted, and with the nail of his forefinger he traces first the red line across Jinhua’s throat, about which he has never asked and for this she is grateful, and then he scratches two new lines, lazy, intersecting lines across her bare chest.
“I’ll go first,” Edmund says. “I’ll ask you a question.” He is speaking slowly, the way he always does when he is smoking opium. His pale eyelids drift. “And you must answer, and I must guess”—he drops back down against the quilts—“whether your answer is the truth or a lie.”
There is a song in Jinhua’s head. A very handsome gentleman / He waited for me in the lane / I am sorry that I did not—
It is an old Chinese song from the Classic of Poetry, a song that the girls sing to entertain the guests in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams. Jinhua wonders, Does Edmund hear it too? But it is she who is waiting. She has been waiting for so long.
A very handsome gentleman—
“Are you ready?” Edmund is asking.
<
br /> The air is like syrup on Jinhua’s tongue. A beetle crackles somewhere close, easy to hear but hard to see in the dark. She nods. Her head is heavy.
“Why, Madam Sai Jinhua,” Edmund says, his voice suddenly loud, “do you and Suyin not go home”—Edmund coughs an opium cough—“home to Suzhou? Why are you here in Peking, where you and she are both unhappy? Why do you not see—and why, God’s blood, why the brothel named with inspiration from none other than the Bard of Avon?”
He is mocking her, and she doesn’t care. Opium brings quick thoughts, tens and dozens and thousands of them, and Jinhua assembles them in her head and turns them over this way and that, and she isn’t sure what to say—and why is Edmund asking not just one but four questions with a hundred deeply buried answers—and has he heard what she is thinking?
She doesn’t have to play this game, does she?
Pearls flow and jade turns, and it is the opium that is leading Jinhua to the answer, to the words of the fortune-teller—There is Great Love waiting.
“Well?” Edmund’s voice intrudes.
“He said he would come,” she says, and it feels as though her voice is slipping in the way that a fistful of sand falls between your fingers. “He said, ‘I will come to Peking to see the golden roofs and high walls and eunuchs and concubines and palaces, and I will find you’—and that is why—”
“Will you have some more?”
Edmund isn’t listening. Or perhaps he is and doesn’t care—
Will she have some more? She wants the dreams, the good and happy ones, the dreams about love and kisses and dancing. But—she shakes her head—no, she cannot bear it—and then she changes her mind. She wants to do this fully and completely. She wants to dream, to see the count whom she loves, who said, “I will find you”—
A very handsome gentleman—
She will have more.
Edmund smiles and pokes another pellet, and brings the pipe to his lips. The rasping, bubbling sound comes back. And then the smell and he is murmuring in her ear. “Dreams are ridiculous, delicious creatures that live and breathe and grow—and who is the gentleman for whom you pine so madly?” Edmund pauses but doesn’t wait. “Take another sip, Jinhua. I believe your answer is both truth and trickery. Am I right? Cross your heart and hope to die—and now it is your turn, ma chère Jinhua. What is your question for me?”
The Courtesan Page 24
