The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  She waits. She feels like weeping. She will never smoke again, because opium brings confusion. It destroys the will and harms the dreams. But she has a question. One for Edmund—

  “What is love?” she asks. “What is Great Love?”

  Lying on her hip, looking at Edmund’s almost pretty face, Jinhua waits for the answer.

  “What is love?” he repeats, and he is looking at the ceiling, allowing smoke to drift from between his lips—and it seems such a long time before he speaks. “It is a large question, a worthy one that you have asked.” Edmund is whispering now, and listening to him is like waiting to hear the last, precious words of a poem—waiting to understand what it means. “As my dear friend Oscar once wrote to me,” he says, finally, “‘Let us always be infinitely dear to one another, as indeed we have been always.’ And this, Jinhua”—his eyes are on her—“is love. It is Great Love, and anything less is almost nothing.”

  Now Edmund is looking past Jinhua toward the dark gap in the doorway to the hall. She follows his gaze with her eyes, and with her fingertips Jinhua traces the place across her throat, and she is thinking now for no reason at all—I should be kinder to Suyin. She is thinking, too, that Edmund has crossed his heart and answered with the truth, and that she must wait for the count, who is infinitely dear.

  Edmund is saying in a languid, sleepy voice, “It is viciously hot in the city this year. I do fear, Jinhua, that terrible days lie ahead.”

  39

  THREE MEN MAKE A TIGER

  Suyin

  A man’s elbow gouges Suyin’s rib—painfully. She is walking quickly down Jewelry Street toward the Qianmen Gate. Her shoulder bumps an arm, a head, a jacket the color of bruises; a blue-hooded cart passes, and a mewling rat scuttles between feet and shoes and boots that are tawny with dust.

  That awful Peking dust is everywhere today. Dust in your eyes, your nose, your mouth. There is no sign of rain. A hand on Suyin’s sleeve that forces her off balance is the hand of a grinning crone. One of those Boxer fellows pushes past, a knife at his hip, wearing, as they all do, a red headscarf, a sash—and red ribbons on his ankles and wrists. The crone, too, is wearing a scarf. It is a recent thing to see this. The Boxers have come to Peking. They hate the foreign devils, who are everywhere these days. They say that they can make them leave.

  Suyin has no time for this—today. There are things to be done, a banquet just hours away. Two tables. Fifteen foreign devil guests. Guests who should not be here in China—she does believe this—and yet they are our customers.

  Twenty dishes and one or two soups.

  Tai duo shiqing. So much to be done.

  Suyin pulls away from the crone. The woman is small and dirty, her face as wrinkled as a bird’s nest, and she is scuffling along wearing that bright red scarf, still clutching Suyin’s sleeve.

  “Let go of me,” Suyin says, sounding anxious even to herself. But she is only irritated. Not anxious. Or is she both? It is a strange mood today in the Chinese City. It is a sudden change of something that feels oddly monumental. Or maybe it is just that Suyin is tired.

  “Have you heard?” the woman says, holding on, pulling Suyin back. “Do you know what these Christians do to babies?”

  Suyin stops. Filthy, dirty hands. That awful, empty grin. The old crone will not let go.

  “They plug up the back door of their newborns with a hollow tube to make it big enough for their monstrous”—the woman cackles and raises her voice, and Suyin can see her gums, raw, pink ridges, scalloped where she once had teeth—“for their monstrous and enormous cocks,” she says.

  Suyin cannot hide her shock, her disgust, her disbelief. “No one would do such a thing to a child,” she says. “You are mistaken, old woman. Go home and scrub your mouth.”

  The crone’s eyes are maniacal now; she presses a pamphlet into Suyin’s hand, a greasy piece of yellow paper.

  Suyin pushes past and glances at the page.

  We are hungry.

  The earth is parched and the crops are burnt.

  No rain falls—and it is the fault of the Foreign Devils and their Barbarian Gods and their Missionaries.

  There is more.

  Kill the Foreigners.

  Burn the Churches.

  Punish the Chinese Christians who eat the Filthy Foreign Rice.

  Suyin stops, briefly. “It is nothing to me,” she calls out, “if you wear out your teeth talking ignorant Boxer nonsense.” The woman screams back at her. “It is the churches and the missionaries who have ordered the rains to stop and the heat to burn our crops. They are offending the spirits of heaven and earth. Beware of them,” she shrieks. “Beware. It is”—she screams even more loudly than before—“it is against the Will of Heaven.”

  Suyin pushes on through the crowd and lets the pamphlet drop, where it is trampled into the Peking dust. She hates that the woman has touched her; she feels a new unease. She feels the heat and glances back, and yes, she is afraid and not just tired. Until now, one didn’t need to worry. These Boxer fellows, the Yi He Tuan, have been elsewhere and not here, far away in Shandong Province. They had attacked a foreigner, one would hear. Or burned a church or killed a missionary—or two or three or dozens of them. But one hadn’t needed to worry; not when it was Shandong where all of this was happening.

  But now, Suyin thinks—they are here, in Peking, with their red scarves and red sashes—and with knives at their hips. They are pasting placards on the city walls. They are close at hand and angry—and the weather is so very hot.

  We are Brothers and Sisters in revolt.

  With one Heart and Magical Powers we fight the Foreign Perpetrators.

  We are immune to their bullets.

  We will tear up the foreign devils’ Railroads—tear down their Telegraph Poles.

  Annihilate them.

  Kill the Chinese Christians and exterminate the Collaborators.

  Suyin presses on through the crowd. She is in a hurry, sweating. There are important things to do. There is fish to be bought for tonight’s guests.

  Jinhua

  It was Lao Ye who saw it first: the placard on the front gate of the Hall of Midsummer Dreams with the mark of the bloodied handprint next to it. He screamed—“Aiyo, aiyo”—in that cracking up-and-down voice he has. He rang the bell; he rang it immediately, furiously, urgently, and everyone hurried outside to look, every one of them, even the girls, who were sleeping in their beds, and Cook, who had been chopping vegetables in the kitchen, and the houseboys, for whom Jinhua had been searching, who appeared as though from nowhere.

  Erguizi, the placard reads—Collaborator Devils—written in fat, black characters on yellow paper, written large enough to read from fifty steps away or even a hundred. It is shocking to see those words right there on her own front gate, right in front of Jinhua’s eyes. Shocking to see that bloodied print of a man’s hand.

  “What does it mean?” someone asks, and no one answers, but they all know that it is Boxer trouble—more or less. They have all seen the placards popping up like weeds in a field, every day more of them, every day more of those strutting, dancing Boxers on the streets shouting their murderous slogans. And as for rumours, there are many of those about Boxer magic and incantations. People say that these Boxer fellows are immune to foreign bullets—which cannot possibly be true.

  Or can it?

  Even Suyin seems uneasy. Last week she broached the subject of leaving. “We are in the wrong place,” she told Jinhua. “Waiting for the wrong things to happen, and other things are happening—bad things, and they are happening at the speed of a galloping horse. We should leave Peking,” Suyin said. “You and I, Jinhua, and Cook and Lao Ye. We will bring the houseboys, and the girls can come as well if they want. We will look after one another, all of us will.”

  Jinhua looked away. She remembers doing that, avoiding Suyin’s eyes. She remembers saying, “Not today, Suyin.” She said, “Perhaps on another day,” but Suyin had already turned away.

  Now
a new and different thought arrives. Suyin is unhappy. Really, deeply, profoundly unhappy. Jinhua’s stomach lurches, and all of them are standing outside in the street looking at this horrifying placard, and an old man with bells on his hat and a huge blue pouch on his back is calling out, “Kill the collaborators.” He hawks a glob of spit onto the street close to where Jinhua is standing.

  It is not a good time to be in Peking, to have foreign guests—and an old man with bells and a pouch talking of murder outside the gate. It is not a good time to be known as the Emissary’s Courtesan. Perhaps—

  Suyin is speaking now to the man. “Lao chunhuo,” she calls him. Old fool. “We are not afraid,” she says. She is a pillar of iron in a sea of trouble, but she looks worried in a way that Jinhua has never seen before in her. Suyin turns. “We have been accused,” she says. “We are all in danger now.” She turns to the gatekeeper. “Pull the placard down, and see if you can buy a vicious dog.”

  “Ah yes, the Spirit Boxers,” Edmund says, bathed in smoke from his cigar, his eyes half closed. “Ad captandum vulgus.”

  He rotates the figurado one full turn between two fingers and a thumb, and his attention to the ferocious gleam of the tip is perfect, and Jinhua is first impatient and then anxiously so.

  “What does it mean? Help me understand, Edmund.”

  “It means, my darling girl,” he says, “to appeal to the masses—which is precisely what those Boxer miscreants are doing quite effectively.”

  Edmund takes another long drag on his cigar, a pause to savor, and then he blows a vague cloud of smoke out and into the parlor. The cigar is elegant in his hand, but the smoke smells foul and is the same, Jinhua thinks, as the smell of Lao Mama’s sick-sweet pipe.

  “I tremble to think what will happen next,” Edmund continues, “as, I imagine, does the empress dowager, who has no love lost for the foreign devils herself. Bit of a powder keg, it seems to me.”

  Despite what he has just said, Edmund is exquisitely calm, dressed today in padded Chinese robes, sipping now at a glass of calvados. The calvados he buys at Kierulff’s on Legation Street. He keeps a bottle here at the hall for his own consumption and convenience. And the cigar in his hand is a Romeo y Julieta, “the finest Havana on earth,” he calls it. “The lovely Romeo.”

  Jinhua sent for Edmund after the placard incident this morning, interrupting him—he scolded only partly in jest—in the middle of a breakfast of finnan haddie with the pompous, muckraking set at the Hôtel de Pékin—“many of whom are, by the way,” he mentions, “up in arms about the Yi He Tuan—les Boxeurs, the French minister Pichon ridiculously calls them. And they have plenty to say, the ministers do, about what the old dowager and her old-guard cronies should do to bring les Boxeurs into line. And then there is the young emperor, of course, who is spreading his wings right beneath the nose of his auntie, issuing edicts almost daily. Reform this. Discard that. It is as though the young fellow has woken up,” Edmund says. “Do as the Japanese have done. Emulate the West.”

  This is precisely why Jinhua has asked him to come. Because Edmund sometimes writes for an English newspaper. He knows people. He knows things. “Comes from keeping my ears pricked,” he tells her, “and hanging about in sordid places,” and when he says this, Jinhua thinks of Wenqing and his Diplomatic Diaries—and how there is much to understand in the world. Now Edmund is saying, “It is all theatre, of course, pure nonsense—at least the Boxer business is.” He wags his cigar toward the door, and ashes fall to the floor, and she begins to hope that all is not lost. “They claim to be invincible,” he says. “That with their Boxer incantations and their prayers and knives and martial arts they are immune to foreign devil bullets, that they can summon an army of eight million spirit soldiers to the cause. Which is—in nuce, as the Romans put it—to exorcise the damnable foreigner from the damnable empire of the damnable Qing. Which might just be what the empress dowager and her old-guard cronies would like to see happen as well.”

  Jinhua knows all this—or some of it. What she wants now from Edmund is reassurance. She wants him to say, again, that it is all nonsense. She wants him to make her feel safe. He draws a long breath on his cigar. He waits, and she can see him savoring the taste of his beautiful Romeo, and then he tilts his head back for a languid release of the smoke—and no, she is not at all reassured. She doesn’t know what to do, and she asks him, “What will happen next?” and is afraid of the answer.

  “Hard to say,” Edmund replies. “It is a damnable affair. Immanuel Kant had the idea. Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus. ‘Let justice reign, even if all the rascals in the world shall perish from it.’ You see,” he adds, flicking a bevy of red-hot ash into a Viennese ashtray, silver and shaped like a seashell, “it is the missionaries that the Boxers blame first and foremost, and they are not blameless—a force unto themselves, they are. I suppose none of us foreign devil types has been quite pukka in our dealings. Long live Her Majesty Victoria, by the grace of God—and rule Britannia, of course.”

  Jinhua is silent, thinking—eager now for Edmund to go. “Alors,” he says. “You want my advice? Lie low for a bit—get rid of your Shakespearean sign, just until it all blows over. Which,” he adds, “it will. After a fashion.” He kisses her in the foreign manner, once on each cheek, and Jinhua notices anew the blue of Edmund’s eyes. Blue like the sky when a storm is coming.

  40

  THE STINK OF A EUNUCH

  Jinhua

  “There is a eunuch in the parlor,” Suyin says. The half circles of worry under her eyes have grown deep and dark in a single day.

  “Tell him we are not open for business,” Jinhua responds. She has only just decided this. “And, Suyin, you should rest for a bit. You look pale and unwell. And we must talk about what is to be done. I have been thinking—”

  “He is no ordinary eunuch,” Suyin interrupts. “He wants to see the Emissary’s Courtesan, the madam who has traveled, he says. He wants to see you, Jinhua, and this is something we cannot escape.”

  In his crimson surcoat, with his rouged cheeks and his peacock’s plume, the eunuch is a daub of color in the room. Seated, legs spread wide; his hairless face looks boneless; his shapeless body looks—but surely isn’t—benign and powerless. Neither man nor woman, he is taking slow, slurping sips of tea.

  Stay away from the stinking eunuchs, it is said. They are dangerous—carrying their shriveled Thrice Precious in pouches at their waists. They are the ones, people say, who push and pull and plot and scheme—and do evil—behind the walls of the Forbidden City.

  A eunuch in the parlor is trouble, and Jinhua is—lips tight—head bent—bound feet wanting to run away—afraid.

  There has never been a eunuch here before.

  “I have come to arrange for a banquet,” this one says, smirking, reaching for a melon seed, rings glittering.

  “We would gladly entertain the honorable eunuch and his venerable guests,” Jinhua replies, and the smirk on the eunuch’s face and the seeds in his mouth and the pouches at his hip make her think of Banker Chang, who had something quite different in his pouches. “But I regret to say that this must be on some future occasion. I regret to say that our hall will be closed until the time of Autumn Begins.”

  “It is the particular request of a particular member of a particular imperial family,” he says, and the eunuch is precise and firm with each word. “A family to whom one does not say no. A prince, that is to say, a powerful prince of the blood who prefers that his name not be mentioned. Shall we call him Prince Ying or Ding or Wang or Hu? You are our hostess. You may decide. Tomorrow evening. The prince and eight very special guests.”

  The eunuch’s eyes are quarter-moon slits staring at Jinhua.

  “I needn’t caution you, experienced as you doubtless are in your line of business, to be mindful of his imperial appetites,” the eunuch continues. “Eel, for instance. Monkey brains, duck web, deer lips; tiger tails, bear paws. Fetus of leopard. My master’s tastes are very refined and difficult to
satisfy.”

  There is no way, Jinhua thinks, glancing at Suyin, to avoid this person of slippery tastes. It is a eunuch who is ordering this. It is a prince of the blood who will come. Wu ke wan hui—the die is cast. She and Suyin will have to do this.

  The eunuch, hands to knees, braces himself to stand. It is Suyin who bows and Jinhua who says, “Your honorable, venerable, imperial master and his eight honorable guests will be most welcome in our humble hall. We will do our best to please them all. Of that, old eunuch, you may be sure.”

  From outside comes the sound of the knife seller’s drum. Dong—dong—dong. Standing, the eunuch is barely taller than Jinhua. Several pouches dangle at his waist—and Jinhua cannot help but think—

  “My master has an interest,” he turns to say as he is leaving. “A prurient interest, one might call it, in the courtesan who has traveled to barbarian lands, and who has named her hall, most interestingly he finds, the Hall of Midsummer Dreams, which is not, he finds, a name that is indigenous to China. And, by the way, where, oh where has the sign that names this name, where has it gone?”

  When the gate hinges have screeched, and the eunuch has left, and the dead bolt is back in place, Jinhua covers her face with her hands, and she is thinking of what was before and isn’t now, and what she has caused to happen by being here, by naming this name, by waiting for so long. Suyin touches her arm. “There is both nothing to be done and much to be done,” she says. “I will go to the Mongol Market. I will see what slippery foods I can find.” And then Suyin says a strange thing, something Jinhua did not know, or maybe she did and doesn’t remember—or perhaps, and it is impossible to contemplate this now when the world is collapsing around them—perhaps she did not think enough about Suyin’s hopes and Suyin’s dreams.