“I have always wanted to go back to Suzhou,” Suyin says, “to live a good and simple life where the sound of water is never far away. I am so afraid, Jinhua, that now it is too late for this.”
Eunuch Wei
A flick of the eunuch’s long-nailed finger summons his sedan chair, making him feel mighty. His thumb ring glints. His feet are sweating inside his velvet boots, and his bladder is near bursting from drinking so much tea.
The tea was exceptional and the merchandise beautiful in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams, he is thinking now, picking melon-seed fragments from between his teeth with a fingernail, keeping a firm hand on the one pouch he doesn’t ever leave behind.
Some things—these things—one cannot be caught without. They are, as they say, truly Thrice Precious.
If I were the man I will be in my next life, he thinks, what I would not have done to them, the two powdered ladies. First one and then the other—and then both of them together. Yes. He pictures this. He can imagine doing these things. He savors the thought.
He knows what people say. They say that just because—because of a certain severing, because he is a teapot without a spout or a tiger without its tail, a eunuch has no feelings. Hè, if this were only half true. He thinks about women—and men—and women again—he thinks about them from sunrise to sunset and from sunset to sunrise.
He thinks also about his wealth—and how his life is better than it would, or could, have been.
The eunuch’s toes curl inside his boots. The sedan chair is here, facing east. A young boy helps him mount to his seat. He settles himself. “Be quick,” he tells his bearers. “I am desperate to relieve myself. If you are slow,” he adds, “the consequences will be dire.”
The bearers hurry; one of them stumbles and the eunuch is thinking, with not a little satisfaction, I have made the ladies shiver, both of them. They will look hard—or more than hard—to find a leopard fetus for my master. And then he thinks, Aiyo, my shrieking, stinking bladder—how it tortures me.
41
A CARPET OF NEEDLES
Jinhua
Wonder why he wants to come here? Edmund mused this morning. He was dressed in an elegant linen suit. He said that Eunuch Wei with the scarlet gown and the boneless face is from the household of Prince Duan, who is, he told Jinhua, a powerful man with ties to the empress dowager. A member of the Manchu old guard. “Hates the foreign devils,” he said. “Hurts my feelings just to think.” And then Edmund told her something else. “The old dowager has given Prince Duan the bloody Shangfang sword, of all bloody things. Have you heard of it? The Shangfang sword?”
Jinhua hadn’t—and then she thought that, yes, she had heard of it. A sword with sharpness on two sides. “It goes back,” Edmund told her—and he didn’t seem to notice that her eyes were beginning to spill tears because it is all too much to think about—“the Shangfang sword goes back to the Tang or the Sung—to one of your ancient, venerable dynasties. The bearer has the authority to chop off heads at will—anyone—at any time without so much as a how-do-you-do. Bloody dangerous, if you ask me. And you Chinese call us the barbarians.”
Then Edmund’s mood changed, the way it does when Edmund is finished with the subject at hand, whatever it is. He asked Jinhua, as though it were just in passing, “You met her once, didn’t you? Empress Elisabeth of Austria? It was a bloody anarchist with a bloody needle file,” he said. “Four inches was all it took. Nasty business. Tragic. It was the Duke of Orleans that he wanted to assassinate, but the empress was there, and she was the one he stabbed to death. Don’t know why I think of it now.”
Jinhua couldn’t take it in at first. The beautiful empress with smoldering eyes and diamonds in her hair who said, “Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed.”
She was the one—
“Maybe you and Suyin should leave for a bit. Close things down and go south where things are calmer. Just until it rains.” Edmund patted Jinhua’s arm, and he spoke as though it were an easy thing that he was telling her, as though it were not too late to run away. “You know, if the drought would end,” he said, “I think this Spirit Boxer nonsense would fizzle out. But if it doesn’t rain—”
As Edmund was leaving he kissed Jinhua twice, once on each cheek, and he said, as though it were something he had only just thought of, “Have I ever told you, Jinhua, that the correct pronunciation of my surname is Bacchus, like the Roman god of wine?”
When he was gone, Jinhua smashed the bottle of Edmund’s calvados, and the Shangfang sword was on her mind. She wept for Baba in a way that she has not wept in a long time. And she wept new tears for the empress Elisabeth, and she remembered how the empress mourned her own father even though he was alive and well. “A father is a precious thing,” she said. “I see too little,” she said. “May I ever love the person I love?” she said.
Jinhua hid the iron knives and forks from Europe, the pictures, and the foreign clocks—and she wept as she cleared away the evidence of her foreign life. She went to her room and hid the snow globe, the gift from the count that traveled with her across the ocean from Vienna to Suzhou and then to Peking—she put it under her bed where no one will look, she thought, but it will still be here with me.
Edmund is not wrong in what he advised, but it is too late to think of leaving. It is too late to hope for a change in the weather. The banquet is tonight. Prince Duan is coming. One prince of the blood and eight special guests—and the price of knives has doubled in just one month—and every Boxer has one at his waist. Cook told her this, about the price of knives doubling. He shook his head when he said it, trumpeting his outrage while his earlobes wobbled.
It is too late, Jinhua thinks, to hope for anything good to happen. She calls Suyin’s name—Suyin who has never been afraid until now, who wants to live a good and simple life, who wants to go back to Suzhou.
42
A NARROW ALLEY
Jinhua
“The guests are at the gate.” Lao Ye’s old voice sings from the courtyard, where a hundred lanterns glow vermilion. A sweltering afternoon has given way to a fat and sticky dusk, and his voice is languid. All day, Cook has been in a fury. The aromas coming from his kitchen are strong enough to taste in your mouth: meat and yeast and oil and spice. Duck web and deer lips and the brains of monkeys.
Suyin did not try to procure the leopard fetus or the tiger tail. “They cannot be found,” she said, lifting her shoulders, “with so little warning.”
“It is time,” she says now, dabbing at a blemish on Jinhua’s chin. A sudden twist below her breastbone reminds Jinhua that she hasn’t eaten, and Suyin probably has not eaten either. She frets the top clasp on her jacket, the one at her throat. Suyin seems calm in her gown of dove gray, her face lightly powdered. She steadies an earring at Jinhua’s ear, and Jinhua whispers, “I am so afraid.”
Suyin shakes her head. “Do as you always do,” she says, “and we will survive this. We will survive this and other things yet to come.”
As always, Suyin accepts the inevitable. But for Jinhua, the fear does not leave because she wants to be brave. It sticks to her heart like burning sugar.
Jinhua tallies quickly. Nine Manchus in grass-cloth gowns and conical hats with finials. The six courtesans are gaily dressed in blues and reds and greens and pinks. They are bejeweled and fragrant and nervous in the presence of an imperial prince, and the two houseboys with freshly oiled and braided queues are flogging the air with paper fans.
They have all been warned.
“We humbly welcome—” Jinhua begins, smiling a cast-iron smile.
“Ha-ha-ha,” a man cuts her off in the middle of her bow. A three-eyed peacock feather dangles from his hat, and Jinhua exchanges a look with Suyin.
Already the prince has revealed himself.
The houseboys work their fans harder, faster, higher, lower—like giant wings. The parched and feverish summer heat has settled here in the courtyard.
“So these are the treasures of the Hall of
Midsummer Dreams.” The man who is surely Prince Duan says this, and then he says ha-ha a second time and flicks a glance at the line of girls before his eyes rest on Jinhua’s face. She is looking at him through lowered eyelids, wondering what malicious intent could be hiding behind his laughter.
“We are here to see what a man can experience in this hall of foreign dreams,” he says. The prince is a delicate man with narrow, sloping shoulders, and lurking beneath the brim of his hat is a ferret’s small face—part sweet and part vicious. “Most intriguing,” he says, biding his time, stretching the words in all directions, leaving room for many possibilities.
From the kitchen comes the sound of oil sizzling; a butcher’s cleaver slams a chopping block, and metal scrapes metal in a frying pan. From a shadowy corner the eunuch emerges, his flabby face florid and sweating.
That makes ten. The prince. Eight guests—and one stinking eunuch.
“I present,” the eunuch says, gesturing toward the man with the ferret face and the peacock feather, “my master, Father Hu, our host for this evening.”
The eunuch bows deeply; someone laughs, and a moment later when they are sure of the joke, the others join in. Now all of them, except for the prince, are bowing and clasping their hands. Bowing deeper and more deeply and deeper yet.
The prince’s henchmen, Jinhua thinks, are like a pack of dogs cringing and wagging their tails and their tongues. She swallows hard. The prince has a restless eye, she sees, traveling the courtyard, looking at each of the girls, the houseboys, his guests, and then coming back to her.
She feels her cheeks redden and burn. She is more and more afraid—and the summer heat is unrelenting.
“And these gentlemen here,” the eunuch continues, “are the second Father Hu and the third Father Hu and the fourth and the fifth—” He giggles too long and too hard at this false naming, this hiding of identities—at his own marvelous wit.
One thin, one stout, one rangy, one jowly, one very, very fat—and so on. A prince and eight false guests with nine false names—falling over themselves and one another, each to say that he is more humble, more unworthy, more clumsy—more unlearned than any of the others.
Eight degrees of false humility in the presence of Prince Duan. And a eunuch who is not humble at all. All six girls are bowing now, murmuring words of welcome. Jinhua fears for them. She fears for herself as well.
Lanterns sway, surcoats gleam; shadows shift in the courtyard. Everyone is sweating, and Jinhua regrets, very much, the name she chose for sentimental reasons—the name that takes her back to Vienna—the Hall of Midsummer Dreams.
“I have eaten an inelegant sufficiency,” one guest says. He is the very, very fat one, the one who has lost most often at the drinking games and who has had to drink the most wine in penance. His collar is oiled and shiny where his chin has rubbed it in too many wearings.
“The duck web was superb,” he continues, tilting his head to scratch the inside of his ear with a long fingernail, “and we must thank our host, Prince—Father Hu, I mean.”
The banquet room is lamp lit, sweltering, chaotic with what is left of a hundred sumptuous courses. Jinhua bows her head. “Our kitchens are unworthy of such high praise,” she says, glancing at the prince, who is seated across from her, his back to the wall, his ferret face turned toward the door. “And if I may say, the delicacy of the feast is owed neither to the cook nor to the ingredients,” she continues, still bowing. “Rather it is owed to the wit of our venerable host and his esteemed guests—and his learned, honorable eunuch.”
The evening has meandered toward drowsiness. The prince has been quiet. Robes have been discarded, sleeves rolled, and Jinhua has dared to hope that she—and Suyin and the girls and Lao Ye and Cook and the houseboys—all of them, will survive this evening and tomorrow as well.
Now the prince clears his throat, and hers feels dry. “The sauces were too sweet,” he says, “generally speaking. And the eel was tough, and the monkey brains were inexpertly prepared. I have been, I must say, a poor host. I have,” he says, and his voice has taken a disturbing turn, “lost face in the presence of my eight honorable guests.”
Jinhua apologizes, as she must—for the eel, the sauces, and the monkey brains, and for anything else that offended or did not please. She bows. She speaks the prince’s false name humbly, respectfully, carefully: “Honorable Father Hu.” She clasps her hands, one in the other. “Our hall is not worthy,” she says. Lao Ye arrives with cool towels and a silver tray of toothpicks and a plate of sliced fruit, and she prays for the fruit to be crisp and sweet and fresh. A guest belches and takes a wedge of orange. Suyin presses a jug, plump with wine, to her belly. She moves to fill the prince’s empty cup, and Jinhua thinks, He will be a mean drunk, and the prince picks at the crevasses between his teeth with a silver toothpick. He nods as Suyin pours for him.
“Who among us has heard,” he says now, laying aside the toothpick, “the new title of our young and hapless yet esteemed Guangxu emperor?” The prince’s voice is aloof, crisper than the soupy voices of his guests; he holds his wine better than they do. They wait uncertainly, trying to clear their woozy heads at this sudden, serious, perhaps even dangerous turn in the conversation. The prince waits too, watching them, and then he laughs heartily, showing his small teeth, and they understand—one by one and then all of them—that it is a riddle, a joke, something to be laughed at. A few of them snigger; a few are silent, thinking, pondering how to answer. One of the girls plucks a string of twisted silk on her lute, another giggles, and the guests, relieved, begin to make their guesses.
“The Lord of Ill-Advised Decrees,” one man shouts, and he has thick Manchu eyebrows, fleshy earlobes, and a voice that travels far. “Our emperor proves every day with a new decree that he is a lapdog of the foreign devils and their missionaries.”
“And I say he is the Lord of Groveling Obeisance,” another guest wagers, sounding pleased with his own cleverness. “The emperor’s dowager auntie,” the man continues, and he is the second or third or fourth Father Hu, “has him groveling now from inside his prison cell in the Ocean Terrace. Have you all heard?”
It is what Edmund said, that the young emperor had pushed too hard and moved too fast with his Hundred Days of Reform, his edicts for self-strengthening.
“How about the Duke of a Thousand Stammers?” another guest says with northern, guttural r’s and barefaced mockery. He glances around the room, drunkenly, for affirmation from the prince. “Death to the foreigners and the collaborators,” he adds, sounding not quite certain.
The room falls silent. The guests are out of ideas, or courage, or both. The prince leans down to retrieve an object from the inside of his left boot. All heads turn to look.
Jinhua looks too, and she is hot and cold and sweating and shivering. Everyone knows where the prince’s boot comes from. It is a boot from Nei Lian Sheng, the finest workshop in Peking. “The wearer will be promoted again and again to ever more powerful positions,” the proprietor promises his customers.
With a long and yellowed fingernail the prince is tapping the bowl of his pipe, which makes a peng sound, a call to attention, and the object he has pulled from his boot is a fan—it is only a fan and not a knife—and not the Shangfang sword.
“You are all wrong,” he says, straightening in his chair, putting an end to the naming game, and the danger, Jinhua thinks, is not yet over.
“The correct title for the Guangxu emperor is—the Lord of Misguided Virtue.”
A few guests titter, viciously—then anxiously—then viciously again. Several of the girls giggle in a nervous way; a few of them laugh outright, covering their mouths—and Jinhua shivers. The prince continues, “It is no laughing matter.” He raps his fan, still folded, on the table. Laughter ceases, and Jinhua notices his small, white, childlike hands.
No one dares to speak.
Everyone is waiting.
Prince Duan has not yet finished.
“From the four directions,” h
e says now, “we are threatened, and the might of the imperial Qing, the Ten-Thousand-Year Dynasty, the ever-glorious Aisin Gioro clan, cannot be in doubt.”
The sound of the prince’s fan opening is the same as gunfire. The evening has been smoldering. Now it is igniting.
“We have gone to war,” the prince is saying, “to keep the English, their missionaries, and their opium out—and we have lost. We have paid them millions of our silver taels in reparations for these unjust wars. The French have taken Annam, Cochin, Tonkin, Cambodia. They have seized the lands of the Lao. The Germans have claimed Jiaozhou Bay and Shandong and who knows what next, and the Russians are pushing south from Manchuria. Even the stinking Japanese have beaten us at war and have taken Formosa and Korea, which are our rightful vassal states. Peking is full of foreign devils. Their legations are right outside the Forbidden City. They have occupied the treaty ports. Their missionaries anger the spirits and destroy the natural order of things deep in the heart of our Middle Kingdom.”
And now the prince slams his fist on the table. Cups and guests alike are startled.
“The heavens are displeased,” he says now, fury in his eyes.
“These are urgent matters. We have been invaded.” The prince’s voice is loud, becoming louder with each elongated word. “Our treasures have been plundered,” he says, fanning himself—and the evening has shifted with an earthquake force.
“We have been raped,” he says, and every eye around the room is wide and watching and full of fear. “And this is why I have pressed my lips to the empress dowager’s ear, and this is why she has taken the vermilion pencil in her hand and written her decree. The cause of the Yi He Tuan—she has decided—the cause of the Spirit Boxers is just and correct and will be supported. We will give the Boxers incense for their offerings to the god of war; we will give them bolts of red cloth for their turbans and their sashes. We will give them rice and silver, and paper for their placards; we will buy for them swords and spears, guns and knives, so that they can fulfill their destiny. And victory will be the result. We will rid ourselves, finally and forever, of the foreign devils that have plagued our lands.”
The Courtesan Page 26
