The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  By pro tempore, Edmund also means the porcelain cups, and the green lamp, the silk carpets, the urns, the books and jade, and all the other treasures he has brought here from outside.

  They are the spoils of a war that China has lost. Edmund is one of the victors.

  Perhaps when Edmund speaks of safekeeping he means the boy as well. He is painfully thin, a beautiful child. He looks vaguely familiar, but Jinhua cannot put a memory to him. Pouring tea, her hands are not steady. The words that Edmund uses to describe what has happened—the troubles, le siège, the siege—that to him meant fifty-five days of confinement inside the walls of the British Legation—these words are inadequate. For Jinhua it was the very same fifty-five days that were fifty-five days of the unimaginable—fifty-five days of crouching in fear on a threadbare mat in the garden of Prince Su, a beautiful site that had become a place of stink and squalor where dogs ate the bodies of the dead, the weak, the ones who starved; where the most fortunate of the Chinese Christians were crammed together to be safe from the wrath of the Spirit Boxers.

  It was fifty-five days, too, of reliving over and over the horror of what Jinhua found at the Hall of Midsummer Dreams on that day of dies irae. Of knowing day after day in her skin and her bones—in her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, and gall bladder—that the Boxers had murdered Suyin and left her body to burn. Jinhua reaches, scalding cup of tea in hand, across stripes of light that hang over Edmund’s bed, and she dislikes the intimacy of this room, the scent of Bordeaux on Edmund’s breath so early in the morning—he says that the legation cellars ran dry after only twenty days of the siege—“c’est vrai,” he says—and most of all Jinhua dislikes this new conceit of his, the child in Edmund’s bed. How were those fifty-five days for the boy? she wonders. Where was he when the Boxers ravaged and Peking burned and all was lost?

  Edmund has saved her, and he has probably saved the boy, and that is why they are alive, the two of them, living here, pro tempore, in this house. Everyone else has disappeared. Alive or murdered, who knows? Lao Ye? The girls? The gatekeeper?

  The two houseboys? Liu, who helped her?

  Jinhua releases the cup to Edmund’s outstretched hand. “Stay as long as you wish, Jinhua,” he said when it was all over. “We will look after each other, the two of us, for a while.”

  He means this honestly, if Edmund can be honest. Jinhua has begun to understand why it is that he calls himself the harmful horse of the herd. He is a person who cares for himself more than for others. And if she is honest with herself—

  Jinhua pours a second cup of tea for the boy, whom Edmund has dressed in a tunic the color of butter, his legs and hips swaddled in yellow quilts—and she thinks of Resi’s hot chocolate drink with whipped cream in a mound on the top—and would the boy like that as much as she did?

  The boy looks Jinhua full in the eyes when he thanks her for the tea. Maybe, she thinks, he is already twelve years old—as she once was in a faraway time and place. He is certainly no older. And then he says, “I remember you. You are the sister of the lady with the candied crabapples. She gave me money. She said to hurry up before she changed her mind. You told me not to eat too many,” he says. “You said it would make my belly ache.”

  And now she knows. The boy is Edmund’s houseboy. She remembers his eyes, Suyin saying that they made her ache, those eyes. She remembers Suyin telling him, “Go and buy yourself some skewered crabapples coated with honey and sesame seeds,” and Jinhua remembers how the boy ran off, as quick as a rabbit, pigtail flying, trousers flapping, peeking back at her and Suyin—and remembering this makes her ache anew for what she has lost.

  The boy’s eyes have changed, and she thinks now of what he has lost. If she were to speak, Jinhua would say to Edmund—Leave him alone; he is too perfect. He can be broken with your bed business—in the same way that I was broken long ago by a go-between, a foot binder, a madam, and a banker. I was broken, too, by a husband who meant no harm but caused it just the same.

  She cannot speak just now. Edmund tells her, “Xiexie ni.” Thank you. He means for the tea. He means that she should leave the room. The perfect ovals of his fingernails gleam, and they are pink and look as though he has just now finished oiling them.

  Jinhua goes to the door and doesn’t like that she is walking away. She turns back once and looks at the boy still swaddled in yellow. She looks at Edmund. So careless. So unreliable. He has lost so little in all of this, Edmund has. For him it is not the way it is for Jinhua, and for the boy, and for Suyin, for whom this life is over. It is not the way it is for Chinese people who have lost yet another war. Edmund is an Englishman. He is strong and can take what he wants. He is one of the victors.

  When Edmund brought her to the garden of Prince Su, he said, “It won’t be long, Jinhua. Succor will arrive soon. Our armies are en route, and until then you will be safe here with the other Chinese people.”

  Edmund didn’t understand that she didn’t care about dying. He didn’t understand that in the few dark hours before that day of dies irae, Jinhua had finally learned that succor has always and only come from Suyin. He didn’t understand her regret, her shame—her unbearable grief.

  The rain came too late—and so did the foreign soldiers with their marching boots, and their waving flags, and their muskets slung over their shoulders. Chinese people died in the prince’s garden, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. They prayed day after day for the Lord’s protection. They ate rice and horsemeat to keep themselves alive, here where they were safe from the knives of the Boxers. Later it was cakes made of chaff and sorghum and leaves and bark that left their mouths raw and their bellies sore, and still they prayed and spoke of their god.

  Jinhua is meager now, all bones and angles. She goes, still, every day to that darkened, empty place where the hall of her dreams once stood. She sits among the ashes, and there she speaks to Suyin and tells her almost everything. Today she will tell Suyin about the boy. Suyin will want to know what has happened to him. He is meager too; Jinhua noticed that.

  Waking from a brief sleep, Jinhua sees that Edmund has come into the room that is hers, pro tempore. He is sitting at the edge of the bed, dressed in his Chinese gown. Strangely, she feels that Edmund has witnessed her dream, the one she just had. Strangely too, she doesn’t mind.

  “I dreamt about another life. It was a time when I was a child and felt happy,” she says, sitting up. “My father was there and Suyin was too, and he told us both a story, and it began like this—‘Long, long ago in ancient times, when just wishing a thing made it so’—and there were dots like stars in his eyes from the light of the lanterns.”

  Edmund’s eyes are dark, and he is nodding, and Jinhua doesn’t mind him being here; in fact, he must be here. She takes a breath.

  “I have decided,” she says, “to go back to Suzhou.” A glint of sunlight settles on Edmund’s lower lip, and his forehead is furrowed, and yes, there are dots of light in his eyes too. “It is where I belong, back in the place where I began,” she continues, and it feels good to say this to Edmund. It feels good to allow what is real to be real and what is not real to fade. It feels good to decide.

  But there is so much more to think about—and more to say to Edmund.

  She loves the count. She loves him still and always will. She loves his blue, blue eyes and his pale hair and the gold buttons on his jacket. She loves the things she felt when she was with him. His lips kissing her hand. Bubbles on her tongue. His body close to hers on the velvet seat of his carriage. She loves what he made possible. The touch of an empress. Seven sweet, buttery, chocolaty layers. Midsummer dreams—

  It has been a heavy load to keep the dreams with her. Jinhua needed them. Because of them she chose what she should never, ever have chosen. She came here to Peking. She brought Suyin. It is because of the count that she loves Edmund. And yet—perhaps it is as Suyin always said. Some things are inevitable. And sometimes, she now thinks, mud and sand flow together.

  Edm
und’s eyes match, even in this dim, uncertain light, the sky as they always have—the sky when a storm is coming. He is a good man in some ways, Jinhua sees now, and a bad man in others. She has forgiven him for being the way he is—but he is not in any way good for the boy—and she cannot forgive him for taking this child into his bed.

  “Aut viam,” Jinhua says to herself, and the Latin words are impossible to say and hard to believe—and Edmund, who is so unreliable, so dear, so detestable, lovable, foolish, and wise—Edmund is nodding to encourage her. “Inveniam aut faciam,” she finishes.

  I will either find a way—or make one.

  “I will take the boy with me, Edmund,” Jinhua says now, and she is telling him this, not asking him—and it feels as though a storm has ended. She has decided, and it will make Suyin happy—and is so very necessary. It is what Jinhua must do. “He will come with me to Suzhou,” she says. “I will look after him and see that he is well.”

  Edmund looks surprised and then not. He looks down at his hands, and in the droop of his shoulders Jinhua perceives the first real sorrow she has seen in him. “You have learned so much,” he says, and sitting here in this darkened, borrowed room, Jinhua knows that she is strong. She is becoming less harmful.

  “If I were the man that I am not, Jinhua,” he says, still looking at his hands, “I would love you desperately. And as for the boy, my darling girl, it shall be as you wish, of course. I cannot deny you that, or him. And neither you nor I can deny Suyin, who does not deserve what has happened.”

  48

  THE FUTURE IS LONG

  Autumn Begins Again

  1905

  Maple Bridge, Suzhou

  Jinhua

  I have come back to the Maple Bridge, Baba, to tell you the story that you asked me to tell you all those years ago, a story that you have never heard before. I have come here to tell you the affairs of my life. They have been like the five courses of a banquet served up one after the other. The five tastes have come and gone; there has been spicy, sweet, and sour; there have been tastes that were bitter and salty, and often the tastes have blended together. Some have been hard to swallow. Others have been delicious. All have lingered. They have changed me, and I go back to them sometimes, still. The spicy, the sweet, the sour, the bitter, the salty—the tastes will last for all of my life. And I have tried, Baba, to be curious and virtuous and wise. I have tried to do as you taught me. I have done good things: one or two of them. I have done harmful things as well—some of them against my will, and others—

  But, Baba, I have come home to Suzhou, where the sound of water is never far away, and I have opened a cake shop on the canal, near the West Gate. It is a small place that makes children smile. And the best thing, Baba, the best thing in all of my life is here with me. His name is Xiao Shunzi and you would be proud; his spirit and his heart are alive, and he is curious, and the memories of terrible things have become pale in his mind—and I have done this for him. Xiao Shunzi is your grandson, Baba, and he is filial, and I tell him stories in just the way that you told stories to me. I tell him about Nüwa, who was curious and virtuous and wise, and I tell him that she was—just—like—Mama.

  Overhead, geese with wide wings and rough, untidy honks fly across a dark sky in a not-quite-perfect skein formation, and Jinhua looks up. From far off in the distance she can hear the toll of the great bell at the Cold Mountain Temple. When it falls silent, she hears the crow of an all-knowing cockerel and says a final good night to her father.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Atlanta, Georgia

  THE FIRST DAY OF OCTOBER 2014

  There are confessions to be made. The facts of Sai Jinhua’s life are mired in legend, and I have taken liberties with some of them in the service of this story, but also as a matter of necessity. Much of what is said and written about the woman known as Sai Jinhua conflicts, one version with another. Much is not known—or has been adulterated by other writers’ efforts to fictionalize her life. She was born in 1872. Or was it 1874? She had an adulterous love affair with Count Alfred von Waldersee when she lived in Europe. Or did they never actually meet while she was there? They met for the first time—or became reacquainted—when he came to Peking. Or they did not meet at all, ever. The reader should know that I have displaced Sai Jinhua and her husband to Vienna from Berlin, where they actually lived for the duration of his diplomatic career; that over her lifetime, Sai Jinhua used several different names, and that I have elected to use just one of them to avoid confusion. Her husband was known officially by the name of Hong Jun.

  To serve the telling of this story I have also caused Jinhua to encounter several people of contemporary historic significance, all of them colorful—people who may not have crossed paths with her, but could have; people with stories of their own. Among them is Sir Edmund Backhouse. He was an Oxford-educated eccentric, a brilliant linguist, a homosexual with a not-so-private penchant for pornography, a China scholar whose credentials are tarnished with accusations of fraud and deceit, a man who claims to have had many sexual liaisons with the empress dowager Cixi, who was forty years his senior. He died in 1944 in China, a lonely and impoverished man. His bequest of books and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library at Oxford is substantial.

  Count Alfred von Waldersee remained in Peking until 1901. He survived the huge blaze that destroyed parts of the Forbidden City in April of that year, escaping through a window in his nightshirt with only his field marshal’s baton in his hand. Some say that Sai Jinhua was with him on that night. Waldersee’s health was frail thereafter, and he died in 1904 at the age of seventy-two in Hanover, survived by his pious and ambitious American wife, Marie.

  The empress Elisabeth of Austria has legends of her own. A free spirit who detested Vienna and the demands of its imperial court, a child of the outdoors who is widely thought to have been anorexic, she had a difficult marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph, and she lost her eldest son, Rudolf, to suicide at the Mayerling hunting lodge. She herself was assassinated in 1898 by the anarchist Luigi Lucheni on the shores of Lake Geneva.

  This list of historic persons who appear in the novel would not be complete without mention of Prince Duan. Perniciously antiforeign and conservative, he was a powerful patron of the Boxer movement, and his name was prominent on a list of twelve senior Qing dynasty officials for whom the Eight-Nation Alliance sought a death sentence as part of the postwar settlement. Prince Duan escaped execution but was exiled to a palace in Turkestan. He resurfaced in Peking after the fall of the Qing dynasty. It is important to note that the account of the rapes in this novel is entirely fictional.

  The great question of Sai Jinhua’s life, the question of whether she is or is not a Chinese heroine, hinges on whether she became acquainted—or reacquainted—with Count Alfred von Waldersee when he came to Peking as the Supreme Allied Commander of the Eight-Nation Alliance, whether she influenced him in the bedroom or otherwise to exercise leniency in the treatment of her countrymen after the siege of the legations. The most titillating stories revolve around Jinhua and the count frolicking in the bedroom, in the very dragon bed of the dowager empress Cixi. Her life was portrayed in the decades after the Boxer Rebellion in poems, novels, plays, and operas. Her story was used to make subtle—or sometimes not so subtle—political and literary points about such weighty subjects as treason, depravity in the final decades of the Qing dynasty, surrenderism, and bravery versus weakness in the face of imperialism. Renderings of her story were banned from time to time in China for allegorical finger-pointing at various actors on China’s political stage, most recently during the Cultural Revolution. The actress Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, allegedly coveted the role of Sai Jinhua in a 1930s play about her life, but she was thwarted by another actress, who later paid a price for her victory, also during the Cultural Revolution.

  The story you have just read is the product of my imagination. I have tried to portray Sai Jinhua as a living, breathing child and then woman who lived in a fascinating t
ime and place. I have allowed my imagination to create one possible answer to the mystery of her reputation. I owe a debt to others who have written her story before.

  Mention must also be made of China’s story in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. The allied powers indulged in an appalling display of looting, plunder, rape, and murder that was at the time and later widely condemned. Some of the items taken from the palaces and mansions of Peking and elsewhere may be found today in museums and collections outside China. The Boxer Protocol, the peace treaty negotiated between China and the Eight-Nation Alliance, exacted yet another round of punitive reparations, and the treaty is known as one of the unequal treaties with which various Western nations, Russia, and Japan punished China during the Age of Imperialism.

  For myself, I can only say that people are endlessly fascinating. History endures through the telling of their stories, and I am glad of that. I thank Sai Jinhua, Hong Jun, Count Alfred von Waldersee, the empress Elisabeth, Sir Edmund Backhouse, and Prince Duan for lending themselves and their stories to me. I have enjoyed my time with them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am eternally grateful:

  Most of all to my husband, Kevin, for his steadfast belief in this story and my ability to tell it under the least likely of circumstances, for never once saying—What on earth is taking you so long?

  To Sebastian, who left no stone unturned in his campaign to cajole, nag, reward (with chocolate), and punish (by withholding it) as I worked my way to completion of this novel.