Peking Story (11 page)

While the music played, servants passed trays of drinks — vodka, and fruit juice, and the standard cocktails. For the confirmed drinkers, there was plenty of Chinese
pai gar
, one of the world's more potent drinks. It looks like gin, is drunk warm, and leaves the drinker with a breath like automobile exhaust. We also had the gentler Chinese yellow rice wine, which is warmed before drinking, too, and tastes to me like straw, although I've known people who claimed it to be very like sherry. Using chopsticks two feet long, the guests grilled strips of lamb over charcoal braziers set up in the garden, and ate them, Mongolian fashion, with chopped leeks, ginger, and vinegar. Later, the young man in the pink turban sang what was then a new song, beginning, “I want to get you on a slow boat to China.” It was not a success, but a variant — ”I want to get myself on a fast boat leaving China” — occurred simultaneously to a number of people, and was. There was a good deal of laughter, and in the midst of it a late guest dressed as Yang Kuei-fei, the most beautiful empress in Chinese history, came up to me. “Who rates the guard of honor?” she asked, with a strong American accent.

“What guard of honor?” I asked.

“Why, those soldiers with guns at the front gate,” she said.

I told her that she must have seen some of the guests, in costume, but I had seen no one with a gun, so I excused myself, and found Aimee and called her aside. “Do you know anything about soldiers at the gate?” I asked. She looked surprised, and I said, “They may be only guests, but we'd better go and see.”

When Aimee and I got to the main gate, we found that there were indeed two soldiers there, one on each side of the gate. Hand grenades hung at their belts, and each carried an obviously real gun with bayonet attached. Aimee rattled her tambourine at them. “Why are you standing here?” she demanded.

Just then the gateman ran up from the direction of the garden. “I've been trying to find you,” he said to Aimee. “These soldiers came here a while ago, and when I ask them what they want they won't answer. Look.” He turned and shouted to them. “What do you want? Why are you standing here?” They made no response. “You see?” he said, turning back to Aimee.

“Perhaps there's someone outside who's in charge of them,” she said. She started through the gate, but the soldiers suddenly lowered their guns to block her. “Can't I even go out of my own house?” she cried furiously, and just then a pedicab pulled up in front of the gate and a “mandarin” in full court dress — still another late arrival — emerged. He lifted a painted eyebrow at the sight of the soldiers, who had resumed their positions and were staring straight ahead like hitching posts, and walked between them without hindrance. Evidently the gate could be used in one direction only.

Aimee then went off to find Elder Brother while I escorted the new guest to the garden. Coming into it out of the comparative darkness of the courtyards we had passed through on the way was a shock. The fruit-tree blossoms, reflecting the orange and blue lights of the lanterns, hung like gauze veils receding, one behind another, into the remote corners of the garden. A wind had sprung up, and the petals, already past their prime, were falling everywhere, thick and glittering, while people in shining red brocades and crowns of feathers and jewels strolled to the sound of still another conga.

I didn't like it. I still could not recognize the garden — it might as well have been a Chinese garden in Burbank or Rio de Janeiro — and I felt, now, that I did not know, or could not recognize, the people. All of them were strangers to me and to the place. I was glad that the party was none of my doing and that although I lived in the house, I was, at the moment, only another guest.

I took leave of my mandarin as soon as I could, and went back through the quiet courtyards to the rooms occupied by old Aunt Chin. She was there, an asthma cigarette drooping from her lips, playing solitaire. She looked up when I entered. The wind had suddenly become much stronger, and some of her cards fluttered to the floor. I picked them up and asked her if she wanted me to close her windows.

“What are you?” she asked sharply, pointing to my costume. “A devil from the underworld? Well, if you have human hands, you might as well close the windows. You ghosts and devils in the garden are raising quite a wind.” Under ordinary circumstances, she might have annoyed me — she was trying to — but just then I was too uneasy and depressed to answer her. “Some soldiers are here,” I told her as I closed the windows. “They're going to arrest us all.”

“Are they?” she said calmly. She began to gather up her cards, which had worked out in a winning game; Aunt Chin always won at cards, even when she played against herself. “I am not surprised at that. You are all impostors,” she said, and I could see that she was serious. “You know nothing of the history of China, and yet you are trying to imitate the illustrious prodigals of antiquity, who also went down to destruction.” She slapped the cards onto the table and, her head swaying, chanted what I took to be part of a poem: “Golden pendants and silver pins are smashed, and blood-red skirts are stained with wine!” She stopped abruptly, and then spoke again. “That is how the great have always perished,” she said. “Their sins turned day to night and their follies opened the gates of Hell, but they lived boldly and, when the time came, died boldly, too. You out there in the garden, celebrating your own end, are nothing like them, however you may dress.” Clearly, Aunt Chin misunderstood the purposes of costume parties, but she refused to be interrupted. “With the rebel armies at the gates of the palace, the last Ming emperor cut down all his concubines, daughters, and even the empress with his own sword before he hung himself,” she said. “In the confusion, he failed to decapitate the empress, cutting off one of her arms instead. Disgraced at finding herself still alive, the empress threw herself into a garden well and drowned. It was the only virtuous thing to do. And the ancients! When
their
time came, they dressed in pearled robes and crowns of jade, and were murdered in palaces of sandalwood and cassia so huge the smoke of their burning hung over the whole land. They were phoenixes and dragons, and compared to them you poor imitators are no more than the ghosts of butterflies and crickets.”

She fell silent, and I knew it would be useless to explain or argue with her. Besides, I felt that she had shown her usual uncanny knack for hitting the nail on the head no matter how wrong her premise might be. So, removing my wig, I sat down opposite her at the table. And, still in silence, she dealt a hand of rummy, and we played.

Aunt Chin won the first round, and we were starting on a second when Aimee came in. “So this is where you are,” she said. “It's terrible. Elder Brother tried to go out and they wouldn't let him, and some of the guests wanted to go home and they wouldn't let them. Someone finally telephoned the police station, and they told us they're deciding what to do about us. They say we're breaking the law by holding a private meeting. They've never heard of a costume party, of course.”

I remembered that there is no word in Chinese for party. A few young moderns I knew used the Chinese transliteration, “
p'a-t'i
,” but most people simply said “
k'ai-hui
,” which means “hold a meeting” — and that was exactly what we had no permit for. Aimee went on, “And now we don't know what to do. No one is allowed to leave until the police make up their minds, and I think a storm is coming. The moon is still out, but it's such a strange color.”

“There's going to be a dust storm,” Aunt Chin said. “I could have told you that this morning, if you'd asked me. Of course, no one around here ever gets up early enough to see the sunrise. All the signs were right, and this is the season. The moon looks strange because of the dust in the air.”

Aimee went back to the garden, but as there was nothing I could do about the police or the coming storm, I stayed where I was.

Aunt Chin won the next round, too, and by the time we were well into the third, the wind was making a whistling sound, the latticed, paper-covered windows rattled and popped, and I had begun to feel fine grit between my teeth. I was just beginning to think I had better go back to the party when Aimee returned.

She told us that the police had telephoned and said that everyone could go. The guards had been called away from the gate, and the guests were now leaving. The police had indicated that they were coming around themselves, within the next hour, to see what was going on here.

Surrendering an excellent hand, I put my wig back on and followed Aimee through the windy courtyards to the garden, to say good-bye to the remaining guests. I could hear and feel the dust whispering underfoot as we went. In the garden, the trees had been blown almost bare, and fallen petals swirled in the shadows cast by the swinging lanterns. The members of the orchestra, carrying their black instrument cases, were just leaving. Scheherazade and a small group who had stayed to the end with her were wading through a pile of petals, clutching their costumes about them and carrying broken headdresses. From the veranda of the Hall of Ancient Pines, Aimee and I waved to them, and then we went inside the hall. There Elder Brother and several of Aimee's sisters joined us, and we waited for the arrival of the police. The family considered my presence necessary because so many of the foreign guests had been acquaintances of mine but strangers to the family, and it was assumed that questions would be asked about them.

The dust was now everywhere in the tightly closed hall, seeping in between windows and their frames, and under the door. I took off my wig once more and draped it over the back of a chair. Presently, someone turned off the garden lanterns, and we continued to sit in the dimly lit room, surrounded by the sound of the wind, until at last we saw the Communist police picking their way by flashlight through the crumbling garden.

Elder Brother went to meet them, and ushered two officials into the hall. An underling stayed outside. The officials sat down, and immediately one of them jumped up again, striking out at something behind him. He had sat on the chair with my wig hanging on it, and I suppose the wind had blown the hair against his neck. He was given another seat, which he accepted suspiciously, and Third Sister brought cups of hot tea, which neither policeman would drink. Another sister offered them cigarettes, which they refused. “Will you please show us where you held this dance meeting?” one of them asked. His use of the word “dance” seemed to indicate that the police had already come a long way toward our explanation of the evening's activity.

“Here,” Elder Brother answered. “In this room and in the garden.”

The police looked around in surprise at the dusty room. Plainly it was hard for them to believe that we could have held a party in it.

“But all those people in the expensive clothes — do you mean they came
here
?” the other man asked.

Elder Brother pointed to the overflowing ashtrays and to the scattering of empty glasses on window sills and on the arms of a few chairs and sofas backed against the walls. Most of the litter had been left on a buffet on the veranda, and had been carried away by the servants when the wind began to rise, but the remainder was evidence enough, and the police settled down to giving us a lecture.

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, they told us, for causing them so much anxiety. What had we expected them to think, they asked peevishly, when flocks of pedicabs began to pass their station at the end of the street, all coming in this direction and all filled with strangely dressed people? The men they sent to investigate had been further astounded to hear loud foreign music and the sound of laughter wafting over the walls. We must admit that we had behaved very peculiarly, they said, and couldn't we at least have let the police know what we were doing?

Elder Brother explained politely that it had been a moon-and-flower-viewing party, and that, because the moon and the flowers couldn't wait, we had been in such a rush to hold the party that we had completely overlooked the important matter of informing the People's Police of our innocent pleasures.

“Moonlight and flowers!” one of the policemen cried contemptuously. He brought out a sheaf of papers from his valise, saying that since we had failed to make a written request at the proper time for permission to hold a private meeting, we must do so now. We must do it before another minute passed, and we must also fill out a form listing the names of all the people who had attended our dance meeting.

Aimee and I did what we could with the form. I gave her as many names of foreign guests as I could recall, and she wrote them down, transliterated by their sounds into Chinese. It was unlikely that anyone could decipher them. In the meantime, Elder Brother wrote the request and a letter of apology for not having submitted it earlier.

He was just impressing his personal seal on the form and letters when, over the sound of the wind, we heard a loud creaking and cracking out in the garden, followed by a sound rather like that of an immense cabinet filled with thousands of dishes falling over. We all rushed to the windows just as the underling left on guard outside came bursting into the room.

“What happened? What happened?” the officers asked.

“I don't know,” he said, getting as far away from the door as possible. “I don't know.”

Elder Brother strode manfully out into the wild, dark night. “What's going on out here?” we heard him call, and through the door I saw him throw the switch that controlled all the lanterns strung in the trees. They flashed on, leaping about in the branches like fiery goblins, their paper coverings torn by the wind. The sudden illumination came as a complete surprise to the police, who gasped in unison.

Then we saw that the Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues had collapsed. Its roof tiles were scattered in all directions, and the roof itself lay half on, half off the stone terrace on which the pavilion had stood. We had just time to realize what had happened when, accompanied by sparks from the switch, all the lanterns went out again.