The Courtesan (14 page)

LIKE A SMILE AND YET NOT

Jinhua

“Please, Lao Mama, may Suyin come with me to live in Madam Hong's house?”

After Jinhua said this, the silence was like thunder.

“Please, Lao Mama.” Jinhua was on her knees.

After a long, long time, Lao Mama said, “You came here alone and with nothing.” Her eyes and her emerald ring glittered with one hard light, and Jinhua knew that it delighted Lao Mama to see her weak and on her knees, and even so she stayed there just like that, begging. “You will leave in the same way,” Lao Mama said. “Alone, taking not a single thing from here. Especially not,” she added, “Suyin, who is my daughter.”

“It is not the worst thing,” Suyin is saying now. “In fact it is the very best thing that could happen to you, Jinhua, and the thing has been done. Madam Hong has paid the money, and you will be a concubine in a great house with three black gates and six stone lions, just as you have described to me—a great house with ancestor
paintings and high walls and a courtyard all of your own. Think of it—you will leave the life of a money tree behind you, and I will think of you living a new and better life.”

Suyin has begun to cry, but just a little, and Jinhua is crying too, but harder. “I am not,” she says, “the person that Madam Hong believes me to be. I am not the courtesan who was that man's lover, and I don't remember what they want me to remember—and how can I forgive what that man has done to someone else?”

And yet, it is true what Suyin says. The thing has been done. The money is in Lao Mama's purse, and it is a large sum, and she will not let go of it. Jinhua will have to leave the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love; she will leave the grinning, pink-faced god of wealth, the opium and drinking games, and the men who come to her bed. She will leave behind Monkey Squat and Fishes Gobbling, Flying Dragon and Cranes Entwined, and she will learn another language, the language of a concubine. Jinhua reaches for Suyin and feels a kind of pain that is both new to her and not new at all.

“And what about you, Suyin? What will happen to you?”

They hold each other tightly, Suyin's arms around Jinhua and Jinhua's arms around Suyin. “You and I are like skin and bones,” Jinhua says
.
“We are
jiemei—
we are sisters in a family that should stay together forever and for always.”

A coughing sound in the doorway is Lao Mama standing there and listening, pipe in hand.
“Hè,”
she says, sipping smoke. “What do you two girls know of sisters anyway? You know nothing at all about such things, and both of you are liars when you talk
jijizhazha
like this. When you say
family,
Suyin, when you say that word you must say my name because you belong to me, and you are my daughter, and I am your mother. And as for Jinhua, she is nothing to you and you are nothing to her. She will leave you behind, Suyin,
because Madam Hong has paid for her, and you will never see each other again. It will be as though Jinhua never knew your name, Suyin, because she will forget you and remember nothing, not even your ugly face or your stinking feet or anything you have ever said to her.”

Lao Mama hurls smoke from her mouth into the air, and the look on her face is like a smile and yet not, and she tells Suyin that she must go downstairs and do her work. “Right now.” When Lao Mama has gone, Suyin tells Jinhua, “She is not wrong. You will forget, Jinhua, because you must. We do not own ourselves, and we do not own each other. We will live where we must live and go where we must go. We must accept what is real, and as for what is not—”

Jinhua replies, and she is angry. “Lao Mama is wrong and you are wrong too. The feelings of one sister for another can never, ever be forgotten. You have not forgotten Little Sister, or the scar on her lip, or how she was carried away from here because Lao Mama did not want her. You have not forgotten Aiwen, Suyin, and I will not forget you.”

Jinhua pauses, and her breath is coming quickly, and there is more she has to say. “I am afraid, Suyin,” she whispers. “I am afraid of Madam Hong, and I do not want to live where I cannot hear your voice. I am afraid of that as well.”

Now it is Suyin who is sobbing and cannot stop. Before she leaves the room to do her work, she says one last thing. “When you have gone away to that great house, Jinhua, you can imagine the sound of my voice—at least for a while. You can imagine the words that I would say, and this will be enough for you. And whether you are or are not the person they believe you to be, no one can know this for sure. Between one life and the next there is much that can happen. You and I both have seen this before.”

Jinhua hears the sound of Suyin's old wooden shoes on the floor
going
tok, tok-tok, tok, tok-tok
the way they always do, and the sound gets smaller and smaller until it is gone. And then Jinhua thinks of something else Lao Mama said that is not at all true. Jinhua did not come here to the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love with nothing. She had her tiger shoes that Lao Mama threw onto the fire, and she had the things she remembered from the life she had before. She came here with Baba and Timu and “A Night-Mooring Near Maple Bridge” in her mind. She came with the sound of a gate that cried like a baby, and with Nüwa and Mama, who were both of them curious and wise and virtuous. All of this she had with her; all of it she will always have. She will not forget Suyin, and Suyin, surely, will not forget her either.

Jinhua is leaving in a thin rain, late in the morning, when the Hour of the Horse has just begun—and Suyin has not come to say good-bye. The guard dog is barking ferociously, and Jinhua is wearing red underclothes, red stockings, and a red veil that hides her tears. Drums and flutes and wailing strings fill her head with concubine-wedding sounds, and the dog will not be still, and seen through the veil and her tears, everything is a hazy vermilion. It is difficult now to feel what it means to be going away when there is so much noise, and it is raining, and when Suyin has not come. It is a strange feeling for Jinhua to be not here and not there, both of these things at the same time. Lao Mama watched her dress this morning in these concubine clothes that Madam Hong has sent. “Suyin doesn't want to see you. She is busy with her work,” Lao Mama told her with that same smile that is not a smile. And then, when Jinhua was putting on her shoes, she said, “Madam Hong didn't even try to get a cheaper price to buy you. She is a stupid woman with a stupid
husband who allows his wife to choose a concubine for him. What kind of man obeys his wife in a matter such as this?”

And then Lao Mama said her last words: “If you are miserable in that house you can powder your face and then hang yourself, and this, Jinhua, is my last piece of advice for you. Remember, too, to wear red when you do it, for a better fortune in your next life. That is the thing to do, to wear red.”

It was Lao Mama's last cruelty to tell her this—that and keeping Suyin away, which is almost the worst of all the cruel things that she has done, because surely Suyin would have wanted to see her one last time to say good-bye. Surely Suyin is grieving now, and Jinhua will grieve too, waiting in the great house for the
tok, tok-tok
of Suyin's footsteps, longing for the stories that she and Suyin have told each other in days that have passed, and longing, too, for the comfort that used to come from this, but won't
anymore.

Facing Madam Hong

THE TWELFTH YEAR OF
THE GUANGXU REIGN

1887

Suzhou

THE TENTH DAY OF
THE CONCUBINE

Madam Hong

“Can you not be still for even a moment?”

From Madam Hong, Huizhong's round, northern face hides nothing at all. The maid does not like that the courtesan has come. She doesn't agree with what Madam Hong has done in bringing her here. Huizhong is a simple person; she has a soft, bean-curd heart where her mistress is concerned, and Madam Hong has always known this. It is the one thing she can count on.

“I cannot be still,” Huizhong is saying now. She is darting here and darting there, a flyswatter in her hand, stalking a cockroach that has come in from the cold. “And I cannot be quiet either, Madam. You have hardly eaten a grain of rice in these ten days since that person arrived. You do not sleep.” Huizhong smacks the wall, and a cockroach shadow leaps to the floor. “The tea I bring you stays untouched in the cup until it is cold and unhealthy for you to drink. You have not left the house to visit your friends—nor
have you invited them to come here to play mah-jongg, or to chat and laugh and tell—”

Madam Hong has stopped listening.

“She is a fox girl,” Huizhong said when the bride chair arrived not at the third gate, or the second, but at the first as Madam Hong had instructed. “What does the master need with such a person in his house?” she said. “Why, Madam, do you allow this? This
hulijing,
this fox girl, will send you to your coffin, and that, Madam, is as certain a thing as the dust that will gather in the bristles of my broom tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.”

Huizhong is an impudent goose. She cannot hold her tongue. But she knows—of course she does—the answers to these questions. She has been here long enough to know everything. Now she pounces, smacking again, and the cockroach lies on its back on the floor, legs paddling, not quite alive and not quite dead—and now that she has murdered the cockroach, Huizhong abandons the flyswatter and takes up a hairbrush.

She was here—Huizhong was—on the night that the courtesan's mother came. Madam Hong was a bride of just one day; she was waiting for her husband to come to her, to do what a husband should do with his wife. Huizhong was nearby—and they both heard the pounding at the gate, and then they heard the screaming, the screaming that came from the lips and the throat of the courtesan's mother.

Everyone heard the noise and the screams: the neighbors in their courtyards, the servants in their beds, people far and near and high and humble.

It was late at night and dark, and the screams stopped the blood in Madam Hong's veins. It made her ears pound and her chest stomp, and Huizhong came running to her side.

The courtesan's mother stayed at the gate for a long time, screaming this and screaming that. Screaming that her number one daughter was dead—that she was hanging by a rope—that it was Master Hong—the young and newly married one and not the old one—who made her do it. “My precious, my first and best and most filial daughter is dead,” she wailed, “and what will become of me? He has done this to her, and he has done this to me, and her ghost—”

Madam Hong heard that screaming mother's every word and closed her eyes and thought,
This cannot be. My husband has not done this thing.
That woman who is at the gate and will not leave is a wretch and a liar.
Ten days had passed when her mother-in-law came “to explain that woman's outburst,” she said. “It is a simple matter, no more and no less than a misunderstanding. That woman was mistaken. She believed that my son loved her daughter, that he had promised to take her away from her courtesan's life—to marry her. But he did not love that girl. My son promised nothing. He would never have married her, and that is why she hanged herself.”

The old woman said all this without shedding a tear, without even blinking. “We will never speak of this again,” she pronounced with her ancient, weathered lips. And as she was leaving, this strange and difficult person of a mother-in-law turned to say one more thing. “I must protect my son, and so must you. Promise me. We are both of us stronger than he is. It is not a good thing for my son to have a hanged person's ghost haunting his life and demanding vengeance and who knows what else. I will give the mother some money, and this will be the end of the matter.”

If only it had been so. If only the screaming woman had not come, and Madam Hong's husband had been in a wifely bed on that night and on every night thereafter, and if only there had been sons born, one after the other. And now, if only this girl that
Huizhong so despises had not been found. But she is here, and she has the brilliant red mark of the hanging rope on her throat—and the fortune-teller has spoken.

“The girl cannot be in this house and yet she must be here.”

She must be here—
and there is Great Love waiting for her.

“You are as stubborn as a weed,” Madam Hong says now—and Huizhong is brushing her hair with long, firm strokes and oiling it with pomelo, and the relationship between the two of them is both tender and tough, which is as it should be. “How can it be, Huizhong,” Madam Hong continues, “that as each year passes you get fatter and more meddlesome, and nothing else changes, ever, with you? You must leave me some peace to do what I will do. Go and rest yourself, you old and clumsy servant girl, so that you have strength to work harder and better tomorrow.”

Huizhong is plucking the bad and crinkled strands from Madam Hong's hair—the white ones too—coiling them up, placing them in a jar, where she keeps them with great loyalty, and Madam Hong feels almost safe, even though the courtesan is in her house.

“There is one more thing,” Huizhong says now, and Madam Hong sighs—
will she never be still?
“And this is the very last thing I will say. I will not leave you in peace to do what you will do until your hair gleams and your skin and your pillow are soft and until you drink every drop of the tea that I have brought to make you warm. And even though I am only a worthless maid, even though you are high and I am low, I understand much more than you think, Madam Hong. I understand that you believe there are no choices for you, and maybe that is true and maybe it is not. But as you say, you will do what you will do, and you will think what you will think, and the same is true for me.”

When her hair gleams and her skin is soft and when Huizhong has gone, Madam Hong sits in her garden wrapped in fur against a bone-chilling wind, and she contemplates a screen of bitter bamboo. An owl hoots. She thinks of demons. She thinks of what it is that she and her husband have shared and will never share again now that the courtesan has been reborn. How when she was married her shoulder touched his; how he and she drank from two cups tied together with a single cord of red silk. How they joined the yin and the yang on the night of their wedding, and it was the one truly tender moment of their marriage; how she hoped for many sons and for a mother-in-law who would treat her well and kindly.

There have been no more nights like that first one. There have been no sons for Madam Hong. And now it seems that her mother-in-law was right. It is something to fear—the ghost of a hanged person haunting her husband, sending him back to a courtesan's bed.

She uses this word to describe the girl—
courtesan
—and not the other, worse, more apt expression that darts in and out of her mind—
biaozi.

Yes,
Madam Hong is thinking now, and she smells the scent of camphor, strong and tart, almost singeing her nostrils,
I am my husband's shadow and I will never be anything more than that. I will do what I must do to repay his debt. It is as high as a mountain, as wide as an ocean, and as heavy as a monument. It is a debt of betrayal and killing, and I know this contemptible person must be here and nowhere else. But I will not be kind to her. She has taken far too much from me, and I, too, have been abandoned. I, too, have been betrayed, and who knows, perhaps Huizhong is right. Perhaps this person, this biaozi, will have her revenge, and perhaps the scent of camphor will surround me in my coffin. If this is to be,
she contemplates,
I fear it will be
soon.