The Courtesan (18 page)

Beneath the weight of the scratchy, pepper-colored blanket that Herr Swoboda has thrown over them for warmth, Jinhua is looking at the sky, vast and gray above the open carriage. The coachman has just turned and said, “Prinz Eugen Strasse.”

“It is savage, the sound of their language,” Wenqing says, and Jinhua nods without listening. The streets are long and wide; the
buildings are high with row upon row of tidy foreign-glass windows trimmed with stone. Weiyena is a city made of stone. The color red is missing here. There are no banners reaching far into the street, overlapping vertically one against the next, shouting out the names of shops and of purveyors in large Chinese lettering. No laundry hung on bamboo poles. No yin and yang roof tiles, no whitewashed walls that hug the streets, no gates adorned with dragon heads; no lanterns, no pagodas, no sedan chairs. Instead there are barren winter trees, iron lampposts, towering statues of men on horses, and naked men, and women in gowns that drip and flow even though they too are made of stone. And there is so much more than this, too much to take in all at once.

Jinhua's eyes are wide. Her nose is cold, and under the blanket she is warm and almost hot. The blanket smells of dust and smoke. She feels Wenqing's body huddled next to her, shivering sometimes, reaching for her now and again.

“He looks like an animal, so large and so hairy,” Wenqing is saying, pointing at the coachman. His voice is too loud. Jinhua reaches for his hand.

“His name is Suo Bo Da,” she says. She says it gently in a Chinese-sounding way, and when the horses hesitate, Herr Swoboda snaps a firecracker whip against the hindquarters of first one horse, then the other, and Wenqing flinches. The coachman turns briefly, saying something, and Jinhua notices that his eye, the one she can see, is the color of a jewel and not an eye. Green. Brilliant, emerald green. Like Lao Mama's ring. Two eyes of that color, she sees now. Wenqing turns to avoid those eyes, looking back for the other carriage, the one behind them carrying Interpreter Ma and the servants and the trunks with tea and spices from home, the six daily essentials, clothing both ceremonial and ordinary, dishes and chopsticks, which the foreign devils do not use, the
Dream of the Red
Chamber,
which Jinhua has packed herself, and of course Wenqing's maps, his inks, his brushes, the wooden pass of his new office—and Madam Hong's embroidery box.

The Honorable Bearer of this pass
—she remembers him reading.

Know yourself, know your enemy
—

“I wonder,” Wenqing is saying now, “whether there will be news from China when we arrive. I wonder how long it will be before we get there. I'm pining for a cup of Longjing tea, Jinhua. When we arrive we will have some. That will be the very first thing, and then I will read the news, and I will feel much better than I do
now.”

FOAM ON WATER

Jinhua

She is alone in a barbarian bed.
No,
Jinhua reconsiders, it is a Viennese bed in an apartment on the third floor of a Viennese building that stands on the edge of a market square in the city of Vienna—and the square is really a
sanjiaoxing
—a three-point triangle that Jinhua can see from her bedroom window high above it.

This square that is really a triangle is called the Freyung, and the building is a palace, and it is old and was built for a nobleman in the barbarian year of 1717, which is the same as the Fifty-Sixth Year of the Kangxi Emperor. Interpreter Ma told them this, looking only at Wenqing, who wasn't really listening, but Jinhua was. The palace is yellow and white outside, with giant, naked men carved in stone at the gate, and it is beautiful but strange, with a long, wide staircase made of marble and covered in thick red carpet.

The giant stone men are like demons. They are shocking to look at. Wearing no clothes. As muscled as plow-pulling oxen, with
grimacing faces. Wenqing hates these naked men of stone who adorn the front gate where lions would be were they in China.

“You are very near,” Interpreter Ma told Wenqing, and Jinhua paid attention to every word he said, “to the winter residence of the emperor Franz Joseph and his consort, the empress Elisabeth of Austria. The emperor of this land has only one wife, which is the custom here. The name
Freyung
,” the interpreter added, “means
free.
I don't know why this place has such a name,” he said. “It is a most peculiar name for a public place.”

Jinhua is trying to remember all of this, every strange word. Every sight, every sound, every detail that has been revealed to her on this strangest and most exciting of days. She is remembering how it felt when Swoboda, the coachman, lifted her into his arms, carefully, as though she were a fragile thing and not a bag of rice, and he carried her up all those stairs with the thick red carpet. And she is remembering how close she was to him, so close that she could see his ripe-persimmon-colored whiskers peeking through the skin on his face like grains of chili pepper, and his
houjie
—his Adam's apple—rooting out from beneath his stiff, white collar, as large and lumpy as a knob of garlic. Wenqing stiffened when this barbarian man picked her up. He thought it was unsuitable, improper, not appropriate to decorum, and he said so to her, making her think of Madam Hong for just a moment.

The bed has heavy wooden panels at Jinhua's head and at her feet, and it is so high off the floor that Jinhua needed a footstool to climb up. The bed is covered with bright white linens that are smooth and crisp and almost crackle against her skin; it has the smell of fresh, outdoor air and something else, maybe flowers, maybe something herbal. The bed is soft, with huge white pillows, and the quilt is as thick as a wall but featherlight. She could have chosen,
as Wenqing did, to use the bedding that was brought from Suzhou in a trunk, but she did not.

Lying here, dressed in her Chinese silk pajamas, looking at the ceiling, which is cloud high and white and ornamented in relief with scrolls and flowers and curving lines, Jinhua is tired and thrilled with the feel of China and Vienna on her skin—both at once—and she thinks of what it would be like to tell Suyin about all she has seen and learned and felt since leaving Suzhou. What would Suyin think about these things that thrill Jinhua? Jinhua doesn't know the answer. Suyin seems very far away now that everything is new around her. Now that she is beginning to live a new life.

The sound that Wenqing makes when he sleeps—the sound of his breath catching in his throat—is far away in another room across the hall, and Jinhua cannot hear it and she is glad of that. She is alone after a long journey in small spaces. There are no one else's needs to worry her tonight, only her own. Jinhua's chest rises and it falls, and she takes in huge gulps of air and thinks of the views of the ocean she has had, and of the view she has now from the foreign-glass windows. From here, from the inside of her own new room, she can see Weiyena. Vienna: the building with the soaring bell tower across the Freyung,
which means free,
the statues on the fountain in the middle of the square—dark, watchful, waiting women, the woolly-fingered ladies selling cabbages, potatoes, carrots, chestnuts—which look much as they do in China. The ladies weigh their vegetables and take people's money here, and this is the same as well; and then there are the barbarian children playing games, chasing one another. And the sound of the church bells ringing every hour. So rich, so untidy. “They fill my head, my ears, my body beneath my skin,” she told Wenqing, and he looked
astonished that Jinhua would say such a thing—and didn't understand at all what she meant.

She has not seen evidence, yet, of a Chinaman's head used by barbarian children as a ball, which happens here, according to one of Wenqing's books that he has been reading to inform himself. When Jinhua pointed this out to him today in the carriage, he said, “Yes, I thought as much.” And then he added, “Not all that is said is the truth,” and she responded,
“Ò,”
when really she was thinking,
I know this, Wenqing. I know it already.

And now Jinhua tells herself that she will look out of this window tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that, and she will never tire of watching Weiyena, and yes, it is a new life she is starting here, far beyond the walls of her Suzhou courtyard where she knew the names of everything, and yes, she feels for the first time in almost forever—happy and hardly afraid at all.

The wooden floor is lit by moonlight. It creaks, and is patterned, and it glows a golden red. The door has opened, and slippered feet brush across the flowered carpet at the foot of the Viennese bed. Someone else is breathing in the room. Jinhua closes her eyes more tightly than she would in sleep.

She is pretending.

A moment later, Wenqing lifts the feather quilt and climbs onto the bed and settles himself next to Jinhua, where she can feel the edges of him, bony and cold, bonier than his body used to be. She does not move, and he says nothing. He does not reach for her.

And then, when the silence in the room has become too long and it has become too hard to breathe quietly, he speaks.

“I am a serious man, with serious things to do here,” he says,
and his voice is not his usual voice. “It is my duty to observe the ways of the foreign devils. I must go out into this barbarian place where I am ill at ease and not familiar, and I must learn from them about matters of weapons and business and science. I must help make China strong against the West. It is a new way of thinking about the management of barbarian affairs.”

Wenqing pauses for a moment, and he looks straight up, unblinking, at the ceiling without seeing, Jinhua knows, the scrolls and flowers and curving lines that she has seen and loved the sight of.

“China is already strong in morals and in culture. But perhaps it is true that only by knowing what our enemies know and how they think can we restore the maps that show our greatness. I am here because I must be here. I am here because of the maps, and because of the imperial edict, and because there are powerful men in Peking who believe that China must strengthen herself in this way. And yet—”

Jinhua feels her husband's body shudder underneath the feather quilt. There is more he wants to say. She waits.

“And yet”—Wenqing is whispering now—“I fear I am not strong enough for this. It is all too strange for me. I am like a mouse among tigers in this foreign devil place. I have lost so much in coming here.”

Wenqing turns his face toward the window. Away from Jinhua.

“I am not worthy,” he continues, and she feels sure that he is weeping as he says this. “I am a man of the old ways, a writer of eight-legged essays that have been the foundation of all things for centuries. I revere what is old and abhor what is new. I do not believe in self-strengthening. I fear that I must change myself. I fear that I cannot.”

Beneath the bedding, featherlight, Jinhua is hot with shame for
Wenqing's tears, with pity for him and sadness for them both. She is afraid now, too, not of the foreign devils or their warships, or of losing her head to barbarian children's games. She is afraid for Wenqing. Afraid that he is in a place that is all wrong for him. Afraid of his hunger for China and for all that is familiar, and for nothing that is not. She touches his shoulder, grateful for the darkness that allows her to see a little bit less than everything, aware that she, too, has been in places that were all wrong, that she, too, has lost so much, that she, too, has wept in much the way that he is weeping now.

“You are not yourself,” she tells him. “It is the strangeness of the day that makes you feel this way. It is that you are weary, and nothing more than that. You will get used to the way things are in this place. Perhaps you will help China to emerge victorious. Perhaps the maps—”

She says these things to comfort him. She wants them to be true, for his sake.

“Close your eyes and sleep,” she tells him now. “The future is long. Do not allow today to use up the moments that belong to tomorrow.”

This last thing she has never said aloud before. Baba's words have come back to her quite suddenly, and Baba was a wise, wise man, and the words are right for Wenqing to hear at this time and on this night. He turns his head. He strokes Jinhua's forehead with just the tips of his fingers, and he whispers—“The journey here has changed us both, and I fear—in fact, I am terrified—that you, Jinhua, are far more changed by it than I am.” And then he reaches for her and she stops him, and she is quite firm in this, and it is because of how she feels, and because of Madam Hong, and because at this time and in this moment she is strong and Wenqing is weak—and she is ravenous to live a new life.

She wakes to the sound of three soft knocks—a long pause—and then three more knocks. Bright sun is streaming through the foreign-glass windows, and Wenqing has gone, and Jinhua can see that he has smoothed the bedding in the place where he lay last night, weeping until he slept.

A plump face peeks out from behind the door. Jinhua sits up, tugging the feather quilt to her chin. It is the person she saw yesterday, with pale, crinkled hair like curling noodles made of egg, and a stiff white cap with ribbons that dangled all the way down her back.

She is still wearing the cap. It is a tiny thing, perched on top of her golden head.

Jinhua tells her,
“Jinlai,”
which the person seems to understand.

This black-and-white person is the maid—Interpreter Ma told them. “She is plump and strong and Viennese, and she will help you get accustomed to barbarian ways of living. Her name is Re Xi.” He repeated the name. Resi.

Resi is wearing the same dress that she wore yesterday. It is ink black and cinched at the waist. Her apron is bright white and long and ruffled at the hem and shoulders, and Jinhua notices that beneath the bib of it she has large, plump breasts. This maid, Resi, has a tray in her hands, and an unfamiliar odor, slightly bitter and slightly unpleasant, follows her into the room.