The Courtesan (19 page)

And now Jinhua notices a small red purse on the bed beside her pillow.

“Kaffee?”
Resi says.

A single barbarian word. One of thousands that Jinhua doesn't understand. A question. Jinhua bows her head.

Black liquid arcs, steaming, from the spout of a jug and into a flowered porcelain cup. The liquid looks like
jiangyou,
but it doesn't
smell like soy sauce. It doesn't smell like tea, either. The odor is strong. The liquid is hot.

“Milch?”
Resi asks.

Another arc of steaming liquid, this time white, goes into the cup. Then a spoonful of white crystals. Jinhua takes a cautious sip. She has never tasted such a thing before. Rich. Bitter and sweet. Not salty, not sour, not spicy either. She doesn't like the taste and then decides she does like it, a little, and she nods at Resi, and Resi smiles, showing the gap between her two front teeth.

When she moves quickly, the ribbons sway across Resi's back. Jinhua takes a sip of the hot drink. She opens the small red purse and the earrings pour out into her hand. Finger long; strands of gleaming pearls and jade beads. She puts them back into the purse and closes the clasp.

Madam Hong's earrings.

Resi is lighting the fire and humming and saying things that Jinhua doesn't understand. Jinhua is watching her and worrying,
Will Wenqing be all right this morning?
And then she worries,
Must she wear the earrings?
And this Resi person, this maid, seems happy and cheerful, first humming and now singing, and Jinhua decides—
No, she will not wear the earrings.
She will put them away in the little red pouch, and if Wenqing asks, she will tell him,
They belong to Madam Hong and if I wear them I will fear that she is here, watching me and judging.

And the truth is that Madam Hong
is
here, and the memories of her float in and out of Jinhua's mind, and sometimes, still, Jinhua can see her long neck with the white cord wrapped around it. And Madam Hong's eyes, she sees them too, dark, dusky, and wide open.

THE SEMBLANCE OF A THING

Jinhua

“
Ich—trinke—Kaffee,
” she says.

There. She has said it aloud and in German, speaking very carefully, syllable by syllable. Jinhua repeats—“I drink coffee”—to practice once more. In her mind she tells Suyin,
See what I have learned,
because Suyin would nod in response, encouraging her. She might even smile if she were not busy, and this makes Jinhua smile for a moment.

She longs, sometimes, for someone to share this new life of hers. Someone to talk to. Someone who likes the things that she likes. Wenqing is not this person.

“What is that you said?” The yellow pages of the
Jing Bao—
the
Peking Gazette
—obscure his face, and the paper rattles in Wenqing's hands. He is sitting at the far end of a long, shiny, oval table, a stack of newspapers, dispatches, and telegrams beside him, most of them newly arrived in the pouch from Peking.

Wenqing seems happiest when there is news from China.

“I am practicing,” Jinhua tells him, “for when Resi comes to serve breakfast.”

Wenqing's forehead crinkles above the edge of his paper, and she can see only his skullcap and the uppermost half of his eyeglasses.

“Resi. The maid,” she adds. “Resi has been teaching me some words in her language. I want to learn. I want to speak German as well as Interpreter Ma speaks it.”

Wenqing turns another page. Another crackle sounds. “They have murdered yet another barbarian missionary in Tianjin. Severed his limbs. Gouged out his eyes,
”
he reads aloud.

“So that I can speak and understand,” Jinhua elaborates.

Wenqing lowers his newspaper. “These foreign devil missionaries are disturbing the natural order of things. Telling people they cannot make offerings to the gods. Defying the magistrates. Meting out barbarian justice. And there is talk of them murdering Chinese babies to make medicine.”

“Kaffee oder Tee, gnäd'ge Frau?”
Resi has arrived with her breakfast tray, and she does her strange, barbarian bow, putting one gleaming boot behind the other and bending her knees, which Wenqing says is a symptom of an uncivilized culture in the Western countries: a bow of only a few inches.

Jinhua has no interest today in Wenqing's remarks, or in his news from China. She tells Resi that she will drink coffee, and Resi smiles proudly because she is the one who has taught Jinhua to say this in German.

From Resi, Jinhua is learning things beyond her imagination. She calls Jinhua
gnädige Frau
—which means “gracious lady” and is a politeness between servant and mistress in the barbarian language. And sometimes, when she is in a hurry, Resi just says
gnä'
or
gnäd'ge,
which mean the same thing.

It feels strange to be spoken to like this, to be called such a thing as
Gracious Lady
in a foreign language.

Resi doesn't ask Wenqing what he would like, but she does her barbarian bow—her curtsy—next to his chair. He will have Biluochun tea, which he drinks every morning, just as he would at home in Suzhou. The tea, from the baskets of the finest tea growers in China, and Wenqing's blue-and-white cup, from the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, both traveled in the camphorwood trunks that sailed with them, and even now that they have been here for more than one month, Wenqing clings to these things that are from China. When Resi pours his tea he frowns, although Jinhua has asked him, “Please, don't frown at her like this. She can see it, and she knows you are displeased, and she is not at fault.”

Wenqing says, “I do not frown.”

The Chinese cook who came with them from Suzhou lasted less than a week before packing his wife and his things and leaving to go home. “Too hard,” he said. “Too cold.” The other Chinese servants went with them, one of them saying, “I am afraid to stay here among the barbarians,” and the others agreeing. So now Wenqing eats rice and noodles and other dishes that the Viennese cook tries and fails to prepare in the Chinese way, and Wenqing frowns often. He says that “even in this foreign place we Chinese must preserve our customs or lose all self-respect,” and he shakes his head from side to side when he says this, and probably doesn't notice that he is doing this either.

Wenqing won't allow the windows to be opened in his room, which Resi likes to do to let the healthy, outside air come in; she calls this
lüften.
Wenqing says that windows should be papered shut to keep out the drafts and the cold and to prevent people on the outside from looking in. He says that the air of Weiyena is a danger to one's health. “One can become ill and die in air like this,” he says. “With our health we must be careful in this place.” Jinhua has
not left the apartments to go outside since coming here, because Wenqing won't allow it. “It is not suitable,” he says. “You must stay in the inner realm, just as you would in China.”

It has become their habit to eat breakfast here, she and Wenqing together in what Resi calls the
Speisesaal,
a room filled with white air and crystal, velvet and wood, dark and heavy paintings on the walls. The table is set with stiff white napkins folded like Manchu ladies' headdresses, ivory-colored dishes from Hungary that have tiny clusters of pink and violet flowers on them. So many dishes on the table. So many pieces of silver. So many politenesses to remember. In Vienna there is a different spoon, a different knife, a different fork for this and that and the other food, and the fork must be held in the left hand and the knife in the right and the spoon, well, Jinhua isn't sure. One must not touch the serving dishes with the eating implements, nor may one drink from the small bowl that is for washing fingers.

All of this is noted in the
Diplomatic Handbook,
every page of which Jinhua has read and committed to memory. Wenqing uses only chopsticks to eat. He says these other implements are confusing and unnecessary. He seems very far away in this room; it feels as though the distance of an entire courtyard is separating him from Jinhua when they sit like this at opposite ends of this long table. Perhaps the distance is also in his head, a dispatch that he is pondering. Or maybe he is thinking of what he will write next in the diary he is keeping with such diligence.

He seems content, but not happy. He hasn't been to Jinhua's bed since the first Vienna night. They haven't spoken of his fears. He did once ask, “Might there be joyful news?” Jinhua paused for just a moment, tallying moon cycles in her head, thinking of red dragons, and told him, “No, there is not.”

The red dragon comes and it goes, and Madam Hong has been between them since the day of her death—and about this, Jinhua is not unhappy.

Now there are just two sounds in the room: the tick of the clock on the mantel, which leads Jinhua to think briefly of Lao Mama's clock and how she can now read the numbers and say that it is five o'clock in the afternoon instead of saying it is the Hour of the Rooster. And the second sound is that noise that Wenqing makes when he drinks in the Chinese way, two-handed, sucking through his teeth to cool the tea. He takes a bite of fried cabbage. He chews and then he stops.

“We cannot live like this,” he says, and Jinhua holds her breath.

“We cannot live by eating this kind of food. I will write to the Foreign Office and tell them to send a new cook from China. I will do this today. I will tell them to attend to it as soon as possible, if not immediately.”

She breathes. Jinhua takes a bite of her
Semmel.
It is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, fresh from the oven and delicious with butter and apricot jam, and she eats one for breakfast every morning—except on Sundays, when the baker is in church.

Resi has come with the silver pot for coffee in her hand, and she is waiting to pour. The curves of Wenqing's nose tighten. He says, “It smells like river water,” and he has said this before. Resi looks, but of course it is only Jinhua who understands. Wenqing has never tasted Resi's coffee. He removes his eyeglasses and reaches for one of the tough, sticky plums he brought from Suzhou to aid his digestion. He pops it into his mouth, and his jaw line pulses as he chews. He punches his newspaper to straighten it, and then he says, looking at Jinhua over the tops of his glasses, “Do not forget that you are Chinese.”

Her reply comes quickly. “I do not forget,” she tells him, “but we are in Vienna and I would like to enjoy what is here in the time that I have.”

Two years—or maybe three.

Jinhua talks to Resi every day when she comes to light the fire and make the bed and tidy her room. Resi bustles like a great winged bird with her ribboned cap, flinging back bedding, shaking and punching the pillows and the feather quilt. It is a noisy ritual. Every morning she opens the windows to air the room, which Jinhua loves, and Jinhua asks her questions. “How do I say this—and this—and this?” They draw pictures and point and use their hands and arms and heads and feet. A shoe, a broom, a painting of a girl with golden hair. Foot, arm, leg, neck. Tree and flower. Through the open windows Jinhua listens to the singsong voice of the flower seller calling out,
“Lavendel, Lavendel, kauf' mein Lavendel.”
She learns the words for
sing
and
buy
and
sell
and
walk.

And
love.
Resi teaches her that word too, putting her hand on her heart. The word in German is
Liebe.

Resi brought Jinhua some
Lavendel
yesterday. The flower seller's name is Frau Anna, she said. Frau Anna has four children and no husband. “A sweet person,” Resi said. Jinhua recognized the tiny purple buds, the narrow gray-green leaves. It is
xünyicao.
“We use it for medicine in China,” she told Resi, acting out the part of a sick person and pretending to eat the flowers.

“We use lavender to scent our clothes and our bedding,” Resi replied in gestures and in words. “We think it smells nice.”

VIENNA, THE 25TH OF FEBRUARY, 1887

Resi

Das arme Hascherl,
Resi writes in her monthly letter to her mother in Spannberg—the poor little thing. This is how she thinks of the new mistress who is so tiny and hardly more than a child.

Ever since the
Herrschaften
arrived from China, Resi has had much to tell in her letters about her new employers. How they have hair that is blacker than the blackest coal, and yes their eyes are narrow and slanted, a bit like the eyes of the Great Chinaman statue in the Prater that she told of in her last letter, but not exactly like that; and their skin is
nicht ganz gelb
—not quite yellow—but not like ours either. In her last letter Resi wrote that the apartment in the Palais Kinsky is slowly becoming a Chinese place. She wrote that the Little Chinaman, which is what she calls the new master but only to herself, has arranged a gaudy altar in the salon with a fat Chinese god—a heathen god with a loud pink face, and a huge belly, and real hair for his beard,
can you imagine that?