The Courtesan (21 page)

Wenqing has written also about the Ball Season, which has recently ended, where men and women mingle in palaces, and the women's arms and chests are bare, and the men wear tight, skin-colored trousers, and he remarks that the men and women dance, quite openly, dressed in this way and positioned close to one another, with the men's hands touching the women's waists and the women's hands on the men's shoulders—and these people who dance together like this are not always husband and wife.

Jinhua wants to see this kind of dancing for herself. She wants to learn how to do this, and a voice inside her head says,
You can aspire to gallop a thousand miles, but on the feet you have, you will not succeed
—and it is Suyin's voice telling her this.

Suyin is right. The dancing women who go to balls in palaces do not have feet like hers. Suyin is always right, but she is far away in Suzhou, and Jinhua, sitting here and thinking these intoxicating thoughts, does not want to be reminded of some things. Of her bound
and crippled
feet—and what she cannot do.
Can't you understand this, Suyin? Why must you always speak the truth?

“Madam Ma is here to see you,” Resi says.

“Again,” she adds, because Wenqing has been gone now for three days, and Madam Ma has come here every day that he has been away, and she stays until Jinhua yawns and flutters her eyelids and says to her, “I am so very tired,” and Madam Ma says, “Ahhhh, perhaps you are—”

Jinhua is dawdling now over what Resi calls her
Toilette.
She
has traced her willow-leaf eyebrows and rouged her cheeks and tinted her lips with red; she has powdered her face in the way that Resi has suggested—which is more subtle than the way that Suyin always did it. And she has, of course, painted the line across her throat and covered it immediately so that Resi does not see.

She has begun to think of the line as a way of asking for forgiveness.

Now Jinhua lifts her hand and positions it in front of her face to gesture—
No.
Not Madam Ma again.
Resi giggles, then makes the face of a sick person and says, “Gnäd'ge.” She curtsies, spreading her skirt with two hands.

They understand one another quite well, she and Resi. Resi will send Madam Ma away.

It is true, as Wenqing said, that Madam Ma is lonely. She is also fat and homesick and all knowing, and Jinhua does not like her. Being fat, Madam Ma wants only to sit with her embroidery in the salon and talk of the feasts she will have on her return to Peking, where she is from. With her eyes alight and her tongue circling her mouth, she talks of sesame seed mutton, and earthen-jar pork belly; of dragon whisker noodles and queen mother's cake. Madam Ma craves these things. Being homesick makes her peevish and shrill, and she is always complaining that she is never not hungry.

On her first visit she asked Jinhua, “Why do you not do embroidery? It helps to pass the time. It is a sign, you know, of a woman's virtue.”

Madam Hong's words from Madam Ma's mouth.

Jinhua replied, “I do not embroider because I do not wish to embroider, and I pass the time in other ways.” And then she asked Madam Ma, “Have you been to a Viennese ball? Have you seen the Viennese dancing?”

It was perverse of her to ask this of a woman like Madam Ma.
It gave her pleasure to ask and to see the lines of a frown form on her visitor's face.

Madam Ma replied by listing, yet again, all that disgusts her in Vienna: “We Chinese are superior in moral character,” she said. “They do not comprehend subtleties. They know nothing of decorum or of virtue. Their foods are only either sweet or salty. They are missing the bitter, the piquant, the sour.

“And as for this dancing—”

Jinhua hears the butler's voice now, coming from the hall.

“The mistress is unwell and cannot see you,” he is saying. “Not today, Madam Ma.”

“It can only be this filthy barbarian air,” Madam Ma replies in that all-knowing voice of hers that cannot be mistaken for any other voice
.
“One can become ill and die in air like this,” she says. “I will be back tomorrow when your mistress is better. I will bring my embroidery.”

The door to the apartment is polished and massive. It takes two hands and the full weight of Jinhua's body leaning backward, straining and pulling, to open it. The hinges scream, but no one comes, and Jinhua takes her first step out of the apartment—and Madam Ma has really, truly gone, leaving a stray piece of black embroidery thread on the floor.

Standing at the top of the great white staircase, looking down—down the long red carpet—Jinhua is thinking now that it is a journey of a vast distance to go from the third floor of the Palais Kinsky to the places she longs to go. She grips the marble balustrade and moves a breathless inch toward the edge of the top step. There are so very many of them. She glances up and sees the flutter of a small
brown bird in the dome of the ceiling.
Qian li zhi xing, shi yu zu xia.
A huge tree that fills one's arms grows from a single seed—
and a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step.

The words of Laozi. The wisdom of the ancients—

Jinhua's belly whispers now—
I must take this single step on my wretched, tiny, lotus feet.

Baba said, “No, not ever. Her feet will not be bound.” And yet they were.

Suyin said, “You will cry a thousand buckets of tears.” And she has cried that many.

Banker Chang said that her feet were
wanmei.
And now she knows that they are not perfection. Jinhua braces herself, and she takes the first step. She hates her feet. She ignores the pain, and the fear of falling, and the certainty that Suyin would say now, again,
You can aspire to gallop—

“Your poor little feet,” Resi calls them.
“Ich helf' dir,”
she says now. Resi is suddenly here, looking worried, patting Jinhua's hand. “I'll help you,” she says, “or we can ask Herr Swoboda to carry you down these dreadful stairs.”

Jinhua shakes her head.
No, not Herr Swoboda.
She wonders about Wenqing's quiet black boots with the white soles, how it was when he went to Berlin, descending so easily on a man's feet—and yet so full of doubt. And she takes a second step, and she wonders how her husband is managing. Whether he is still afraid. What he would say now if he saw her. What he would do. And what about obedience, and virtue, and Madam Hong and Madam Ma with their embroideries? And she hears Suyin's voice whispering in her ear very, very quietly:
I am nodding, urging you forward. I understand, Jinhua, that you must do this—but you must be careful. Do not lose your way.

“I will go by myself,” Jinhua says to Resi. “I will do it without any help.” She is doing it now, taking the tenth step down and then
the eleventh, and she is thinking of the Freyung, of buying a bundle of lavender from Frau Anna, of feeling the fresh, barbarian air on her face and walking on cobblestones, and of feeling, too, that if she can do this once, she can do it again and again—
and Suyin is watching and she understands.
When she arrives at the last step, Resi is there, and Jinhua is exhausted.

“I am so proud of you,” Resi is saying, and what she has just said—
I am so proud of you
—is the best thing that has ever been said to Jinhua by anyone, and it is the best thing Jinhua has done in a long, long time, to descend the stairs with Suyin at her side, being very careful.

BE AFRAID OF STANDING STILL

Jinhua

“It is beautiful,” Resi breathes when she sees the embroidery box on the table. “It must be very precious.”

Jinhua hasn't touched these things since the day she visited Madam Hong in the Courtyard of the Virtuous Lady. It was Wenqing who ordered them packed in the traveling trunks, and Huizhong who wrapped the box in blue silk for the journey, weeping all the while, saying things under her breath.

The box of Madam Hong's embroidery is the only Chinese thing that has not been unpacked. It is larger than Jinhua remembered. Made of red lacquer. Deeply carved. Rough to the touch, like sharp rockery. Every bit of the surface is covered with household scenes. Women in gardens, women with babies, women painting and playing lutes and doing needlework. The meaning of a gentlewoman's life intricately carved into bloodred lacquer.

Hard to look at even now.

Especially now.

“It was a gift,” Jinhua tells Resi. “From a long time ago. I needed to see it. It has meanings that I need to think about.”

Resi's lips part, showing the gap in her front teeth, showing her puzzlement. She curtsies.

“Will there be anything else,
gnä' Frau
?” she asks.

Jinhua sends her away. She lifts the lid of the box. Colors roar. Memories explode. The square of white silk with the
Ye He Hua
—the Flower of Nocturnal Togetherness—remains unstitched, untouched, the outline faded to a pale suggestion. The silk threads in very many colors, the needles, Madam Hong's tiny silver scissors, are all jumbled underneath it in the box, disturbed by the long journey across the sea.

Jinhua leaves the threads, the needles, and Madam Hong's scissors as they are. She refolds the square of silk. She replaces the lid on the box. And she is thinking now, not about embroidery and how it is not the pastime for her, and not about Madam Hong, who was the perfect wife for Wenqing even though he did not know this. She is not thinking about chastity or virtue either. It is stairs that she is pondering. How many there are and how wide and how deep. And how many steps it took for her to go from the third floor of the Palais Kinsky all the way down to the great wooden door that opens out onto the Freyung,
“
which means freedom,” Interpreter Ma said all those months ago. “A strange name for a place,” he said, and Jinhua remembers this now and finds it not at all strange.

Wenqing's gift is wrapped in brown paper that has been used before for something else. It is tied with string. He is beaming and pleased—and he does not often look this way.

“I know that you sometimes find my way of thinking harsh. You
think I disapprove,” he says, and Jinhua knows that it costs him much to speak this way to her. He is bundled in blankets; she is, too, against the unexpected cold. “I have brought you this gift to show you otherwise,” he says.

Wenqing's mood has improved since his return from Berlin, and Jinhua thinks that this is owing, almost certainly, to the arrival of Gao Chuzi, the new cook, who brought with him the familiar smells of fermenting sauces, and spices fried in oil, and dried fish, and sweet, dried meats from China.

And to the arrival, “just fourteen days late,” Wenqing now says, as though this were hardly late at all, of the gifts for the German emperor.

Yes,
she thinks,
these things have lifted his mood,
even though it is cold and snowing outside. Winter has returned to Vienna, although it is the time for Spring Begins both here and far away in Suzhou.

The snowstorm is immense. “Unusual for this time of year,” Resi says. “It won't last long,” she adds.

Soldiers walk the Freyung, silent, collars high against the cold, pearls of ice forming in their beards. Street sweepers comb paths through the snow, wearing fur caps that are huge and weighted down with layers of white. The paths they clear do not last long. The Freyung gas lamps are lit all day, giving off an icy glow.

No one else is outside. It is too cold. It is a forbidding kind of weather now that Wenqing has returned.

“Go on,” he says. “Open it.” His eyes are shining. He is standing next to Jinhua's seat at the table, still bulky with the blankets. From the kitchen come noisy exclamations in the northern dialect, full of
aaarrr
sounds that are like the halfhearted growling of a dog who can't quite bring himself to bark or to bite. Being from Peking, the cook is used to snow. Now that he is here and the Viennese
cook has gone, there are no crisp buns with apricot jam and butter in the mornings. It is rice and meat and vegetables cooked in the Chinese way.

Jinhua opens the parcel with care, and inside is a book with a faded blue binding and mottled lettering. Chinese characters and Western letters—both—written on the cover. She looks up at Wenqing.

“A German-Chinese dictionary,” he pronounces, as Resi comes in to pour his Biluochun tea, and there is no mistaking Wenqing's pride in what he has done. “I found it in a shop window and thought you would like it for your studies of the German language. It belonged to a missionary. His name is written here on the first page. Look.”

The name is written in a sloping script, jagged as though it had been quickly scratched in blue ink.

Leaning in, Resi reads for them:
Georg Schumacher. May. 1837.

Wenqing says that he negotiated very cleverly with the old Jewish bookseller using marks on a piece of paper and no words, and that he paid only a few kreuzer for the book and this was a very advantageous price. The barbarian bookseller shook his hand quite heartily in the European way, he tells her, when the transaction was complete.

Jinhua looks up the word for
yinyue
in German. She shows this to Wenqing, and when he pronounces the word the way she has just said it—
Musik
—it sounds as though he is speaking Chinese instead of German, and both of them laugh.

Resi laughs too, and Wenqing removes his eyeglasses. He looks tired now, Jinhua thinks. This small thing has been for him a very large thing. She thanks him for the book. She likes it, she tells him. He looks pleased, and then he bows his head and finds the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He massages the small
bony part with a circular motion, which is what he does when he is thinking deeply.

Jinhua fills her lungs, and Resi fills her coffee cup, and yes, she still drinks coffee every morning even now that Gao Chuzi has come. “Thank you, Wenqing,” Jinhua says again. “You have made me very happy with this gift of a dictionary.”

She is reading by candlelight when he comes to her.

Hong Lou Meng. Dream of the Red Chamber.
The Matriarch has decided that Baoyu is to marry Precious Virtue, and not Black Jade, whom he loves. He is to be tricked into this marriage, the Matriarch has decided. Jinhua knows what will happen next. She has read the book a dozen times.

Wenqing hesitates at the door. He removes his slippers and climbs into the bed, and Jinhua whispers to him, “The ghost of Madam Hong has left me—and it is thanks to Madam Ma.” He cannot, of course, understand this, but he nods—and moments later he is sleeping. She lies there next to him alive and not at all
tired.