The Courtesan (22 page)

LIEBELEI

Jinhua

Resi likes to talk about the empress. Our Empress Elisabeth, she calls her, or sometimes Sisi. “She is the most beautiful woman in all of Europe,” Resi says. “Her waist is no more than this big”—she shows Jinhua with two hands forming a tiny circle—“and our emperor adores her. Sisi spends hours outside every day, even when the weather is bad. She rides horses and walks and practices her fencing.”

“What is that?” Jinhua interrupts.

“It is a pastime for ladies with a sharply pointed weapon,” Resi tells her, and she draws a picture and the weapon is like a needle
.
“Our empress does all of these things to keep herself beautiful and healthy. They say she needs her freedom,” Resi says. “She is, or so it seems to me, a very passionate woman.”

Resi has given Jinhua something called a postcard. It is a time for gifts, first the dictionary from Wenqing and now this, a postcard that is a photograph of the empress of Austria-Hungary—taken, Resi says, on the very day that she was crowned the queen of Hungary.

The empress is beautiful in the picture, and the neckline of her dress is far below her throat, and her hair cascades over her shoulders, and when you look at the postcard it is almost as though the empress were right here in the room. Her eyes draw Jinhua close. They are dark—and alive, and yet unhappy. They smolder in the way that coals smolder on the dying end of a hot fire, and it can only be with love or with hate—or is it both?

Jinhua asks Resi, and Resi shrugs.

Resi has put the picture into a silver frame she found in a drawer, and Jinhua has put it next to her bed. It is where she keeps the dictionary that Wenqing gave her, and
Dream of the Red Chamber
—and these are the things that are most precious to her right now, besides her memories from a long time ago.

Wenqing has written about the empress in his diaries, and Jinhua has read the entries again and again.

The Empress is much admired throughout Europe for her appearance although this is according to the European taste, which is not the same as ours. There is a painting of the Empress which hangs quite openly in the Imperial Palace, I am told. She has been painted without the covering of any clothes at all. I have not seen this shameful painting for myself, and I cannot therefore confirm that it exists—

And he has written more.

About a love affair.

There are scandals at court. I have heard about these matters from Pah Shah, who is the Turkish Ambassador and who is a well-connected personage, having been in Weiyena for almost five years. The empress Elisabeth is rarely at court, evidently preferring to spend her time in the neighboring lands of Hungary, and Italy, and Greece. She leads a life, they tell me, that is best described as jiao she yin yi—indulgent and decadent. She is often away from the Emperor Franz Joseph, even though she is his only wife and he has no concubines, and there is only one son, the Crown Prince Rudolf. There is talk, also, of a love affair between the Empress and the former Foreign Minister, the Hungarian Count Andrássy. It is mentioned that the Crown Prince may not be the true son of the Emperor Franz Joseph—

She finds the slip of paper tucked between the pages of Wenqing's Diplomatic Diary. It is not a part of the diary, but something else that he has written.

When an Emperor cannot maintain order in the affairs of his Consort—how can there be Harmony? When a man cannot understand the thoughts of his wife—

Another entry on this piece of paper reads:

It is the wisdom of Mencius that a man and a woman should not touch when an object passes between them,
but if a sister-in-law is drowning, to pull her out with one's hand is a matter of expedience. Questions: What thoughts are in my wife's mind when she looks out of her foreign-glass window and sees men and women walking openly together, arm in arm? Is it true that the Christian religion encourages immoral behavior between the sexes?

And yet another written below this:

The spirit of my little concubine is hungry. I fear I cannot feed her. The solution is elusive. My own feelings cannot be understood. When she bears my son, perhaps then there will be Harmony for us both. I must return, soon, to her bed. I think she is willing.

THINK FIRST ABOUT
THE PRESENT

Resi

Vienna, the 12th of May, 1887

Liebe Mutter,

I am well, and sorry to read of the death of Herr Maier. I am sorry about something else, Mother. I do not want to marry Sepp. Not even a little bit, not even now that he will inherit his father's house and the farm of fifteen Joch. I know that you think I can do no better than to marry him, but I love someone else. His name is Bastl. In my next letter I will tell you more about him. You have asked me how the little Chinese mistress is doing. I have told her the story of Rapunzel like you suggested, and she can understand almost everything now in German. I don't even need to speak slowly, but sometimes I draw pictures to be sure that all is clear. I
drew Rapunzel in the tower and made Rapunzel's hair long and black and straight like the mistress's hair. She liked that. She liked that the Prince rescued Rapunzel from the Tower. She said—maybe one day a prince will climb to my foreign-glass window over the Freyung and rescue me, and we both laughed at that, but it was a sad thing for her to say, don't you think?

The Little Chinaman goes to Saint Petersburg next week to visit the Tsar. The Mistress has asked me if I would take her to the Prater on Sunday while he is away. She insists that she will go. I wonder, shall I do this? I feel sure that the Little Chinaman would not agree, that he would be very angry at this. I will almost certainly lose my position if he finds out.

Resi

Jinhua

They have been on her mind—the empress Elisabeth and her Hungarian count. Jinhua has read and reread what Wenqing wrote in his diary, and she cannot stop thinking.

The eighteenth day of the month of March. 1887.
There are scandals—

She has been rereading
Dream of the Red Chamber
too, and wondering—
is the love between Black Jade and Baoyu, the love that is doomed because love is out of balance and because Baoyu must
marry Precious Virtue, is it the same for the empress and her count because she is married to the emperor?

Jinhua finds Resi in the
Speisesaal.
She tells her, “I would like to ask you a question.” It occurs to her that it is a question of a kind she could never have asked Suyin, not really, because Suyin knows nothing about love. Sunshine is leaping through the windows. Resi is cleaning the silver. Her fingers move in tiny circles; her whole body shakes with the effort of polishing the sugar bowl. The coffee pot is already gleaming.

“Is it true,” Jinhua asks, “what they say? Is it true that your empress loves the Hungarian count, and is it true that he loves her?”

Resi stops. She looks up, blackened polishing cloth in one hand, sugar bowl in the other. Stacks of forks and knives sparkle. She has not yet cleaned the spoons.

Resi leans back in her chair.

“I don't know,” she says, taking a moment to think, tipping her head from side to side. “I grew up in the village. I am not an empress. But I hope these things are true. I hope they love each other very much. You see,
gnä' Frau,
our emperor is a fine emperor, and a fine man too, but—how shall I say this? As a man he is a little bit stiff. A little bit serious. A little bit lacking—in humor. It would be a nice thing—even for an empress, don't you think?—if there were someone who was . . . less like that.”

Resi goes back to her sugar bowl. “Can you tell me one more thing?” Jinhua says, and she is thinking that Resi is a very wise maid. “Can you tell me—
what is virtue
?”

Resi makes a gesture, a quick movement with her right hand. She touches her forehead, her chest, her left shoulder, her right. She does this sometimes when she is worried, or grateful, or wondering about something. But Jinhua has seen this gesture before; it is a
small thing, a thing from her past, a thing Jinhua can't quite place. And Resi says, “To answer your question I must tell you a story. It is the true story of a man named Joseph and a woman named Maria. In the story Maria is untouched by Joseph; she has never been touched by any man and yet she has a child, and the child's name is
Jesus Christus,
and he is the son of God.”

Jinhua is thinking that this story cannot be true, because without bed business a woman cannot have a baby—it is not possible—and what does this story have to do with the question she has asked? And now Jinhua remembers where she has seen this gesture before, the sign of Resi's god. It is the gesture that the boatman made when he told Jinhua that his heavenly father had made him strong, when he told her that he lost his number four finger facing down the enemy. When he gave her the pussy willow spray. Thinking of him makes Jinhua sad—sad for the boatman with his missing finger, for the empress with a husband who cannot laugh, for herself, and for Suyin, who—yes, Jinhua is sure—for Suyin, who knows nothing about love.