The Courtesan (23 page)

AZURE SPRINGS FROM BLUE

Jinhua

Today, happiness feels like a thousand flowers opening, spilling feelings out into the fresh air, and Jinhua's hands and feet are dancing and it feels, almost, as though her feet are not bound. It is because Wenqing has gone to Saint Petersburg, and because Resi has confessed that she is in love with a chimney sweep named Bastl who is strong and handsome and who loves her, and it is because it is springtime and the dome of heaven is a cloudless lavender blue.

“There are two Praters,” Resi is saying, and Herr Swoboda is nodding, pulling the reins to the right, turning the carriage, leaning his body to the right as well.

Jinhua is nodding too.

“There is the Nobelprater, which is where—” Resi interrupts herself to say, “
Schau'ns
—look”—she grabs Jinhua's arm and points—“a
Schimmel
—a pure white horse—he'll bring us good luck.” And then she says, “A kiss from a chimney sweep brings good luck too—and what was I saying?
Ah ja,
the Nobelprater is where
fine people go to promenade in their carriages and show their fancy clothes.”

Resi is not her black-and-white self today; she is wearing her
Dirndl
with sleeves that bloom from her shoulders, an apron of cherry-blossom red, and a neckline that plunges and doesn't even try to cover the hollow between her breasts. Her hair is a sparkling mass of golden curls, and Jinhua has never seen her like this, happy and muddled and not at all calm.

Jinhua feels just the way that Resi seems: happy and muddled and not at all calm, and she is not thinking—even a little—about Wenqing with the tsar in Saint Petersburg.

“And then,” Resi says, “there is the Wurschtlprater, where anything can happen—well, you will see it soon enough, won't she, Herr Swoboda?”

They are driving down the gray stone corridor of the Herrengasse, where the princes have their city palaces, and the sky is a solid blue cutout above high rooflines, and it has been a long time since Jinhua has seen and felt the open sky above her head. They pass the Palais Lembruch, the Palais Liechtenstein, and the Palais Modena. At the Michaelerplatz Herr Swoboda holds the horses back and steers the carriage close, as close as he dares, he tells them, to the black iron gates that are heavy with curls and scrolls and bits of gold. “It is the Hofburg,” he says, “where our emperor lives.”

The imperial residence. The home—in winter—of the empress Elisabeth—when she is here and not in Hungary with her lover, the count.

Jinhua strains to see. Two trabant guards stand by the gates. Their boots gleam; their faces are stern; their jackets are red and cluttered with gold, their britches as bright as polished ivory. They have swords and white gloves and helmets with feathers, and they stand there, utterly still.

“She doesn't show herself today,” Herr Swoboda is saying. And then he calls her
the Beautiful One.
He means the empress Elisabeth.

Herr Swoboda's hips and shoulders and tall black hat sway from side to side keeping pace with the horses' gait as they move on—and Jinhua is disappointed.

“Can we come back to see the empress?” she asks. “Another time?” And then she says, “Sing the song about the bride's fate, Resi, the one I like. The one that is about Christinchen.”

Resi begins to sing, and her voice is clear and sweet, and the melody is beautiful. It goes around and around and around, from beginning to end and from end to beginning, and Jinhua is thinking about the story of Christinchen first in German and then in Chinese, and now she understands this time, for the first time, that Christinchen's fate was written in the stars. She understands that even though her wedding procession had thirty-two carriages, and her own was a carriage of silver, and Christinchen was a princess, it is not a story with a happy ending.

Christinchen sass im Garten

Ihren Bräutigam zu erwarten—

Sie hat es schon längst in den Sternen geseh'n,

Dass sie im Fluss soll untergeh'n.

Jinhua understands now and only now that the beautiful song she has come to love is about fate, and that Christinchen drowns in the river on the way to marry her beloved, and she sees—can it be?—the sparkle of tears in Resi's eyes as she sings about tragic love.

“We are here at the Prater already,” Resi has just said, and in a whisper Jinhua translates for herself—
Yijing daole.

It has been
jijizhazha
with Resi all the way from the Palais Kinsky. She has talked without stopping, and Jinhua has both listened and not listened. What Wenqing has written in his diary about the Prater and what Resi has said are not the same at all.

The people of Weiyena have a volatile aspect which is evident on Sundays when they do not work
.
In the morning there are festivals in the churches, and as soon as the god has forgiven them for six days of evil deeds, they go in droves to the Prater, being an area measuring approximately sixty acres according to the map of the Kaiserlich-Königliche Residenz-Stadt Wien. This place was once the hunting ground for the emperors of the present dynasty, but long ago, during the time of our Illustrious Qianlong Emperor, the lands were given to the people of Weiyena. I can only think that the Habsburg emperor of that time intended it as a place to contain the behavior of the common people far away from the imperial palace. Perhaps he also did not wish to hunt. I am told that there are monstrosities on display in this Prater, and that even princes and princesses spend their Sunday afternoons here, staring at human specimens of particular ugliness in cages—and putting their wealth and possessions immodestly on display.

The Wurschtlprater is like nothing else in the world, Resi has said, and now she is saying, “We will have sausage and beer and spicy cakes in the shape of little hearts with colored icing and pictures and ribbons on them—and they are called Lebkuchen. And,
Herr Swoboda,” she continues, hardly taking a breath, “did you hear about the person last week who jumped from the Crown Prince Rudolf Bridge into the Danube? He left his top hat, his jacket, and his umbrella on the bridge, and
puh
—just like that he was gone. Drowned. Dead. It said so in the
Extrapost
, and there was a drawing of his things that he left behind when he jumped, and no one knows why he did it. And in the Wurschtlprater,
gnä' Frau
, we can see shows and bears, and clowns, and puppets, and all sorts of oddities—we call them
Abnormalitäten
.”

It is a little bit too much, what Resi is saying and what Wenqing has written. Too much to hear and too much to think about. Herr Swoboda's attention is on the horses and the road and the water cart that they have followed all the way down the Praterstrasse. Jinhua has been watching the water boy running behind the cart, his trousers rolled to his knees, his bare feet filthy, steering a rubber hose from side to side with his hand. He has been making sloppy patterns with water in the street—to keep the dust down, Resi said. And he's been making silly faces too, directed at Jinhua, and shouting things, but Resi says, “Never mind. Pay no attention to him.”

“
Abnormalitäten
like the thin man, who is no wider than a measuring stick”—Resi is relentless—“and the
Haarenmensch,
who is covered like an animal everywhere with hair, even on his elbows and eyelids and the bottoms of his feet—but he is really a man, and the fat lady, Dicke Rosl, who weighs five hundred and fifty pounds”—Resi spreads her arms to show how big this is—“and a whole village of little black people from Afrika who live in huts made of straw, and I think that they eat each other too, sometimes—and we can go to see them in the Wurschtlprater.”

Jinhua nods and cannot imagine these things that Resi tells of—and she cannot imagine either going to see a show of people who are fat and thin and hairy and who eat each other. The water
cart has made a turn, and the boy is no longer to be seen. They are now in a busy circle of traffic, the Praterstern, with spinning carriage wheels and clattering hooves and clouds of dust; people by the hundreds are pouring out of horse-drawn trolleys like ants from a nest.
It is chaos.

“It is the gateway to the Prater,” Resi almost screams, and Jinhua cannot take this in, quite. She is thinking now of the foreign-glass windows at the Palais Kinsky, and the view from them that has become so familiar, and how maybe that is enough for her. She thinks of the words in Wenqing's diaries, and she thinks of his unease—and maybe it is just too soon for this—and why did that person jump from the bridge, leaving his top hat behind?

He did not hang himself—or eat opium. He jumped instead from the bridge.

Resi touches her arm, and for an instant Jinhua thinks of Suyin nodding, urging her forward, telling her to
be careful.
They are on the Hauptallee, driving more slowly now in a steady stream of carriages, and the Hauptallee is just as Resi has described it. Long and straight and wide, and lined on both sides with perfect rows of chestnut trees. And in the carriages are people in hats: tall black hats and hats with feathers and flowers and ribbons and birds, and so many pink barbarian faces. There are parasols, and people waving, greeting one another. White gloves. Whips that snap on horses' rumps. Horses' rumps that twitch. People walking. People looking, Jinhua notices. Looking at her as though she were strange. And Resi's eyes are hurrying from place to place to place. Searching, Jinhua supposes, for her chimney sweep, the one who calls her
herzallerliebste Resi.
The Resi whom I love with all my heart.

The carriage has pulled now to one side, and Resi is getting to her feet. She is saying, “This, my darling,
gnäd'ge Frau,
is the Wurschtlprater, where you will see the real Vienna, the very best parts.”
She grabs Jinhua's arm. “And that,” she says, “that young man over there, that
fesche, kräftige Bursch,
he is my darling Bastl.”

She didn't expect to feel like this, like a blade of grass beneath the boots of a barbarian army. Wenqing never mentioned this in the diaries or how a Chinese person must worry about his feet and his shoes and falling down among all these enormous people, and how it would be hard to breathe in the smell of
Langosch
—which is fried dough with garlic, Resi says, and the smell of which reminds Jinhua of banquets in the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love—but the smell is stronger here by far and mixed with the smells of oil and barbarian sweat and the smoke from barbarian pipes, which is not the same as Chinese smoke. She didn't expect the view of mostly people's buttons and the backs of their jackets and dresses, a mob of people who are so much larger than she is.

She didn't expect the stares.
“Schaut's,”
one man said.
“A chinesische Pupp'n.”
A Chinese dolly, he has called her, speaking Wienerisch, the peculiar Viennese dialect that is hard to understand and sounds different from the way that Resi speaks when she is in the Palais Kinsky. The man had yellow sleeves, imperial, egg-yolk yellow, and a large red ball for a nose, and strange red hair, and Resi said, “Don't worry, he is just a clown,” but he wouldn't leave them alone. And then Bastl came and said,
“Halt's Maul,”
to him, which means shut your mouth, Resi told Jinhua—in dialect—and the clown shrieked and bowed and went away laughing. And then Bastl kissed Resi right on the mouth in plain sight of all these people, and called her
Liebling
and
herzallerliebste Resi,
just the way that Resi said he would. He bowed to Jinhua and called her
gnä' Frau.