The Courtesan (26 page)

A THOUSAND NEW PATHS

Resi

Jesus-Maria.

Will the mistress really go? Or won't she?

Of course she will go. She is determined in a way I have not seen before. Not when she learned her German words by heart: twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty of them each day. Not when she went down all those stairs without any help. Not even when she begged me to take her to the Prater.

Now she is even more determined.

All morning Resi has been hovering and dawdling and fidgeting and pottering. She can almost hear her mother's voice, strung like a farmhand's fiddle, scolding her, almost mooing—
Warum wurschtelst Du so herum, Resi?
All morning she has been like this and hasn't finished anything—and this on washing day, on Tuesday, when there is not only laundry but at least five other things to be done.

It is as though by staying near the mistress and by bringing tea and putting whipped cream on the
Gugelhupf
and flicking raindrops
from the windowsill, Resi can make the mistress change her mind. She feels responsible. She took the mistress to the Prater. She left her there alone. Resi's lips are sore from pursing and licking and biting,
and remember your place,
she tells herself.

It is—probably—an affair of the heart, and this is something Resi understands.

She is thinking—again—
I must remember my place. I am only the maid.
And she is thinking,
What will the master say when he returns, and who is this man, this count, anyway?

She makes the sign of the cross every time she thinks these things.

He could be a cad, a rogue,
ein fürchterlicher Schurke
with flirtation on his mind, a quick Vienna dalliance for a scoundrel from Berlin, a tryst, a
Liebelei
—and no worry at all for a lady's reputation. A man like this, a shallow-minded cad with a sweet young girl—who hasn't a clue what men can be like.

Um Gottes Himmels Willen.
Resi's hand moves to touch her forehead yet again, and then her breastbone.

Of course, Resi was grateful on Sunday when he brought the mistress home. She was relieved. He seemed a respectable gentleman, a fine-looking man. Handsomely dressed. A little bit old for the mistress, but nonetheless a count.

But
—Resi smacks herself on the cheek—
what am I thinking? The mistress is married to the Little Chinaman. They are from China, where virtuous women do not go out. Ever. The master has forbidden this.

The poor little thing is sitting by the window, has been sitting there all morning, a book in her lap—
a Chinese love story,
she told Resi, sighing deeply.
Dream of the Red Chamber,
she said, gazing out the window. There is no doubt. The mistress is in love. She cannot possibly love the Little Chinaman, can she?

Too old, too dull, too much lacking in—

And who is she, Resi, to begrudge a sweet young thing her very first love?

A love like the one she feels for Bastl. Like the one that the empress feels for Count Andrássy.

And now she asks, “Does the book end happily? The love story, I mean.”

When the mistress says, “No, it does not. It ends in a tragedy,” Resi feels anxious again—and a little bit disappointed.

The church bells ring once and then a second time. It is two o'clock. The mistress has been reading and not really reading her Chinese love story, and she has been eating but not really eating her
Gugelhupf
with the whipped cream. She looks up, and her cheeks are tinged with pink, and Resi hurries to the window. The roof of the carriage is a dark rectangle waiting down below, just outside the front gate. The rain has stopped.

“Anarchist plot to burn Vienna. Read all about it. Anarchist plot—”

The
Ausrufer
is calling out the headlines, and how can it be that his voice is so cheerful when the news is so grim?

“It is exactly two o'clock,” Resi tells the mistress, who is beautifully dressed in bright colors. “And the carriage is waiting. Are you sure,
gnä' Frau,
that we should go?”

The expression on the mistress's face makes everything clear. She doesn't want a chaperone. “I will go,” she says, “and you, Resi, will stay here.”

Jinhua

After all the rain, the air is thick and sweet over the Freyung, and Frau Anna is calling out in her tremulous old woman's voice that sounds as though it might crack at any moment: “
Lavendel, Lavendel,
come and buy my lavender.” Her song and her voice collide with the newsboy's sweet and gleeful chant: “Anarchist plot to burn Vienna—Anarchist plot—”

No one seems to care about the plot. But people are stopping to buy Frau Anna's lavender, and they are all smiling and laughing, and Frau Anna is too.

“If Madam is ready,” the footman says, his hand cupped on Jinhua's elbow, his eyes barely visible beneath the brim of his hat.

There is no sign of a person inside the carriage. No sign of the count.

Turning back, Jinhua sees the shadow at the third-floor window—Resi watching and worrying—Resi, who is, she knows, terribly, anxiously, guiltily afraid of what might happen, and
shi hua shi shuo
—to tell the truth, she herself is a little bit anxious, a little bit afraid, a little bit guilty.

COME, SIT THEE DOWN—

Empress Elisabeth (Sisi)

Standing next to Ida, who is herself of delicate stature, the wife of the Chinese emissary looks as dainty as a child.

Count Alfred was right. “You will be enchanted, Majesty,” he said. He called her the little Chinese princess and told Sisi, “You must meet her, and you will see for yourself what I mean. I will arrange it.”

And he did.

She is not what Sisi expected. And then again she is. Her clothes are colorful and intriguing and heavy with embroidery. The coat she is wearing—the shape of it hides everything and reveals nothing, and yet it is becoming on her. She is small and pale and hesitant; exotically exquisite with her wide and slanted eyes, her dark, dark hair bound fetchingly in a knot at the back of her head.

And there is one more thing. There is no doubt but that the little Chinese princess knows that she is alluring.

Sisi has questions, lots of them, for Count Alfred's newfound
friend. And she will ask them all, one by one, and she will doubtless think of many more.

Darling, loyal Ida doesn't quite approve. She has that deep, stern look she gets, but if she did say something, anything, it would be,
If it makes you happy, Majesty, then we will do it,
and Ida would whisper it in the language of the Magyar that she and Sisi share for secrets.
Ha Öfelsége ezt óhajtja, akkor így cselekszünk—

She would say this, Ida would, and she would mean it faithfully and with all of her heart. Ida, always protective, pretty today in cloud gray, is suspended in her deepest curtsy.

“Your Majesty,” she says, and the dress she is wearing is fetching on her, rich with ruffles, newly arrived from Worth and Bobergh in Paris. “I present Madam . . . Sai Jinhua . . . wife of His Excellency . . . Hong Wenqing, emissary of the . . . Guangxu emperor to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.”

Ida has stumbled over these unpronounceable foreign names, and her cheeks have colored, and the emissary's wife is standing next to her, eyes wide, lips parted—teeth like pearls—caught in emotions that Sisi knows very, very well. It is awareness that all eyes are on her—it is bewilderment, embarrassment, and the hesitation, that terrible feeling of
What is it that is expected of me? What shall I do?

And yet, she knows that she is beautiful; of that there is no doubt.

Strangely, very strangely, it is herself that Sisi recognizes in this exotic Chinese creature, the way she was before becoming the way that she is now.

“Ida, you may leave us,” she says. “Ask Schmidl, if you would, to bring us—”

Sisi was about to say, “Ask Schmidl to bring us mint tea and oranges,” but the tiny Chinese lady has descended to her knees and
is bending down, touching her forehead gently to the floor, once—twice—three times, and this can only be the strange prostration, the Chinaman's bow that one hears about at court.

But what the little Chinese princess has just done is so much more than what they talk about and ridicule. It is surprising and exquisite and as graceful as a fencer's lunge, and yes, it is a faux pas, a blunder, and not at all the etiquette for an audience with an empress.

Dots of light in Ida's eyes. The merest hint of her disapproval changing to amusement. Sisi finishes her own sentence. “Tell Schmidl,” she says, speaking now in Hungarian, “to bring some tea, and while we wait I will ask my guest to teach me how to execute this bow that is so lovely.”

And now it is indulgence on Ida's lips and in her eyes, and Sisi knows what she is thinking. Dear, sweet Ida—
Reader to Her Majesty,
the court of Vienna has titled her, idiotically, as she has never in twenty years read a single line of a single book to Sisi—she calls these special interests
Your Majesty's fascinations.
And it is true—Sisi is obsessed. She is fascinated by women. Beautiful women. She likes to be with them. She collects photographs for her Album of Beauties. These things make her happy, and she is not often happy in the life that she is living.

The little Chinese princess is a patient teacher. She explains in not-quite-perfect German, accented and charming, and then she demonstrates. They practice in front of a full mirror. She corrects—
“Nicht so, aber so.”
Like this and not like that. “It is called the
san gui jiu kou
,” she says.

The three kneelings and the nine knockings of the head. “It is what we do,” she tells Sisi, “in the presence of those we must venerate.”

It is thrilling to learn this Chinese bow in the company of this beguiling person. They practice over and over, standing side by side, watching themselves and each other in the mirror. And Sisi is obsessed. She is fascinated by the movement, the grace, by something she has never done before. And never seen.

And this woman who is little more than a child—or is she more woman than child after all?—she will be one of Sisi's beauties. She will have a page all to herself in Sisi's album. And in the meantime, “May I touch your hair?” she asks.

Jinhua

The empress smells of—something sweet, and her hair is wavy and magnificently thick and ornamented with diamonds, and it reaches almost to her ankles. She is lying now on top of all that hair and on top of a flowery carpet on the floor, and she is saying, “Come, sit thee down upon this flow'ry bed. Lie down here next to me. It is the best way to see the painting,” she says.

This is not at all what Jinhua expected. She expected the count and did not think of lying here, side by side on the floor in a hushed room with shimmering rose-red walls and sparkling lights and velvet curtains that match the walls, and much that is gold and much that is silver. Lying here next to the empress—Resi's beautiful, extraordinary empress who is also the queen of Hungary and who is in love with the Hungarian count.

And Jinhua did not ever think of looking up—up like this at a
painting on the ceiling. She wants to ask the empress about the count, about Count Andrássy and Count Alfred von Waldersee, but the empress is talking of other things.

“It is a story about a lost child and about infatuation and trickery and love,” she is saying now, and she is murmuring more than speaking. “About requited and unrequited love, about true and false love, about love that is out of balance. It is by Wilhelm Shakespeare, who is a great poet and a writer of plays.” The empress's hand drifts across her forehead and jewels twinkle, and there are fine lines that Jinhua sees right at the edge of the empress's eye.

Fishtail crinkles.

“The painting is a gift,” the empress says, “a gift from my husband. An adornment for my Secret Apartments. He thought that it would please me, and it does.” And then she laughs. “Titania and her lover. You know,” she says, “he—my husband, the emperor—has never even seen the painting. I do not allow him to come here.”

Titania and her lover, who is a man with the head of a donkey.

“The name of the story,” the empress says, “is
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
”

She has asked Jinhua what it is that she uses to make her black Chinese hair so fragrant and so shiny, and with what does she treat her skin? “At court it never, ever stops,” she says. “I am fodder for their idle chatter: What is Empress Elisabeth wearing? How is her complexion? She looks fatter or thinner or older or younger. Is the empress clever enough for us? Is she charming enough? Is she beautiful enough? I wonder,” she says, “may I ever be myself? The way that I am? May I ever love the person I love?”

She must try magnolia oil herself, the empress is saying now, and the conversation twists and flows like water, here and there and back again. “Can you get me some?” She means magnolia oil. And now she is telling Jinhua the story of Titania, the woman on the
ceiling. And yes, it is as the empress says: The best way to see the painting is when you are lying on the floor. A forest scene rich in blues and greens and reds and violets and dotted with many other colors; it is vivid with trees and vines and fruits and flowers, and tiny people with wings—
and they are the fairies,
the empress says. The woman in the center of the painting is Titania, and with her long, amber hair and smoldering, unhappy eyes, she really is the empress Elisabeth, isn't she?

“And yes,” the empress tells Jinhua, “the object of Titania's love is really the man with the head of a donkey, but this is not a true love. It is only a story,” she says. “But a story can contain both trickery and truth. At least I find it so.” The empress's eyes are sparkling, and then they change and they are smoldering like Titania's eyes and like her own eyes in the photograph that Resi gave Jinhua. The empress touches Jinhua's hand, and the donkey's head is vast and furry on the ceiling, and ornamented with flowers, which, the empress says, Titania has arranged to make her lover seem more lovable than he really is. And now the empress's eyes are sparkling again, and she is getting up from the floor and holding out her hand, and her dress is beautiful in buttery swirls of color.

“Oh no,” the empress has just said, half singing the words. “Count Alfred won't be joining us.” She takes a sip of weakly colored broth.

“Zur Stärkung,”
she says. To strengthen herself.

“The count has gone to Saint Petersburg to visit with the tsar. He left this morning, by train.” The empress takes another sip of broth, and Jinhua says,
“Ò,”
and she pauses, and her first thought is disappointment—the count will not come and he will not kiss her,
and next she thinks,
He is in Saint Petersburg,
where Wenqing also is, and this is a complicated thought, and one that matters greatly, and then, moments later, it doesn't seem to matter at all.

Rice, once cooked, will never again be raw,
she thinks, and this is so.

Jinhua is sipping sweet mint tea, and the empress is urging her to try a taste of cake although she herself is not eating. “It is,” the empress says, “newly invented by a Hungarian confectioner for the exhibition in Budapest. Dobos Torta,” she says, “is all the rage in Vienna. This in spite of our heavy-handed politics toward the Hungarians. They accuse me, you know, for my sympathies. They say I am infatuated.”