The Courtesan (29 page)

“Smoke with me,” he says, pleading, his blue eyes narrowed, speaking English, which he is teaching Jinhua.

Sometimes Edmund wears a Chinaman's robes and quiet, felt-soled boots.

“Opium destroys the will,” Jinhua replies. She has told him this before. She has watched it happen and has learned to believe that a strong and vibrant will is essential. It is how she has survived.

“Why do you do it?” she asks. “Why do you smoke?” This, she has never asked Edmund before. Once, when he was very drunk on hot
baijiu,
he told her, “I am the black sheep of a proud family. I suppose I have a lot to be ashamed of.” He translated into Chinese to help her understand. The harmful horse of the herd is what he called himself.

“Smoke with me,” he tells her now, “and you will see exactly why I do it.”

Again, English, and she understands. He says that she has a rare gift for languages, that she is quite as talented as he is. She likes that he says this, that he is teaching her. He makes her happy, sometimes.

“You will have magnificent dreams,” he says. “Dreams that return you to your memories; dreams that let you see what is true; dreams that take you to your destiny.
Il sera superbe.
You will see everything.”

Edmund takes the silver needle in his hand.

In French it is called
opium.
In German,
Opium,
with the
o
written large.
“
Comes from the Greek word
opion
,” Edmund tells her.

She has always wondered what it is that Edmund has done to shame his family. And now she wonders what it is that Edmund sees when he is smoking
da yen.

The big smoke.

She nods and tells him, “Yes, Edmund, tonight I want to dream and remember. To see my destiny. I will smoke with you. But I will do it only this one time and then never, ever again.”

Edmund's skin is yellow in this light. He is naked; so is she. They are lying on the bed facing each other, the opium tray between them, the lamp burning.

The dark deed is done,
Jinhua is thinking, the taste of
da yen
on her tongue. Edmund is coaxing a pellet of shiny, gooey opium onto the tip of the needle and then into the bowl at the end of the pipe. He positions the bowl over the flame. His lips tighten around the mouthpiece, and a wet, crackling sound comes from the pipe. Strands of opium look like burnt cobwebs. Blue smoke blooms, and time is perfectly still.

They have been talking about the empress dowager—China's empress, the Old Buddha, they call her—how she will not relinquish power to her nephew, the Guangxu emperor. How she is influenced by the old guard. How she despises the English and the French. “It is because of the sacking of her beloved Summer Palace,” Edmund says, “the Garden of Perfect Brightness.” He likes to talk about politics. He is interested in the empress. Strangely, almost obsessively so.

“Victor Hugo said it best,” he tells Jinhua, leaning back, handing her the pipe. “About the Summer Palace, I mean. ‘Two robbers breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures; one of the robbers is called France and the other Britain.' It was wrath and greed,” Edmund says, “two of the seven deadly sins at the end of a war they had already won. An unjust war, some might say,” he adds, and Jinhua is thinking—
so much has been against my will.

“Hold the smoke in your lungs, old girl. Carpe diem.” Edmund's voice, his lips at her ear. “Hold it as long as you can.” The mouthpiece tastes of damp wood. Jinhua's throat is burning. She waits. Her mind is calm.
Carpe diem
is the language of the Latins and it means, she remembers, that you must do what makes you happy now, and thinking of this Jinhua thinks of Empress Elisabeth lifting her skirts, bending her knees, bowing, learning to do the
san gui jiu kou
—the three kneelings and the nine knockings of the head—for no one in particular. She remembers the empress laughing, touching her hair. She thinks of Resi in a pink dress, smiling, laughing, holding Bastl's sweating hand, looking at him with love. And then she thinks of bubbles in her mouth and Johann Strauss and dancing—of being in the count's carriage, of his lips touching her hand.

Madam Hong's note intrudes, and Jinhua's mind is clear and bright.
Yes,
she is thinking,
carpe diem.
All these lives that she has watched and the lives she has had and the lives she will have tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that. And she is thinking,
I will wait for my Great Love.
And then she thinks,
Madam Hong was a sad and jealous person who had no joy—and I miss my father so.

“I need to get up,” she says, knowing that she cannot possibly do this by herself.

“It is a game,” Edmund says. “One that children play in England. Called cross your heart and hope to die.”

Jinhua's half-closed, aching eyes open wide. Edmund still hasn't lifted his head from the quilts that halo him on the bed. The pipe is limp in his hand.

“A game,” she repeats. “I do not know this game.”

The flame on the opium lamp wavers.

“You have no game like this in China,” Edmund says. “But it is easy—harmless, just a game—for fun—to pass the time.” He lifts a shoulder and his mouth expands to a smile. Jinhua notices the jumble of his teeth, like an abandoned game of dominoes, his well-shaped lips. He is a handsome man. He has blue eyes. Blue like the sky when a storm is coming. She takes another sip of opium into her mouth and wishes she could dream as Edmund said she would. Magnificent dreams. Dreams of her destiny. Of what will happen next. Of the count coming to Peking. And then she warns herself,
A harmless game with a man who is the harmful horse of the herd—is not a harmless game.

“How does one play this child's game with crossing hearts?” she asks, and it is the opium deciding that
yes, she will play,
and the opium tells her, too, that she herself has not been harmless
. Has she? She has not been harmless to Suyin.

Edmund props himself upright on one elbow. His head is tilted, and with the nail of his forefinger he traces first the red line across Jinhua's throat, about which he has never asked and for this she is grateful, and then he scratches two new lines, lazy, intersecting lines across her bare chest.

“I'll go first,” Edmund says. “I'll ask you a question.” He is speaking slowly, the way he always does when he is smoking opium. His
pale eyelids drift. “And you must answer, and I must guess”—he drops back down against the quilts—“whether your answer is the truth or a lie.”

There is a song in Jinhua's head.
A very handsome gentleman / He waited for me in the lane / I am sorry that I did not—

It is an old Chinese song from the
Classic of Poetry,
a song that the girls sing to entertain the guests in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams. Jinhua wonders,
Does Edmund hear it too?
But it is she who is waiting. She has been waiting for so long.

A very handsome gentleman—

“Are you ready?” Edmund is asking.

The air is like syrup on Jinhua's tongue. A beetle crackles somewhere close, easy to hear but hard to see in the dark. She nods. Her head is heavy.

“Why, Madam Sai Jinhua,” Edmund says, his voice suddenly loud, “do you and Suyin not go home”—Edmund coughs an opium cough—“home to Suzhou? Why are you here in Peking, where you and she are both unhappy? Why do you not see—and why, God's blood, why the brothel named with inspiration from none other than the Bard of Avon?”

He is mocking her, and she doesn't care. Opium brings quick thoughts, tens and dozens and thousands of them, and Jinhua assembles them in her head and turns them over this way and that, and she isn't sure what to say—
and why is Edmund asking not just one but four questions with a hundred deeply buried answers—and has he heard what she is thinking?

She doesn't have to play this game, does she?

Pearls flow and jade turns, and it is the opium that is leading Jinhua to the answer, to the words of the fortune-teller—
There is Great Love waiting.

“Well?” Edmund's voice intrudes.

“He said he would come,” she says, and it feels as though her voice is slipping in the way that a fistful of sand falls between your fingers. “He said, ‘I will come to Peking to see the golden roofs and high walls and eunuchs and concubines and palaces, and I will find you'—and that is why—”

“Will you have some more?”

Edmund isn't listening. Or perhaps he is and doesn't care—

Will she have some more? She wants the dreams, the good and happy ones, the dreams about love and kisses and dancing. But—
she shakes her head—
no, she cannot bear it
—and then she changes her mind. She wants to do this fully and completely. She wants to dream, to see the count whom she loves, who said, “I will find you”—

A very handsome gentleman—

She will have more.

Edmund smiles and pokes another pellet, and brings the pipe to his lips. The rasping, bubbling sound comes back. And then the smell and he is murmuring in her ear. “Dreams are ridiculous, delicious creatures that live and breathe and grow—and who is the gentleman for whom you pine so madly?” Edmund pauses but doesn't wait. “Take another sip, Jinhua. I believe your answer is both truth and trickery. Am I right? Cross your heart and hope to die—and now it is your turn, ma chère Jinhua. What is your question for me?”

She waits. She feels like weeping. She will never smoke again, because opium brings confusion. It destroys the will and harms the dreams. But she has a question. One for Edmund—

“What is love?” she asks. “What is Great Love?”

Lying on her hip, looking at Edmund's almost pretty face, Jinhua waits for the answer.

“What is love?” he repeats, and he is looking at the ceiling, allowing smoke to drift from between his lips—and it seems such a
long time before he speaks. “It is a large question, a worthy one that you have asked.” Edmund is whispering now, and listening to him is like waiting to hear the last, precious words of a poem—waiting to understand what it means. “As my dear friend Oscar once wrote to me,” he says, finally, “‘Let us always be infinitely dear to one another, as indeed we have been always.' And this, Jinhua”—his eyes are on her—“is love. It is Great Love, and anything less is almost nothing.”

Now Edmund is looking past Jinhua toward the dark gap in the doorway to the hall. She follows his gaze with her eyes, and with her fingertips Jinhua traces the place across her throat, and she is thinking now for no reason at all—
I should be kinder to Suyin.
She is thinking, too, that Edmund has crossed his heart and answered with the truth, and that she must wait for the count, who is infinitely dear.

Edmund is saying in a languid, sleepy voice, “It is viciously hot in the city this year. I do fear, Jinhua, that terrible days lie ahead.”

THREE MEN MAKE A TIGER

Suyin

A man's elbow gouges Suyin's rib—painfully. She is walking quickly down Jewelry Street toward the Qianmen Gate. Her shoulder bumps an arm, a head, a jacket the color of bruises; a blue-hooded cart passes, and a mewling rat scuttles between feet and shoes and boots that are tawny with dust.

That awful Peking dust is everywhere today. Dust in your eyes, your nose, your mouth. There is no sign of rain. A hand on Suyin's sleeve that forces her off balance is the hand of a grinning crone. One of those Boxer fellows pushes past, a knife at his hip, wearing, as they all do, a red headscarf, a sash—and red ribbons on his ankles and wrists. The crone, too, is wearing a scarf. It is a recent thing to see this. The Boxers have come to Peking. They hate the foreign devils, who are everywhere these days. They say that they can make them leave.

Suyin has no time for this—today. There are things to be done, a banquet just hours away. Two tables. Fifteen foreign devil guests.
Guests who should not be here in China
—she does believe this—
and yet they are our customers.

Twenty dishes and one or two soups.

Tai duo shiqing.
So much to be done.

Suyin pulls away from the crone. The woman is small and dirty, her face as wrinkled as a bird's nest, and she is scuffling along wearing that bright red scarf, still clutching Suyin's sleeve.

“Let go of me,” Suyin says, sounding anxious even to herself. But she is only irritated. Not anxious. Or is she both? It is a strange mood today in the Chinese City. It is a sudden change of something that feels oddly monumental. Or maybe it is just that Suyin is tired.

“Have you heard?” the woman says, holding on, pulling Suyin back. “Do you know what these Christians do to babies?”

Suyin stops. Filthy, dirty hands. That awful, empty grin. The old crone will not let go.

“They plug up the back door of their newborns with a hollow tube to make it big enough for their monstrous”—the woman cackles and raises her voice, and Suyin can see her gums, raw, pink ridges, scalloped where she once had teeth—“for their monstrous and enormous cocks,” she says.

Suyin cannot hide her shock, her disgust, her disbelief. “No one would do such a thing to a child,” she says. “You are mistaken, old woman. Go home and scrub your mouth.”

The crone's eyes are maniacal now; she presses a pamphlet into Suyin's hand, a greasy piece of yellow paper.

Suyin pushes past and glances at the page.

We are hungry.

The earth is parched and the crops are burnt.

No rain falls—and it is the fault of the Foreign Devils and their Barbarian Gods and their Missionaries.

There is more.

Kill the Foreigners.

Burn the Churches.

Punish the Chinese Christians who eat the Filthy Foreign Rice.

Suyin stops, briefly. “It is nothing to me,” she calls out, “if you wear out your teeth talking ignorant Boxer nonsense.” The woman screams back at her. “It is the churches and the missionaries who have ordered the rains to stop and the heat to burn our crops. They are offending the spirits of heaven and earth. Beware of them,” she shrieks. “Beware. It is”—she screams even more loudly than before—“it is against the Will of Heaven.”

Suyin pushes on through the crowd and lets the pamphlet drop, where it is trampled into the Peking dust. She hates that the woman has touched her; she feels a new unease. She feels the heat and glances back, and yes, she is afraid and not just tired. Until now, one didn't need to worry. These Boxer fellows, the Yi He Tuan, have been elsewhere and not here, far away in Shandong Province. They had attacked a foreigner, one would hear. Or burned a church or killed a missionary—or two or three or dozens of them. But one hadn't needed to worry; not when it was Shandong where all of this was happening.

But now, Suyin thinks—they are here, in Peking, with their red scarves and red sashes—and with knives at their hips. They are pasting placards on the city walls. They are close at hand and angry—and the weather is so very hot.

We are Brothers and Sisters in revolt.

With one Heart and Magical Powers we fight the Foreign Perpetrators.

We are immune to their bullets.

We will tear up the foreign devils' Railroads—tear down their Telegraph Poles.

Annihilate them.

Kill the Chinese Christians and exterminate the Collaborators.

Suyin presses on through the crowd. She is in a hurry, sweating. There are important things to do. There is fish to be bought for tonight's guests.

Jinhua

It was Lao Ye who saw it first: the placard on the front gate of the Hall of Midsummer Dreams with the mark of the bloodied handprint next to it. He screamed—
“Aiyo, aiyo”
—in that cracking up-and-down voice he has. He rang the bell; he rang it immediately, furiously, urgently, and everyone hurried outside to look, every one of them, even the girls, who were sleeping in their beds, and Cook, who had been chopping vegetables in the kitchen, and the houseboys, for whom Jinhua had been searching, who appeared as though from nowhere.

Erguizi,
the placard reads—
Collaborator Devils
—written in fat, black characters on yellow paper, written large enough to read from fifty steps away or even a hundred. It is shocking to see those words right there on her own front gate, right in front of Jinhua's eyes. Shocking to see that bloodied print of a man's hand.

“What does it mean?” someone asks, and no one answers, but they all know that it is Boxer trouble—more or less. They have all
seen the placards popping up like weeds in a field, every day more of them, every day more of those strutting, dancing Boxers on the streets shouting their murderous slogans. And as for rumours, there are many of those about Boxer magic and incantations. People say that these Boxer fellows are immune to foreign bullets—which cannot possibly be true.

Or can it?

Even Suyin seems uneasy. Last week she broached the subject of leaving. “We are in the wrong place,” she told Jinhua. “Waiting for the wrong things to happen, and other things are happening—bad things, and they are happening at the speed of a galloping horse. We should leave Peking,” Suyin said. “You and I, Jinhua, and Cook and Lao Ye. We will bring the houseboys, and the girls can come as well if they want. We will look after one another, all of us will.”

Jinhua looked away. She remembers doing that, avoiding Suyin's eyes. She remembers saying, “Not today, Suyin.” She said, “Perhaps on another day,” but Suyin had already turned away.

Now a new and different thought arrives.
Suyin is unhappy. Really, deeply, profoundly unhappy.
Jinhua's stomach lurches, and all of them are standing outside in the street looking at this horrifying placard, and an old man with bells on his hat and a huge blue pouch on his back is calling out,
“
Kill the collaborators.” He hawks a glob of spit onto the street close to where Jinhua is standing.

It is not a good time to be in Peking, to have foreign guests—and an old man with bells and a pouch talking of murder outside the gate. It is not a good time to be known as the Emissary's Courtesan. Perhaps—

Suyin is speaking now to the man.
“Lao chunhuo,”
she calls him. Old fool. “We are not afraid,” she says. She is a pillar of iron in a sea of trouble, but she looks worried in a way that Jinhua has never seen before in her. Suyin turns. “We have been accused,” she
says. “We are all in danger now.” She turns to the gatekeeper. “Pull the placard down, and see if you can buy a vicious dog.”

“Ah yes, the Spirit Boxers,” Edmund says, bathed in smoke from his cigar, his eyes half closed.
“Ad captandum vulgus.”

He rotates the figurado one full turn between two fingers and a thumb, and his attention to the ferocious gleam of the tip is perfect, and Jinhua is first impatient and then anxiously so.

“What does it mean? Help me understand, Edmund.”

“It means, my darling girl,” he says, “to appeal to the masses—which is precisely what those Boxer miscreants are doing quite effectively.”

Edmund takes another long drag on his cigar, a pause to savor, and then he blows a vague cloud of smoke out and into the parlor. The cigar is elegant in his hand, but the smoke smells foul and is the same, Jinhua thinks, as the smell of Lao Mama's sick-sweet pipe.

“I tremble to think what will happen next,” Edmund continues, “as, I imagine, does the empress dowager, who has no love lost for the foreign devils herself. Bit of a powder keg, it seems to me.”

Despite what he has just said, Edmund is exquisitely calm, dressed today in padded Chinese robes, sipping now at a glass of calvados. The calvados he buys at Kierulff's on Legation Street. He keeps a bottle here at the hall for his own consumption and convenience. And the cigar in his hand is a Romeo y Julieta, “the finest Havana on earth,” he calls it. “The lovely Romeo.”

Jinhua sent for Edmund after the placard incident this morning, interrupting him—he scolded only partly in jest—in the middle of a breakfast of finnan haddie with the pompous, muckraking
set at the Hôtel de Pékin—“many of whom are, by the way,” he mentions, “up in arms about the Yi He Tuan—les Boxeurs, the French minister Pichon ridiculously calls them. And they have plenty to say, the ministers do, about what the old dowager and her old-guard cronies should do to bring les Boxeurs into line. And then there is the young emperor, of course, who is spreading his wings right beneath the nose of his auntie, issuing edicts almost daily. Reform this. Discard that. It is as though the young fellow has woken up,” Edmund says. “Do as the Japanese have done. Emulate the West.”

This is precisely why Jinhua has asked him to come. Because Edmund sometimes writes for an English newspaper. He knows people. He knows things. “Comes from keeping my ears pricked,” he tells her, “and hanging about in sordid places,” and when he says this, Jinhua thinks of Wenqing and his Diplomatic Diaries—and how there is much to understand in the world. Now Edmund is saying, “It is all theatre, of course, pure nonsense—at least the Boxer business is.” He wags his cigar toward the door, and ashes fall to the floor, and she begins to hope that all is not lost. “They claim to be invincible,” he says. “That with their Boxer incantations and their prayers and knives and martial arts they are immune to foreign devil bullets, that they can summon an army of eight million spirit soldiers to the cause. Which is—
in nuce
, as the Romans put it—to exorcise the damnable foreigner from the damnable empire of the damnable Qing. Which might just be what the empress dowager and her old-guard cronies would like to see happen as well.”

Jinhua knows all this—or some of it. What she wants now from Edmund is reassurance. She wants him to say, again, that it is all nonsense. She wants him to make her feel safe. He draws a long breath on his cigar. He waits, and she can see him savoring the taste of his beautiful Romeo, and then he tilts his head back for a
languid release of the smoke—and no, she is not at all reassured. She doesn't know what to do, and she asks him, “What will happen next?” and is afraid of the answer.