The Courtesan (30 page)

“Hard to say,” Edmund replies. “It is a damnable affair. Immanuel Kant had the idea.
Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus.
‘Let justice reign, even if all the rascals in the world shall perish from it.' You see,” he adds, flicking a bevy of red-hot ash into a Viennese ashtray, silver and shaped like a seashell, “it is the missionaries that the Boxers blame first and foremost, and they are not blameless—a force unto themselves, they are. I suppose none of us foreign devil types has been quite pukka in our dealings. Long live Her Majesty Victoria, by the grace of God—and rule Britannia, of course.”

Jinhua is silent, thinking—eager now for Edmund to go.
“Alors,”
he says. “You want my advice? Lie low for a bit—get rid of your Shakespearean sign, just until it all blows over. Which,” he adds, “it will. After a fashion.” He kisses her in the foreign manner, once on each cheek, and Jinhua notices anew the blue of Edmund's eyes. Blue like the sky when a storm is coming.

THE STINK OF A EUNUCH

Jinhua

“There is a eunuch in the parlor,” Suyin says. The half circles of worry under her eyes have grown deep and dark in a single day.

“Tell him we are not open for business,” Jinhua responds. She has only just decided this. “And, Suyin, you should rest for a bit. You look pale and unwell. And we must talk about what is to be done. I have been thinking—”

“He is no ordinary eunuch,” Suyin interrupts. “He wants to see the Emissary's Courtesan, the madam who has traveled, he says. He wants to see you, Jinhua, and this is something we cannot escape.”

In his crimson surcoat, with his rouged cheeks and his peacock's plume, the eunuch is a daub of color in the room. Seated, legs spread wide; his hairless face looks boneless; his shapeless body looks—but surely isn't—benign and powerless. Neither man nor woman, he is taking slow, slurping sips of tea.

Stay away from the stinking eunuchs,
it is said. They are
dangerous—carrying their shriveled Thrice Precious in pouches at their waists. They are the ones, people say, who push and pull and plot and scheme—and do evil—behind the walls of the Forbidden City.

A eunuch in the parlor is trouble, and Jinhua is—
lips tight—head bent—bound feet wanting to run away
—afraid.

There has never been a eunuch here before.

“I have come to arrange for a banquet,” this one says, smirking, reaching for a melon seed, rings glittering.

“We would gladly entertain the honorable eunuch and his venerable guests,” Jinhua replies, and the smirk on the eunuch's face and the seeds in his mouth and the pouches at his hip make her think of Banker Chang, who had something quite different in his pouches. “But I regret to say that this must be on some future occasion. I regret to say that our hall will be closed until the time of Autumn Begins.”

“It is the particular request of a particular member of a particular imperial family,” he says, and the eunuch is precise and firm with each word. “A family to whom
one does not say no.
A prince, that is to say, a powerful prince of the blood who prefers that his name not be mentioned. Shall we call him Prince Ying or Ding or Wang or Hu? You are our hostess. You may decide. Tomorrow evening. The prince and eight very special guests.”

The eunuch's eyes are quarter-moon slits staring at Jinhua.

“I needn't caution you, experienced as you doubtless are in your line of business, to be mindful of his imperial appetites,” the eunuch continues. “Eel, for instance. Monkey brains, duck web, deer lips; tiger tails, bear paws. Fetus of leopard. My master's tastes are very refined and difficult to satisfy.”

There is no way,
Jinhua thinks, glancing at Suyin,
to avoid this person of slippery tastes.
It is a eunuch who is ordering this. It is a
prince of the blood who will come.
Wu ke wan hui
—the die is cast. She and Suyin will have to do this.

The eunuch, hands to knees, braces himself to stand. It is Suyin who bows and Jinhua who says, “Your honorable, venerable, imperial master and his eight honorable guests will be most welcome in our humble hall. We will do our best to please them all. Of that, old eunuch, you may be sure.”

From outside comes the sound of the knife seller's drum.
Dong—dong—dong.
Standing, the eunuch is barely taller than Jinhua. Several pouches dangle at his waist—and Jinhua cannot help but think—

“My master has an interest,” he turns to say as he is leaving. “A prurient interest, one might call it, in the courtesan who has traveled to barbarian lands, and who has named her hall, most interestingly he finds, the Hall of Midsummer Dreams, which is not, he finds, a name that is indigenous to China. And, by the way, where, oh where has the sign that names this name, where has it gone?”

When the gate hinges have screeched, and the eunuch has left, and the dead bolt is back in place, Jinhua covers her face with her hands, and she is thinking of what was before and isn't now, and what she has caused to happen by being here, by naming this name, by waiting for so long. Suyin touches her arm. “There is both nothing to be done and much to be done,” she says. “I will go to the Mongol Market. I will see what slippery foods I can find.” And then Suyin says a strange thing, something Jinhua did not know, or maybe she did and doesn't remember—or perhaps, and it is impossible to contemplate this now when the world is collapsing around them—perhaps she did not think enough about Suyin's hopes and Suyin's dreams.

“I have always wanted to go back to Suzhou,” Suyin says, “to
live a good and simple life where the sound of water is never far away. I am so afraid, Jinhua, that now it is too late for this.”

Eunuch Wei

A flick of the eunuch's long-nailed finger summons his sedan chair, making him feel mighty. His thumb ring glints. His feet are sweating inside his velvet boots, and his bladder is near bursting from drinking so much tea.

The tea was exceptional and the merchandise beautiful in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams,
he is thinking now, picking melon-seed fragments from between his teeth with a fingernail, keeping a firm hand on the one pouch he doesn't ever leave behind.

Some things—these things—one cannot be caught without. They are, as they say, truly
Thrice Precious.

If I were the man I will be in my next life,
he thinks,
what I would not have done to them, the two powdered ladies. First one and then the other—and then both of them together. Yes.
He pictures this. He can imagine doing these things. He savors the thought.

He knows what people say. They say that just because—because of a certain severing, because he is a teapot without a spout or a tiger without its tail, a eunuch has no feelings.
Hè,
if this were only half true. He thinks about women—and men—and women again—he thinks about them from sunrise to sunset and from sunset to sunrise.

He thinks also about his wealth—and how his life is better than it would, or could, have been.

The eunuch's toes curl inside his boots. The sedan chair is here, facing east. A young boy helps him mount to his seat. He settles
himself. “Be quick,” he tells his bearers. “I am desperate to relieve myself. If you are slow,” he adds, “the consequences will be dire.”

The bearers hurry; one of them stumbles and the eunuch is thinking, with not a little satisfaction,
I have made the ladies shiver, both of them. They will look hard—or more than hard—to find a leopard fetus for my master.
And then he thinks,
Aiyo, my shrieking, stinking bladder—how it tortures
me.

A CARPET OF NEEDLES

Jinhua

Wonder why he wants to come here?
Edmund mused this morning. He was dressed in an elegant linen suit. He said that Eunuch Wei with the scarlet gown and the boneless face is from the household of Prince Duan, who is, he told Jinhua, a powerful man with ties to the empress dowager. A member of the Manchu old guard. “Hates the foreign devils,” he said. “Hurts my feelings just to think.” And then Edmund told her something else. “The old dowager has given Prince Duan the bloody Shangfang sword, of all bloody things. Have you heard of it? The Shangfang sword?”

Jinhua hadn't—and then she thought that, yes, she had heard of it.
A sword with sharpness on two sides.
“It goes back,” Edmund told her—and he didn't seem to notice that her eyes were beginning to spill tears because it is all too much to think about—“the Shangfang sword goes back to the Tang or the Sung—to one of your ancient, venerable dynasties. The bearer has the authority to chop off heads at will—anyone—at any time without so much as a
how-do-you-do. Bloody dangerous, if you ask me. And you Chinese call us the barbarians.”

Then Edmund's mood changed, the way it does when Edmund is finished with the subject at hand, whatever it is. He asked Jinhua, as though it were just in passing, “You met her once, didn't you? Empress Elisabeth of Austria? It was a bloody anarchist with a bloody needle file,” he said. “Four inches was all it took. Nasty business. Tragic. It was the Duke of Orleans that he wanted to assassinate, but the empress was there, and she was the one he stabbed to death. Don't know why I think of it now.”

Jinhua couldn't take it in at first. The beautiful empress with smoldering eyes and diamonds in her hair who said, “Come, sit thee down upon this flow'ry bed.”

She was the one—

“Maybe you and Suyin should leave for a bit. Close things down and go south where things are calmer. Just until it rains.” Edmund patted Jinhua's arm, and he spoke as though it were an easy thing that he was telling her, as though it were not too late to run away. “You know, if the drought would end,” he said, “I think this Spirit Boxer nonsense would fizzle out. But if it doesn't rain—”

As Edmund was leaving he kissed Jinhua twice, once on each cheek, and he said, as though it were something he had only just thought of, “Have I ever told you, Jinhua, that the correct pronunciation of my surname is Bacchus, like the Roman god of wine?”

When he was gone, Jinhua smashed the bottle of Edmund's calvados, and the Shangfang sword was on her mind. She wept for Baba in a way that she has not wept in a long time. And she wept new tears for the empress Elisabeth, and she remembered how the empress mourned her own father even though he was alive and well. “A father is a precious thing,” she said. “I see too little,” she said. “May I ever love the person I love?” she said.

Jinhua hid the iron knives and forks from Europe, the pictures, and the foreign clocks—and she wept as she cleared away the evidence of her foreign life. She went to her room and hid the snow globe, the gift from the count that traveled with her across the ocean from Vienna to Suzhou and then to Peking—she put it under her bed
where no one will look,
she thought,
but it will still be here with me.

Edmund is not wrong in what he advised, but it is too late to think of leaving. It is too late to hope for a change in the weather. The banquet is tonight. Prince Duan is coming. One prince of the blood and eight special guests—
and the price of knives has doubled in just one month
—and every Boxer has one at his waist. Cook told her this, about the price of knives doubling. He shook his head when he said it, trumpeting his outrage while his earlobes wobbled.

It is too late,
Jinhua thinks,
to hope for anything good to happen.
She calls Suyin's name—Suyin who has never been afraid until now, who wants to live a good and simple life, who wants to go back to
Suzhou.