The Courtesan (31 page)

A NARROW ALLEY

Jinhua

“The guests are at the gate.” Lao Ye's old voice sings from the courtyard, where a hundred lanterns glow vermilion. A sweltering afternoon has given way to a fat and sticky dusk, and his voice is languid. All day, Cook has been in a fury. The aromas coming from his kitchen are strong enough to taste in your mouth: meat and yeast and oil and spice. Duck web and deer lips and the brains of monkeys.

Suyin did not try to procure the leopard fetus or the tiger tail. “They cannot be found,” she said, lifting her shoulders, “with so little warning.”

“It is time,” she says now, dabbing at a blemish on Jinhua's chin. A sudden twist below her breastbone reminds Jinhua that she hasn't eaten, and Suyin probably has not eaten either. She frets the top clasp on her jacket, the one at her throat. Suyin seems calm in her gown of dove gray, her face lightly powdered. She steadies an earring at Jinhua's ear, and Jinhua whispers, “I am so afraid.”

Suyin shakes her head. “Do as you always do,” she says, “and we will survive this. We will survive this and other things yet to come.”

As always, Suyin accepts the inevitable. But for Jinhua, the fear does not leave because she wants to be brave. It sticks to her heart like burning sugar.

Jinhua tallies quickly. Nine Manchus in grass-cloth gowns and conical hats with finials. The six courtesans are gaily dressed in blues and reds and greens and pinks. They are bejeweled and fragrant and nervous in the presence of an imperial prince, and the two houseboys with freshly oiled and braided queues are flogging the air with paper fans.

They have all been warned.

“We humbly welcome—” Jinhua begins, smiling a cast-iron smile.

“Ha-ha-ha,” a man cuts her off in the middle of her bow. A three-eyed peacock feather dangles from his hat, and Jinhua exchanges a look with Suyin.

Already the prince has revealed himself.

The houseboys work their fans harder, faster, higher, lower—like giant wings. The parched and feverish summer heat has settled here in the courtyard.

“So these are the treasures of the Hall of Midsummer Dreams.” The man who is surely Prince Duan says this, and then he says
ha-ha
a second time and flicks a glance at the line of girls before his eyes rest on Jinhua's face. She is looking at him through lowered eyelids, wondering what malicious intent could be hiding behind his laughter.

“We are here to see what a man can experience in this hall of
foreign dreams,” he says. The prince is a delicate man with narrow, sloping shoulders, and lurking beneath the brim of his hat is a ferret's small face—part sweet and part vicious. “Most intriguing,” he says, biding his time, stretching the words in all directions, leaving room for many possibilities.

From the kitchen comes the sound of oil sizzling; a butcher's cleaver slams a chopping block, and metal scrapes metal in a frying pan. From a shadowy corner the eunuch emerges, his flabby face florid and sweating.

That makes ten. The prince. Eight guests—and one stinking eunuch.

“I present,” the eunuch says, gesturing toward the man with the ferret face and the peacock feather, “my master, Father Hu, our host for this evening.”

The eunuch bows deeply; someone laughs, and a moment later when they are sure of the joke, the others join in. Now all of them, except for the prince, are bowing and clasping their hands. Bowing deeper and more deeply and deeper yet.

The prince's henchmen,
Jinhua thinks,
are like a pack of dogs cringing and wagging their tails and their tongues.
She swallows hard. The prince has a restless eye, she sees, traveling the courtyard, looking at each of the girls, the houseboys, his guests, and then coming back to her.

She feels her cheeks redden and burn. She is more and more afraid—and the summer heat is unrelenting.

“And these gentlemen here,” the eunuch continues, “are the second Father Hu and the third Father Hu and the fourth and the fifth—” He giggles too long and too hard at this false naming, this hiding of identities—at his own marvelous wit.

One thin, one stout, one rangy, one jowly, one very, very fat—and so on. A prince and eight false guests with nine false names—
falling over themselves and one another, each to say that he is
more
humble, more unworthy, more clumsy—more unlearned than any of the others.

Eight degrees of false humility in the presence of Prince Duan. And a eunuch who is not humble at all. All six girls are bowing now, murmuring words of welcome. Jinhua fears for them. She fears for herself as well.

Lanterns sway, surcoats gleam; shadows shift in the courtyard. Everyone is sweating, and Jinhua regrets, very much, the name she chose for sentimental reasons—the name that takes her back to Vienna—the Hall of Midsummer Dreams.

“I have eaten an inelegant sufficiency,” one guest says. He is the very, very fat one, the one who has lost most often at the drinking games and who has had to drink the most wine in penance. His collar is oiled and shiny where his chin has rubbed it in too many wearings.

“The duck web was superb,” he continues, tilting his head to scratch the inside of his ear with a long fingernail, “and we must thank our host, Prince—Father Hu, I mean.”

The banquet room is lamp lit, sweltering, chaotic with what is left of a hundred sumptuous courses. Jinhua bows her head. “Our kitchens are unworthy of such high praise,” she says, glancing at the prince, who is seated across from her, his back to the wall, his ferret face turned toward the door. “And if I may say, the delicacy of the feast is owed neither to the cook nor to the ingredients,” she continues, still bowing. “Rather it is owed to the wit of our venerable host and his esteemed guests—and his learned, honorable eunuch.”

The evening has meandered toward drowsiness. The prince has been quiet. Robes have been discarded, sleeves rolled, and Jinhua has dared to hope that she—and Suyin and the girls and Lao Ye and Cook and the houseboys—all of them, will survive this evening and tomorrow as well.

Now the prince clears his throat, and hers feels dry. “The sauces were too sweet,” he says, “generally speaking. And the eel was tough, and the monkey brains were inexpertly prepared. I have been, I must say, a poor host. I have,” he says, and his voice has taken a disturbing turn, “lost face in the presence of my eight honorable guests.”

Jinhua apologizes, as she must—for the eel, the sauces, and the monkey brains, and for anything else that offended or did not please. She bows. She speaks the prince's false name humbly, respectfully, carefully: “Honorable Father Hu.” She clasps her hands, one in the other. “Our hall is not worthy,” she says. Lao Ye arrives with cool towels and a silver tray of toothpicks and a plate of sliced fruit, and she prays for the fruit to be crisp and sweet and fresh. A guest belches and takes a wedge of orange. Suyin presses a jug, plump with wine, to her belly. She moves to fill the prince's empty cup, and Jinhua thinks,
He will be a mean drunk,
and the prince picks at the crevasses between his teeth with a silver toothpick. He nods as Suyin pours for him.

“Who among us has heard,” he says now, laying aside the toothpick, “the new title of our young and hapless yet esteemed Guangxu emperor?” The prince's voice is aloof, crisper than the soupy voices of his guests; he holds his wine better than they do. They wait uncertainly, trying to clear their woozy heads at this sudden, serious, perhaps even dangerous turn in the conversation. The prince waits too, watching them, and then he laughs heartily, showing his small teeth, and they understand—one by one and then all of them—
that it is a riddle, a joke, something to be laughed at. A few of them snigger; a few are silent, thinking, pondering how to answer. One of the girls plucks a string of twisted silk on her lute, another giggles, and the guests, relieved, begin to make their guesses.

“The Lord of Ill-Advised Decrees,” one man shouts, and he has thick Manchu eyebrows, fleshy earlobes, and a voice that travels far. “Our emperor proves every day with a new decree that he is a lapdog of the foreign devils and their missionaries.”

“And I say he is the Lord of Groveling Obeisance,” another guest wagers, sounding pleased with his own cleverness. “The emperor's dowager auntie,” the man continues, and he is the second or third or fourth Father Hu, “has him groveling now from inside his prison cell in the Ocean Terrace. Have you all heard?”

It is what Edmund said, that the young emperor had pushed too hard and moved too fast with his Hundred Days of Reform, his edicts for self-strengthening.

“How about the Duke of a Thousand Stammers?” another guest says with northern, guttural
r
's and barefaced mockery. He glances around the room, drunkenly, for affirmation from the prince. “Death to the foreigners and the collaborators,” he adds, sounding not quite certain.

The room falls silent. The guests are out of ideas, or courage, or both. The prince leans down to retrieve an object from the inside of his left boot. All heads turn to look.

Jinhua looks too, and she is hot and cold and sweating and shivering. Everyone knows where the prince's boot comes from. It is a boot from Nei Lian Sheng, the finest workshop in Peking. “The wearer will be promoted again and again to ever more powerful positions,” the proprietor promises his customers.

With a long and yellowed fingernail the prince is tapping the bowl of his pipe, which makes a
peng
sound, a call to attention, and
the object he has pulled from his boot is a fan—it is only a fan and not a knife—and not the Shangfang sword.

“You are all wrong,” he says, straightening in his chair, putting an end to the naming game, and the danger, Jinhua thinks, is not yet over.

“The correct title for the Guangxu emperor is—the Lord of Misguided Virtue.”

A few guests titter, viciously—then anxiously—then viciously again. Several of the girls giggle in a nervous way; a few of them laugh outright, covering their mouths—and Jinhua shivers. The prince continues, “It is no laughing matter.” He raps his fan, still folded, on the table. Laughter ceases, and Jinhua notices his small, white, childlike hands.

No one dares to speak.

Everyone is waiting.

Prince Duan has not yet finished.

“From the four directions,” he says now, “we are threatened, and the might of the imperial Qing, the Ten-Thousand-Year Dynasty, the ever-glorious Aisin Gioro clan, cannot be in doubt.”

The sound of the prince's fan opening is the same as gunfire. The evening has been smoldering. Now it is igniting.

“We have gone to war,” the prince is saying, “to keep the English, their missionaries, and their opium out—and we have lost. We have paid them millions of our silver taels in reparations for these unjust wars. The French have taken Annam, Cochin, Tonkin, Cambodia. They have seized the lands of the Lao. The Germans have claimed Jiaozhou Bay and Shandong and who knows what next, and the Russians are pushing south from Manchuria. Even the stinking Japanese have beaten us at war and have taken Formosa and Korea, which are our rightful vassal states. Peking is full of foreign devils. Their legations are right outside the Forbidden
City. They have occupied the treaty ports. Their missionaries anger the spirits and destroy the natural order of things deep in the heart of our Middle Kingdom.”