The Courtesan (32 page)

And now the prince slams his fist on the table. Cups and guests alike are startled.

“The heavens are displeased,” he says now, fury in his eyes.

“These are urgent matters. We have been invaded.” The prince's voice is loud, becoming louder with each elongated word. “Our treasures have been plundered,” he says, fanning himself—and the evening has shifted with an earthquake force.

“We have been raped,” he says, and every eye around the room is wide and watching and full of fear. “And this is why I have pressed my lips to the empress dowager's ear, and this is why she has taken the vermilion pencil in her hand and written her decree. The cause of the Yi He Tuan—she has decided—the cause of the Spirit Boxers is just and correct and will be supported. We will give the Boxers incense for their offerings to the god of war; we will give them bolts of red cloth for their turbans and their sashes. We will give them rice and silver, and paper for their placards; we will buy for them swords and spears, guns and knives, so that they can fulfill their destiny. And victory will be the result. We will rid ourselves, finally and forever, of the foreign devils that have plagued our lands.”

The prince is breathing hard, and Suyin is pouring wine into his cup, and he touches her arm, a curl of a smile twisting his princely lips. “Surely the Lady in Gray does not disagree with me. She has vast experience, I believe, with foreign devils of one sort or another. Perhaps she can tell me whether it is true that they all have blue eyes, whether all of them have golden hair sprouting from all of the nine orifices.”

Jinhua tenses every bone and every muscle. She is thinking of
eyes that are light and dark and blue and green, and she is thinking too that the prince is a toad, his insights no deeper than the inside of his own, dark well. Suyin looks stricken. The girls' faces are whiter than powder. “If only,” Jinhua says—and she says this aloud and cannot stop the words from coming—“if only it would rain, this Spirit Boxer nonsense—”

The prince's ferret eyes take aim, drilling into her. On the plate in front of him are bits of deer lip in brown, congealing sauces, and the remains of duck feet, sucked dry, strangely lifelike in their naked state. The eunuch cracks a melon seed. The prince calls out,
“Gan bei,”
bottoms up, and sleeves of blue and brown, and the red sleeve of the eunuch, rise in unison—and the prince does not drink.

Empty cups slam the table. One of them topples, rolls, smashes onto the floor. Jinhua nods to Lao Ye, “Clear the dishes, sweep the floor.” She nods to Suyin, who is standing guard by the bamboo curtain at the door, “More wine.” And Suyin's lips move and Jinhua knows that she is counting—this in spite of everything.

The prince stirs in his chair. The great bell at the Qianmen Gate is tolling. It is the Hour of the Rat—it is midnight. Lao Ye moves through the room, carrying dishes that are as precarious as a pile of eggs. The air is cloudy with smoke. The houseboys fan, and as late as it is, it is still so very hot. Time feels infinite, and Jinhua can see that the prince is not yet satisfied. She hears him take a breath, and then he speaks.

“The Emissary's Courtesan strains to walk on tiptoe. And yet,” he says, and the prince's sleeves obscure his hands, “and yet—we hear her perfectly. We see her foreign sympathies quite clearly. And now,” he says, rising from his chair, “if my guests will excuse us, she will take me to her bedroom.”

The prince is moving toward the door, and Jinhua is following
him on wooden legs because there is nothing that can be done—and she is shrieking, silently—
I am not for sale
—and she hears the eunuch saying, “I do believe that the Lady in Gray is a tigress.” And then she hears the eunuch spit the remains of a seed onto the floor. “Watermelon seeds,” he says, “are most effective in preventing skin sores.” From the corner of her eye Jinhua sees him caress the mound of his eunuch's soft belly as though it were a lapdog, and she issues a silent warning to Suyin—
Do not try to save me.

TEN THOUSAND BONES

Jinhua

The prince's buttocks are motionless, finally. Grunts have given way to the sound of sleep, and his sweating body pins Jinhua down—a poisonous weight pressing against her pounding heart, slick and ropy thighs entangling hers, his princely chin unyielding near her collarbone.

It is over.
Jinhua can no longer feel the presence of the prince's jade stalk, although its shadow—naked, flaccid, nauseating—is still there somewhere in the narrow place between skin that is hers and skin that belongs to him. She aches in a way she had almost forgotten she could hurt, and above her, the rain that has come too late is tapping on the roof tiles.

Di da. Di da.

Jinhua opens her eyes and then closes them quickly.
Better not to look. Better not to see the brute who has done this.
Prince Duan's breath flutters on her shoulder. It is grotesque, and falsely innocent,
and much too close, and from the alley comes the terrible scream of cats, feral—fornicating violently in the rain.

She remembers feeling this way before—she remembers the anger. The grief and fear. The shame and wanting not to see. Jinhua remembers learning to let go, bone by defeated bone. She thought that she had finished with this kind of life. But now, surely, the worst is over, and it has begun to rain, and she has survived this terrible thing on this terrible night.

The prince shifts, groaning, and rolls to one side, and the bed creaks. Jinhua watches his eyes. She listens and hears nothing; there is no
di da
sound; there are no raindrops on the roof; it was the trickery of hope that Jinhua heard and nothing more than that. Gingerly she moves a leg to the edge of the bed. The prince stirs—and lightning fast the weight returns, his arm across her chest holding her down. Again.

“Not so fast, my traitorous, foreign-devil–loving courtesan.” Slow words. Hot breath. Pools of sweat in the crease of Jinhua's neck.

“The last dish,” the prince continues, and each of his ferret eyes is biting into her, “is still to come this evening.”

Jinhua stiffens.

He has not finished after all. She cannot—will not—survive another—

“It is time,” the prince is saying, “for the Gray Lady . . .”

His voice fades maliciously. The door cracks open.

“She is precious to you, I think, the woman with unbound feet who dresses modestly and barely powders her face.”

Words begin in Jinhua's throat and stay there. The crack in the door widens. The eunuch is there—and behind him is Suyin, and she is wordless too. The lines of her gown are utterly still as she stands, poised to enter the room.

“And now, my lovely, traitorous madam”—the prince's hand, his too-small hand, explores her throat, and he is pressing down on it and looking across the room at Suyin, and not at Jinhua—“you will have another view of the garden. Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha.”

Jinhua understands. A scream musters strength. The prince's knee lands near her hip. His chest is white, his nipples dark, and he is far too small, far too slender for the violence he has done. Jinhua shrieks. She pummels, fist to flesh on that white, white chest.

“You cannot touch Suyin,” she screams. “Suyin is chaste—she is not like me. She has never been—”

A knife in the prince's hand gleams. Silk slides from Suyin's body, revealing her throat, her shoulders, her breasts, her hips—it is a slow undressing, and the night is not black enough to hide the agonizing reveal of a body that has lived in a brothel and never been touched—until now.

Suyin's gown is on the floor, bunched around her feet. She steps forward toward the bed. The knife in the prince's hand is unnecessary. “It is not a cheap choice,” Suyin says, and Jinhua isn't sure to whom she says this. “But I will do what must be done.” And yes, Suyin has accepted what is going to happen as she always does. Always, Suyin accepts the inevitable.

Small sounds are large in the room. The prince's naked feet slap the floor. Skin and silk tussle as his arm tunnels through the sleeve of his jacket. One breath in and one breath out—Jinhua is waiting, eyes shut tightly, crouched in the darkest corner, where she has listened but not watched.

“Another view of the garden,” he said. And then he said, “Ha-ha.”

The prince's velvet boot kicks Suyin's gown. It drags a grain of sand across the floor, and it is the sound of his leaving. The door opens. He clears his throat, and a small cough becomes a momentous, phlegm-filled hawk.

Jinhua waits—still crouched, eyes still shut, hands covering her ears—for the sound of the prince's spit hitting the floor.

Ptuh.

And then she hears his voice. “Do not rest, Madam Sai,” he says. “What I have done is nothing. The wrath of the Boxers is something to fear . . .”

The door closes. Jinhua lifts her head and sees blue shadows. Tonight she has heard such terrible sounds. Now it is the sound of Suyin moaning, and the sound of voices outside in the street—and they are ferocious voices armed with venom and rage and brute power—and she cannot stand, but crawls toward the bed.

“Suyin,” she whispers. “He has gone, and I am so terribly sorry.”

Suyin has curled her body toward the wall. Her body that has now been ravaged and will never be the way it was before this night.

“We'll go,” Jinhua says, and she is desperate for the sound of Suyin's voice. Desperate to hear Suyin say, “I will be all right. You will be all right. We . . . will be all right together.”

But Suyin's body is rigid, her head still turned away, and in the dark the stains—her blood—look black on the bedding.

Outside, more voices. The sounds of more Boxer rage—coming closer, spreading in the way that fire and sand and water spread. It is, Jinhua thinks, an unstoppable rage—one that Prince Duan has unleashed.

“We will go back to Suzhou,” she says, and she places her hand on Suyin's arm and her grip is tight and she is sure of this. “We'll go tomorrow. We will open a cake shop that smells of sweet beans and
sugar and candied plums—and next door will be a kite shop with big, beautiful kites, and we will stay there, in Suzhou, where the sound of water is never far away, and our life together will be good and simple. We will do it all, Suyin, in just the way you wanted. You are dear to me, Suyin. You are infinitely dear and always will be—”

She is using Edmund's words, speaking quickly, breathlessly. Edmund's words that were and are so wise, coming from his careless mouth. The dark outline of Suyin's hip moves, but she says nothing. Her knees shift. A glint of metal on the floor is the blade of the prince's knife, which he has forgotten to take. Suyin turns her head, and the look on her face—her face that is always tranquil, always comforting, always beautiful and always near—is terrifying, and emptied, and not her face at all.

“Go away,” Suyin screams. Another unstoppable rage, one that Jinhua has unleashed. Rage at a sister who has never been wise enough to listen. Who did not see. Who thought first of herself—

“It is too late,” Suyin screams again, and Jinhua covers her ears with her hands. “You are merely telling stories while the water boils and the fire burns. The truth is, Jinhua, and you must hear it now, and you must listen, and you must be clever enough to know clearly what is true and what is not—
Xianzai mei banfa.
”

There is no solution. No story to be told while fire burns and water boils. No dream, no wishing a thing to make it so, no wishing that none of this had happened, that Suyin had not been raped, that she—Jinhua—had not been the cause of this terrible, terrible harm to someone she loves.

There is no escaping the truth.

“What can I do?” Aloud, Jinhua is asking this question. Suyin, who always knows what must be done, who has always been a pillar of iron, who has never before turned away in anger—Suyin doesn't answer. And then they hear it. Those distant voices coming
closer—louder—closer still. Not just one or two or three, but many voices shouting:
“Sha—sha—sha.”

Boxer voices. Boxers on the streets of Peking. Boxers calling for killing.

A sudden glow in the room is the flare of torches in the street below, and Suyin closes her eyes, and Jinhua reaches for the prince's knife with its purple rosewood handle and its neat, fat blade that is surprisingly small and has the perfect shape of a camphor leaf. Holding it in the palm of her hand, squeezing hard, Jinhua whispers. “It has taken me far too long, Suyin, but I am ready now to allow what is real to be real and what is unreal to fade.” She reaches out and touches Suyin's shoulder. She places the prince's knife next to her on the bed. “It is not too late, Suyin,” she says. “We will always be together—like sisters in a family. And I am ready, now and finally, to do what must be done.”