The Courtesan (33 page)

SPIRIT AND SOUL
UPSIDE DOWN

Number Two Houseboy (Houseboy Liu)

Hè.

Doesn't look quite right.
Does it?
He turns his head
zuo you
—first left and then right—to check in the foreign devil mirror. Hard to see; it is dark. It was already late when those guests went away, and now it is even later.

One was a prince, they said. The mean one with the rat face.

He should hurry. It smells like fire outside.

Houseboy Liu has wrapped the red cloth around his head, the cloth that those Spirit Boxers gave him.
How do those fellows do it?
They didn't show him. They just said: You are strong, like us. You look well fed. Come and join and you can be a Boxing master. Here is some cloth. Get your own knife. They gave him the yellow placard that said “
Erguizi.
”

He put the placard on the gate.

Maybe he should not have done that.

The red sash at his waist looks splendid. Houseboy Liu pulls it tighter. He unwinds the piece from his head because it doesn't look right. His hands are shaking, but not from fear. He still has to put the ribbons on his wrists and ankles. He tore off four pieces of cloth for that. Smaller ones.

The fire smell is getting stronger, and you can hear the Spirit Boxers yelling:
“Sha—sha—sha.”

Everyone else has gone already—except for the mistresses, of course. They are still upstairs. Maybe they are resting. Probably they will stay here.

It isn't nice, what happened to them this night. But Houseboy Liu can't think about that—or the placard on the gate. It is a time for adventure and excitement, and the Boxers are on the move, and he is going to be one of them. His teeth are clattering in his head. He pulls a demon face to get some courage, and his own squinting eyes and his puckered mouth look back at him from the foreign devil mirror.

He looks mean and strong. Like a Boxer.

“Support the Qing and exterminate the foreign devils.” Houseboy Liu says it out loud, just to try. It comes out in a whisper.

“Kill the Chinese collaborators.” This comes out a bit louder, and that makes him turn to look over his shoulder. He wouldn't want the mistresses to hear him saying this.

He didn't know at first: “What are collaborators?” He asked those Spirit Boxer fellows what they are.

They said, “Collaborators are people who love foreign devils.”

He said,
“Ò,”
thinking of Mr. Bao Ke Si and his brown bottle from which Houseboy Liu took a swig once, and it was powerful stuff and made his head spin—and he is thinking also about the Japanese dwarfs, and the other foreign devils with those noses that are big and fleshy and they come here sometimes for banquets and girls.

Mr. Bao Ke Si gives him extra money sometimes. But he is still a foreign devil, and he will be killed by the Boxers for sure. He didn't notice that the level in the brown bottle went down, which is lucky.

The gatekeeper has gone already. He took the dog and a shovel, and he was the first to leave, before the guests had even gone. The girls went right behind him. Squealing with fright. Stupid girls. They can't be Boxers, for sure.

Cook went next. He took his knives, but Houseboy Liu is a quick thinker. He had already taken two of the bigger ones and hidden them under his mattress for later.

No one noticed—not even Cook—that two knives were missing.
Big ones.

Even Lao Ye has gone “to join the Yi He Tuan,” he said, “before they kill me.” He was crying when he went. He has been saying,
“Aiyo—aiyo,”
and shaking his head all the time, ever since the placard. Stupid old man. He is a coward and not brave enough to be a Boxer. Lao Ye will be killed, almost for sure.

Everybody said—it is bad luck to be in this place. If we stay here they will kill us all. Those men at the banquet—they said it too. The rat-faced man who is the prince said, “Go and join the Boxers. That is the clever thing to do. Even girls,” he said, “can be Boxers.”

Houseboy Liu doesn't believe the part about girls. He didn't need that man's advice the way the rest of them did. They are nobody—and he is somebody. He was already clever before that prince said anything. He has been to the boxing ground at the Dong Yue Temple by the east wall. He went a week ago and he saw what those Boxer fellows do, waving their knives and burning incense and doing those special martial arts. He saw it all. Spirits coming down and going into the Boxers' bodies and making them
say things. Crazy things, as though they were Monkey and Pigsy and Sandy and Yulong, the horse, from those stories about the journey to the west.

And then there were the guns. Big noise.
Dong.
And fire. But those foreign guns can't hurt the Boxers. Houseboy Liu saw that with his own eyes.
Dong
and then fire, and not a single Boxer was killed.

Houseboy Liu tucks the end of the headscarf in next to his ear. It looks almost right this time. Or good enough. Time to go. He'll follow the noise. He'll go where those Spirit Boxers are.

Truth be told, now that he is leaving he is a little afraid.
Shi hua shi shuo
—Houseboy Liu doesn't like to think of the mistresses getting hurt, even though they are those things called
collaborators.
Last month when his stool turned watery and yellow and his belly ached and his tongue was white, Mistress Jinhua gave him Calm Wind tea, and Mistress Suyin massaged his feet to make the
qi
move, and he felt better fairly quickly. His
dajie
went back to the way it should be.

“Support the Qing and exterminate the foreigners.” Houseboy Liu screams it this time and feels like a real Boxer. He steps over the spirit threshold and out into the street. The street is empty now—and dark. Stars like rice in the sky. He heads east and goes around the corner and feels someone pulling at his Boxer sash. He turns, and it is Mistress Jinhua standing right behind him.

DIES IRAE

Suyin

Weng. Weng.

It is a loud and metallic noise, the hum of a mosquito in the room, and it wakes Suyin and she gasps. She gasps because she has slept when she should have been alert and watchful at a time of great danger, because she is naked, because the blade of a knife is next to her on the bed—and she sees right away that she is alone.

Jinhua is not here.

Suyin gasps too because she can still hear those other sounds, fainter and more distant than they were before, the sounds she heard in the night that made her body sweat and the blood pound in her ears; they made her bones quiver and her teeth clench as though they were nailed, the top ones to the bottom.

It was those sounds that made her body do these things while Suyin slept and didn't sleep—and it was the prince and what he did to her. She has known pain before, but it was a different kind of pain and she cannot think about that now. It was Jinhua as well.
That Suyin screamed and blamed her, that Jinhua left—and who can say that she should have stayed?

Lying there, Suyin calls Jinhua's name. She calls for Lao Ye and the two houseboys and Cook. She calls for the girls, one by one, all six of them, even though she knows that everyone has gone, and no one will come back to a place where such terrible things have happened. She calls in a weak and quiet voice, and no one answers.

It is ferociously hot in the room. Daylight is beginning, and there is much to be done, surely there is, and Suyin aches in too many places to count: her ankle, her shoulder, her mouth—her breasts and her bottom. It takes a huge effort to will the aching places out of her mind. She won't think about the prince or the pain—she won't think now about a man forcing himself on her, although the words for this are there in her head.
It is not so bad,
she tells herself.
It is a thing that has passed, and I have survived just once what Jinhua has survived so many times. And now there are things to be done, and I must be the one to do them.

Weng. Weng. Weng.
The mosquito is circling, and the sound of it is unendurable. Suyin sits up slowly. She gets slowly, painfully out of the bed. She stands for a moment, motionless, eyeing with horror the stains she now sees on her naked body. Bruises, scratches, drying blood, and fresh blood too. Places where the prince has left his mark. Suyin howls, a howl for all that has happened. For the pain she cannot, after all, deny. For her chastity that is no longer, and most of all because the Boxers are chanting those terrifying words of murder, and Jinhua has gone somewhere—and terrible things can happen—and Suyin does not know what to do.

When the howl subsides, when Suyin has found a way to be quiet, she reaches for the knife on the bed, and she tells herself,
You are the same person you were before the prince came here. You are
Madam Working Hands. You are as strong as a boulder. You are a pillar of iron in a sea of trouble, and you can wield this knife.

Jinhua

“I'd love to offer you a drop of sherry or port or a cup—” Edmund is saying, and he is neither calm nor looking at Jinhua, speaking very quickly, and his bed has not been made. “Don't be cross with me—but the situation is calamitous, and I have no time—you do see, don't you?” He looks up, but only for a moment, “Clever girl,” he adds, “to dress yourself like a filthy, dirty Boxer in this time of
canis canem edit.
”

Dog eat dog.

Edmund's pale hair is out of order, and he is packing, doing it carelessly, throwing things into his leather traveling case. A shirt not properly folded, a slipper, a pipe, a bottle of tawny liquid.

Calvados. Or one of Edmund's lovely brandies.

Jinhua's heart is pounding. She has seen things on her way here—terrible, shocking things—streets on fire lighting up the sky. Knives, flames, axes, spears. Rivers of blood. Boxers stomping through the streets—cutting people into pieces.

“I need your help,” she says, pleading with Edmund. “They have lists—”

“Dies irae,”
he says, snatching up a pair of trousers and tossing them into the leather case. “Another Latin phrase for you to learn, and this is the moment,
je promets.
It means the day of wrath.” He is still not looking at Jinhua. A heap of other items on the bed are poised for packing: socks, a book, a silver corkscrew, a jade belt buckle. He is looking at these things, choosing and deciding. Jinhua grabs his arm.

“There is no one else I can ask—”

Edmund stops. He stops for just a moment, and he is shaking his head, and he says, “Look, it is worse, much worse, than we all feared. Boxers killing foreign bugger devils and foreign bugger devils killing Boxers. My neighbor's head has been removed from his body and is now parading the streets on the high end of a long stick. As for me—
c'est très périlleux,
I do fear. Time to push off, you see, for safety, for the dubious comforts of the British Legation.”

“I know,” Jinhua screams, and she has mustered all the strength she has left to say this, and her feet are aching, and she is tearing at the front of Edmund's shirt. “I saw it,” she sobs
.
“I saw your neighbor's head—and Edmund, you are strong. Tell me what to do. I am not asking for myself. I need help for Suyin. She doesn't deserve to be killed. She is injured, Edmund, and not herself. Where can we go?”

Edmund has pulled away from her. Gone back to his packing. “Pull yourself together,” he says, and his voice is sharp. “I will help you if I can, if you will just simmer down and let me think.” He snatches up a stack of handkerchiefs. “Come to the main gate at Legation Street. You and the always lovely Suyin. Meet me there. Now, off you go, fetch her, and hurry.”

Edmund is looking now at Jinhua with his blue, blue eyes, a box of cigars in his hand poised for packing. “Ah,” he says. “You have a knife. Be ready to use it. Remember, Jinhua,
dies irae.
”

The red headscarf from Houseboy Liu has slipped over one of Jinhua's eyes. She has the knife he gave her in an iron-fingered grip, and she is running, running as she has never run before, her feet on fire, her teeth clenched, her lungs close to bursting. The street is filled with people; all of the people are running as she is, their
possessions, as much as they can possibly carry, bundled into great blue parcels; dragging children, pushing wheelbarrows laden with old people, pots, kindling, and bedding; heading east, a few heading west. They are running away as fast as they can, looking neither left nor right, looking now and again over their shoulders to see the danger behind them, running faster than Jinhua can run with every muscle working.
They are running away from catastrophe—running away from fire, and knives, and almost certain death.

“When you get to Legation Street speak German, old girl, speak English, French, Latin,” Edmund called to Jinhua as she was leaving his house. “Tell the foreign devil bugger bastards that you are a Christian, for Christ's sake. Our Father which art in Heaven is a good start.
Pater noster qui es
—if you can manage—otherwise they will shoot, and they will shoot to kill.”

And now Jinhua sees them coming down the street toward her. Boxers. Three of them in front and many more behind—strutting like dusty, hungry farmyard cockerels with their headscarves and sashes and wide, dirty country faces—knives in their hands, some of them carrying flickering torches; they are almost dancing, waving yellow banners, brandishing those knives above their heads. They are laughing as though they own the pebbles on the street, the dust in the air, and the clouds in the sky. Laughing like crazy people. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Shouting those awful words. “Support the Qing,” they scream in their hoarse voices. “Kill the collaborators.” In her mind, Jinhua hears Prince Duan saying, “The cause of the Spirit Boxers is just and correct,” and she sees him mounting Suyin—and then she hears the last words that Prince Duan spoke. “What I have done is nothing,” and she is running on her tiny feet back to the Hall of Midsummer Dreams and back to Suyin, who does not deserve any of this—
and when all of this is over—

Suyin

She is in the kitchen when she hears them. A cricket is singing, and Suyin is eating cold rice from an oxblood bowl with wet hair dripping down the back of her gown, armed with the prince's knife that Jinhua left for her. She is hungry enough to swallow the wind, and Suyin has decided to go—again and again, and decided to stay—over and over. To go and find Jinhua wherever she is. To stay here and wait for her to come back.

But those Boxer voices are very near, and it is too late now to think of choices, of going or staying or finding or waiting. Suyin leaves the rice and the oxblood bowl and steps onto scorching courtyard pavers arranged in the everlasting pattern; and every muscle is taut, and the Boxers are just outside the gate, shouting, fearless—enraged and excited—the flames of their torches soaring over the wall. “This is the place,” they holler, “the hall of foreign devil dreams,” and the wall seems suddenly impossibly low and the lock on the gate is impossibly meager, and the low wall and the meager lock are all that separate Suyin from the knives and the flames and the Yi He Tuan.

“Support the Qing and kill the collaborators,” the Boxers are screaming, and Suyin maneuvers herself into a small space between the kitchen wall and the frail cover of a cluster of camellia bushes that have not yet bloomed. She hears the gate groan, then creak, then splinter with a loud, long, untidy crash. She sees splashes of red leap through a glaring, ragged opening. One—two—five—no, ten—eleven—there are far too many of them to count. The Boxers are inside, overturning potted plants. Smashing a garden stool, a table, a lantern. “We are here for the Emissary's Courtesan,” they
shriek, and there is noise everywhere, and there is no air left in Suyin's lungs. “We will show no mercy. We will slice off her breasts and sever her arms and her legs from her body. We will poke out her eyes and burn her to ashes. She cannot run away—she cannot hide. We will find that woman wherever she is—”