The Courtesan (4 page)

THE HOUSE WITH THE
WIDE GATE

Jinhua

Stone steps lead from the street to the canal, and a boatman poles his boat close. He is naked from the waist up, brown and as thin as a scallion. A straw hat hides his face, and he calls out,
“
Taitai, dao nar qu?”
Where to, Lady?

“To House with Wide Gate on Cangqiao Lane.” The go-between turns her head to hawk a glob of spit into the canal. Jinhua watches as it foams for a moment and then is lost amid floating bits of garbage, full of color, things that nobody wants to have. She rolls the three kumquats that Timu gave her in the palm of her hand and thinks of eating one, and then thinks,
No, I will save them for later.

“How much?” The go-between is pushing her down the steps, slippery with green slime, and Jinhua worries about the leap she will have to take from the bottom step to reach the boat. She worries about her special tiger shoes; they will get wet and dirty. They will
be ruined. The boatman reaches to lift her, as though he knows about her worries, and says without looking at the go-between, “My price is fair.” His hands make a tight circle around Jinhua's waist, and Jinhua notices that his number four finger is gone from one hand.

When the go-between clambers in, the boat shudders and the boatman takes his pole in two hands and stands, balancing, wind blowing the legs of his trousers, feet on two sides of the gunwale at the back. His bare toes are dark and knobby. They grip like fingers. A spray of pussy willow tied with a hairy piece of string dangles inside the boat between his feet. Slowly the boat moves away from Cook's third gate. The man is careful, leaning into his work, splashing only a little, making tidy, beguiling sounds as his pole dips in and out of the water. He poles the boat under a humpbacked stone bridge and crouches down. They turn a corner and they are gliding now farther and farther away from the gate, and home, and Timu, who doesn't want Jinhua—and before Jinhua is ready, the boatman calls out, “
Yijing daole.
”

We have already arrived.

Jinhua doesn't know this place at all. Above the boat, ancient streets hug the canal on two sides, and gray roof tiles stacked like leaning coins cap the dirt-stained walls of houses. Dark dragons twist and writhe along the eaves. The boatman lifts his pole. He is as graceful on water as a girl dancing.

“What happened to your number four finger?” Jinhua asks. Sitting, she can see the boatman's eyes beneath the brim of his hat. She can see the stub where a finger should be.

“Lost, facing down the enemy,” he replies, and Jinhua asks him, “Will it grow back?”

The boatman makes a strange motion with his hand touching his forehead, then his brown and naked chest, his left shoulder and his right. “It will not grow back,” he says. “But it is only one finger,
and I have learned to live without it. My Heavenly Father has made me strong enough to bear this and other things.”

The go-between shifts on the seat, and the boat heaves. “That heavenly-father-your-god is a filthy, hairy, big-nose, foreign devil,” she says, and she spits for the second time into the water—
and it is not right to speak in this way to an old person who has lost his finger—and why would the go-between say these things?

The crusty stain on the go-between's sleeve touches Jinhua's arm, and the go-between says the words
foreign devil
and
filthy
a second time. The boatman coughs and holds his stance and coaxes the boat into position next to a bank of stone steps. A two-stringed
erhu
wails nearby, and Jinhua hears Baba's voice, almost. “One day I will take you—”

From the bottom step she calls to the boatman. “Uncle,” she says, “would you like a kumquat?” He bows, removes his hat, and reaches with his poor, four-finger hand.

“Wait a moment,” he says, and the boatman springs to the back of his boat. He unties the pussy willow spray and tosses the hairy piece of string aside. “May the Lord, my god, make you strong too,” he says, putting the spray in Jinhua's hand, taking the kumquat she has offered him. Unable to stop this, the go-between has turned her back and is making her way up the steps to the street. “Hurry,” she says, wheezing.

But Jinhua waits, stretching the moments, clutching the pussy willows, watching the boatman balance himself so perfectly on the water. She is glad she has seen his walnut face. She is glad, too, that she has given him one of her kumquats; and she is worrying, a little, about the boatman's enemy and whether he is really strong
enough.

THE HALL OF ROUND MOON AND PASSIONATE LOVE

Jinhua

The pussy willow buds are kitten soft and pearl gray, and Jinhua whispers, “What is this place?”

Gold glints on the sign above the door, and she can read the characters for
Hall
and
Round
and
Moon;
the rest she does not recognize.

“House with Wide Gate,” the go-between says, and she is picking at the stain on her sleeve—which she has suddenly noticed—in the same way you would scratch an itch, and Jinhua suspects that she cannot read a single character on the sign.

There is no wide gate at this place, only a red door that isn't wide, with a brass door pull—a dragon's face with shiny, slanted eyes and holes for nostrils that are deep and dark and large enough for a person's thumb to fit inside. The house has two stories, and two rows of hundred-leaf windows that are painted bright blue, and a high veranda with lanterns hung like huge cherries from the
eaves all the way around it. The railings are painted red and blue and green, and the blue is the same blue as the windows and the same blue, too, as Meiling's earrings that she always wears.

Now the go-between is pulling at the hem of her jacket, lifting it up, patting the sash at her waist in a frantic way. “Where it is?
Aiyo,
where I put it?” She seizes her sleeves and Timu's paper flutters to the ground. Jinhua bends to pick it up. Her tiger shoes are wet.

“You can't have that,” the go-between says, snatching the paper away.

Jinhua looks around. The dusty street that lines the canal is filled with people. Two men nearby are having an argument; one of them belches loudly; the other spits and says,
“Qi si wo le.”
I am angry to death. The second man wraps his queue around his throat, and Jinhua's heart pounds. From behind the red door a dog barks, and the go-between is blinking faster and faster, eyeing Jinhua's hand with the two kumquats that are left.

“Where you get those?” The go-between dabs her forehead with her sleeve and makes a wet, sucking sound through her teeth. “Give them to Auntie. Auntie is hungry.” The dog's bark becomes a snarl behind the door, and Jinhua imagines long, pointed yellow teeth and a pink tongue that drips spit.

“No,” she says. She wants to go home. “Timu gave me the kumquats for my journey.” She tightens her grip on the pussy willow spray in her one hand and the kumquats in her other. The go-between shrugs and lifts a fist to knock. They hear the dog's toenails scratching to get out, and now the go-between's chest heaves, and she raps her knuckles on the door.
Bi bi
—and then again louder—
bao bao.
The dog barks in reply, and a woman's voice reaches the street, as thin as shiny thread.

“Old Man, throw that
gaiside
dog a
gaiside
pork bone to shut him up. And you—dirt dumpling—go and see who's at the
gaiside
door.”

It is a rude way of talking. The half of the go-between's face that Jinhua can see goes pale, and the flabby line of her jaw sags. They hear the rattle of a chain, link by link collapsing on a hard floor, and the wet smack of a piece of meat. The go-between takes one step backward. The door opens the width of a man's pockmarked forehead.

“What do you want?”

The man is not a friendly person.

“I have girl.” The go-between's voice slides out of her mouth like oil from a spoon, and she bows almost to her knees. “Good girl,” she says. “Very, very beautiful.” Her hand between Jinhua's shoulder blades pushes Jinhua forward—and Jinhua does not want this—and the go-between's voice drops to a whisper. “Family very good. Fragrant cunt. You want look-look?”

The gap in the door widens, and a man's thin beard juts out. Behind him, the dog makes gobbling noises.

“I have”—the go-between scratches herself in a private place—“paper that is signed with chop mark. Everything very, very proper for selling.”

“
En,
” the man grunts. His eyes move from the go-between to Jinhua and then back. He swivels his head and calls loudly to someone they can't see. “Lao Mama. There is a fat woman at the door with a girl to sell. You want to see her?”

“Very good girl, eye like almond, mouth like rose,” the go-between calls into the dark place behind the man, and he frowns, and they can hear the dog growling. Jinhua crouches to scratch her ankle because it has been itching for a while, and she wants to see the dog and doesn't want to look at the man who might buy her or might not. Jinhua meets the dog's unblinking gaze behind the drape of the man's trousers and pops a kumquat into her mouth. The skin is leathery, bitter on her tongue. She bites down and
tastes a spurt of sour juice, then sweet flesh. Familiar tastes. She swallows the seeds, and the dog is watching her while gnawing at his bone.

“Very cheap price,” she hears the go-between call out.

“Wait,” the man says. He pushes the door shut and the dog disappears. Jinhua pops the last kumquat into her mouth, and the go-between yanks her to her feet. In the next street firecrackers detonate, and the go-between mutters something you should never, ever say, and Jinhua looks down at two wet tiger faces on her special shoes.

“She's as thin as a stick. Can she sing?” Something bright flashes in the lady's mouth—gold on her tooth. It is the shiny voice they heard from the street, but now Jinhua and the go-between are inside, in a room beyond the courtyard that is crammed with dark furniture, and paintings on the walls, and round tables with pipes and cups half filled with tea and bowls with scraps of rice and bone and noodle—and the lady with the voice is standing there, one eyebrow higher than the other on her powdered face. With that sharp, brushstroke eyebrow she looks angry. The old man calls her Lao Mama—
Old Mother
—and the go-between is hovering like a fat, greedy bee, bowing and glancing sideways at Jinhua, nodding, touching Jinhua's shoulder. She calls the lady
Lao Daniang
to show respect.

Looking straight at the go-between, the eyebrow lady says that out of ten women of her kind nine will lie, “so don't expect me to believe anything you tell me.”

It happens quickly this time. “Take off your clothes and shoes.” The lady's voice forbids refusal. It forbids everything except for
doing as she says. Glittering eyes explore every part of Jinhua's body. Then fingers that are knobby with jewels and pearls—and one large and green and sparkly ring. The lady's face looks like paper, and the veins on her hands look like worms under her skin, and Jinhua stands straight, her arms at her sides. This time, she doesn't cover herself even though she feels ashamed. Even though it is cold in the room. Her mind wanders.
Are Timu's eyes still shiny?
She hears the voice again, the lady asking
, “Duo shao?”
The go-between's breath comes out of her mouth with a cracking sound, and Jinhua's spine tightens as she waits to hear what she will say. How much? She notices the old man watching from the doorway, his eyes squeezed to slits, and a deep blush heats her face from her throat to her scalp. It moves down to her shoulders and across her chest as though she has caught on fire. She reaches for her neatly folded trousers and puts them on. The man is still watching but doesn't stop her—and she cannot think about Baba now even though she wants to.

“Lao Daniang, she worth fifty tael, or maybe sixty,” the go-between lady is saying. She coughs and she bows. “But for you I make cheap price, only twenty silver coin.” The go-between's dirty shoe shifts on the floor, and Jinhua slips an arm into the sleeve of her jacket. It feels better just to have her clothes on.

“We do plenty business, you and me. Tomorrow, next day, next day after that. I get many girls. Your customer like very much. You make very much money.”

The go-between sounds anxious now; she's talking quickly. Jinhua's eyes move. She blinks. A scrolled painting on the wall comes into focus, and she remembers the sound of six heavy silver coins on Timu's table—Timu's money for the temple. In the painting a woman is lying on a bed, her tunic parted at her waist, her white legs spread in a strange way.
Something is wrong.
The woman has no
skirt, no trousers, nothing to cover her bottom,
and a naked man is there, lying close to her. Jinhua fastens the frog buttons on her jacket, starting with the lowest one. Her hands are clumsy, sticky with juice from Timu's kumquats. The buttons don't line up.

“I'll pay five taels and no more. Look at the girl's feet. Like a pair of barge boats. She can only be a servant, nothing more. She is too old to have her feet bound now. The bones are hard already.” Jinhua looks away from the painting. She looks down at the neat row of her bare pink toes and then at the man in the doorway. And then, because she cannot stop herself, she looks back at the picture and the lady without any skirt, and she sees what she has never seen before: a man's parts, his pale legs, his
jiji.
“Fifteen,” she hears. “Less than that absolutely cannot.” Jinhua is looking at plum blossoms and pine branches in the picture, the curve of the woman's delicate hands, the dark pit of her belly button, the look on her face that makes Jinhua think that maybe the woman is dreaming.

And now the dog has started to bark again. The go-between has gone and Jinhua didn't even notice when she left. She didn't hear the price; she forgot to listen.

“
Duibuzhu,
Lao Daniang,” she says to the eyebrow lady. Excuse me, Madam. She is holding the boatman's pussy willow, edging backward toward the doorway, where the old man is still standing.

The man laughs,
ha-ha,
and after the second
ha
comes out he sounds like a pig snorting into a bucket. “She is your Lao Mama now,” he says. “So you must call her
that
name.” Old Mother.

Jinhua swallows. She is thinking about Baba and how he is a
rotting-no-head-dead-body-corpse.
And she thinks about Mama, who is just like Nüwa and is her real mother, except that she is dead as well—
and Jinhua is to blame for both of these things because Mama died while she was being born and she told Baba—

“I need to go home now,” she says, and everything hurts, and the lady's steep eyebrow moves up even higher into her forehead.

“How will you get there?” the lady asks—and there is no answer for this question—and Jinhua takes another step toward the door. “The affairs of your life have changed, you see. Your days of farting through silk are over.” The lady's lips are a dark red color and Jinhua stops moving because of the voice and her eyes and because the man is blocking the only way out of the room. The lady, Lao Mama, is looking at Jinhua's feet, scratching her head just behind her ear with the long nail of her small finger. It makes a loud, dry sound like drawing a picture in dirt with a stick. Jinhua covers her ears, but Lao Mama's voice slips past her fingers. “If you do not understand what I mean,” she says, “I will have to beat you, and I will beat you hard and for a very long time.”

Jinhua nods, and she is crying. She is a good girl. She has never, ever been beaten before.

“Raw rice can still be boiled,” Lao Mama continues with those red lips, “and a little girl's feet can still be bound. Isn't that right, Old Man?”

The man bows, and this means
Yes
—he thinks that she is right—and Baba said, “
Yongbu;
her feet will never be bound.” He said it hurts too much; he won't allow it. With bound feet, a girl can't run, he said.

“Old Man, put the girl in Aiwen's room. And tell the foot binder to come. We must fight minutes and snatch seconds in this matter, so you must do this now and quickly.”

The old man bows again and his bow is very deep. “Yes, Lao Mama,” he says. “You are right, of course. Aiwen won't need that room anymore.”