The Courtesan (5 page)

The Go-between

The god of wealth is smiling. Good luck is very, very big today—big like a barbarian's nose, or a demon's face, or even big like the East Sea.

The go-between steps out through the red door and into the lane. She is in a hurry; there is much to be decided with all of this good fortune, but first there is the matter of this empty, gurgling belly she has. She sniffs the air. A bowl of steaming pig-meat noodles would be tasty now—much more tasty than those puny kumquats. The go-between looks east and west, smiling to herself at the thought of rich broth and fatty meat and just a little green vegetable. That place by the West Gate is a bit far, but not too expensive. Feeling rather grand, she pats the pouch at her waist, heavy with nine silver coins, and she regrets the one that she owes the night-soil man for telling her about the girl. Every time he gets money he buys opium and gets that stupid smile.
Same-same like that worthless father of my child,
she thinks. But unlike her husband, the night-soil man knows everything. He is a good friend to have.

Across the street a beggar man rattles his cup. The go-between glances over at him, and he meets her gaze head on. “Lady,” he says, “I saw the bad thing that you did.” His voice is loud in the busy street. “I know you sold that little girl. I saw you go inside that house.”

The beggar has a stick in his hand for beating off dogs and a meaty sore in the middle of his forehead. He has a good face for making people feel sorry—
good for getting money.
Several passersby slow down. An old man drops a coin in his cup. The go-between looks away.
I am clever,
she tells herself,
and don't feel sorry like that.

The beggar man rattles the cup again, and the go-between turns west as though she hasn't heard what he said.
Hè,
she thinks, quickening her pace.

“I know you sold her,” he calls out even louder. “How much did you get, lady, for that little, tiny girl?”

She won't turn around even though she can hear the beggar man's stick tap-tap-tapping on the ground. She walks faster, and the tapping sound stays right behind her. She is breathing hard. She slows down.
Aiyo, why does he want to make trouble for me?
She hawks loudly to clean her throat and stops to spit. She turns, and there he is with that mighty sore right in her eye. She feels sick in her stomach. “One copper only,” she says, turning away from him to fumble in her purse for the smallest coin she has.

Maybe after she has had her pig-meat noodles she'll go to the City God Temple to burn incense. Yes—that is what she will do. She will pray for another lucky day tomorrow. She drops the copper piece in the beggar's cup. He lowers his head. “That one girl was so little, so pretty.” He turns and hobbles away, and she is thinking of her pig-meat noodles and that maybe she won't pay the night-soil man with such a big coin. She turns once more and calls out in a loud voice, “I am not a bad woman.” The beggar man turns a quarter turn and is shaking his head.

“
Hè,
” she says, mostly to herself, and then she spits and feels better.

Jinhua

The old man's breath rattles as he climbs the stairs. He climbs with care, bringing one foot up to meet the other before reaching for the next step. Jinhua does the same a step below him. He has her arm tightly in his grip just above her wrist.

One step at a time.
Tiger shoe alone—tiger shoes together.
Jinhua
looks down at her feet.
Tiger shoe alone—tiger shoes together.
Her arm hurts from the squeeze of the man's fingers. She could climb these stairs so quickly by herself. Her toes feel damp inside her shoes.

“You're hurting me,” she says when they are almost at the top.

The old man stops and leans against the wall breathing hard, gripping even harder than before. “We lost one girl already this week, you stupid little cunt,” he says. “What do you think Lao Mama would do if I were the person who let you get away when she has only just bought you?”

Jinhua doesn't know what Lao Mama would do, but the man doesn't need to grab her like that.

“Ni jin qu ba.”
Go inside. The old man has opened a door on the second floor, and now he lets go of her arm. He pushes her, and she stumbles into the room, rubbing her wrist. Not too much light inside because the shutters are closed, but enough to see that things are scattered
si chu langji
—in a very big mess. Crumpled clothing. A single shoe without its mate. A sprig of osmanthus on the floor, wilting.

No one is here.

“Aiwen's room,” the old man says, and then he says,
“Hè,”
and closes the door. A lock clanks and clicks in the hallway. Jinhua blinks and tears arrive—hot, salty, impossible to stop. Meiling says, “Big girls drink their tears like soup.” But this is not the same as other crying. Tears like this cannot be stopped. They cannot be swallowed, and you can't drink them.

Layers of light draw Jinhua's gaze. She sniffs a string of syrupy sniffs and wipes her nose on her sleeve. The blue hundred-leaf windows
open easily, surprising her with bright air. She can see the canal and the bridge where the boatman disappeared. She can see that he has not come back. In the street below, a straw hat passes; it is the color of burning sugar, and the man underneath it has a quick pace. A mule stumbles, beaten by its master; the clanging sound is a street seller's bell, and a beggar man's cup makes the thin metal sound of not-nearly-enough.

As she steps away from the window, Jinhua's fingers reach for the things in this room. A heap on the floor takes shape as she lifts it: a long, pleated skirt. Magnolia green. The sash beside where it lay is a pale, shiny color. These are a grown-up lady's things, too big for Jinhua to wear; they smell of something nice and something not so nice, both at once. Jinhua drapes them over the bed. She remembers the single shoe and finds its mate toppled on its side in the corner. They are silvery pink, tiny, embroidered with garlands of flowers and leaves. They are smaller than her tiger shoes; Jinhua's hand barely fits inside.

Aiwen has tiny feet and pretty, tiny shoes—and other pretty things. An apple—in a bowl on a table with a shrine—catches Jinhua's eye next. The apple is yellow, an offering to the god of the shrine. Jinhua's stomach roars with hunger, and the apple fills her hand. She waits, water in her mouth. The god's shrine twinkles red and gold, and the god is as round as a sweet bean dumpling and pink, not like the shoes but a brighter, screaming pink, and the god is sitting on a stack of shiny silver coins like the ones that Timu got. He is Caishen, the god of wealth. His beard is crinkly and black and looks as though it were made of real hair, and his lips are black too; sticks of incense are burnt to nubs on the table in front of him, and Jinhua takes a bite of the apple. It is loud and crisp in her mouth, and she feels the space left by her missing tooth with her tongue, and she chews and swallows and takes another, larger bite. The
sound the apple makes in her ears is like a crash inside her head, and she puts the apple back in the bowl with the bitten parts hidden on the bottom. It is Aiwen's apple—not hers to eat. She turns away, still hungry, feeling the way a thief would feel, and sees a box on Aiwen's table.

The box is lacquer with mother-of-pearl, like the box for inks and brushes that Baba keeps on the great, dark pearwood desk where he works in his library, and seeing it makes tears come back. Jinhua isn't allowed to touch Baba's precious scholar things when he is gone, but sometimes she does, just a little, being very careful, thinking he won't notice. Jinhua lifts the lid of Aiwen's box and catches a glimpse of her own dark fringe and her little-bit-swollen eyes in the mirror that folds out of it. She settles herself on Aiwen's stool.
Maybe Aiwen won't mind. Baba never minded, really, but that was because she is Baba's child and he will love her forever and for always.
Jinhua's feet don't quite touch the floor from where she is sitting. A shuddery sigh escapes—the kind of sigh that happens after crying.

Inside Aiwen's box are bright, delicate things that ladies use. The small pot of pink is like the circles on Lao Mama's cheeks and like the god's pink face and his fatty-fat hands. The pencil is black for painting eyes. The paper box is square and half filled with powder for a white face. Jinhua takes these things out of the box one by one and puts them on the table in a neat row. She tilts her head back, closes her eyes halfway, and adjusts the mirror. She knows what to do; she has seen Meiling do this often, and Timu once. It is what grown-up ladies do. She draws the black pencil across her eyelid, stretching the skin sideways almost to the edge of her face. The mark she has made is faint and uneven. She presses harder. “Eye like almond,” the go-between said. Yes. The color on her two eyes is dark, still uneven, but quite beautiful, and
the shape is almost like an almond. Jinhua turns her head to one side, and her pearl earrings that Baba brought from Peking dangle next to her throat—

The face part is easier. Jinhua rubs powder in circles around her forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin. Her face is milky white, but now her neck is its usual color and doesn't match at all. She peels back the collar of her jacket. And then she sees the fat red stick still inside the lacquer box. Red is for painting lips. Thumb and forefinger reach for the stick. A noise from outside the locked door is the sound of wooden shoes on a wooden floor.
Tok. Tok-tok. Tok. Tok-tok.
Slow, uneven steps are coming. A hobbling way of walking.

Jinhua leans into the mirror.
You have your mother's eyes, her nose, her beautiful hair, but your mouth is all your own. And when your lips move, they tell the stories of your curious, clever, child's heart.
It is almost as though Baba were here, whispering into Jinhua's ear, telling her these things the way he always does. Her reply to him is always the same, and now she speaks to him even though he isn't really here.
I love you, Baba. And I love your stories that are like gardens in my pocket, and I wish you would come back to me.

Jinhua waits, then takes the red stick to her lower lip, touching it.
Long, long ago in ancient times, when just wishing a thing made it so— Tok. Tok-tok.
Tok. Tok-tok.
The steps are coming closer, the lock on the door is making an unlocking noise, and the stick in Jinhua's hand looks like blood when something sharp is cutting you and you know it will hurt later but you can't quite feel it now.
Like the blood,
she thinks, and then she says out loud, “I wish—I wish—I really wish I had not told Baba to disobey the emperor.”

Jinhua lifts her chin. Hinges groan on the door like crickets in the garden that she hears at night, lying in her own bed at home and listening to Baba tell stories. Her hand brings the stick to her throat, and her eyes are on the mirror, and the red stick makes a
small mark, a bigger mark—a line across her neck. The line is blood.
Blood on Baba's neck where the emperor's sharp sword cut him.

Behind Jinhua the door moves, and she sees it in the mirror. The stick for blood tumbles to the floor, and Jinhua covers her throat with both hands.

“What are you doing?”

She turns to look. A thick fringe of dark hair. No powder on her face. A girl—and not a grown-up lady.
Tok. Tok-tok.
The girl is coming inside, and she is walking like a cripple, and it is her shoes that are making that
tok
-ing noise. She looks very, very angry, and Jinhua says, because it is the thing that is right there in her mouth, “I am lamenting my father's death. I am being sorry and sad—and I am wishing for something that matters more than anything.”

MEMORIES OF
WINDBLOWN DUST

Suyin

Suyin screams.

It is in her hands that she feels her anger first; her fingers curl and clench; her knuckles spread; her work-worn palms fold into fighting fists.

How dare the new girl touch these things that are so precious?

Suyin screams again. She barely feels herself move. Crossing the room, she almost doesn't hear the dreadful sound of her crippled feet in wooden shoes.

The girl has huge, frightened eyes, and she is tiny sitting there on Aiwen's stool. Suyin grabs her arm. She cannot stop herself. The girl cowers, covering her face with her other arm.

“These are Aiwen's things: her shoes, her comb, her skirt, her powder. You cannot have them—” Suyin is sobbing now. The girl looks up at her, and Suyin sees the open collar. The mark across the child's throat: a line of crimson that is the color of Aiwen's lips.

The child is sobbing too, and in an instant Suyin knows. Lao Mama said, “I bought a girl today. You will look after her, Suyin.” And then Lao Mama drew her two taut fingers across Suyin's neck. She said,
“Kacha.”
She said, “The father has been sent to the Western Heaven without his head.” She said, “Bad for the girl and good for the weight of the coins in my purse.”

Suyin lets go of the girl's arm. Her hands drop to her sides, and the rumble in her throat is becoming a moan. The child has slipped from the stool and is crawling on her hands and knees away from Suyin, into the corner next to Aiwen's bed, and now she is crouching there, watching, wary, eyes wide open. Awful with her white and powdered face, her eyes smeared black with kohl—and the line across her throat that looks like blood—the words barely past her lips:
I am lamenting my father's death.

The room is silent now, and the stick of lip paint is on the floor, and it is red for Aiwen's lips and red for a father's blood. It is red for both of these things. The child has tucked her head to her knees and wrapped her arms around herself, and she is right there next to the place where Aiwen—

Suyin drops to the floor and she, too, tucks her head and wraps her arms, and she is weeping because it is all she can think of to do, and the girl is crying, and each of them is overcome with sadness now and together, because a person each of them loved is dead.

Suyin remembers. It happened yesterday—a long time ago. It was a day of black sky and dark earth. Suyin remembers Aiwen calling her. “Come here, Suyin.” Her tone was sharp, as it often has been of late, although her name—Aiwen—means
Loves Gentleness.
Suyin hurried up the stairs as best she could on her broken, clumsy
feet. “Suyin?” Aiwen's voice heaved skyward into a wail. Suyin hurried more. She was out of breath. She'd brought osmanthus for Aiwen's hair.
It will please her,
Suyin remembers thinking. Aiwen loves osmanthus.

“Suyin, the guests will be arriving soon. Master Wang might come for me tonight. He said he might and I know he will, this time. Arrange my hair, Suyin. Not that oil; it smells rancid. No, the other.”

The scent of incense was thick in the room, and urgent, the evidence of Aiwen's need to pray and beg the gods for luck and love.

“Suyin, you are so slow and stupid today. What is the matter with you, Suyin?”

What indeed was the matter? Aiwen's back was turned, her face reflected in the mirror, a pulse fluttering at her eye at the edge of the cruel fishtail crinkles that worried her so very much. Suyin grieved for her. Master Wang would not be coming. He visits a younger girl now, in another hall not far away on another Suzhou street. Everyone knows that.

Was it only yesterday? Aiwen leaned toward the mirror, peering at her reflection. She touched the corner of her eye, first one and then the other. “I am old,” she said. “Fetch the powder, Suyin, and polish my skin. Polish it with crushed Taihu pearls. Polish it until I bleed. Make me young again. Make the gods stop laughing at my prayers. Please, Suyin, do these things for me. Do them now.”

Suyin tucked the osmanthus in the knot at the back of Aiwen's head. “No,” she said. Her heart was breaking. “No more crushed Taihu pearls,” she told Aiwen
.
“No more polishing.” How thick and dark Aiwen's hair still was. “You are beautiful, old or young, and I will always love you,” Suyin said. “We will make a plan, you and I together, and you won't need him anymore. You must learn, Aiwen, to have hope and love of a different kind now that you are—”

Aiwen shook her head, and her hair gleamed, and she went to
the shrine and knelt. Her lips moved in prayer as she lit ten sticks of incense and then twenty more. She was Lao Mama's top girl once, before the fishtail crinkles came. She was the number one
huaniang,
and the guests all loved her then, and Aiwen loved herself.

Later, when the evening was over and the guests had gone and Master Wang had still not come, Suyin brought chrysanthemum tea to brighten Aiwen's eyes. She found her lying quite still, a dainty smear of black glistening at the corner of her mouth. She shook her hard to try to wake her. Aiwen was wearing red. Her face was powdered, her lips and eyes freshly painted, the osmanthus still in her hair but beginning to wilt. Lying there, Aiwen looked like a sleeping goddess, a fox spirit—a ghost. An almost empty pot lay upturned on the bed next to her. The tiny silver spoon marred with thick black paste was the last thing to touch her lips.

Yapian
—opium. Aiwen's last, bitter, poisonous meal. Smoke it and you dream. Eat it and you sleep until you die. Aiwen didn't need the tea that Suyin had brought to brighten her eyes. She wouldn't wait for Master Wang—ever again. She didn't wait for Suyin, who loved her, who would never have left her alone.

Now another memory comes. An older one. Another day of black sky and dark earth. Little Sister on her lap. Suyin's legs were cramped. They were crammed together, the two of them and many others, in a basket filled with little girls whose parents had sold them for a few small coins. They were carried from the countryside to Suzhou, like chickens bound for pots on city people's stoves. Lao Mama's voice when they arrived—that Suyin remembers too. “You stink like an armpit, you filthy peasant cunt,” she said
.
“But you look strong. I'll keep you for working. For a while, anyway. Because you are cheap. Only because of that.” Then Lao Mama grabbed her chin. “The feet are impossible,” she said, “but the face is not so bad underneath all that filth. Maybe you are worth something, after
all.” Her mouth was like a knife. Suyin remembers that. Turning to Old Man, who wasn't as old as he is now, Lao Mama said, “Strip her. Burn all of it, every pitiful thing she's brought. Use the fire to boil tea, and make her drink it so that she remembers the stink of her old life. And,” Lao Mama said, “send for the foot binder.”

Suyin remembers hearing Aiwen's voice while the fire burned and the tea boiled.
“Ni bu pa,”
she said on that first day. Don't be afraid. Aiwen said this even though she was the top girl then. She didn't have to be kind, and sometimes—later—she wasn't. As for Little Sister, she stayed in the basket and was carried off to a different place, and Suyin still thinks of her sometimes. Lao Mama doesn't like ugly girls. She didn't want a girl with a scar on her lip. Suyin knows that now. And she has those small memories of her clothes glowing on the kitchen fire, turning from something into nothing just like that. She has the things that she remembers from her old life: a dark room with a dirt floor that was never really warm, a cold bed where all the family slept, and a rice bowl that was never really full. She remembers her father's voice—“Go with that man and do as he tells you”—a strand of her mother's hair, the color of black sky and dark earth, caught in her fingers when the man snatched her away. She remembers that no one stopped him, that he went back to get Little Sister. She remembers that Little Sister screamed loudly and that she cried bitter tears for a long, long time.

“Would you like me to tell you a story to make you feel better?”

The child's voice is small and clear, and Suyin is startled. She has been weeping and had almost forgotten the girl: how small she was, how she crept away like a frightened animal because of Suyin's anger.

Suyin's mouth is dry; her legs are stiff. Her feet are tingling, folded underneath her on the hard floor of Aiwen's room. It is evening. Dark. The guests will be arriving soon, and there is work to be done to get ready. It is not the time for stories.

Suyin doesn't try to get up. She hears the whisper of fabric, the girl moving closer, sliding across the floor on her bottom. She needs comfort. They both do, huddled on the floor, close to each other but not touching. Lao Mama's voice splits the silence like a whip, calling from another room, calling for Old Man. Suyin doesn't move. “How old are you?” she asks the girl. Lao Mama's voice moves to another place that is farther away.

“I am seven years old,” the girl says, and her breath flutters in the dark. “And,” she adds, “I don't ever want to be eight or nine or ten or eleven.”

Suyin closes her eyes and nods and feels as sad for the girl as she is for herself. A pause; a breath becomes a sigh.

“Long, long ago in ancient times, just wishing a thing would make it so,” the girl begins her story. “And in those times,” the girl continues, and Lao Mama calls again, and this time it is her angriest, most shrieking voice moving closer. The girl's voice falters.

“Don't be afraid,” Suyin says, reaching for the girl's hand. “Go on with your story.” Her sadness is so large, and the way the story begins is making it even larger. She, too, feels small and frightened, and she, too, wishes for something that cannot ever be. Her fingers make contact with a cold floor, a damp embroidered shoe, a small knee.

“And in those times,” the girl goes on, “when someone was dead and when someone else wanted very, very much for the dead person to come back and be home forever and for a long time—”

A cold breeze strokes the room, and Suyin sees the girl shiver, and she wishes it were Aiwen sitting here with her, telling the story that makes her heart feel like bursting.

“Tell me the rest,” she says, and she is desperate just once to hear what can happen when a person wishes and wants—and hopes, but now the little girl is shaking. She has drawn her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“I cannot finish this story today,” she says. “It is not, after all, a good day for telling
stories.”