The Courtesan (7 page)

Lao Mama won't do this, surely she won't.
All is still in the room except for the spitting, crackling fire. Jinhua has stopped her crying and is watching the sweet little dog. Everyone is watching. Lao
Mama shakes Xiaoyun once and then again, and he squeals, and his little voice can barely be heard even in this quiet place.

“Take him, Suyin. He is yours. I am sick to death of the little beast. Get him out of my sight before he, too, lands in the fire. Throw him out into the street; sell him; wring his little neck. It is nothing to me what you do with him.”

From beyond the kitchen walls that are blackened with soot and grease comes the voice of the night watchman on an early morning round in the street. A tomcat yowls, and a woman lets loose a string of the foulest words Suyin has ever heard in all her life. She receives the dog with two hands cupped, and his rosebud tongue appears, and the brew in the basin has reached a blistering boil.

“You don't mean it,” she whispers, and she is terrified.

Lao Mama shrieks back in reply, her eyes glittering. “Of course I do. I mean every single word that I say, just as I always do.”

Suyin feels the girl's eyes on her back as she turns. “I will put Xiaoyun somewhere safe,” she says, “so that you can decide later, Lao Mama, what to do—when you are not so angry.” The words
when you are not so angry
Suyin says softly, almost silently, under her breath.

Jinhua

“Did you hear that, Lao Mama? She likes her feet the way they are. I think she wants those stupid red shoes out of the fire.
Hè.
”

The foot-binding lady is mocking Jinhua, speaking in a little-girl whine that isn't her voice. She has three fingers pressing down on Jinhua's ankle, moving from spot to spot to find her pulse, and
bright green disks wobble in her ears each time she moves those three fingers. Lao Mama is smoking her smelly pipe, and Jinhua wishes she hadn't said that about her feet, that she wanted them to stay the same. The words came out of her mouth even though she knows that Lao Mama will not change her mind. The tiger shoes are gone; she knows that, too, and what will happen to the little dog?
Surely Suyin—

“The girl's kidney
qi
is surging.” The foot binder is using her normal voice now, and her eyes look like shiny cat's eyes, yellow in the firelight. She has found the spot she was looking for on Jinhua's ankle and is pressing hard, and Jinhua is watching everything she does.

Lao Mama pulls the mouthpiece of her pipe away from her lips. She lifts her chin and makes a popping sound. A cloud comes out of her mouth, as round as an apple. “Stupid girl,” she says, and her thin cheeks swell, and the cloud disappears. “It is the way of women to bind our daughters' feet. Besides”—her eyes turn to slits—“if we don't do this, how will your cunt become tight and your buttocks firm from walking in a woman's way? How will my customers know the difference between you and a stinking turtle-head boy?”

Lao Mama puts the pipe back in her mouth, and Jinhua feels swallowed by her shadow and has no answer for any of this. She sniffs twice and wipes her hand across her nose and sniffs again.

“Yi, er, san, si.”
Outside in the street someone is counting. The foot binder is sitting now on a low red stool in front of Jinhua, a blue bag beside her on the floor. She lifts Jinhua's foot to the level of her eye. She tips it one way and then the other as though it were a puppet's foot, or a doll's, and as though she were playing. Lao Mama leans in to watch. Jinhua's foot is bending back and forth and up and down, and then it stops. The lady is fumbling now in
her bag. The coil of hair at the back of her neck is gray and thin, what Meiling would call
a pitiful sight that my eye can hardly bear to look at
.

Meiling had beautiful, thick, shiny hair, and she let Jinhua run her fingers through it, and . . . Suyin's hair is beautiful, thick, and shiny too. Jinhua looks sideways at the basin on the fire and then leans down to touch her toes. “This little cow eats grass. This little cow eats hay.” She pinches her toes one by one and sings the words to herself in a tiny voice, and the words are comforting because it is only a game.

“This little cow drinks water, and this little cow runs away.” Holding the fourth toe between her thumb and finger, her chin pressed against her knees, Jinhua stops and she looks up.

“Ah yes,” the foot binder says, “the five little cows. How very, very suitable.” The green disks in her ears are made of jade, and she is taking things out of the bag: a fat roll of white bandages, a skein of thread, a knife, a needle the color of mules' teeth. She spreads a blue cloth on the floor next to her stool, and it is the same color of blue as the bag.

“So, little girl, why don't you finish your rhyme? Tell us what happens to the last little cow? Sing loudly for us; please sing loudly.” The foot binder is laying her things neatly on the cloth: the bandage roll, the thread, the knife, the yellow needle. She has only a few hairs on the top of her head, and her scalp is as shiny, almost, as a silver mirror.

“I don't remember,” Jinhua replies, and now her voice is very, very small—and really the truth is that she does remember. She has played this game a hundred times. She remembers being tickled. She remembers laughing until she cried—

“What happens to the last little cow?” The foot binder's eyes are on Jinhua, and her hands are clasped, and Jinhua is becoming
more and more afraid of what will happen next, and she is thinking about the dog and her shoes and—

“I don't know,” she says. “I can't remember.” She is crying now and she can't stop, and snot and tears are on her face—and the lady who is going to bind her feet is shrieking with laughter. Lao Mama is still here watching, puffing on her pipe, making round smoke apples with her lips.

“If you won't say it, I will.” The foot binder is pulling now on Jinhua's fifth toe—pulling hard and using fingernails that are like swords—and the two houseboys who made the fire are sneaking off, out through the kitchen door—and Jinhua kicks wildly with her foot. She won't say that thing about the last cow because—

“Little cunt,” the foot binder says, holding her cheek where Jinhua has kicked her.

“The last little cow—” It is Lao Mama talking now, rapping Jinhua on the shoulder with the bamboo rod. “The last little cow does nothing—and the master comes home and whips him again and again and again.” Each time Lao Mama says the word
again,
she brings the rod down harder. Three times.
Praap—praap—praap.
Hard—harder—hardest. And then she stops. The rod is perched on Jinhua's shoulder. “Look at me in my eyes,” she says, and Jinhua will not do this either. “Tell me that you understand what it is that I am saying.”

The foot binder has returned to her stool, and she is unraveling a long thread, smiling in a nasty way. “I have heard a man claim,” she says, “that there are a thousand ways to enjoy bound feet. Imagine that, one thousand ways to play with a girl.” Jinhua clasps her hands over her ears, and the foot-binding lady is cutting the thread with a knife, and Jinhua remembers what Suyin said to her. “A thousand buckets of tears,” she said. “You will cry that many,” she said
.
“There is something much more terrible,” she said.

The needle is perched between the foot binder's teeth; a strand of thread hangs down her chin, and a rope across Jinhua's thighs puckers the cloth of her trousers. They have tied her to the stool, and the knot is huge and hairy and cannot be undone, and Lao Mama's hands are bearing down on Jinhua's shoulders. The rings she is wearing have teeth that bite into Jinhua's bones. Jinhua can't move. The foot binder has taken her foot, crinkled from soaking in the basin and white from alum, and she is holding it tightly. “The left foot,” she says,” is more easily broken—in most cases.” She is bending Jinhua's four lesser toes back and forth, back and forth, each time pushing them farther and farther toward her heel—forcing her foot to do an impossible thing. Jinhua's skin burns; the bones resist; the muscles are tearing. Jinhua kicks with the foot that is free—a small kick is all she can manage—and the bending stops. The rope cuts into her thighs, and Jinhua shakes her head from side to side. The foot-binding lady slaps her face. The stool wobbles. Her cheek stings. Jinhua opens her mouth and screams for Baba.
Of course
—she snatches her hand to her throat—
Baba cannot come to her.

Someone grabs Jinhua by a leg, an arm, an ankle. Someone is pulling at her braided hair. That old man is here, the houseboys have come back—and the look in their eyes makes Jinhua even more afraid. Hot, wet bandages crawl across her ankle, over her toes and around her heel. Pain shoots up her leg. The bandages go around and around, tighter and tighter. First one foot, then the other, disappears; her lesser toes are gone. She hears the dry sound of white thread passing through the bandages. The thread catches, and the foot binder curses. She wipes her forehead with her sleeve.

WINTER BEGINS

Suyin

It is the hundredth day and there are ghosts in Aiwen's room—and the child has worn the stick of red lip paint to a nub with painting her neck. Each night when it is late, when she has finished with her work, Suyin goes in to check on Jinhua. Sometimes she cries in her sleep or whimpers for her father, and on those nights Suyin lies down on the floor and sleeps there next to the bed. She is beginning to think of this now as Jinhua's room, even though it is the place where Aiwen lived until she died.

Tonight—one hundred days after Aiwen ate the opium—the child's fever has gone, and she is sleeping quietly. She is learning to walk in a new way, and to bathe her feet with alum, and to change her own bindings when it is time. She is learning to sit with her feet curled under her, to keep the bindings tight, to obey Lao Mama—even, sometimes, to flatter her and make her smile. The child is clever in this way. She is strong; her feet are becoming small, and
she will survive this and other things that will come later, some of which are worse than what has already been.

Most girls do survive for a while—

Jinhua will survive, too, the loss of her father. It soothes her, Suyin knows, to paint that red line across her throat. She does this every morning when she wakes. She says the words “I am being sorry and sad, and I am lamenting my father's death.” These are the first things she does each day, and she allows Suyin to watch, and neither of them speak of it. It is a private ritual, something the child needs, and somehow, although she doesn't know why, it is soothing to Suyin as well.

It is time to buy a new stick of red lip paint, and Suyin will do this for Jinhua today, and she will tell Lao Mama that the lip paint is for Qingyue, who is always losing things. And Suyin has decided, too, that today, for the first time, she will open the wooden chest where Aiwen's things are packed away, and she will find the bundle with Aiwen's special shoes.
Silvery pink with flowers and garlands.
They were Aiwen's favorite shoes, but Suyin has waited for one hundred days, and that is long enough. It is time for Jinhua to have them now that her feet are getting smaller.
They will make her smile for a moment. They will make her happy, if only for a brief time,
Suyin thinks, and perhaps she herself will smile as well. If she knew how, she would write Aiwen a letter on this hundredth day to tell her how things are: that a terrible grief still comes, sometimes, that it is slowly becoming bearable, that this little girl who now sleeps in the bed that was once Aiwen's has lost as much as they both have. And she would tell Aiwen that the little girl named Sai Jinhua loves her, Suyin, in a kind and gentle way—and that life is hard but it can be endured—
and
why, oh why, did Aiwen not believe this?