The Courtesan (11 page)

While she sleeps, Lao Mama dreams. Old Man is lying in her bed, and she is watching him through a narrow slit in the red bedcurtain. In the dream she finds this not at all strange. Old Man is older than he was when he poured wine for her this evening. His face is as crinkled as a cabbage leaf; his hair is bone white, his body wasted, as frail as paper. He is sleeping deeply. Lao Mama parts the curtain and climbs onto the bed, and she lies down next to him. She feels a deep longing to share her destiny. In the dream she falls asleep and aches with this need, and then suddenly she wakes, sweating. The bedding is hot and as damp as mud. She is not well. Sitting up, she retches, then vomits into her lap. “Look, Old Man,” she cries out, and Old Man's eyes open wide and he is no longer himself. He sits upright, staring at her, and he is youthful and handsome, the most beautiful man she has ever seen. “Look,” she cries, “it is a baby.” She is filled with grief. “I have vomited a baby,” she tells him. “Help me, please, help me clean it up, and then you must hold me in your arms and take me away from this place.”

The man in the dream, who both is and is not Old Man, turns away. “I cannot save you,” he says.

In the morning, remembering the dream, Lao Mama thinks,
I am not fine.
I am not fine at all.

BIRDS OF SADNESS

Jinhua

She has been groaning in her sleep; Jinhua hears the sound of it, and this is not a dream, and there is no part of her that feels all right. The bed is hard, and it is not her bed. The places that Banker Chang has injured burn and throb and ache, but he is not here. A moment later, eyes wide open, Jinhua isn't sure where she is. The room is barely larger than the bed on which she is lying, curled around herself; it is a room without a window or furniture, with a broom leaning against the wall and a pile of rags on the floor.

It is Suyin's room. It is the closet where she sleeps.

Jinhua touches the swollen place between her legs and looks at her fingers. Her hand is red with blood, and she holds it far away from herself, fingers loosely curved and dangling downward. She begins to sob. Her mind is busy remembering every single thing that Banker Chang did, and it is as awful and as painful now as it was when he did these things last night.

“Call me Baba,” he said.

She is fully awake now. There is a bucket near the bed, and Jinhua needs to pee but she doesn't dare; it hurts too much down there.

Did he really say it?
Call me Baba
—

When Suyin comes, she says, “Good morning,” and Jinhua sobs harder. She shows Suyin the blood on her fingers, and she is helpless as she watches Suyin wipe one finger at a time, firmly, thoroughly, the way one cleans muck from a baby's hand. She asks through tears, “Is it the red dragon? Will I bleed each month? Will I be in Lao Mama's moon cycle book from now on?”

Suyin shakes her head. “No,” she says. “That will happen later, maybe soon and maybe not so soon.”

“It is bad, isn't it, when blood pours out for no reason?” Jinhua is looking at her fingers, her nails still rimmed with blood. Suyin touches her arm.

“It is not the worst thing,” she replies. “Now, drink some tea. It will help you to heal. It will make you feel better for a while.”

First she needs to pee. Suyin lifts her over the bucket. She strokes her hair. Jinhua holds her breath, and the pee comes in burning dribbles. It is strong smelling, a dark color in the bottom of the bucket. Afterward she drinks the tea, greedy to quench a terrible thirst, and Suyin brings a bowl of heaving liquid. “Medicine,” she tells Jinhua. “Lie down.” She pushes Jinhua's legs apart. When she bathes her, Jinhua flinches, drawing her knees in toward herself. Liquids trickle. Suyin folds a soft, dry rag and wedges it between Jinhua's legs. With a cord, she binds it around her waist, tightly, so it won't slip.

“There,” she says. “Now get dressed. Lao Mama wants us all to come downstairs. She has a surprise. For everyone, she said.”

Long, long ago
—in another life—surprises were enchanting things. Now, pulling her tunic over her head, Jinhua says, “Tell me
what it is, Suyin.” Tears are running down her cheeks, and Suyin shrugs her shoulders. “If I knew what it was,” she says, “it would not be a surprise.”

The courtyard is loud with bird sounds, and the sun is warm already. Lao Mama's face looks strange without powder or color or paint. She has no eyebrows, her lips are gray, and she smells of smoke and incense from the City God Temple, where she has been this morning to pray.

“The little one will go first,” Lao Mama says, and she is pointing at Jinhua. Old Man is holding a brown sack.

Jinhua doesn't want to be the first. The sack in Old Man's hand is moving, and Old Man growls and thrusts it toward her, and she can smell the earthy, gnarly smell of hairy, old-sack fibers and the stink of his sleeve. She hears a small sound and pulls her hands behind her back.

“Go on. Take one. They don't bite nearly as hard as Banker Chang does.” Lao Mama's morning laugh is like a tiger's roar, and now everyone is laughing at Jinhua. From the place where she is standing at the edge of the courtyard, Suyin gives the smallest nod, and the nod says,
Jinhua, you must do this thing.

Old Man holds the bag open. Jinhua reaches in. Her fingers still feel sticky. Everyone is watching and giggling, and Jinhua is afraid of what is in the bag—and her hand closes around a tiny heartbeat.

“All the beings in the Six Paths of Existence are our parents,” Lao Mama announces, and it is a tiny bird, as round as a meat bun, the softest thing Jinhua has ever touched, and she pulls it out of the sack and uses two hands to hold it so it won't fly away. Jinhua lifts
the bird up close to her face, and it is the best thing that has ever happened, this little bird in her hand with bones like twigs that could break so easily and eyes like bright beads; with every feather twitching, his feet pricking the palm of her hand, his head swiveling this way and that to look here and look there.

“To release a bird to the sky is to honor our ancestors,” Lao Mama is saying, and Jinhua wants to keep this precious thing forever and for always.

“Today,” Lao Mama continues, “we will all honor our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers—and all who came before them. All six of you girls and Old Man too. And me, of course. I will do this thing as well. All of us will gain merit for the future.”

Jinhua and the bird are looking at each other, and Lao Mama has not said anything about a bird for Suyin, but she is saying a prayer with her lips and no words—and Jinhua doesn't want her bird to fly away.

“Well?” Lao Mama says now, flicking fingers in Jinhua's direction. “Let it go. That is the point, stupid girl.” She pauses. “It is only a stupid bird.”

Hongyu is hovering, talking into Jinhua's ear, and Jinhua's fingers are tight but not too tight around the little bird. “You can't keep him,” Hongyu is saying. Then she whispers, “He won't get away to the sky, you know. The bird seller is waiting. He is there with his cage on the other side of the wall. He'll get them all back, every one of them, and sell them for karma to someone else. That is what the bird seller does, over and over. He sells the same birds.”

Jinhua glances at Suyin. Hongyu won't stop talking, and Jinhua doesn't want this to be true—what Hongyu has said.

“This is the way it is for birds,” Suyin says, and her voice is bright, and Jinhua can tell that she is pretending not to mind even
a little that she did not get a bird for her karma. Lao Mama's bird has flown away over the wall, and now Lao Mama is saying that she wants to speak with Suyin in the parlor. She says she has a different surprise for her that isn't a bird but something else, something better. Suyin is looking at the ground and isn't saying anything, and Qingyue's bird has gone as well, and now Old Man's.

Jinhua waits, and she opens her hand, and she can feel the blood trickling out of her into the rag inside her trousers. The bird sits quite still for a moment on her palm. And then with a shake and a quiver, he spreads his wings and flies up into the branch of the ginkgo tree. His yellow throat is beautiful amid green leaves, and he opens it to sing, and Jinhua cannot remember exactly how it is that Baba looks, but hearing the bird she remembers something else.
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a
song.

LIKE A PIECE OF PAPER

Suyin

Some things have changed in the days since Lao Mama said that she would adopt Suyin, but Suyin's life is definitely not better than it was before. Sometimes Lao Mama calls her Daughter; sometimes she says Suyin's name properly, but when she is angry she forgets and calls her Dirt Dumpling or Little Cunt, the way she always did before. And now it is Suyin who must change the bandages on Lao Mama's feet whenever they smell bad, and when Lao Mama has an angry day, she beats Suyin and she still beats her harder than she beats the girls who are her money trees. It makes no difference, Lao Mama says, if Suyin's face is ugly with cuts and bruises, and she already has a limp. Even when Suyin has had a beating and her eyes are swollen almost all the way shut, she can sweep and wash clothes and carry the night-soil buckets out to the street the way she always has done.

She can still change Lao Mama's bandages.

Another thing that hasn't changed is Lao Mama telling Cook
to give Suyin the maggoty rice, because she does not need to be plump and soft to please the customers the way the money trees do. Lao Mama just needs Suyin to stay alive so that she can be filial, and burn incense and paper money for Lao Mama when she is dead.

One other thing is different now. It happened yesterday. Old Man found the first houseboy and brought him back, and Lao Mama whipped him on the soles of his feet first and then on his head and his shoulders. Now he can't walk, and he can't wear slippers or a shirt. The second houseboy died from vomiting feces on the street; that is what Lao Mama says, and Old Man says, “Yes, that is what happened to him. His tongue was like a fat gray fish hanging out of his mouth, and his eyes were left wide open even though he was dead, and the dogs on the street were biting him.”

Suyin isn't certain that what Old Man says is true. The second houseboy isn't here, and that is all she knows for sure.

Jinhua

She has done bed business fourteen times. Twice with Banker Chang and the rest with other men. Cuilian told her, “You will get used to it,” and Sibao said, “After a while it doesn't hurt and the customers will give you presents.”

Qingyue laughed and told her, “You will never be as good as I am.”

It still hurts to do bed business, every time, and Jinhua bleeds and doesn't want to be a money tree. She would rather eat maggoty rice with Suyin. She would rather sweep the floor. She wonders about the second houseboy and whether he is really dead with a gray-fish tongue.
Maybe,
she likes to think,
he got away and Lao Mama doesn't want anyone to know.

Suyin has stopped telling stories now that she has become Lao Mama's daughter. She says that stories are of no use. They are no better than dreams. Jinhua told her that “a story is like a garden you can carry in your pocket,” which is what Baba said—but Suyin just shook her head and said,
“No.”