The Courtesan (28 page)

Lao Mama's death had been a slow thing. Suyin suspected that she held on because she didn't want anyone to touch what she would leave behind: her emerald ring and her gold hairpins, her jade bracelets, her water pipe, her embroidered clothes in the chest of blood-
ju
wood with the pagoda-mountain pattern. And then there were the girls, of course—Lao Mama's money trees—ten of them by this time.

In the end, Lao Mama lay for many days looking dry, always awake and always watching. Her head was still but her eyes edged left and right and up and down. Her hair was a gray and tangled mess, not black and oiled and sleek the way it always was before. Her eyebrows flinched continually as though there were a thousand tangled worries dashing in and out of her head. Her lips worked silently. Lao Mama had things to say, Suyin thought, but at the last it was phlegm and nothing else that coughed its way out of her mouth.

It was easier to look at her when Lao Mama was strong and cruel and cared only for money, when she was someone to be afraid of.

On that last day Lao Mama closed her eyes. Her lips stopped working. Her eyebrows rested, finally, and what she had been unable to say would be left unsaid forever. And when Suyin found that she couldn't cry a single tear, she wondered whether her own heart had died as well, right there inside her rib cage. She was, she thought, a drifting boat cut loose from its anchor. Where would she go, and what would she do—and for whom would she care? She had no answers. Suyin worried, too, about the god of walls and moats.
She worried about where he would take Lao Mama's spirit now that she was dead.

But Lao Mama had thought of that as well. She left a list inside the blood-
ju
trunk. She bequeathed Suyin her emerald ring. Everything else—the clothes, the hairpins, the trunk and furnishings, the coins in her purse—all of this went to the Cold Mountain Temple to sow goodness for her next life. And as for the girls—all ten of them—Lao Mama gave them their freedom, and for them it would be, Suyin feared, the same as it is for the birds.

A caged bird is sold. It is set free, and then it is caught, only to be caged and sold again.

It is, Suyin thinks now, the circle of a life. It is the way things are.

Later, when Suyin saw the boy on Pingjiang Street and Jinhua came and touched her arm, she knew her heart was still alive. When she had purchased a coffin for Lao Mama and burned incense, and prayed and made offerings, then the tears finally came. Suyin no longer felt like a boat drifting with nowhere to go.

Now, these ten years later, after a long night in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams, Suyin's head feels heavy and tired and a little sad. She is almost finished with her work for the day. A few more entries to make in the book of accounts and then she will put down her brush and go to Jinhua, and she will tell her that profits for the night have been good, and this they will share with each other and feel glad about together. There are, Suyin thinks, things that she knows and need not doubt, and this is one of them—
for now.
There is money, and it is enough. There is enough to eat and enough to pay the landlord and enough to treat the six girls well. No one is forced to eat maggoty rice. No one is beaten, and no one is threatened, and doors are not locked. She and Jinhua are together in all of this—and they are not for sale. These things that Suyin knows
are blessings, and for these she is grateful. But then there are the things that Suyin does not know and the things that she doubts. It feels sometimes as though they are here in Peking, she and Jinhua, waiting . . . waiting . . . and waiting more . . . for someone who may never come.

And when this person—this man that Jinhua loves—when he comes to the city of golden roofs and palaces and twelve unpleasant things, will Jinhua go away—again? Suyin doesn't know, but she does know that heaven's net is wide.

Jinhua

Suyin is frowning, speaking through a veil of steam.

“Lao Ye has made it much too hot,” she scolds. “He has filled it much too full.”

Jinhua lowers herself slowly into the Soochow tub. She likes the water scalding hot. As hot as torture. Too hot—almost—to bear at the end of a long evening.

She tells Suyin, “Too hot or too cold, it is the one who bathes in it who should say. You worry about every small thing. Always this and always that.” She hears the sharpness in her own voice. Suyin's eyebrows crimp with hurt, and a flush flies to her face—and stays there. The tub is full to the earthenware brim, and Jinhua feels vaguely sorry but says nothing to repair the harm she has caused.

Yiiiii—yiiiiii.
Outside, copper hinges work. The sound lasts forever, rising . . . rising . . . rising, making Jinhua shudder. Then the heart-smacking
deng
and
dong
as the front gate closes and the deadbolt slides into place. Laughter ornaments the street. These are familiar sounds. Much too familiar, it now occurs to Jinhua. She
hates these sounds that mark the comings and goings in the Hall of Midsummer Dreams, where a single evening feels endless. Where night after night has become an eternity.

A line of water at her chin, steam touching her face, Jinhua lifts a hand slowly. They watch, she and Suyin, and listen to the
di
 . . .
da
 . . .
di
 . . .
da
—the small sound of water falling from her fingertips, drop by drop by drop, and Jinhua is thinking of Edmund Backhouse—Mr. Bao Ke Si—and she is thinking, too, about the count, who has been in her thoughts this evening.

Suyin looks tired. She makes her discontent known. She has her ways—some are subtle and some are not.

“It is late,” Jinhua tells her. A new subject in a lighter voice, wanting peace between them. “Our Japanese guests will have to bribe the Manchu guards to get back through the gate to the Legation Quarter.”

Suyin pushes up a sleeve and dips her hand into the tub. Her skin is instantly as red as a radish. “Foolish, foolish men,” she says. She laughs. “Serves them right,” she adds, “for staying so long and for drinking so much. For giving us so much of their money.” And then she adds, “With such a night Lao Mama would be happy.”

It is good to hear Suyin laugh, not easily, but still it is a laugh. It is good to know that almost all is well between them. And as for Lao Mama, the mention of her name gives Jinhua pause. “We are not,” she says, “like Lao Mama.” And then she says, “Are we, Suyin?”

Jinhua's skin is soapy, slippery with sandalwood oil. Suyin's fingers are rubbing her back, traveling up and down the aching knots of her spine. It feels good to have these moments of closeness. Suyin stops for a moment, and it is clear that she is thinking, and Jinhua needs to hear her answer now. “Please, Suyin, tell me that we are not like Lao Mama.”

“I have come to know,” Suyin replies, and she is sighing as she
says this, “that some things are inevitable. And in such cases,” she adds, “we do what must be done—and no, Jinhua, we are not like Lao Mama.”

Suyin's fingers return to Jinhua's spine, and her touch and her words bring relief. She shifts her weight on the stool and clears her throat, and now it is she who has a question to pose. “Will the foreign gentleman be coming this evening?” Jinhua turns to face her, and water slaps the floor, and she sees that the flush has returned to Suyin's cheeks. It is because Suyin does not like Edmund. “He is,” Suyin says, “a foolish, careless man who may be dangerous. Mr. Bao Ke Si does not belong here in China doing what those foreign people do.”

Edmund's houseboy came early in the afternoon. He is pretty like a girl. He has wide eyes that are full of trust, and Suyin says they make her ache, those eyes he has.

Edmund's note said,
I will come to see you this evening.
It was signed,
Eternally yours, Edmund Trelawney Backhouse.

Jinhua wrote her response in German, which Edmund speaks fluently, along with Greek, French, Chinese, Latin, and English, of course. While she was writing, she heard Suyin talking to the boy. “Go and buy yourself something nice, like skewered crabapples coated with honey and sesame seeds.”

A pleasure of childhood that clings to a person's teeth—and his memory.

Suyin gave the boy a string of cash and said, “Go quickly before I change my mind,” but she was only teasing him, and her voice was gentle.

Jinhua told the boy, “Don't eat too many or your tummy will
ache.” He dashed off as quick as a rabbit, pigtail flying, trousers flapping, peeking back at them over his shoulder and laughing. Jinhua called out, “Don't forget to deliver my note,” and Suyin turned to her and said, “I hope that your Mr. Bao Ke Si is good to that child.”

Jinhua doesn't know about that. Edmund is unreliable. He does as he pleases, and Jinhua tells herself,
Be careful. He is not who you want him to be, even with those blue, blue eyes he has.

Maybe he will come this evening, and maybe he won't.

She feels warm and moist and clean after her bath. Eager to see Edmund. When Jinhua walks into the room—her bedroom—he is sitting on the pink and foreign divan; he has one leg crossed over the other, his buckled shoe is wagging back and forth, and his fine hands are resting on his narrow thigh. It is a pose no Chinaman would ever strike.

Edmund has ignored the midnight rule—again. Jinhua's hair is wet and dripping down her back.

“
Tu arrives enfin,
ma chère luotangji,
” he says, calling her his darling and bedraggled little chicken in the way that only he—Edmund—could, blending what is Chinese and what is French in his mouth, tasting the words and spilling them out as though—of course—they all belonged together.

He is affectionate with her. He speaks the Chinese words as though he were part Chinaman after all, and Jinhua doesn't mind about the breaking of the midnight rule—or the lateness of the hour.

“I have been craving your company,” he says, “all day,” and his hand moves to his throat with a glint of gold; his fingers stroke his silk cravat, the one with the yellow-, blue-, and red-striped crest of
his college back in England. A place he talks about called Oxford. He mentions a man named Oscar Wilde as though she should know who that is, but she doesn't. “He is a great friend who has made me very happy at times,” he tells her. The opium tray is on the table next to him. The lamp is lit. Edmund unties his cravat; he unthreads it from his collar and allows it to drop to the floor.