Cloud Mountain

by Aimee E. Liu

  All right, I’ve allowed myself to get carried away with this rapture, at least in part, because I’m ashamed. The cool light of reason and your sage advice have prevailed. Why is it that we accept wisdom so much more readily from friends than lovers? Your reprimand was hardly different from Paul’s and yet I was willing to listen instead of bullheadedly ducking and dodging as I did with him. The answer to your question of infidelity is, I don’t know. When I asked Paul, he insinuated that there had been rumors, and though he stopped short of saying he believed them, I’m quite certain he does. So perhaps Mulan is lucky to be alive at all, as Dalin would be well within his rights to lock her up and starve her to death—or worse—for such a crime. And perhaps she was trying to use me by painting herself as the victim, the way some play on the heartstrings of missionaries. How easily truth and deceit are exchanged in this land of mirrors! While we can’t help those who refuse to help themselves, there’s such a fine line between refusal and helplessness that I often can’t find it even within myself. I think you will understand why I feel I have been embroiled in a cautionary tale, and I must step back out of it if I know what’s good for me, whatever the truth of Mulan’s plight may be. Still, there’s no pretending I feel any better about it than I would if I were watching her slide over the edge of a precipice. Survival may be the axis around which we revolve, but it’s a painfully bleak world if that is all that we have in common.

  So, my dear, I must close and go rouse young Princess Jasmine. We are going for a last swim with Paul at Paradise Pool before he leaves us for Canton. I suppose you have heard Sun’s sometime ally Ch’en Chiung-ming has taken the city back again, and so the Ping-Pong game continues, and my husband with it. We will stay on here until the first, and be home the week before school starts—in time to move back to Frenchtown in October! I am writing madly to stockpile some articles, as I know I won’t get a word down once that onslaught begins.

  Thanks, as always, for bearing with me—and for the significant contribution you’ve made to the peace that currently reigns in my marriage. I do try to remind myself daily that that and the children are my primary concerns, but I am unforgivably distractible.

  See you in September,

  Love, Hope

  4

  She would think of the early twenties as accordion years, a time of continuous squeeze and expansion, with Sun in power in Canton, Sun out of power and back to Shanghai; a push toward modernization, a pull toward tradition; civil war against the north, truce with the various warlord cliques; drought and famine, rain and flooding; the Kuomintang dissolves, then reorganizes; the foreign imperialists are the enemy, the foreign powers allies. Paul’s moods and movements on any given day mirrored these various switchbacks so exactly that Hope gave up trying to gauge his mental outlook, as she had long ago given up trying to predict when he would come home. But every few weeks—or months—he did come home, and they would sequester themselves in their second-floor suite in the new house on Rue de Grouchy (their last neighborhood, Hongkew, had become so overrun with impoverished White Russians and other war refugees that Paul decided it was no longer suitable for Hope and the children), or in the book-lined study of the house in Kuling, and Paul would update her. He told of Sun’s grand military plan for a Northern Expedition to sweep the country under Nationalist control, and of the Bolshevik emissaries who were bending Sun’s ear with promises of arms and expertise—if he would embrace a socialist agenda. Sometimes Paul was didactic, often irate, and occasionally dejected. Increasingly he seemed plain worn out.

  Paul had lived, breathed, and dreamt the revolution every day for more than thirty years. To Hope’s mind, he had little to show for it. The country had become a patchwork of ever shifting and proliferating warlord fiefdoms, and while Dr. Sun was lionized by those like Paul who still credited him with overthrowing the Manchus, his real power in the current state was nonexistent. By remaining tenaciously in his service, Paul often worked months without pay and, though he was careful to see the Kuling house finished, the remainder of the funds Nai-li had left him soon vanished into Sun’s bankrupt coffers, to be doled out to the hundred men who formed Sun’s personal bodyguard—the only troops over whom Sun had any real control. This financial transfer, of course, was accomplished without Hope’s knowledge, nor was she ever notified ahead of time when Paul disappeared into the interior to negotiate the support of warlords who, likely as not, would be killed or ousted before the pact was sealed. Upon his return he would tell stories of pirates he’d passed on the river, or bandits he’d watched robbing graves, or the smoking funeral pyres he had seen in areas of cholera or smallpox epidemics.

  After sitting through one particularly long and grisly account of a warlord battle in which four schoolboys were killed in crossfire, she asked, “When are you going to realize that you also are vulnerable?”

  He smiled, and gave the familiar refrain. “I am not important. Nothing will happen to me.”

  “You are important to me and the children. That’s precisely what I wish you would get through your thick head.”

  “If my head is so thick,” he said blithely, “it will protect me.”

  Nothing changed and yet, for all the strains, these years introduced a new peace between them. Though Paul spent weeks at a stretch in Wuchang, where he was forever hammering out deals with local warlords on Sun’s behalf, she no longer recoiled from his embraces when he returned from these home visits. Nai-li was dead, and Ling-yi, as Hope had predicted, was erased from Paul’s thoughts as if she had never existed. While his capacity for oblivion gave her some pause, she trained herself to view it as affirmation of their own love.

  Gone were her early fantasies of working by his side, of translating his writings or being a political helpmate, yet Hope realized now that she was his partner in more meaningful ways. When he was tired and discouraged she gathered him into bed. Through her articles for Cadlow, she would flatter him with anonymous portraits of China’s returned students “striving for modernization,” and at those still rare events when it was politically helpful to display a foreign wife, she would appear publicly by his side. Sometimes she even went forth as his emissary, as on one memorable occasion when she and the children were driven in a Stutz roadster, with armed bodyguards on the running boards, to a banquet out by Siccawei with the head wife of Shanghai’s director general—who conversed in her thudding Hakka dialect for three solid hours without noticing that Hope understood not one word. Finally, there was her role as intermediary with Jin, who had sworn to her that he would never again let his politics endanger her or the children—but who nevertheless was becoming an ardent socialist. This meant that he and Paul continued to clash, and it fell to Hope to deliver the conciliatory messages and reports of Sun’s softening toward the Bolsheviks that would bring the two back together.

  At the same time, even if she had to secure an advance from Harper’s or borrow from Sarah, Hope made sure that Pearl and Morris and Jasmine, in her turn, were enrolled in school every fall, with new shoes and books and the latest fashions—white duck trousers and flannel jackets for Morris, pleated knee-length skirts and blouses for the girls—which Hope made from Parisian and American patterns. Summers they would spend in Kuling, usually with Sarah and Gerald and Ken (though Paul encouraged Hope to call on Daisy Tan, who was now living in Shanghai, he no longer opposed her preference for Sarah), and Paul joined them sometimes for as long as three weeks at a stretch. The children grew brown and sturdy during these idyllic months, and Hope put endless finishing touches on their home, convinced this was where she belonged.

  There were certain matters that Hope now banished from her thoughts. Stephen Mann was foremost. She told herself to consider him dead. To Sarah’s inquiries she would shrug or laugh. And on the rare occasions when the old longings threatened to rise again (usually during Paul’s prolonged absences), she would take herself out and photograph the meanest, most devastating images—maimed one-eyed babies, streetwalkers in rags, opium eaters
crouched by the road selling scraps of paper and used tin cans, corpses encrusted with rats, or human heads dangling in cages in the Chinese City—anything to remind herself how trivial were her own regrets.

  The other name she rigorously shut from her thoughts was Mulan’s. The autumn after Nainai’s death they had received a terse note from Dalin stating that Mulan had disappeared in the night. She had not taken her daughter or any of her belongings, and had poisoned Dalin’s four pet keeshonds to prevent their barking when she left. Paul wrote back that he had not seen or heard from his daughter, but would notify Dalin if he did. For days afterward, Hope was aware of a black Pierce-Arrow parked around the corner and a figure wearing a blue scholar’s gown and Homburg who hovered up the block. She kept the children home from school. Then Jed told her that a member of the Green Gang, Shanghai’s most notorious criminal syndicate, had demanded duplicates of her film, which, at Paul’s insistence, she authorized Jed to hand over. Paul assured her there was no basis for her gravest fear, that Dalin would try to get to Mulan by kidnapping the other children. “Such tactics are a last resort. If he really suspected that I had helped her he would confront me directly.”

  “That’s very reassuring,” Hope retorted, but soon the Pierce-Arrow and its occupants disappeared. There was nothing further from Dalin, and Paul said they should put Mulan out of their thoughts.

  Then, one evening in early May 1922, Hope received a note summoning her to an inn in the Chinese City. It was written in English and signed “Your Daughter.” Paul was in Canton, Jin in Hankow, and Yen had gone to the cinema for the evening. Hope was terrified the note might be some kind of trap and wanted someone to go with her. Sarah was unlikely to be either sympathetic or discreet, so instead, Hope telephoned Denniston’s. Fifteen minutes later Jed Israel was in front of her house with two rickshaws.

  Having never mentioned Mulan before, she quickly filled him in. Ever prepared, he had his Speed Graphic slung over his shoulder, but she instructed him that the subject might be less than cooperative. He dashed a hand through his thick red curls and answered noncommittally that he was used to that. The sinew in his voice startled her, and for a moment she was distracted by the recognition that the stammering adolescent she had met in Evanston had long since matured into a professional “China hand.”

  She gave a false address near French Park, but there was no sign they were being followed, and so, keeping as much as possible to back streets, they proceeded to their true destination. It was nearly ten o’clock when they reached the inn, a squat shadowy building, closely shuttered and barred, flanked by piece factories. Hope shuddered, recalling her last Chinese inn.

  Jed laid a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I know this place. The owner’s a g-good man.”

  She looked at him.

  “I know his son. He’s trying to organize the local sweatshop w-w-workers.”

  Jed knocked at the door, identifying himself by his Chinese name, and after a pause, a short tubercular-looking man opened up. But his smile faltered when he saw Hope, and faded completely when she asked to see Mulan. He led them to the opposite side of a court that must once have been a stately home, though the original halls had been divided and subdivided, the spaces between hemmed in, so that some twenty cubicles now surrounded the flat paved yard. The full moon was bright in a cloudless sky, but to Hope the pale dazzle only made the place seem more desolate.

  The room into which the innkeeper showed them was grimmer still. Even before the door opened they were assaulted by the stench of a full chamber pot and the strains of a tango pitching and dying at low volume from a box Victrola. One bare electric lightbulb flickered above the mattress where Mulan’s body lay.

  Hope’s first thought was that her stepdaughter was dead. The girl did not move, and her eyes were glassy. But then she saw Hope and tried to smile. Her head lolled back and forth. Hope crouched beside her and took her hand. The face was bare and she wore a man’s trousers and shirt many sizes too big for her. Suddenly she grimaced, and made an unearthly noise. Milky fluid trickled from the corner of her mouth, and a sweet metallic smell cut through the room’s general stench.

  Hope had a hand on her forehead, was searching for a pulse and shouting for Jed to get help, when Mulan tried to raise herself. “No!”

  Hope hesitated, then put an arm around the rigid shoulders and shook her head for Jed to stay.

  “It is carbolic.”

  Hope looked up and discovered a bulky blond man, dressed in the same manner as Mulan, sitting in the darkened corner on the other side of the bed.

  “I tell her ve better alone, but she vant you come.” The stranger’s voice was like a trampled animal’s.

  “Why?” demanded Hope. “Why has she done this?”

  “Dalin.”

  The girl’s head rocked to the right, and a bizarre brightness came into her eyes. She breathed, “Ivan, look. Pictures.”

  Hope glanced around and, to her disgust, saw that Jed had placed his camera on a stool and was training his lens on the couple. Ivan knelt beside the bed and took Mulan’s hands. Mulan pursed her lips in a grotesque stage kiss.

  “Don’t move,” said Jed in a low voice, his stammer overcome, as it always was, by the intensity he applied to his work. Hope wanted to fly at him and tear the stupid little machine from his grasp. She wanted to take Mulan and shake her. But she couldn’t move.

  “Two years ve live in secret,” said the Russian. “Dalin, he track us.”

  Jed slid his improvised tripod closer as the man bent to kiss Mulan’s forehead. The camera snapped. The tango wheezed and rallied. Mulan’s body convulsed.

  “Your friend, Jed.” Hope blocked the lens. “He must know someone around here with opium. Morphine. Anything to ease her pain.”

  They locked eyes for a moment, then he nodded and left the room. Hope took a rag that Mulan had clenched in her fist and wiped the sweat from her forehead. It was cold. “Why have you done this,” she murmured. “Why?”

  Mulan was trying to swallow. Her lover held a dirty glass to her lips. “Little bird,” he murmured.

  Hope said to him desperately, “Couldn’t you get her away!”

  His large, deep-set eyes welled up. “I try. I beg her, com vit me back to Russia. She vill not.”

  “Tell Father,” Mulan panted. “You see. Picture. Show him.”

  Hope backed away. “Is that why you sent for me? To punish your father?”

  A wild look of panic crossed Mulan’s face. Her knees seized up to her chest and she clung to Ivan’s arm as if she meant to climb it. The stink of the chamber pot, which the horror of the situation had overwhelmed, now rose to Hope’s notice once more. She crossed the room and yanked the needle off that grinding record, found the pot behind its screen. The contents slopped from beneath the lid, but she got it outside and herself to the pump in the center of the courtyard. She scrubbed her hands, her wrists, soaking her sleeves to the elbows, and struggled to compose herself.

  She was still standing there when Jed returned. “Better than opium.” He opened his palm to reveal a small black capsule.

  “What is it?”

  “Cyanide. Carbolic can take hours, and it’s agonizing. This, immediate.”

  Hope’s hand shook violently as she took the thing, so deadly it seemed alive.

  Ivan had settled onto the mattress beside Mulan with one arm cradling her shoulders, the other stroking her cheek. Hope held out the pill. “You can end this now.”

  But as Ivan lifted the capsule to her mouth, Mulan noticed Jed back behind his lens. “Picture,” she begged. “For my husband.”

  Hope turned away, repelled. The next instant she heard a faint gasp and the snap of Jed Israel’s shutter.

  It was her wish, Ivan told them, that he bury her at sea.

  Hope and Jed walked the darkened streets in silence back to Nanking Road. An American man and woman, they entered the lobby of the Cathay Hotel and turned toward the bar. It was well after midnight
, but no one tried to stop them. No one gave them a glance. Jed ordered two scotch whiskeys. Hope, who rarely drank anything more potent than a thimbleful of wine, swallowed hers in a gulp. The alcohol made her head throb. Her thoughts were consumed with Paul.

  Suddenly Jed’s hand covered hers. The sharp glitter of the bar lights and mirrors reflected in his eyes. Around them couples leaned, cuddled, nuzzled necks, clasping each other and swaying to the blues of the black pianist in the corner. The Annamese bartender smiled.

  A new revulsion came over her as she saw how she must appear to Jed. How she would, at this moment, appear to Paul. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

  Jed gazed at her steadily, then slid his hand away and ordered another drink. As she stood to go, he lifted his glass and said, “F-f-from the w-wedding to the deathbed. I feel like a member of the f-f-family.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “Is it?” He tilted his head and looked at her with one eye closed, as if taking her picture. “Why’d she h-hate Paul so much?”

  “Because he married me.”

  “Married you? Or l-l-loved you?”

  Hope murmured, “Loved.”

  Jed turned back to his drink, head down and shrugging. “Then you shouldn’t care.”

  She touched his shoulder gently, and kissed him on the cheek.