A Geisha for the American Consul (a short story)

by Lesley Downer

  And so it went on night after night. He would clamber on top of her without bothering to acknowledge that she was even a person, as if he was simply satisfying a need as basic as eating or drinking. She did her best to pretend to enjoy it, but he didn’t seem to care or even notice, and each night she would lie silently weeping afterwards.

  *

  Little by little she became used to her life in the temple, but the nights continued as grim as ever and she found herself dreading them more and more.

  Then one day it came to her. There was one thing at least she could do. She waited till she was alone with Fuku then turned to her and asked as casually as she could, ‘At night … do you talk with the young master?’

  ‘With Henry? A little. He speaks our language.’

  Okichi was silent. It was humiliating to have to admit to failure; but it had to be done. ‘I can’t talk to the old master at all. Tell me, Little Sister, does he teach you any words, any sentences?’

  Fuku raised her shaved eyebrows in mock incomprehension. ‘Of his language? Teach me? Why should he? We’re too busy with other things.’ There was a spark of triumph in her eye. She had succeeded where Okichi had failed.

  Okichi stared at her plump round face, stifling the urge to snap at her. Fuku was only fifteen, only a couple of years into adulthood, she reminded herself. Okichi was Fuku’s Big Sister, she was supposed to take care of her and teach her, not rebuke her. She dug at the ground with the toe of her sandal. ‘I’d like to learn their language,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘It would help if I could talk to the old man, a few words at least.’

  Fuku was silent, then she nodded, her face softening. ‘Give me a little time. I’ll ask the young master for a few words and tell you them.’

  Okichi took a breath. She couldn’t escape it so she might as well make the best of it. ‘Ask him for pillow talk,’ she said. ‘Words for making love.’

  *

  That evening, Okichi went to the bedroom as usual. She took a deep breath, then arranged herself on the futons with her kimono arranged around her, falling enticingly open. The old man burst in frowning, as if the day had not gone well, shaking his head as if at some troubling thought. He looked surprised at her seductive pose.

  Okichi held out her hand. She knew about powerful old men. Some of her clients had been merchants or city elders. As a geisha it was her job to help them relax and forget.

  He hesitated, then sat down beside her and rested his chin on his fist, his brow furrowed, and gave a long sigh.

  She waited a while, then gently touched the back of his hand, resisting the urge to recoil as her fingers brushed the coarse hairs there. He started and looked at her and she pointed to herself. ‘I am Okichi. Okichi,’ she said, softly but clearly. She wished she could speak his language but she couldn’t. The best she could do was to phrase it as simply as possible. She gestured towards him. ‘And you?’

  He scowled. Then his face softened as he realized what she was asking. ‘Townsend.’

  ‘Ton Sen,’ she repeated. ‘Ton Sen.’

  He corrected her. ‘Townsend.’

  ‘Ton Sen,’ she said again. He chuckled. She felt something change. They were both human beings; that much they’d established.

  Suddenly she was not so afraid any more. She gazed at him. His face was stern, he pursed his lips in an arrogant way and he held his back very straight, with his chest thrust out like a fighting cock. He was an important man, a proud man, she could see that. Yet she could also see the sadness in his eyes that she’d noticed on their first night.

  She was only seventeen and he looked as old as her grandfather but somehow she could understand his sadness. She tried to imagine how it must feel, living in this foreign country, just the two of them, where everyone was afraid of them and called them barbarians, where they had to stay far away from the city so they wouldn’t bring pollution, where everything was different – food and manners and customs and clothes, probably even the landscape – and all this without even a woman to ease their hearts. The only person the old man could talk to was the young master. Perhaps he missed his country, missed being at home among his own people. He must have family somewhere, a wife and children maybe, even grandchildren. People he cared about and never had the chance to see.

  Tears pricked her eyes. It must be lonely for him here, she thought, so lonely.

  She laid her hand on his leg and stroked it.

  After a while he took off his clothes and lay down next to her and put his arms around her. She stroked his back and whispered, ‘Ton Sen, Ton Sen,’ as if he were a child.

  *

  After he left next morning she lay for a while, thinking. She knew now what the porcelain bowl under the bed was for. It was not a pillow, as she’d thought, even though it was the perfect height for one. It was for when the old master needed to relieve himself in the night.

  On previous days she’d fled without even a look behind, as though demons were on her tail, trying to shake the smell of him off her clothes, but today she felt different. The garments Ton Sen had worn when he’d come in last night were strewn about, some on the carved platform he sat on, some crumpled on the floor for the Chinese servants to tidy away.

  She picked one up and rubbed the fabric between her fingers. It was not silk or cotton but some other material, heavy and coarsely woven, with the damp feel and musty smell that the floor coverings had. The garment was not made of large rectangles that could be neatly folded and stored away, like a kimono, but of differently shaped pieces stitched together, like peasants’ clothing.

  She held it up and turned it round and round till she worked out how it hung. Spread flat it looked like the upper half of a person, with two tubular extensions that would fit around an arm. Instead of ribbons or a drawstring to hold it in place, there were neatly stitched holes cut in the fabric and small round objects that slotted through them. It had Townsend’s smell but it didn’t repel her as much as it had.

  ‘Ton Sen,’ she murmured, ‘Ton Sen.’ She smiled to herself.

  She looked at the garment more closely and saw a small hole with a frayed edge in one of the tubes. She clicked her tongue in disapproval. As was to be expected, the Chinese servants weren’t doing their job properly. She would mend it, she told herself, and put it back.

  She examined the other garments – two tubes like a peasant’s leggings but narrower and of that same scratchy material, a starched upper garment of fine white linen and a garment, embroidered like an obi, that covered the chest but not the arms. She folded them all carefully, then looked around for the futon cupboard to put the futons away but couldn’t see one. Pursing her lips she smoothed the futons out, laid the folded garments on top and checked to make sure the room was tidy. She would pick some flowers for the table, she told herself.

  As she tucked the torn upper garment under her arm and went to join Fuku for breakfast, she hummed quietly. Life no longer seemed so unbearable.

  Chapter 3

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, instead of climbing straight into bed Townsend pulled open a drawer and took out a thin metal case. He sat on the edge of the bed and gestured to Okichi to sit beside him.

  Inside the case were two stiff rectangles of some sort of paper marked in shades of silver and grey. When he held them out, Okichi saw two faces, blurry but distinct, not stylised like a woodblock engraving but real human faces imprinted on the paper, one an elderly woman with barbarian features, the other a man. They were so close to real life it made her shiver. It was like magic.

  Townsend put his hands together as if in prayer and gestured upwards. His parents, Okichi guessed, now dead.

  He showed her another picture, of a house, unlike any Okichi had seen before, with trees beside it. She looked at the pictures reverently, touched that he wanted to show her the world where he belonged. If these were his parents and his house, she thought, then the pictures should be where he could see them, not hidden away in a drawer. She propped them on top of the ches
t, beside the vase of flowers. He nodded approval.

  For a while they sat together in companionable silence. He took her hand and ran his finger across the small, smooth palm, then turned it over and looked at the back, examining each nail. Laughing, she put her hand on top of his. Hers was tiny and brown, his twice as big as hers, and hairy.

  ‘Hand,’ she said.

  He repeated the word, then said in his language: ‘Hando.’ He held up a finger and said, ‘Fingaa’, then showed her his thumb and she repeated, ‘Tum.’ But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t make the same sound he did. He laughed so much he had to take out a handkerchief and wipe his eyes.

  Then he closed his large hand over her small one and held it tight, gazing at her with his round eyes. He wasn’t laughing now. He raised her hand to his mouth and she felt the roughness of his whiskers pricking her skin as he pressed his lips to it. She looked at him, bewildered, wondering what this strange licking could mean. It was not to do with lovemaking. It was warm and intimate, more like a gesture a mother might make to her child, not a man to a woman.

  Then he put his mouth to her cheek. Mouth-to-mouth contact, mingling tongues, was what you did at the height of passion, but this was not that. It was more like being nuzzled by a dog. She wondered if he was expecting her to laugh and push him away, but he seemed too serious. He moved his mouth to her chin and throat, pausing to murmur words in his own language, and she closed her eyes, basking in the closeness.

  When he sat up abruptly and blew out the oil lamps, she felt a pang of disappointment. She’d been enjoying the new intimacy. Perhaps his lovemaking would be different tonight, she thought, more tender.

  He threw off his clothes as he always did, pushed her sleeping robe aside and thrust her back on the bed. Then she felt his hand reaching for her breast in the darkness, cupping it gently as if enjoying its soft roundness. He fumbled for the nipple and put his lips to it and she gasped at the unexpected shock of pleasure. She could hear the rasp of his breath and feel his Jade Stalk hard against her leg. In the past it had repelled her but now it didn’t.

  ‘Ton Sen, Ton Sen,’ she groaned, feeling herself melt under his touch as the yin juices began to flow.

  *

  Next morning even the sour-faced head servant was smiling. ‘I don’t know what you do but whatever it is, it good. Old Master very cheerful. Tonight you take in dinner. From now on you serve meals.’

  Later that day, early in the afternoon when there would not be too many people around, Okichi and Fuku slipped into town and went to the bath house. The men and women soaking there drew back as the two girls finished washing and stepped into the steaming water. They heard mutters of ‘Look, it’s Okichi. It’s Fuku. They’ve been with the tojin. They’re tojin too.’ Okichi kept her eyes lowered. It was true, she realized with a shock. She was part of the tojin’s world now. She could never go back. She had already decided she wouldn’t go and speak to the magistrate. She had nothing to report – nothing that would interest him, anyway. Strangely, the temple was beginning to feel almost like a refuge, like home.

  In the evening they went to the kitchens. The cramped cooking area was full of smoke and sounds of sizzling and the smells of hot oil and cooking meat. Sparks flew from the charcoal stoves. There were a couple of large slices of meat grilling on the big clay oven.

  ‘Pig meat,’ grunted the plump Chinese cook.

  Okichi wrinkled her nose. The cook laid the slabs of meat on round white plates and put them on two trays with a couple of lethal-looking knives and what looked like small pitchforks.

  ‘To eat with.’

  Okichi and Fuku looked at each other in shocked disbelief. It was pitiful that their men had to eat such unappetising food, let alone on such ugly plates and with nothing but weapons to eat with.

  The simple fare for the two girls was already prepared – simmered seaweed, spinach with ground sesame seeds, rice, miso soup and crunchy pickled radish, laid out on small differently shaped dishes; square, round or oval, some ceramic, some lacquered wood.

  ‘Maybe they’ve never had our food. They might like it,’ Okichi said.

  The cook raised a thin eyebrow but he added a small dish of spinach and a pair of chopsticks to each tray.

  Okichi knelt and slid open the door to the dining room. She smiled as she carried in the tray with Townsend’s dinner on it. Fuku followed with Henry’s, just as if they were real wives serving their husbands.

  The two men were sitting on each side of a high table on what Okichi now knew were called ‘chairs’, with their legs hanging down and their boot-clad feet on the floor. It looked very uncomfortable and awkward.

  Townsend seemed in high spirits. He smiled as Okichi set his tray in front of him and took a sip of the pale-gold drink that they seemed to enjoy so much. She’d tried some surreptitiously earlier in the day. It had a fiery taste. The first sip had made her choke, but the second time she found she liked the way it burnt all the way down her throat and glowed in her stomach. ‘Whiskey’, it was called.

  They watched, fascinated, as the men picked up their weapons and tucked into their meat.

  ‘Please,’ said Okichi, gesturing towards the spinach. It was a new word she’d learnt. Townsend looked at her with his habitual frown, but she was used to it now. She took his hand and slipped the chopsticks between his fingers.

  ‘Please,’ she said again.

  He tried to open the chopsticks, wriggling first one thick finger, then another, but they didn’t move. In the end he took the two of them and dug them into the spinach like a spade, hooked up a dark-green strand, then dropped it again. Henry tried and failed too, though Okichi suspected he could use chopsticks perfectly well and was just pretending. The two girls did their best to help, in fits of giggles. The men laughed too.

  Finally Townsend picked up some spinach with his metal implements and tasted it. He screwed up his face and muttered something.

  ‘Not food for a man,’ Henry translated.

  ‘Now you have to sit on the floor like us,’ Okichi teased, gesturing from where she and Fuku knelt side by side, their legs tucked neatly under them.

  Townsend threw back his head and roared with laughter. Okichi had never seen him so merry.

  *

  A few days later, Fuku took Okichi aside and told her she had spoken to the young master and had some words for her. She’d written them down in kana, the script women used.

  Okichi spelled out the syllables. ‘Ai rabu iu. What does it mean?’

  ‘Ai is “I”. Iu is “you”. Rabu is “desire”. It means “I desire you”,’ said Fuku.

  ‘It’s a bit strong, isn’t it? A bit direct. Not very poetic,’ said Okichi dubiously.

  ‘Henry says it’s what barbarians say when they pillow.’

  ‘Ai rabu iu,’ said Okichi, trying out the strange syllables again.

  ‘What other words do you want, Big Sister? Tell me and I’ll ask him.’

  ‘Let me think,’ said Okichi.

  To begin with Okichi had been thinking of words Mother had taught her, words from the manuals like ‘Jade Stalk’, ‘Lute Strings’ and ‘Jade Gate’. But now she knew the old master better, she wondered if more down-to-earth words might not be more useful, comforting phrases like, ‘Are you tired? Come and lie with me,’ and words to use when they grew close: ‘Touch me here,’ ‘Turn over,’ ‘Lie still.’

  A very important word would be ‘Not today,’ on the days when she knew she was at risk of conceiving or when she was having a period, when he would be defiled if he touched her and she would slip away to the room where she and Fuku kept their clothes to sleep.

  It would be good to know the names for parts of the body too, not poetic names like ‘Jade Stalk’ but straightforward ones – ‘hand,’ ‘breast,’ even ‘penis’, though it took away the magic to use such a prosaic term. As for the ‘Lute Strings’, the bush of hair that Okichi always kept neatly trimmed, the ‘Jewel Terrace’, a woman’s most sensitive pl
ace, and the ‘Cinnabar Cleft’, she couldn’t bring herself to ask for more down to earth terms for those.

  That night she tried out the new phrase. As they lay together she ran her hand across the stiff grey hairs on Ton Sen’s fleshy chest. She guided his hand to her small round breasts, then to the Cinnabar Cleft, encouraging him to stroke the Jewel Terrace, and groaned enthusiastically, simulating ecstasy. Then she reached for the Jade Stalk, feeling it spring to life under her touch. When he was ready, she whispered, ‘Ai rabu iu.’

  The result was electrifying. He started and pulled back, his odd pale eyes staring out of the creases in his face as if he couldn’t believe his ears.

  She said it again. ‘Ai rabu iu.’

  He shook his head and rubbed his hand across his eyes and gave an incredulous laugh. Then he did something he’d never done before. He brushed his whiskery mouth across her cheek, then pressed it to her lips. That she understood. The erotic touching of mouths was one of the geishas’ most intimate techniques, reserved for the most favoured customers, guaranteed to enhance intimacy and pleasure. She forgot his age, forgot how different he was. She closed her eyes and curved her body hungrily into his as their lips and tongues touched and mingled.

  The lovemaking that followed had never been so intense.

  *

  At first Okichi had envied Fuku. The young master was slender and his skin was smooth, though he had even more hair on his face than Townsend, and he was cheerful, not heavy and dour. He laughed a lot and could even speak their language. But now she felt perfectly happy that she belonged to the old master, to Townsend.

  As the days grew longer, she found herself yearning for night. Townsend too came to bed earlier and earlier. He was often tired and angry from arguing all day. She’d massage his shoulders or his back or feet and then they would lie together.

  By now she’d almost forgotten how alien his face was, how different his skin. It had become as familiar to her as her own body. And as for his odd smell, she found it almost endearing. But she couldn’t get used to the way he made love. No matter how much time he spent putting his mouth to her face and neck, when they made love it always had to be in the dark, hurriedly and face to face, in the position called Close Union in the manuals. He always kept his eyes tightly closed, as if he wanted to pretend it never really took place. He really did seem to come from a land with no refined techniques of lovemaking, where lovemaking was bad and shameful, to be done furtively, under the covers, hidden and never spoken about. He seemed to want her to be his guilty secret – though actually it was no secret at all that they slept together. That was something Okichi couldn’t understand.