The Last Mandarin

by Stephen Becker

  Burnham crossed the garden, and in those few steps he warmed; his eyes brightened; his blood fluttered, thickened; he seemed to swell. He had come home. He walked in Peking at dusk, and there was no city as beautiful by day, or as mysterious and overwhelming at night. In the shadowed garden spirits prowled. Silence crouched. He held his breath. He had come so far, and now approached the magician’s booth, and enchantment. His mind drew no images, but he walked through a dim gallery of women, and of womanly delights: the sweet round faces, the sweet smooth skin, the sweet small breasts, the surpassing warmth of thighs, the molten moment of union. He was approaching the finite but unbounded universe of the senses, and the stars above him seemed hung from a low and private sky; here he was safe, and could seek the only love he knew or trusted, the shared annihilation. Here he was not foreign; here he was little boy Burnham, offering the dewy, downy, silken submission of the soul, the ultimate, brimming fusion of yang and yin. He stepped softly toward a luminous dream.

  And entered a parlor, and a nightmare. Once gold, the room stood gray, even in lamplight; once richly painted, richly hung with scrolls and drawings, the bare walls shed flakes and curls of cheap plaster. The chill room repelled him. He turned sharply to the boy: “You say Aunt Chi is well?”

  “I will fetch her,” the boy assured him, and padded away.

  Burnham rubbed his hands and wrinkled his nose in dismay. He sniffed: a faint mist of tea, of cooked meats and spices. One lamp only. Where were the rosewood tables, the cloisonné cigarette boxes? And here in the parlor, the antechamber, the scrolls had been decorous: finches, bamboo, calligraphy, a mountain in a red-gold mist. All gone.

  The far door quavered open and she saw her, a little heron of a woman, ancient yet ageless, face and hair all cobwebs, blouse and trousers always red silk, her feet bound, shoes not four inches long. He was assailed by pity—this old bawd, silenced, impoverished, doomed—and did not know what to say.

  Not so Aunt Chi. “Burnham!” she shouted, like a bull bellowing. “Oh you weasel! Oh rutting elephant! Oh liar! Oh thief of sweets! Oh scourge of maidenheads! You owe me twenty dollars!”

  Burnham strode forward, his arms open: “Oh my dowager empress! My forger of virginities! My second mother! You old bustard!”

  She tottered a step or two and suffered his embrace; she had suffered worse. Pulling away to read her features, Burnham saw that her deep brown eyes were clouded, and her lips drawn farther back from black gums. On her left cheek rode the mole he remembered, sprouting two hairs like antennae.

  “Nn, nn, nn,” she agreed. “I age. It is better than not aging. And you? Your health? I suppose you are covered with plum blossoms?”

  These being chancres, Burnham chuckled and winced at once. “You never change. You are the most evil and cynical bawd it has ever been my good luck to know.”

  “Bawd, is it! A business like any other, my son. Younger Brother”—she turned to the boy—“tea in the salon.”

  The boy had lingered in the doorway, and his astonishment was obvious; he scurried away.

  For a moment they did not stir or speak.

  “Times are bad,” he said at last.

  “We have fallen low,” she said. “No more singing girls. Only t’u-ch’ang.”

  Local whores. “But I see none here.”

  “I am a madam, not a procuress. Bustard indeed! So I retired. Come into the other room.”

  He followed her.

  “Close the door,” she told him. “Heat flees.”

  This room too was dead—the grand salon, once a long room and jolly, with real wallpaper in a pattern of golden grass and the walls hung with works of art: The Magistrate’s Wife, Disheveled, Pleading with her Mongol Captors; The Monk and His Pretended Novice; The Virgin’s First Sight of the New Household God; The Four Wives Instruct the Fifth (with the Aid of a Handsome Wine Merchant from Loyang). Burnham saw traces of the wallpaper, stained, peeling.

  Aunt Chi hobbled to a plain wooden chair and sat. Before her, a barrel and a board served as table. Burnham’s cloth shoes scuffed the stone floor. He, too, sat; for a moment they mourned the past. “Tell me.”

  The old woman shrugged. “They left. I can hire all the t’u-ch’ang I want, but t’u-ch’ang are not my way, with a dozen in one room and every street vendor paying a penny for three minutes. You recall Li-li?”

  “Who could forget Li-li?”

  “Ah, yes.” Aunt Chi smiled; her head trembled. “That famous behind. She ran off to Shanghai with a textile tycoon.”

  “And Han-chen?”

  “Of the extravagant globes. The foreigners’ delight. Gone south.” Aunt Chi’s wave dismissed her. “She had a baby and disgraced herself.”

  “She bathed the baby?” It was the gentle way to say “drowned.”

  “No, no. Playfully she squirted milk at a client. I swear to this. An American. He was offended.” Aunt Chi drew breath; she seemed to pant through her wide nostrils.

  “And Mei-tzu the acrobat?”

  “With a colonel. It was fate. This was a house of quality, and women of quality will not stay in rotten times. Rotten, rotten, rotten times. First the money went rotten. Then last year in August they gave us new money, the gold yuan, four of them to one dollar of yours. By then the old money was about twelve million to one of yours, so at the least the new money was easier to carry. With the old money clients brought bags of it for an hour’s pleasure. But the new money too—ai! in a month it was twenty to one. Now it is a thousand to one and doubling every week. That would be—what?—three thousand million of the old money to one of your dollars! And the old money is still much in use, and who can count so high? Who can grasp? Who can conceive?”

  “It is a horror,” Burnham agreed. “Why do I owe you twenty dollars?”

  Aunt Chi giggled. “Perhaps you do not. It is a thing one says. Who knows? A bad conscience pays untendered bills.”

  “You old bandit,” he said softly. “Then you are alone.”

  She nodded. “Only the boy stays. I could rent the rooms, but who can pay rent? Ah, this money! It is garbage! Ju pu fu ch’u!”

  Outgo exceeds income! But it was lovely and almost funny in the melodic Mandarin. He could not laugh in the face of his crabbed old friend’s hot-eyed distress; yet he could not feel the anguish, not fully and perhaps not at all.

  “Paper,” she was muttering. “Endless banknotes. Printed in your Philadelphia.”

  “I know. Shipped to Shanghai. Boatloads.”

  The quiet room spoke. Shabby genteel. Decayed whorehouse. Faded lives. Silenced echoes. “Then how do you live?”

  A gleam of the old mischief, a flash of teeth: “I trade a little. Buy-sell.”

  “Ah.” Perfect understanding flowed instantly between then. “First-class stuff?”

  “Of many origins but one quality.” She grew suddenly cheerful, a hostess remiss: “And you? What is your life? Have you taken a dustpan and broom?”

  “A stupid and thorny? No, I am not married. Such phrases for wives!”

  “Men made the language,” she said, still cheerful. “Women were forbidden to read or write, and could be sent away for daring to learn. What phrase would you prefer? ‘Within woman’?”

  “Not even that,” Burnham said. “‘My within woman.’ As if she were let out of a small box twice a day.”

  “Oh well, women,” she said. “When did you arrive?”

  “Only this afternoon. Would I wait to see my true love?”

  She cackled. “Your true love! Many women were your friends, but your true love was a juicy cunt.” The boy had entered; he set down the tray. “I remember them shouting ‘Burnham! Burnham!’ like a cageful of birds.”

  “Birds of paradise,” he sighed, and he too remembered them, hopping forward like wind-up toys to shelter in his hug; remembered the glee in his soul, as if he were a collector among rare porcelains, or—credit where credit is due—a man of warm affections among many old friends. The beauty of young women, the loose blous
es, khaki shirts, high-slit tunics, a breast bobbling here and a muff flashing there; the lovely faces, soft features, full lips, gentle noses and long black hair, often with red glints. An image teased him: Han-chen’s round face, and the hair whipping as she danced. She wore a whore’s scanty robe, a sleazy print loosely belted, and as she whirled she offered and withdrew her glories, breasts fuller than most Chinese breasts, ivory thighs, an exuberant bush, a jungle. Often he had lit a campfire in that jungle, and even now he could remember the taste of her broad, perfumed nipples, and the waft of ginger on her breath.

  “No gratitude,” Aunt Chi grumbled. “Without me they would have been good women and starving, or slaves to some impotent old guzzler, or hasting toward the long sleep in a military brothel.”

  He remembered Mei-tzu in a long fly-fronted silk shirt, just one gold button at the navel. Tall Li-li of the classic rump, hauntingly handsome in tunics. Shrieks of laughter, glimpses, caresses, protests, their joy in the hair on his chest.

  “I can find you a girl if you want,” Aunt Chi said. “I can send out.”

  “No, no. I came to see you.”

  They sipped. Aunt Chi pulled a box of cigarettes from her pocket and waved it at him; he shook his head, but reached for her matches and offered fire. “Thank you,” she said. “You always did have a manner.” She squinted through the smoke. “You are up to something.”

  “Younger Brother,” Burnham said, “my san-luerh is outside. Will you tell him to wait?”

  The boy hurried off.

  Burnham swallowed more tea, and told the woman about Kanamori.

  “Will it never end?”

  “It is the quest for justice.”

  “Justice does not exist,” she said flatly, and he was reminded that the Manchus had forbidden the binding of feet but could not enforce the prohibition. Those twisted, clawed, agonized feet were deemed sexually exciting. “All men know that justice does not exist. Surely all women know it. If one steals a bowl of rice, why is that worth a year in prison? Why not a week? Or ten years? If one bathes the baby nothing is said. What is justice? Who decides? Where is the justice in being born what one is, a daughter of Han or a son of your American gold? It is accident, not justice.”

  “The man must be punished,” Burnham said. “Do you know of him?”

  “Know of him! Hsüü!” She grimaced, a death’s-head.

  He waited.

  “Yü,” she said, “vile, vile.” She muttered; he did not catch the words. She spat on the floor. “Do you remember O-lu-ka with the dyed red hair?”

  “The White Russian? Olga?”

  “Her. She came here from Nanking, where she had a house once. We gossiped, she and I. Bustards love gossip. Olga knew many Japanese. The White Russians were contemptuous of the Japanese, but even more contemptuous of the Chinese.”

  “And Kanamori was her friend?”

  “Friend? Men like Kanamori have no friends. But she knew his secret. His mother was Chinese.”

  “Chinese!” So much for American military intelligence. Burnham was not easily shocked, but he felt as if the world were slipping from his grasp. “Chinese! But he … he raped! He killed! He was cold-blooded, uncontrollable! A Chinese mother!”

  Aunt Chi shrugged. “Men! Listen now: that was his disgrace. For a Japanese officer a secret shame. He was killing the worst of himself.” She cocked her head, a wizened hen. “Did he rape? You are sure?”

  Burnham was stopped cold. It was an axiom, an eternal verity, a truism: Kanamori raped. Now he reconsidered. He recalled no testimony or evidence that Kanamori himself had raped. “He led gangs of rapists. He kidnapped.”

  “Ah, but the man himself.” Aunt Chi shuddered. “Less than human.” She brooded.

  “Tell me.”

  “Patience. One does not speak willingly of such filth.”

  Burnham was confused and impressed. What there was to know of men’s filth, Aunt Chi knew; what gave her pause must be momentous.

  “He required to be whipped,” Aunt Chi said. “Olga told me this. She supervised the whipping, so this animal would not go too far and die in her house. This skinny Japanese with welts on his back would fall naked to his hands and knees, and his pizzle drooped long like an old horse’s, and the girls would whip him, and he would cry out in Chinese, always in Chinese, and his pizzle would rise. A madman. At the moment of fulfillment he would weep and wail and hang on the tit.”

  Gagging slightly, Burnham protested: “This was a hero. A great fighter, even in single combat.”

  “So much for heroes,” Aunt Chi said. “Then this hero would threaten brutal revenge against any who gossiped. He threatened Olga with mass rape and then flaying. Ah, the officer’s mind! As time passed he needed more and more whipping. A hero! Because he commanded rapists? Because he executed helpless men? Olga was losing weight and had stomach trouble, and between his fancy notions of love and wild-eyed threats she began to vomit at the sight of him. This was less than courtly.”

  “And what became of him? Did Olga tell you?”

  “He disappeared.” She hesitated. “He is dead.”

  “Do you know this?”

  “I know this.”

  “You saw?”

  “Well,” she said, “I heard. There are a few like him still here, the dregs. Also in Tientsin, and in the northeast. This country is full of Japanese.” She waved in dismissal of those invaders. “But I no longer hear anything. I am no longer at the center of society.”

  “Do you know an inspector of police called Yen Chieh-kuo?”

  She laughed harshly. “Him I know. Who does not? A famous guardian of morals, a flogger of students. Is he also after this Japanese?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am on the side of the Japanese.”

  “Yüü!”

  Aunt Chi snorted rudely: “There is little difference between one man and another. With the exception of my foster son Burnham they are all nasty brutes, and I care very little what they do to one another.”

  “But you did not know Kanamori yourself?”

  “No. I tell you the truth.”

  “You always did. Listen: I have spoken to others about this one. They know more than they will say.”

  “So you did not come here first.” She grinned, evil and sly.

  “I make my important visits late in the day.”

  “You always did.”

  “And none more important than you.”

  “Even now?”

  “Even now.” He patted her hand.

  She grunted, but her smile softened. “Well, then.”

  Younger Brother entered: the ricksha man was well and would wait. Was more tea desired? “Go be warm in the kitchen,” Aunt Chi said. The boy left. “And what do your friends tell you?”

  “The usual murky poetry, the usual coded secrets. The Americans told me too little; there must have been more. My Chinese friends tell me politely to go home. I am perhaps to make a friend of the beggars.”

  Aunt Chi radiated astonishment: “Beggars! Beggars of the street?”

  “Beggars. I want to see Head Beggar.”

  She shrugged. “These I do not know. These do not—did not—come here.”

  “Nevertheless, help me if you can. Do you know the place they call the Beggars’ Hospital?”

  Now she nodded. “I know of it. In the lower city. It heals those no one else will heal.”

  “Is it Christian?”

  “No.”

  “Government?”

  “No.” She scowled, in the annoyance of the gossip balked. “A clinic. The very poor go. Chiefly for children.”

  “And whence flows the money?”

  Again the scowl. “I do not know. It is perhaps …” She made the finger sign for eight.

  “That would surprise me. What do you think of them?”

  “The Communists?” Again she waved in impatience and scorn; how many governments had come and gone in her lifetime! “We need something,” she grudged. “But these Communist
s are ungenerous with their seed! They do not differentiate between yang and yin! They hump principles!”

  “Will they harm you?”

  “Who can tell? I am an old woman with bound feet. They will show me and make speeches. I will eat and be warm. I do little more now.”

  “You have money, surely.”

  She peered, as if to verify his identity: yes, it was old Burnham, the goat with two pizzles, who had drunk and pranced and scattered gold. “I have money,” she said. “Why do we speak of my money?”

  “If you truly sell,” he said reasonably, “it behooves old friends to buy.”

  “You sweet boy,” she sympathized. “What do you need?”

  “‘Need’ is perhaps too strong. ‘Desire.’ Stylet, pipe, a hundred pellets—what sort have you?”

  “Heavy yang-t’u,” she said immediately, “from the Plaine des Jarres, and light ch’uan-t’u.”

  “Ch’uan-t’u? They still run it up from Szechuan, do they?”

  “Roundabout. The caravans march always, nothing stops the caravans. And goods arrive at staging points. It is like a great river and many small tributaries. And winter, as you know, is the good season. In summer opium stinks, and the officials pounce on hidden stores.”

  “It will be banned, you know, when the Communists win. A matter of weeks,” Burnham said smoothly.

  “What is this now?” Aunt Chi pretended outrage.

  “It will be illegal and troublesome to possess,” Burnham cautioned her. “In truth I do you a favor to take it from you.”

  “Hsüü! Trader! Thus you dicker with your second mother!” She glowed with the fun of this. “Men died to bring it here! I risk execution for your pleasure!”

  “You risk execution if your inventory comes to light,” he said. “Furthermore, I offer hard currency.”

  “Hard currency is in your favor,” she conceded. “But you save time and trouble dealing with old friends; you spare youself wanderings and chafferings; moreover, you can trust the goods.”