The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  The box is lacquer with mother-of-pearl, like the box for inks and brushes that Baba keeps on the great, dark pearwood desk where he works in his library, and seeing it makes tears come back. Jinhua isn’t allowed to touch Baba’s precious scholar things when he is gone, but sometimes she does, just a little, being very careful, thinking he won’t notice. Jinhua lifts the lid of Aiwen’s box and catches a glimpse of her own dark fringe and her little-bit-swollen eyes in the mirror that folds out of it. She settles herself on Aiwen’s stool. Maybe Aiwen won’t mind. Baba never minded, really, but that was because she is Baba’s child and he will love her forever and for always. Jinhua’s feet don’t quite touch the floor from where she is sitting. A shuddery sigh escapes—the kind of sigh that happens after crying.

  Inside Aiwen’s box are bright, delicate things that ladies use. The small pot of pink is like the circles on Lao Mama’s cheeks and like the god’s pink face and his fatty-fat hands. The pencil is black for painting eyes. The paper box is square and half filled with powder for a white face. Jinhua takes these things out of the box one by one and puts them on the table in a neat row. She tilts her head back, closes her eyes halfway, and adjusts the mirror. She knows what to do; she has seen Meiling do this often, and Timu once. It is what grown-up ladies do. She draws the black pencil across her eyelid, stretching the skin sideways almost to the edge of her face. The mark she has made is faint and uneven. She presses harder. “Eye like almond,” the go-between said. Yes. The color on her two eyes is dark, still uneven, but quite beautiful, and the shape is almost like an almond. Jinhua turns her head to one side, and her pearl earrings that Baba brought from Peking dangle next to her throat—

  The face part is easier. Jinhua rubs powder in circles around her forehead, nose, cheeks, and chin. Her face is milky white, but now her neck is its usual color and doesn’t match at all. She peels back the collar of her jacket. And then she sees the fat red stick still inside the lacquer box. Red is for painting lips. Thumb and forefinger reach for the stick. A noise from outside the locked door is the sound of wooden shoes on a wooden floor. Tok. Tok-tok. Tok. Tok-tok. Slow, uneven steps are coming. A hobbling way of walking.

  Jinhua leans into the mirror. You have your mother’s eyes, her nose, her beautiful hair, but your mouth is all your own. And when your lips move, they tell the stories of your curious, clever, child’s heart. It is almost as though Baba were here, whispering into Jinhua’s ear, telling her these things the way he always does. Her reply to him is always the same, and now she speaks to him even though he isn’t really here. I love you, Baba. And I love your stories that are like gardens in my pocket, and I wish you would come back to me.

  Jinhua waits, then takes the red stick to her lower lip, touching it. Long, long ago in ancient times, when just wishing a thing made it so— Tok. Tok-tok. Tok. Tok-tok. The steps are coming closer, the lock on the door is making an unlocking noise, and the stick in Jinhua’s hand looks like blood when something sharp is cutting you and you know it will hurt later but you can’t quite feel it now. Like the blood, she thinks, and then she says out loud, “I wish—I wish—I really wish I had not told Baba to disobey the emperor.”

  Jinhua lifts her chin. Hinges groan on the door like crickets in the garden that she hears at night, lying in her own bed at home and listening to Baba tell stories. Her hand brings the stick to her throat, and her eyes are on the mirror, and the red stick makes a small mark, a bigger mark—a line across her neck. The line is blood. Blood on Baba’s neck where the emperor’s sharp sword cut him.

  Behind Jinhua the door moves, and she sees it in the mirror. The stick for blood tumbles to the floor, and Jinhua covers her throat with both hands.

  “What are you doing?”

  She turns to look. A thick fringe of dark hair. No powder on her face. A girl—and not a grown-up lady. Tok. Tok-tok. The girl is coming inside, and she is walking like a cripple, and it is her shoes that are making that tok-ing noise. She looks very, very angry, and Jinhua says, because it is the thing that is right there in her mouth, “I am lamenting my father’s death. I am being sorry and sad—and I am wishing for something that matters more than anything.”

  7

  MEMORIES OF

  WINDBLOWN DUST

  Suyin

  Suyin screams.

  It is in her hands that she feels her anger first; her fingers curl and clench; her knuckles spread; her work-worn palms fold into fighting fists.

  How dare the new girl touch these things that are so precious?

  Suyin screams again. She barely feels herself move. Crossing the room, she almost doesn’t hear the dreadful sound of her crippled feet in wooden shoes.

  The girl has huge, frightened eyes, and she is tiny sitting there on Aiwen’s stool. Suyin grabs her arm. She cannot stop herself. The girl cowers, covering her face with her other arm.

  “These are Aiwen’s things: her shoes, her comb, her skirt, her powder. You cannot have them—” Suyin is sobbing now. The girl looks up at her, and Suyin sees the open collar. The mark across the child’s throat: a line of crimson that is the color of Aiwen’s lips.

  The child is sobbing too, and in an instant Suyin knows. Lao Mama said, “I bought a girl today. You will look after her, Suyin.” And then Lao Mama drew her two taut fingers across Suyin’s neck. She said, “Kacha.” She said, “The father has been sent to the Western Heaven without his head.” She said, “Bad for the girl and good for the weight of the coins in my purse.”

  Suyin lets go of the girl’s arm. Her hands drop to her sides, and the rumble in her throat is becoming a moan. The child has slipped from the stool and is crawling on her hands and knees away from Suyin, into the corner next to Aiwen’s bed, and now she is crouching there, watching, wary, eyes wide open. Awful with her white and powdered face, her eyes smeared black with kohl—and the line across her throat that looks like blood—the words barely past her lips: I am lamenting my father’s death.

  The room is silent now, and the stick of lip paint is on the floor, and it is red for Aiwen’s lips and red for a father’s blood. It is red for both of these things. The child has tucked her head to her knees and wrapped her arms around herself, and she is right there next to the place where Aiwen—

  Suyin drops to the floor and she, too, tucks her head and wraps her arms, and she is weeping because it is all she can think of to do, and the girl is crying, and each of them is overcome with sadness now and together, because a person each of them loved is dead.

  Suyin remembers. It happened yesterday—a long time ago. It was a day of black sky and dark earth. Suyin remembers Aiwen calling her. “Come here, Suyin.” Her tone was sharp, as it often has been of late, although her name—Aiwen—means Loves Gentleness. Suyin hurried up the stairs as best she could on her broken, clumsy feet. “Suyin?” Aiwen’s voice heaved skyward into a wail. Suyin hurried more. She was out of breath. She’d brought osmanthus for Aiwen’s hair. It will please her, Suyin remembers thinking. Aiwen loves osmanthus.

  “Suyin, the guests will be arriving soon. Master Wang might come for me tonight. He said he might and I know he will, this time. Arrange my hair, Suyin. Not that oil; it smells rancid. No, the other.”

  The scent of incense was thick in the room, and urgent, the evidence of Aiwen’s need to pray and beg the gods for luck and love.

  “Suyin, you are so slow and stupid today. What is the matter with you, Suyin?”

  What indeed was the matter? Aiwen’s back was turned, her face reflected in the mirror, a pulse fluttering at her eye at the edge of the cruel fishtail crinkles that worried her so very much. Suyin grieved for her. Master Wang would not be coming. He visits a younger girl now, in another hall not far away on another Suzhou street. Everyone knows that.

  Was it only yesterday? Aiwen leaned toward the mirror, peering at her reflection. She touched the corner of her eye, first one and then the other. “I am old,” she said. “Fetch the powder, Suyin, and polish my skin. Polish it with crushed Taihu pearls. Pol
ish it until I bleed. Make me young again. Make the gods stop laughing at my prayers. Please, Suyin, do these things for me. Do them now.”

  Suyin tucked the osmanthus in the knot at the back of Aiwen’s head. “No,” she said. Her heart was breaking. “No more crushed Taihu pearls,” she told Aiwen. “No more polishing.” How thick and dark Aiwen’s hair still was. “You are beautiful, old or young, and I will always love you,” Suyin said. “We will make a plan, you and I together, and you won’t need him anymore. You must learn, Aiwen, to have hope and love of a different kind now that you are—”

  Aiwen shook her head, and her hair gleamed, and she went to the shrine and knelt. Her lips moved in prayer as she lit ten sticks of incense and then twenty more. She was Lao Mama’s top girl once, before the fishtail crinkles came. She was the number one huaniang, and the guests all loved her then, and Aiwen loved herself.

  Later, when the evening was over and the guests had gone and Master Wang had still not come, Suyin brought chrysanthemum tea to brighten Aiwen’s eyes. She found her lying quite still, a dainty smear of black glistening at the corner of her mouth. She shook her hard to try to wake her. Aiwen was wearing red. Her face was powdered, her lips and eyes freshly painted, the osmanthus still in her hair but beginning to wilt. Lying there, Aiwen looked like a sleeping goddess, a fox spirit—a ghost. An almost empty pot lay upturned on the bed next to her. The tiny silver spoon marred with thick black paste was the last thing to touch her lips.

  Yapian—opium. Aiwen’s last, bitter, poisonous meal. Smoke it and you dream. Eat it and you sleep until you die. Aiwen didn’t need the tea that Suyin had brought to brighten her eyes. She wouldn’t wait for Master Wang—ever again. She didn’t wait for Suyin, who loved her, who would never have left her alone.

  Now another memory comes. An older one. Another day of black sky and dark earth. Little Sister on her lap. Suyin’s legs were cramped. They were crammed together, the two of them and many others, in a basket filled with little girls whose parents had sold them for a few small coins. They were carried from the countryside to Suzhou, like chickens bound for pots on city people’s stoves. Lao Mama’s voice when they arrived—that Suyin remembers too. “You stink like an armpit, you filthy peasant cunt,” she said. “But you look strong. I’ll keep you for working. For a while, anyway. Because you are cheap. Only because of that.” Then Lao Mama grabbed her chin. “The feet are impossible,” she said, “but the face is not so bad underneath all that filth. Maybe you are worth something, after all.” Her mouth was like a knife. Suyin remembers that. Turning to Old Man, who wasn’t as old as he is now, Lao Mama said, “Strip her. Burn all of it, every pitiful thing she’s brought. Use the fire to boil tea, and make her drink it so that she remembers the stink of her old life. And,” Lao Mama said, “send for the foot binder.”

  Suyin remembers hearing Aiwen’s voice while the fire burned and the tea boiled. “Ni bu pa,” she said on that first day. Don’t be afraid. Aiwen said this even though she was the top girl then. She didn’t have to be kind, and sometimes—later—she wasn’t. As for Little Sister, she stayed in the basket and was carried off to a different place, and Suyin still thinks of her sometimes. Lao Mama doesn’t like ugly girls. She didn’t want a girl with a scar on her lip. Suyin knows that now. And she has those small memories of her clothes glowing on the kitchen fire, turning from something into nothing just like that. She has the things that she remembers from her old life: a dark room with a dirt floor that was never really warm, a cold bed where all the family slept, and a rice bowl that was never really full. She remembers her father’s voice—“Go with that man and do as he tells you”—a strand of her mother’s hair, the color of black sky and dark earth, caught in her fingers when the man snatched her away. She remembers that no one stopped him, that he went back to get Little Sister. She remembers that Little Sister screamed loudly and that she cried bitter tears for a long, long time.

  “Would you like me to tell you a story to make you feel better?”

  The child’s voice is small and clear, and Suyin is startled. She has been weeping and had almost forgotten the girl: how small she was, how she crept away like a frightened animal because of Suyin’s anger.

  Suyin’s mouth is dry; her legs are stiff. Her feet are tingling, folded underneath her on the hard floor of Aiwen’s room. It is evening. Dark. The guests will be arriving soon, and there is work to be done to get ready. It is not the time for stories.

  Suyin doesn’t try to get up. She hears the whisper of fabric, the girl moving closer, sliding across the floor on her bottom. She needs comfort. They both do, huddled on the floor, close to each other but not touching. Lao Mama’s voice splits the silence like a whip, calling from another room, calling for Old Man. Suyin doesn’t move. “How old are you?” she asks the girl. Lao Mama’s voice moves to another place that is farther away.

  “I am seven years old,” the girl says, and her breath flutters in the dark. “And,” she adds, “I don’t ever want to be eight or nine or ten or eleven.”

  Suyin closes her eyes and nods and feels as sad for the girl as she is for herself. A pause; a breath becomes a sigh.

  “Long, long ago in ancient times, just wishing a thing would make it so,” the girl begins her story. “And in those times,” the girl continues, and Lao Mama calls again, and this time it is her angriest, most shrieking voice moving closer. The girl’s voice falters.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Suyin says, reaching for the girl’s hand. “Go on with your story.” Her sadness is so large, and the way the story begins is making it even larger. She, too, feels small and frightened, and she, too, wishes for something that cannot ever be. Her fingers make contact with a cold floor, a damp embroidered shoe, a small knee.

  “And in those times,” the girl goes on, “when someone was dead and when someone else wanted very, very much for the dead person to come back and be home forever and for a long time—”

  A cold breeze strokes the room, and Suyin sees the girl shiver, and she wishes it were Aiwen sitting here with her, telling the story that makes her heart feel like bursting.

  “Tell me the rest,” she says, and she is desperate just once to hear what can happen when a person wishes and wants—and hopes, but now the little girl is shaking. She has drawn her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

  “I cannot finish this story today,” she says. “It is not, after all, a good day for telling stories.”

  8

  WAITING FOR A MOON

  Jinhua

  It is a place where things happen in the night. People come and go and most of them are men, but some are women. Jinhua hears high, singing voices late in the evening, and giggles; the ding ling of porcelain and the sound of shoes in the hall outside. She thinks about Baba, but sometimes when she is sleeping under the red, sweet-smelling quilt that used to be Aiwen’s, she forgets that he is dead.

  There are three pale ladybugs lying on the floor in the room where Jinhua sleeps, and they are dead too. No one is sweeping them up or looking after Jinhua, except that sometimes Suyin, who is the maid, comes to bring rice, and sometimes the eyebrow lady comes. Suyin mostly cares about doing her work, and that is all. Sometimes she cries because Aiwen killed herself and she was Suyin’s friend.

  The eyebrow lady says she must be called Lao Mama. Once, when Jinhua didn’t call her that and said out loud that she wanted to go home, Lao Mama grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back. It was hard not to cry when this happened. She won’t say that again out loud, but Lao Mama can’t stop Jinhua from thinking what she thinks inside her head.

  Who misses me in my garden?

  The fish. The cat.

  The red apricot tree.

  I want to go home.

  “Suyin, I have a question.”

  It is a bright, cold morning, and Jinhua is speaking in a small voice because she is not yet sure of Suyin’s mood today. Busy or sad or nice, those are Suyin’s moods, mostly. Breakfast is a bowl of gleaming por
ridge on a bamboo tray with pork and a preserved duck egg and golden bits of crisp-fried youtiao topped with ribbons of scallion.

  Jinhua is hungry. Her mouth is ready to eat.

  “What is your question?” Suyin’s breath smells of tea, and her eyes are sleepy. She stops what she is doing.

  “Why, Suyin, can’t we leave my feet the size that fits my tiger shoes?”

  Suyin hands Jinhua a porcelain spoon. “Eat,” she says, moving away, making that tok-ing noise with her shoes. “But be careful, the porridge is hot.”

  Jinhua hardly thinks about Suyin’s limp anymore, but her mouth and eyes look sad today—the way they looked when she put Aiwen’s things in the wooden trunk and locked it with the brass padlock in the shape of a dog. The green skirt, the pink shoes, the lacquer box; she packed all those things away so that Jinhua wouldn’t touch them ever again. Only a few things are left in the room: the red lip paint, the quilt on the bed—and the god of wealth is still there sitting on his pile of coins, grinning and looking at Aiwen’s apple.

  No one knows about the bites that are missing. No one knows yet. Jinhua takes a spoonful of porridge. It has a clean smell, and yes, it is steaming hot, too hot to eat.