The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  Lao Mama puts the pipe back in her mouth, and Jinhua feels swallowed by her shadow and has no answer for any of this. She sniffs twice and wipes her hand across her nose and sniffs again.

  “Yi, er, san, si.” Outside in the street someone is counting. The foot binder is sitting now on a low red stool in front of Jinhua, a blue bag beside her on the floor. She lifts Jinhua’s foot to the level of her eye. She tips it one way and then the other as though it were a puppet’s foot, or a doll’s, and as though she were playing. Lao Mama leans in to watch. Jinhua’s foot is bending back and forth and up and down, and then it stops. The lady is fumbling now in her bag. The coil of hair at the back of her neck is gray and thin, what Meiling would call a pitiful sight that my eye can hardly bear to look at.

  Meiling had beautiful, thick, shiny hair, and she let Jinhua run her fingers through it, and . . . Suyin’s hair is beautiful, thick, and shiny too. Jinhua looks sideways at the basin on the fire and then leans down to touch her toes. “This little cow eats grass. This little cow eats hay.” She pinches her toes one by one and sings the words to herself in a tiny voice, and the words are comforting because it is only a game.

  “This little cow drinks water, and this little cow runs away.” Holding the fourth toe between her thumb and finger, her chin pressed against her knees, Jinhua stops and she looks up.

  “Ah yes,” the foot binder says, “the five little cows. How very, very suitable.” The green disks in her ears are made of jade, and she is taking things out of the bag: a fat roll of white bandages, a skein of thread, a knife, a needle the color of mules’ teeth. She spreads a blue cloth on the floor next to her stool, and it is the same color of blue as the bag.

  “So, little girl, why don’t you finish your rhyme? Tell us what happens to the last little cow? Sing loudly for us; please sing loudly.” The foot binder is laying her things neatly on the cloth: the bandage roll, the thread, the knife, the yellow needle. She has only a few hairs on the top of her head, and her scalp is as shiny, almost, as a silver mirror.

  “I don’t remember,” Jinhua replies, and now her voice is very, very small—and really the truth is that she does remember. She has played this game a hundred times. She remembers being tickled. She remembers laughing until she cried—

  “What happens to the last little cow?” The foot binder’s eyes are on Jinhua, and her hands are clasped, and Jinhua is becoming more and more afraid of what will happen next, and she is thinking about the dog and her shoes and—

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t remember.” She is crying now and she can’t stop, and snot and tears are on her face—and the lady who is going to bind her feet is shrieking with laughter. Lao Mama is still here watching, puffing on her pipe, making round smoke apples with her lips.

  “If you won’t say it, I will.” The foot binder is pulling now on Jinhua’s fifth toe—pulling hard and using fingernails that are like swords—and the two houseboys who made the fire are sneaking off, out through the kitchen door—and Jinhua kicks wildly with her foot. She won’t say that thing about the last cow because—

  “Little cunt,” the foot binder says, holding her cheek where Jinhua has kicked her.

  “The last little cow—” It is Lao Mama talking now, rapping Jinhua on the shoulder with the bamboo rod. “The last little cow does nothing—and the master comes home and whips him again and again and again.” Each time Lao Mama says the word again, she brings the rod down harder. Three times. Praap—praap—praap. Hard—harder—hardest. And then she stops. The rod is perched on Jinhua’s shoulder. “Look at me in my eyes,” she says, and Jinhua will not do this either. “Tell me that you understand what it is that I am saying.”

  The foot binder has returned to her stool, and she is unraveling a long thread, smiling in a nasty way. “I have heard a man claim,” she says, “that there are a thousand ways to enjoy bound feet. Imagine that, one thousand ways to play with a girl.” Jinhua clasps her hands over her ears, and the foot-binding lady is cutting the thread with a knife, and Jinhua remembers what Suyin said to her. “A thousand buckets of tears,” she said. “You will cry that many,” she said. “There is something much more terrible,” she said.

  The needle is perched between the foot binder’s teeth; a strand of thread hangs down her chin, and a rope across Jinhua’s thighs puckers the cloth of her trousers. They have tied her to the stool, and the knot is huge and hairy and cannot be undone, and Lao Mama’s hands are bearing down on Jinhua’s shoulders. The rings she is wearing have teeth that bite into Jinhua’s bones. Jinhua can’t move. The foot binder has taken her foot, crinkled from soaking in the basin and white from alum, and she is holding it tightly. “The left foot,” she says,” is more easily broken—in most cases.” She is bending Jinhua’s four lesser toes back and forth, back and forth, each time pushing them farther and farther toward her heel—forcing her foot to do an impossible thing. Jinhua’s skin burns; the bones resist; the muscles are tearing. Jinhua kicks with the foot that is free—a small kick is all she can manage—and the bending stops. The rope cuts into her thighs, and Jinhua shakes her head from side to side. The foot-binding lady slaps her face. The stool wobbles. Her cheek stings. Jinhua opens her mouth and screams for Baba. Of course—she snatches her hand to her throat—Baba cannot come to her.

  Someone grabs Jinhua by a leg, an arm, an ankle. Someone is pulling at her braided hair. That old man is here, the houseboys have come back—and the look in their eyes makes Jinhua even more afraid. Hot, wet bandages crawl across her ankle, over her toes and around her heel. Pain shoots up her leg. The bandages go around and around, tighter and tighter. First one foot, then the other, disappears; her lesser toes are gone. She hears the dry sound of white thread passing through the bandages. The thread catches, and the foot binder curses. She wipes her forehead with her sleeve.

  10

  WINTER BEGINS

  Suyin

  It is the hundredth day and there are ghosts in Aiwen’s room—and the child has worn the stick of red lip paint to a nub with painting her neck. Each night when it is late, when she has finished with her work, Suyin goes in to check on Jinhua. Sometimes she cries in her sleep or whimpers for her father, and on those nights Suyin lies down on the floor and sleeps there next to the bed. She is beginning to think of this now as Jinhua’s room, even though it is the place where Aiwen lived until she died.

  Tonight—one hundred days after Aiwen ate the opium—the child’s fever has gone, and she is sleeping quietly. She is learning to walk in a new way, and to bathe her feet with alum, and to change her own bindings when it is time. She is learning to sit with her feet curled under her, to keep the bindings tight, to obey Lao Mama—even, sometimes, to flatter her and make her smile. The child is clever in this way. She is strong; her feet are becoming small, and she will survive this and other things that will come later, some of which are worse than what has already been.

  Most girls do survive for a while—

  Jinhua will survive, too, the loss of her father. It soothes her, Suyin knows, to paint that red line across her throat. She does this every morning when she wakes. She says the words “I am being sorry and sad, and I am lamenting my father’s death.” These are the first things she does each day, and she allows Suyin to watch, and neither of them speak of it. It is a private ritual, something the child needs, and somehow, although she doesn’t know why, it is soothing to Suyin as well.

  It is time to buy a new stick of red lip paint, and Suyin will do this for Jinhua today, and she will tell Lao Mama that the lip paint is for Qingyue, who is always losing things. And Suyin has decided, too, that today, for the first time, she will open the wooden chest where Aiwen’s things are packed away, and she will find the bundle with Aiwen’s special shoes. Silvery pink with flowers and garlands. They were Aiwen’s favorite shoes, but Suyin has waited for one hundred days, and that is long enough. It is time for Jinhua to have them now that her feet are getting smaller. They will make her smile for a moment. Th
ey will make her happy, if only for a brief time, Suyin thinks, and perhaps she herself will smile as well. If she knew how, she would write Aiwen a letter on this hundredth day to tell her how things are: that a terrible grief still comes, sometimes, that it is slowly becoming bearable, that this little girl who now sleeps in the bed that was once Aiwen’s has lost as much as they both have. And she would tell Aiwen that the little girl named Sai Jinhua loves her, Suyin, in a kind and gentle way—and that life is hard but it can be endured—and why, oh why, did Aiwen not believe this?

  PART TWO

  Art of the Bedchamber

  THE ELEVENTH YEAR OF

  THE GUANGXU REIGN

  1886

  Hall of Round Moon and

  Passionate Love

  Suzhou

  11

  WHAT IS UNENDURABLE

  Jinhua

  Jade gate, cinnabar hole; children’s palace and red pearl. These are words Jinhua has learned. They are all names for a girl’s yinbu. A man has a jade spear, a golden hammer; a yang sword tip, a turtle head. Jinhua has also learned the Nine Postures with animal names like Roe Deer Butting and Monkey Squat; Toad in the Moon and Fishes Gobbling. And then there are the Ten Enhancements; the Eight Methods; the Five Sounds: breathing, panting, moaning, exhaling, and biting.

  All this she is learning because Jinhua, like everyone else, is afraid of Lao Mama’s whip and her tongue, and because Lao Mama says that one day soon Jinhua will have to do these things and know the names for them. Suyin says so too. Suyin says that Jinhua is eating brothel rice and that when Lao Mama says something will be so, it must be so, and this is true because of the whip and because of Lao Mama’s cruel tongue. Because she has paid money. “You do not own yourself, Jinhua,” Suyin says over and over, and although she never mentions it, Jinhua knows that Suyin doesn’t own herself either.

  Jinhua is almost twelve years old, but not quite, and she has learned all of these things very quickly; she can recite the Ten Enhancements and the Eight Methods and the Five Sounds forward and backward, and her feet are small, and she can play the lute and sing a great many songs, but not very well. Lao Mama says that it is good enough and at this rate she will be in her coffin before Jinhua sings any better. She says that all men want a virgin who is twelve years old, so that is more important than anything.

  Yesterday, Lao Mama made Jinhua sing for a man. Put your lips next to his ear, she said, and whisper the song right there so that only he can hear it. Jinhua closed her eyes while she was singing because there was a speck of food on the man’s mouth, and a clump of whiskers growing from his ear, and there was grease on his cheek; and these things made her feel sick in her stomach. The man smelled bad and didn’t seem to mind that her eyes were closed. He said that Jinhua has meili—the charm of a demon. He said, “When this one is ripe for eating I will be back for a big bite. I will not forget her, ever.” He said this ten times or maybe more, and Lao Mama looked happy each and every time he said these words, I will be back for a big bite.

  After singing for this man, Jinhua told Suyin about feeling sick and the man’s hairy ear, and Suyin gave her special tea with honey. And then she took Jinhua onto her lap and told her one of the secret stories that they have invented together about two girls who escape from a cruel fox woman who looks—just—like—Lao Mama. In the stories the girls have very strong feet, and the name of one of them is Younger Sister, and the name of the other is Elder Sister. They can both run fast in their shoes, and their feet are neither bound nor crippled, and they are clever about finding places to hide. They can swim all the way across the river and climb trees and mountains and leap through the sky by doing somersaults.

  When the story was finished, and when they had laughed and made themselves feel happy, Suyin sighed and said, “You will have to do these things for men even if it makes you sick. There are no cheap choices for girls like you in a place like this, Jinhua.”

  Jinhua is afraid of being twelve years old, now that it is happening so soon. She has seen what the other girls do, night after night. Hongyu, Qingyue; Chunfeng, Sibao, and Cuilian. All five of them, but not Suyin because she is ugly and can only be a maid. Jinhua will be the number six girl when she is twelve years old, like it or not. Suyin says that time is passing, and the passing of time must be endured. She says that there is no arguing about this. She says, “No use fooling ourselves with what is not real, Jinhua.”

  But still, she likes the stories, Suyin does, and Jinhua likes them too.

  Everyone puts their fingers in their ears when they hear it. It is like the sound of wet laundry being beaten against the pavement. Or the sound a piece of meat makes when Cook slaps it onto his chopping block and stands there with his butcher’s knife held over it. It is a wet and heavy sound. Today it is the sound of Lao Mama’s hand on Suyin’s cheek and then the other cheek and the top of her head and her arm and her back. She is smacking, hitting, punching, Suyin.

  Lao Mama is very strong, and you can’t wear clothes for quite a few days when she has given you a large beating. Worst of all is when she whips you on the soles of your feet, and you can’t walk or run away—or when she says she will throw you into the street where the dogs will bite you to death.

  A bad thing has happened, and Lao Mama has been wearing her face that looks like Gong Gong, the sea demon who has twenty-one toes and sharp eyebrows and is always angry. The bad thing is that the two houseboys are gone, and they have taken their bedding and their rice bowls that were chipped and an old lantern that was almost broken. Lao Mama sent Old Man to find them and bring them back—and all of the things they took. “Every single thing,” she said. “I will beat first one and then the other to a corpse when we find them,” she has been saying all morning. The sound of that word—corpse—makes Jinhua feel ill in her heart and her stomach, and she can’t move when she hears it, and in her head she hears rotting-no-head-dead-body-corpse even though Lao Mama did not say that. Lao Mama told Cook to check whether anything else is missing and she said fang ni made pi because the gatekeeper has gone to his laojia in the country to mourn his mother for a hundred days and cannot help with looking. He left the guard dog, who is barking now.

  Old Man has come back but he didn’t find the houseboys yet, and this is why Lao Mama looks even more like a red-faced demon, and it is why she is beating Suyin. She says that Suyin is to blame about the houseboys and the things they took because she is the one who should have been watching. Jinhua wanted to say that it is not Suyin’s fault, and she was going to say this out loud, but then Lao Mama said that word again, corpse—“I will beat you to a corpse”—and Jinhua couldn’t speak at all or even move, and all she could think of was rotting-no-head-dead-body-corpse—again. When Lao Mama had finished screaming, she grabbed Suyin’s pigtail and wrapped it three times around her knuckles. She pulled Suyin out into the courtyard, and now there is that terrible meat-smacking sound, and the sound of Lao Mama’s voice shrieking and the guard dog barking. And Jinhua is crouching down on the floor, squeezing her eyes shut, covering her ears, and saying, “I wish—I wish—I wish—that just wishing something could make it true.”

  She doesn’t believe in wishing anymore, because too many bad things happen and you can’t do anything about it. When things happen, Suyin always says, Mei banfa. There is no solution, but maybe one day Lao Mama will die of her anger; this is something that Jinhua still can hope for. She wishes it could be soon, before Suyin is dead from being beaten. She wishes that everyone did not have to be so afraid. Everyone is afraid of the street and the biting dogs and of being beaten. Even with her fingers in her ears, Jinhua can still hear the smacking sounds, and she hopes that the houseboys are in a hall with a better mistress, one that is very far away so that Old Man won’t find them even if he looks for a very long time. And more than anything, Jinhua hopes that Suyin will be all right.

  Lao Mama has gone to smoke her pipe and be by herself. Suyin is lying on the ground outside, and her teeth are pink with blood. Her ey
es are swollen shut, and Jinhua thinks she might be dead this time, so she is grabbing Suyin’s arm and shaking her, saying, “Please, Suyin, don’t be dead.”

  And now tears are squeezing out through Suyin’s eyelashes, and dead people don’t ever cry, so Suyin must be alive after all.

  Jinhua brings warm tea in a bowl. Suyin is moaning like a person who is very, very sick. Two of her teeth are loose in the front of her mouth, she says, and Jinhua tells her they won’t fall out—probably—but really she thinks they will because Lao Mama hit her so hard. She leans over Suyin and whispers in her ear, quietly so that no one else can hear. “We will run away like Younger Sister and Elder Sister do in our secret stories,” she says, “as soon as you are better.” Suyin shakes her head, and it looks as though it hurts her to do even this—No. And then she moans again. She is very, very tired. Too tired to run away right now. But maybe when she is better. This is something else to wish for.

  Old Man says he cannot find the two houseboys. Suyin is out of her bed, but her eyes don’t open all the way and she is moving like an old person, sweeping the floor in the banquet room, and it is taking her a long time to finish. Jinhua would like to help her, but Suyin says she is better now; she can do it by herself. Jinhua can see from the way she is leaning on the broom that she is not much better yet. The marks on Suyin’s face are still there. They have changed from angry red to brown. But at least the two front teeth haven’t fallen out of her mouth. That is one good thing. And Suyin can walk a little farther each day.