The Red Chamber

by Pauline A. Chen

  Xifeng gives a guilty start, seems about to speak, and then shuts her mouth. There is an awkward silence.

  His father is the first to break it. He looks around, blinking, as if this is the first time that he notices Daiyu’s absence. “I had assumed she was here with the rest of you.” He looks at Lady Jia. “Where is she?”

  Granny’s face is inscrutable. “She disappeared from Rongguo during the confiscation. I think she must have felt we mistreated her, so she ran away the first chance she got.”

  Jia Zheng is shocked. “Disappeared! Where could she have run to? And anything could have happened to her during the confiscation! She could have been taken up by the soldiers as a servant, or worse! Didn’t you make any sort of inquiry?”

  “How could we possibly have looked for her then? We had enough to worry about—”

  “Still, a young girl, alone in the Capital, without anyone to protect her,” his father says, obviously distressed.

  “We must do something to find her, Father,” Baoyu breaks in eagerly. “We can make inquiries with the Embroidered Jackets. Probably she was mistaken for a maid and sent to some other household. We can find out where the other maids were sent and—”

  “I know what happened to Daiyu,” someone says quietly. Even without turning his head, he knows it is Baochai, from her calm voice, with its almost too precise articulation of consonants. He looks at her, and sees that two spots of red burn on her otherwise pale face, but her expression is as composed as always. She turns her back towards him, facing his father, as if making clear that she is addressing Jia Zheng and not Baoyu.

  “What happened to her?” Jia Zheng asks.

  “She went to live with Snowgoose’s family.”

  At Baochai’s words, Baoyu’s heart is filled with relief, and gratitude towards Snowgoose. It was like Snowgoose, so generous beneath her brisk manner, to have made sure that Daiyu was all right.

  “How do you know?” Xifeng asks Baochai.

  “Snowgoose came here once, after the confiscation. She came to ask for some ginseng for Daiyu,” Baochai says.

  “She was ill, then?” Baoyu exclaims, at the same moment Mrs. Xue says, “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

  Baochai does not speak for a moment. Then she goes on, her voice as steady as before. “She had consumption. I went to see her once in the Twelfth Month, and she was coughing terribly, and spitting up blood.”

  He feels his entire body grow as cold and heavy as stone. “Consumption!” he cries. Daiyu’s mother had died of consumption. “Well, we must bring her here, and have the best doctors look at her. I’m sure that with the best care—”

  Finally, Baochai turns and looks at him. Her face is still inscrutable, but is it possible that he hears a tiny tremor in her voice? “It’s too late. I went to see her again at the end of the First Month. She was dead.”

  He recoils as at a physical blow. “Dead!”

  “Yes. I’d given Snowgoose’s brother some money. He had taken her body down south to bury her in Suzhou.”

  His first feeling is burning hatred for Baochai. He wants to strike her face, as cold and empty as a platter. He has always suspected that she tattled on Daiyu and made Lady Jia turn against her. Daiyu’s death should be laid at her door. Only after a moment does it sink into his stricken brain that Baochai must have repented of what she had done. That was why she had paid for Daiyu’s body to be buried in Suzhou.

  And why does he blame Baochai? Wasn’t it his own fault? He had seduced Daiyu, sneaking into her bedroom to see her night after night. He had promised to marry her. Even though Baochai had tattled, his own actions had turned Lady Jia against Daiyu. Daiyu had probably died believing that he had abandoned and betrayed her. Can it be true that he will never have a chance to tell her how much he loved her, how not a day went by in prison that he had not dreamed of her and planned how to spend his life with her?

  All his regrets will not bring her back. With a dull shudder, he sinks back down on the kang. He closes his eyes and feels the weight of his grief crushing his heart.

  3

  For all that afternoon, Xifeng has kept out of Lian’s way. She knew, from the instant she saw him climbing out of the wagon, that he was still furious at her. The fact that he had not ended up serving the full sentence had not slaked his anger. She saw it in the rigidity with which he held his body, in the way he pointedly avoided meeting her eyes. He did not acknowledge her presence in any way, looking right through her as she hurried forward to greet him. She turned aside to greet Huan, hoping that in the bustle of the prisoners’ homecoming his coldness would go unnoticed. All through the afternoon, in order to distract attention from the fact that he was not speaking to her, she made herself as lively and busy as possible. She had presided over the making of the dinner, laughing and joking about the menu. Pan promised to lend the Jias whatever they needed, and she bought fish and meat in honor of the prisoners’ return. She bought material with which to make new clothes for the prisoners, asking everyone what colors and fabrics she should get. Then she had set out her work on the kang in the front room, ostentatiously rolling out the bolts of cloth, and pinning and cutting the paper patterns. Lian never even gave her a glance. She should be grateful, she told herself, that he had chosen not to humiliate her by repudiating her in front of the entire family.

  Now it is evening, and she can no longer avoid facing him alone. Pan has rented the apartment next door so that the family will have more room. She and Lian, as the only married couple, have been allotted one of the bedrooms for themselves. She sits on the kang rapidly sewing a pair of trousers, the dread in her stomach like a lump of iron. She hears footsteps outside the door. Lian comes in.

  “Look!” she says brightly, holding up the trousers. “I’ll probably have them finished for you tomorrow.”

  He does not respond or look at her. She puts down the trousers and stands up. “What did Dr. Wang say about Baoyu?”

  To her relief, he answers after a moment, still without looking in her direction. “He said it seems to be malaria. Baoyu’s body seems to get hot and then cold. His spleen is enlarged and full of fire.”

  “But malaria can be cured, can’t it?”

  Lian sits down on the edge of the kang, and uses his toes to push off his worn and filthy shoes. He grunts. “The doctor left some medicine, but Baoyu wouldn’t take it.”

  “Wouldn’t take it? Why not?”

  Lian does not answer. Momentarily distracted from her own worries, Xifeng wonders whether Baoyu is so upset by the news of Daiyu’s death that he does not want to be cured. “I feel terrible about Daiyu,” she says. “I should have tried harder to find out what became of her …” Seeing that Lian is not listening, she trails off. He stands up and begins to take off his robe.

  “Here, let me help you.” She hurries over.

  He steps away. “I can do it myself.”

  “Then let me help you with your socks.” She kneels before his feet and strips off his dirty and holey socks. She picks up his shoes, examining the worn soles. “These are in terrible shape. I should throw them out, don’t you think? I can start making you a new pair tomorrow.”

  He does not answer.

  She picks up the robe that he has let fall on the kang. “We had better be careful where we put these. Are you sure you don’t have lice or fleas? I have half a mind to burn everything that you’re wearing. Or I suppose that we could just wash it in boiling water …”

  He still does not say anything, just strips down to his patched and stained trousers and tunic. She does not want him to get in bed wearing those clothes from prison. She hurries over to him with a vest she has borrowed from Granny, who is broad-shouldered, and one of her own looser pairs of trousers. “Here. Why don’t you wear these? They’re clean.”

  Ignoring her, he goes over to the basin of water she has heated for him. Instead of taking a proper bath, he sticks his head into the basin. He rubs a handful of soap into his wet hair, then rinses his face and h
ead. When he dries off, he leaves streaks of dirt on the towel. She wants to ask him to wash more thoroughly, but does not dare. He goes to the window, opens it, and throws the water out into the street. He shuts and bolts the window, then goes to the kang, where she has laid out two sets of bedding side by side in the middle. He takes one of the sets of bedding and moves it to the farthest edge of the kang. Then he blows out the light.

  She stands there in the darkness, listening to him climb between the quilts. She can count herself lucky, she reminds herself, that he has not yelled at her or struck her. She should just undress and go to sleep. Yet still she stands there in the darkness listening to his breathing. She knows that he is not the kind of person to relent towards her as time goes by. If she leaves matters like this, the gulf between them, their estrangement, will become permanent, immovable.

  Slowly she undresses, shivering in the cool night air, laying her clothes in a neat pile on the corner of the kang. As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she can discern him lying there in the faint light from the window. She climbs onto the kang beside him, and kneels there.

  “I—I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about those loans,” she begins in a small voice. “I never thought they would get you in trouble.”

  For about a minute he says nothing. When he eventually speaks, it is clear from his voice that he has been lying there seething, that he can barely control his pent-up rage. “And yet, when the Embroidered Jackets were dragging me away, you didn’t say a word.”

  “What could I have said? Even if I had told them that I made the loans, they would still have arrested you.”

  He sits up in bed. “Maybe you could have told the truth, and let the judge decide whether I should be convicted—”

  “You would have been arrested anyway, just like Uncle Zheng and Baoyu and Huan. What good would it have done for both of us to be in jail?”

  “Don’t make me sick with your excuses. The truth is that you just wanted to save your own skin, and didn’t give a damn if I was rotting in prison for a crime that I didn’t even know anything about. I don’t know how you got your hands on my chop in the first place—”

  “I told you I was sorry. I used your chop because I thought it would make the loans more official. And I wouldn’t have made those loans if you hadn’t been so irresponsible about money in the first place—” She knows she should not bring this up, but somehow she cannot sit there listening to him without trying to defend herself.

  “Money! Money! Money! It all goes back to money with you. And I should have known that you would twist it around and try to blame me!” It is turning into a repetition of an argument that they have had dozens of times before. She feels trapped, because she no longer feels like that person who used to argue with him so passionately about money. As she tries to find the words to tell him, he breaks off in frustration, letting himself flop back onto the bed. For a minute or two, he is silent.

  Then he says, “And that isn’t even what I’m most upset about.”

  He stops, and she listens to his quick, angry breathing. He seems to be struggling to get his temper under control. When he speaks again, his voice is unsteady with suppressed fury. “I suppose I should have realized that you’d use this opportunity to get rid of Ping’er.”

  “Get rid of her!” she cries. She sits still in the darkness, speechless for a moment. She should have expected this, she supposes. “How could you think that I wanted to get rid of her, when I loved her—”

  “You were always jealous of her!”

  How like him, she thinks, to be blind to the love that had revived between her and Ping’er after Qiaojie’s birth. When she thinks of how she and Ping’er had struggled side by side nursing Qiaojie, she cannot bear to defend herself.

  “To lose Ping’er, on top of Qiaojie …” Lian says, beginning to sob in the dark.

  “I lost them. You didn’t even care about Qiaojie.” The words slip out without her intending to say them out loud.

  He rises up quickly from the bed. Even in the darkness, she can see his upraised right arm.

  “Go ahead and hit me,” she hisses, rising up onto her knees to meet his blow. “I’ve always expected you to. I’m just surprised that you haven’t done it before, that’s all.”

  His arm drops. For a long time they are both motionless, only their breathing audible. It seems to her that with each breath, they exhale an invisible poison into the room, the atmosphere growing more and more toxic as the seconds tick by, so that she can hardly breathe. She feels herself grow a little lightheaded. These dizzy spells come oftener these days; she needs to take better care of herself. She does not want to live like this anymore, not after all that she has been through. She crawls closer to him on the kang and puts her arms around him. She can feel how tense his body is beneath her embrace.

  “I don’t want to fight about these things anymore.” She puts her head on his shoulder. “Isn’t that all in the past?”

  He does not answer.

  “Why don’t we put our energy into working hard to help the family get back on its feet, instead of fighting?” She grabs his hands. “We can save money, start again. Maybe one day we can even have another child.” In her heart she does not believe that this will happen, but she wants to conjure up a rosy vision of the future to inspire him to work with her.

  He jerks himself away from her. “Don’t touch me!”

  She is surprised and hurt by his vehemence, and stares at him.

  “I wanted to tell you something else that came out at the trial,” he says. His voice is different now, casual, almost conversational. For some reason, this makes her more uneasy than when he had spoken angrily. She tries to read his expression, but it is too dark. “You know, by the end of the trial, I had almost convinced the magistrate that I really knew nothing about those loans. The obvious solution was that you had made them. But in the end, he simply couldn’t understand how a woman from one of the best families, who was supposed to be sequestered in the Inner Quarters, could possibly be making loans to people all over the city. So he decided that it must have been me, after all. That’s why I was convicted.”

  “It was the Abbess at the Water Moon Priory who helped me set up the loans,” she explains quickly, licking her dry lips. “She knows everyone, and goes everywhere. She told me when someone wanted a loan and—”

  He cuts her off, his tone still pleasant. “I have to admit, I wondered myself how you managed it. Then they showed me a note they had found among the loan agreements. What did it say?” He feigns absentmindedness, groping for the words.

  Her heart starts to pound. Could she have been so careless as to have kept one of Yucun’s notes?

  “Oh, yes,” Lian says, as if pleased with himself for remembering. “It said, ‘I can’t go another day without seeing you. Meet me at the storeroom at two.’ It was unsigned, of course. But I recognized the handwriting. You see, he had written me a few little notes as well. So it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. Just a few words, but they explained so much!” He laughs, as if amused by the irony.

  “I was only meeting him because he was helping me out with the loans,” she lies desperately.

  Lian laughs again, unpleasantly. “I thought you said that the Abbess helped you make the loans.”

  “She did, but so did he!”

  “Spare me your lies,” he says. He pauses for a moment, before continuing, “Unfortunately, since there was no evidence that he had been involved in the loans, it was no use bringing it up at trial. You should be grateful to me. I didn’t even say anything to Uncle. But I knew from that moment what you were.”

  She is silent, cold with shame and fear. It is no use trying to lie or make excuses. It is far, far worse than when it was just the loans. All she can do is sit there, with her head bowed, waiting to hear what he will do to her.

  “I had decided to sue you for divorce when I got out of prison,” he says. “But now that I have been released early, I’m not sure. We’ve been thr
ough enough scandal as it is, and it wouldn’t be fair to Granny and Uncle to put them through any more.”

  He suddenly sounds more tired than angry. “Don’t worry. I won’t even tell anyone. But don’t expect me to treat you like a wife.”

  She does not move, still kneeling there with her head bowed submissively. Inside, her thoughts are rebellious. He has never treated her like a wife, she thinks bitterly, not even at the very beginning.

  “By the way,” he adds, and she can tell from his voice that he is going to say something malicious, “you’ve heard the rumors about Jia Yucun, haven’t you?”

  She does not answer, knowing that he wants to rub in the fact that it was her lover who had betrayed the family.

  “You really chose a good one, didn’t you?” he says jeeringly. “He must really have loved you. So much that he testified against Uncle Zheng!”

  His words strike her like physical blows, and she instinctively flings up her arms to ward them off. She crouches there in the dark, sick with humiliation, waiting for him to taunt her again. Fortunately, he does not say any more. She hears him lying down and turning over in the darkness. Still she crouches there, not daring to move. Eventually she hears his breathing deepen, and realizes that he is asleep. She crawls shivering across the kang and climbs into the bedding on the other side. She pulls the quilt over her head and wraps her arms around her body. She feels cold, so cold that she wonders whether she will ever be warm again.

  4

  Everyone else in the family has gone to bed. Throwing his robe on over his nightclothes, Jia Zheng rises from his bed on the kang in the front room and goes to the back bedroom to look in on Baoyu. The room is dark except for a small lantern casting a circle of dim light on Baoyu’s head and shoulders. Since their release from prison four days earlier, the boy has refused both food and drink. He has lain all day on the kang, either asleep or in a stupor, Jia Zheng cannot tell. Sometimes his body draws in on itself and shivers as if he is lying on a bed of ice. At others, sweat starts out on his lip and brow, and he flings off his blankets, trying to claw open his tunic. No matter how they call his name or shake him, he does not respond. When they prop his head up to give him his medicine, he twists out of their grip, refusing to open his mouth. When Dr. Wang first came four days ago, he had predicted that Baoyu would be on his feet in a week or two. This morning, however, he had said that Baoyu’s pulse was tumultuous, and his qi dangerously attenuated. He was dehydrated, and as a result his fevers were spiking higher and higher. If Baoyu did not begin to drink and take his medicine, Dr. Wang could not answer for the consequences.