Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  “It’s not so terrible, Sarah,” he temporized. “She’s only going out to dinner occasionally, and Dr. MacGregor’s wife will …”

  “Saul, don’t put me off,” Sarah snapped, knowing that he feared her infrequent outbursts. “I’m not a child. You know very well why I’m so worried. It’s bad enough there are so few Jewish boys here. When I think of that fat, conceited Joey Benjamin! But you also know she’s making herself into an imitation Gentile.”

  “My dear, there’re lots of fine young men in Bombay and even in Baghdad. She’s still young, so we’ve got time to look. Many boys would jump at the chance to come out here. Then, all we have to do is choose.”

  “Saul, that’s the trouble. If she goes on this way, she won’t accept anyone, no matter who we choose. She wants to be free, she says, whatever that means. It’s medieval to force a bridegroom on a girl, she says. She actually thinks she can choose for herself. Sometimes I think she wants one of those Gentile oafs. Anyway, she’s not that young. Remember, I wasn’t quite seventeen when we were married.”

  “I remember, my dear. How could I forget? To me the perfect age for a bride, but I had the perfect bride. Still, it doesn’t mean that Fronah must marry at that age.”

  “The younger the better, Saul!” Sarah fiercely defended her resolution against his flattery. “You mustn’t put me off with soft words, though you were the perfect bridegroom. And you are … almost … the perfect husband.”

  “Thank you, my love.” Saul too was warmed by their verbal lovemaking. “Remember, Sarah, we can push her only so far. She won’t, I fear, marry younger than eighteen or nineteen.”

  “That’s why we must insist. If we wait till she’s eighteen, only the Almighty knows who she’ll want. She must stop gadding about with Gentiles. I suspect she doesn’t keep kosher. She’ll be neither Jewish nor Gentile if she goes on—just a crazy mixture!”

  “I’ll speak to her, my dear,” he promised. “Also, I’ll write to Bombay and Baghdad for apprentices.”

  “But quickly, Saul.”

  “Sarah, we live in Shanghai, not Baghdad,” he continued thoughtfully. “We can’t shut out the world we live in. Otherwise we won’t survive. We can’t live only among our own. And Fronah must speak English well. She must understand the ways of the Gentiles, particularly the Europeans and Americans, as well as the Chinese.”

  “Saul, what’s happening to us? What’s to become of us?” Sarah impetuously expressed her deepest fears. “We’re changing too fast, and I’m afraid. You’re changing, especially you. I wish we’d never come to Shanghai. How can we lead decent, pious lives in this crazy place? We’re not a community, not a proper Jewish community. All around us there are Gentiles and heathen. We’re losing everything that’s important.”

  “Not everything, my dear, surely. We must build our own community. More young men will be coming and, soon, more young women, too. Soon we’ll build a proper synagogue. And there are our Chinese kinfolk, the Kaifeng Jews. Aaron and David are very important to us, Chinese who know themselves Jews.”

  “It’s not the same, my dear.”

  “What is ever the same, Sarah?” Saul smiled. “Every life is always changing, for Jews especially. That’s how we’ve survived—by changing, by adapting.”

  “But not too much, Saul. We must take care.”

  “Certainly not too much, Sarah. And we will take care. But now, if you’ll leave me for an hour or so, I’ll get through my urgent work. Then we’ll have a glass of wine and relax. Believe me, I’ll work it out.”

  Saul did not return to his papers when Sarah left, but meditatively smoked his cheroot. He started when the embers burned his knuckles and, smiling ruefully, took another cheroot from the tin. Gazing unseeing into the blue mist that filled the room, he pondered the imponderable future.

  CHAPTER 14

  April 23, 1855

  PEKING

  Aaron Lee strolled down the broad Chungwen Men Chieh, the Boulevard of the Gate of Exalted Letters. Remembering his dismay when he thought he had lost his way to the Kiangsu Shanghai Association, he had allowed much time to find the restaurant where he was to meet the deputy chief clerk of the Ministry of Justice. Although he could not anticipate what that worthy would say, he wanted to think about his tactics. He must not brood about his father’s predicament, since his distress would be reflected on his features. Only experience could give him the impenetrable expression his father wore in negotiations.

  Despite the banker’s assumption, Saul had gently warned him that the funds available for his father’s defense were not unlimited. If the deputy chief clerk read from his features the desperation that gnawed like a rat at his liver, the price would rise. The Mandarins would draw out the proceedings, playing on his anxiety to enrich themselves as the Intendant Samqua had done in Shanghai. Having studied the appellate process, he knew that its stages were meticulously prescribed. Nonetheless, that process could encounter strange obstacles to benefit the Mandarins who controlled it. As he strolled up the Boulevard of Exalted Letters, Aaron deliberately turned his mind to another matter.

  Saul Haleevie had suggested casually, “Do write occasionally giving your impressions of Peking, particularly the political situation, and the mood of the people. Just general impressions, you understand.”

  Aaron understood almost too well. Saul had not told him why, beyond his own commercial advantage, he wanted that information. Since Aaron did not really know his reports would be passed to the British Consul, he could in conscience comply with Saul’s request. It would have been churlish, almost unfilial, to refuse.

  He knew, of course, why foreigners were eager for news of the capital forbidden to them. For two years the Europeans and Americans had been pressing the Imperial Court for the promised review of the Treaty of 1842, which ended the Opium War. The five treaty ports in which they were permitted to live did not offer sufficient scope for their ambitions. They wanted not only to win more favorable terms of trade, but to open all China to foreign trade and foreign residence. They also wanted the Court to accept legations in Peking and to “comply with the usages of all civilized nations,” which meant the foreign powers. They were naturally anxious to learn what impression their mounting pressure was making upon Peking.

  Western logic insisted that the Taiping menace must force the Manchus to grant their requests. Aaron understood why the reactionary Court feared a few score unarmed Western diplomats in Peking as much as a million Taiping soldiers. But his own logic, perhaps tainted by Western influence, led him to the same conclusion as the foreigners. Having once used force to impose their will, the great powers would not hesitate to use force a second time. Aaron was convinced they would attack again if their wishes were thwarted. The Court was foolhardy to risk that conflict by refusing even to talk with the powers when the Taiping threat was again acute.

  True, the danger to Peking itself had receded. The daring northward thrust of a few Taiping columns had come closest to the capital in 1853, when they took towns only fifty miles away. Poorly equipped and badly supplied, the Taipings were gradually being forced southward. Only at the beginning of this past March of 1855 had Manchu cavalry driven the Holy Soldiers from a garrison city a hundred and fifty miles south of Peking, and rebel remnants still held a town two hundred miles to the south. Although the heads of their officers must soon hang in cages on the walls of Peking, the Taiping threat was still grave.

  Farther south, the long-haired rebels were resurgent. Despite able leadership, the government forces were virtually besieged in Nanchang, which commanded the chief north-south routes of the Empire. The entire middle Yangtze Valley was again under Taiping control, as was most of the deep South. While the rebels inched relentlessly toward Shanghai, the Imperial generals were as demoralized as their soldiers and their Emperor.

  Walking along one of Peking’s chief thoroughfares, Aaron Lee searched in vain for signs that its people were either disturbed or elated by the threat to the Dynasty. In his native Sh
anghai, he would have felt a galvanic stir in the air. In the Imperial Capital, the sweeping events that could transform all men’s lives might have been occurring on the moon, troubling only the rabbit in the moon. But a year earlier, hundreds of thousands had fled a capital they considered doomed to fall to the flying columns of the Taipings. He could as yet report only one impression. The capital of the world’s largest empire was a dull, provincial city peopled by a dull, backward race.

  Aaron turned an acute corner into the Crooked Sickle hutung. Lively for Peking, the alley would have appeared virtually deserted in the quietest section of Shanghai. A single hawker was crying his wares to sealed oiled-paper windows. The carrying pole that normally supported two tattered baskets of wizened apples was propped against his crude balance-scale, and his bronzed chest was bare under the tattered jacket slung over his shoulders.

  “Ping-kuohr!” he shouted in his thick-tongued dialect. “Apples! The best spring apples.”

  The hawker drew only incurious glances from two man-servants slumped on minute stools, as patient—and as animated—as chronic invalids. One waited his turn while the other submitted his grimy feet to the ministrations of an itinerant chiropodist. The wicked scalpel twinkled in the pale sun as it grated across the bulbous corn protruding from a hooked toe.

  Aaron grinned. So much for the hectic life of the Imperial Capital.

  The Crooked Sickle hutung broadened minutely, and an imposing police post recalled the grandeur it had possessed when it was a major thoroughfare. The virtually eternal memory of Peking set time at naught—time future as well as time past. He had been told of the conflagration that destroyed this district some two centuries ago as if it had raged the week before.

  Aaron read the signboard between the dust-streaked windows of a single-story building. Fortunately, he was in no need of the services of MASTER PHYSICIAN TSAO, SPECIALIST IN BONESETTING. Gold ideograms on the black plaque hanging across the adjoining loft advertised the restaurant he sought: LAO CHIAO WANG—THE OLD DUMPLING KING. Although the noon sun warmed the alley, the diamond-latticed windows were shut. Steam escaping through rents in their oiled paper filled the Crooked Sickle hutung with the fragrance of sesame, garlic, and pepper. The same family, Aaron knew, had run the eating shop for five centuries.

  Aaron eased the door open and stepped into a haze of steam and smoke. His streaming eyes could identify only the outlines of men and tables. When his sight cleared, he saw three cast-iron vats bubbling over wood fires in brick stoves. Wooden trays stacked on a counter held rows of puckered crescent moons shaped of white dough. Dumplings floated in the boiling water of the nearest vat, and others steamed in circular bamboo containers over the second. Strings of crescent moons crackled brown in the oil of the hemispherical pot on the third stove.

  Two chefs presided over the sacramental flames with the liveliest movements he had yet seen in the Northern Capital. Garlanded with steam like priests of some esoteric cult, they wore white cotton coats stained with soy sauce and scrolled with the scarlet ideograms: OLD DUMPLING KING. Their welcoming shout accompanied the first heartfelt smiles he had seen in the Northern Capital.

  The narrow pine tables had been polished golden by repeated swabbing, as had the high stools on which coolies, hawkers, artisans, and poor scholars chatted. The thin man in the gray satin long gown did not look up as Aaron approached, but continued to pick at the small dishes on the square ebony table under the rickety staircase to the loft. Passing over the boiled peanuts and pickled radish strips, his ivory chopsticks took up a miniature tentacle of dried squid with purple suckers like tiny rosebuds. Brown lips unmoving, he waved Aaron to an empty armchair with a heavy-knuckled hand—and three jade rings flashed in the sooty air.

  “Ni lai-lar! Hauerh!” the functionary drawled in the northern burr. “You’ve come! Good!”

  “Shih-di.” Aaron replied as laconically to the man who might prove to be his father’s salvation. “Yes.”

  The functionary glittered, inhumanly still within his lustrous satin carapace. His features, polished to a ruddy gloss by northern winters, were as uncommunicative as an obsidian statue’s. A black pearl glowed on his left hand, which lay on the ebony table top, and a string of amethysts interspersed with white jade shimmered on his chest. His narrow slate eyes were lit by an occasional phosphorescent glimmer like the still water in an ancient well.

  Aaron’s hopes plummeted, and he clenched his trembling hands within his long sleeves. What could he hope for from this unblinking lizard of a man, glittering without but arid within? Only, he feared, that the long tongue would flick greedily from the tight mouth to impale every morsel within reach.

  “Sit down, young Lee, sit down.” The bureaucrat spoke in a melodious baritone. “And do stop staring. I won’t eat you, I won’t devour your substance.”

  “Yes, sir … cer … certainly.”

  Anxiety made Aaron stammer, and his stammering made him even more nervous. He despaired of showing an impassive face to the man who could be either his advocate or his enemy.

  “We northerners normally eat chiao-tze, dumplings, at the New Year. But, of course, we also eat them all year round.” The hypnotic voice had calmed many nervous petitioners. “We also favor tsung-tze, sticky rice in lotus leaves, for the Dragon Boat Festival like you southerners. But the dumplings are appropriate. Like you, we settle our debts when the Dragon Boats race—just as we do at the New Year.”

  So soon, Aaron wondered, to business? Even a crude northerner should feel it unseemly to signal so soon and so broadly that silver must change hands. But the musical voice went on soothingly.

  “You won’t find newfangled delicacies at the Old Dumpling King. No simmered bear’s paws or dried duck’s tongues. Certainly no humming birds seethed in honey. Just good, old-fashioned food. Dumplings steamed or boiled to your taste or fried crunchy gold. They’ll also produce vegetarian dumplings for Buddhists or mutton for Moslems. But no innovations, except a filling of prawns from Tientsin. They’re delicious, even if they’re new.”

  “I see, sir.” Aaron feared Master Way was soothing him as a chicken is given rice wine to make its flesh tender before its head is chopped off. “I know little of northern food.”

  “I assumed so, young Lee. Anyway, I’ve ordered.”

  Aaron was slightly reassured. The reptilian Master Way had not departed so far from normal courtesy as to omit the comforting small talk about food that should precede any negotiation. Perhaps they could, after all, together snatch his father from death.

  “I thank Your Excellency profoundly,” he said.

  “By no means Excellency, young Lee. I’m not a minister, not even a Mandarin. Just a servant of the servants of His Imperial Majesty. And, I hope, a faithful intermediary for those who—like yourself—come to me in perplexity and distress.”

  A boy of ten, his straw-sandaled feet tripping on the skirts of his grimy white coat, placed a platter on the table. Bits of shrimp shone pale pink through the translucent envelopes of the steamed-dough crescents. Aaron’s chopsticks lifted one slippery dumpling and dipped it tentatively into the sauce. The chiao-tze were quite palatable, though coarse in comparison to the refined purse-dumplings of Shanghai. Surprisingly hungry, he consumed most of the dumplings while Master Way discoursed on the customs of Peking—and watched him with sly amusement.

  “You eat well, young Lee,” the official remarked when the waiter served a tureen of thick soup. “I hope your appetite for the complexities of the law is also strong. I always explain to my … ah … clients before discussing their individual problems. It’s imperative that you understand the numerous safeguards the Criminal Code provides for the protection of the convicted. Justice is as much concerned to protect the innocent as to punish the guilty—and to weigh any mitigating circumstances. But can you comprehend the law’s subtlety? That’s the question.”

  “I’m studying for the bachelor’s degree,” Aaron reminded his host. “I know a little.”

  “It
’ll be a pleasure to deal with a young scholar, instead of the usual ignorant dolts.” Master Way smiled. “Now attend carefully.”

  The Great Ching Criminal Code, the functionary explained, provided for automatic review of all death sentences. The Code was in this gravest matter, as in all others, scrupulously fair in intent and in practice. To give every condemned criminal every possible chance for life. Senior Mandarins learned in the law examined all the facts while constantly referring to statutes, precedents, and special circulars. After a case had been reviewed by the hierarchy of courts, the final verdict was pronounced by the Emperor himself.

  “So you now know the magnanimity of the law … how it offers much hope to a man in your father’s position. The lengthy process also provides interesting—and occasionally, I must admit, lucrative—employment for hundreds of Mandarins.” Master Way baited his snare with bureaucratic humor. “For humble underlings like myself too. Most important, the process often … quite often … ends with commutation of execution to a lesser punishment. Upon occasion, to a full pardon, though that’s most unusual. But you can certainly hope for commutation.”

  Suspicious of the deputy chief clerk’s excessive amiability, Aaron was relieved by his information that only one in ten condemned to death by provincial courts was actually executed. Many, however, died in imprisonment. They must therefore move swiftly to preserve the life of Aisek Lee. Aaron wondered whether a man convicted of an “abomination,” filial impiety that had caused a parent’s death, could hope for a sympathetic hearing.