Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  Aaron had been less amenable about the manner in which they should pay their respects. Although Aisek Lee was the father of their flesh, he had declared, Saul Haleevie was their legal father. By consenting to their adoption, whatever the circumstances, Aisek had renounced all claims upon his sons, whose names should properly be inscribed on the ancestral tablets of the Haleevie family rather than the Lee family. David pointed out that the Haleevies kept no ancestral tablets, though Saul had written their Hebrew names in his great-grandfather’s Bible. David further contended that they must kowtow to Aisek as if he were still their legal father. Aaron had regretfully ruled that kowtowing would be most irregular.

  David then suggested that Saul and Sarah, their legal parents, should sit beside Aisek and Maylu, who, though not their mother, was owed reverence as their actual father’s chief wife. Aaron was not amused and remained obdurate until David advanced a second proposition: They were still known as Lee, though they should legally be called Haleevie. Aisek Lee therefore merited their respect as the eldest member of the Lee family. A year older than Saul, he was the most senior in the family hierarchy. Although Aaron lacked David’s humor, he had laughed and agreed that they were not only permitted but required to pay profound respect to their “uncle” Aisek Lee, who was, in effect, their “father” Saul Haleevie’s elder brother.

  Emulated by their wives and children, the two Mandarins knelt and touched their foreheads to the Azerbaijan carpet three times. After rising, they again fell to their knees and again touched their heads to the carpet three times. Upon the third repetition, the ninefold prostration to their ancestor was complete.

  The brothers then offered Aisek their presents. They did not touch him, since public display of affection was improper. Besides, they had already embraced him and rubbed their cheeks against his in private, even the bashful grandchildren.

  “Saul, we are one family, are we not?” Aisek asked softly in his idiosyncratic mixture of Shanghainese and pidgin while the guests applauded. “Just as we are one house in business, Haleevie and Lee. What is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. Is that not true?”

  Saul nodded automatically, striving to keep his features from mirroring his dejection. Why, he wondered miserably, had Aisek chosen this joyful moment to bring matters to a head? Despite his partner’s benevolent air, exile had apparently made him hard and unfeeling.

  “I know you spent a fortune on my defense, but you did take over my properties,” Aisek continued implacably into Saul’s ear. “You sent me money in Heaven-blasted Kansu, but you’ve prospered greatly, haven’t you? And your prosperity was built in great part on my property, was it not?”

  “Aisek, I won’t … can’t … argue with you,” Saul murmured resignedly. “You’re entitled to half of all I own, though, I fear, it may be half my debts. Naturally, I’ll sell Jade House and all my other holdings, but the market’s heavily depressed. Still, I should get something …”

  “You go too fast, Saul,” his partner chided. “I’ve questioned not only my sons but others. I know how straitened you are despite your outward prosperity. You’ll not find me greedy, but only anxious for justice.”

  “I’ll sell everything and settle, as I said. I’ll assume the firm’s debts. I can’t do more, can I?”

  “Yes, Saul, you can! You can do much more!”

  “What do you suggest?” Saul snapped. “What do you want of me?”

  “We are one house, as I said. You can buy now, when values are depressed.”

  “Buy, you said? Not sell? Aisek, I’m afraid you still don’t understand. There are no funds … none whatsoever. How can I … we … buy?”

  “Yü ju chin,” Aisek murmured.

  “I’m sorry,” Saul replied in exasperation, “but I don’t understand.”

  “I said jade is like gold, an old proverb. I didn’t entirely waste my abundant time or my small talents in Kansu. I did a little trading, and I lived frugally. What could I buy in the wilderness? My stocks of jade were acquired openly and aboveboard, though, naturally, with a little oil on the wheels. Briefly, that jade is worth some five million taels, perhaps more depending on the market. As you know, in hard times like these, Chinese buy jade for security. Shall we say roughly two million sterling? We’ll begin paying off the debts. But not so fast that we arouse too much curiosity. And we’ll buy land. Weren’t you thinking of a cotton mill? Other opportunities will certainly arise. We are one house, you and I, one family and one house.”

  CHAPTER 73

  February 17, 1874

  The Garden of Crystal Rivulets

  THE SUMMER PALACES NEAR PEKING

  The lamas’ saffron and magenta robes spilled like fallen berries over the marble platform and down the stairs leading to the Pavilion of Precious Clouds. They wore heavy cassocks that bared their left shoulders despite the biting cold of the morning of February 17, 1874, the first day of the first month of the thirteenth year of the reign of the Tung Chih Emperor of the Great Pure Dynasty. The monks chanted sutras as gray-gossamer incense fumes swirled from their silver censers set with coral and turquoise. The black smoke of firecrackers drifted above the snow-spangled slopes of the Fragrant Hills to the west of the Garden of Crystal Rivulets.

  Wearing a new surcoat over his best official robe and an expression of great solemnity, Mandarin of the Third Grace David Lee listened to the Buddhist prayers for the Imperial Family. The Sanskrit words, rendered phonetically—and meaninglessly—into Chinese ideograms, were intoned by Tibetan and Mongolian lamas who knew no Sanskrit and little Chinese. When he offered a prayer in Hebrew, David mused, he knew exactly what he was saying to the One True God.

  Despite his distaste for the half-pagan liturgy, he was suffused with patriotic pride. After their long suspension, the resumption of the lama rites at the Pavilion of Precious Clouds testified to the resurgence of the Great Pure Dynasty, which foreigners called the Tung Chih Restoration.

  He could again be proud to be Chinese. The Empire was recovering from its protracted humiliation by the foreign powers, which had begun with the First Opium War in 1840, intensified during the indecisive Arrow War, and culminated when the rape of the Summer Palaces in 1860 brought the Second Opium War to an ignominious conclusion. He could be doubly proud to be a Senior Mandarin of the Ching Dynasty. Though the Manchus remained half-tamed savages who practiced barbaric rites, they ruled according to sound Confucian principles.

  Actually a political and moral code, rather than the religion many foreigners thought it, Confucianism was itself forcefully adapting to the new age—just as Aaron and he had envisioned a decade earlier. Moreover, the material basis of Chinese civilization was being vigorously modernized. Factory chimneys were rising, while railroads would soon thrust their shining rails across the ancient land. Telegraph wires were already carrying urgent messages short distances, and paved roads were speeding transportation.

  Most important in a hostile world, the Dynasty’s reorganized military forces would soon be powerful enough to repel any new intruder. Mortars, cannon, and modern breech-loading rifles armed both the Baronet Jung Lu’s Peking Field Force and the Mandarin Li Hung-chang’s Army of Huai. Gunboats with steam engines patrolled Chinese waters, and armored cruisers were to join the fleet. China would soon stand alone and unafraid.

  Perhaps incongruously, the symbol of the new China in David’s eyes was the Pavilion of Precious Clouds, beside which he stood among other Mandarins attending the Empress Dowager Yehenala and the Tung Chih Emperor. The people called it the Bronze Pavilion. Cast entirely of that metal in the middle of the last century for the Great Chien Lung Emperor, it was a masterly amalgam of Chinese artistry with European technology. Damaged by Lord Elgin’s conflagration some thirteen years earlier, the refurbished structure now towered over the intense activity that was rebuilding the Garden of Crystal Rivulets to the west of the Park of Radiant Perfection.

  On the adjoining terrace, the golden palanquin of the Empress Dowager stood before a stack
of raw beams meant for the skeleton of an exact replica of the Tower of Buddha’s Fragrance. Yehenala watched between the Imperial-yellow curtains that hid her from men’s eyes the lama rite imploring Heaven to grant her longevity. Beside her palanquin stood the martial figure of the Baronet Jung Lu, the unicorn of a full general rippling on his chest. As the General whispered intimately through the silk curtains, David concluded that their affair was proceeding smoothly.

  And why should it not? The General-Commandant of the Peking Field Force took immense pains to please his capricious Imperial mistress, who had raised him to that dignity. Yehenala held not only Jung Lu’s career but his life in her soft palm. All men knew of their illicit love, but not even the most fearless Censor dared remonstrate with them as long as they did not violate propriety in public. They had, however, ample opportunity to behave as they wished in the privacy contrived by the immensely powerful Chief Eunuch Li Lienying, who was called Cobbler’s Wax Li by the irreverent and the Lord of Nine Thousand Years by the indignant.

  A short distance from his mother’s palanquin, the seventeen-year-old Tung Chih Emperor sat on a golden throne among his own entourage. David paid homage to the plump figure with the vacant expression as his sovereign, but was not impressed by the youth himself. Second only to intrigue as the Northern Capital’s chief occupation, remarkably accurate gossip reported that the Emperor had recently almost committed his gross indiscretions in public. He had certainly frightened his Ministers.

  Nonetheless, the Imperial mother and the Imperial son were not at odds or they would not have appeared together for the lama rites. The youth was certainly paying more attention to both his studies and his duties, as he had promised his mother he would. He was, unfortunately, also bewildered by Yehenala’s antagonism to the young Empress he had married a little more than a year ago. He was neglecting his wife to frequent the Flower Quarters, transparently disguised as a minor Manchu nobleman. He therefore suffered severely from the plum-poison sickness, the euphemism for syphilis.

  His mother, the gossips said, actually preferred that he debauch himself with Chinese harlots and transvestites, rather than pay his attentions to his ladies. That was almost certainly a canard. Even many Mandarins, who resented the absolute power of a female, invented stories to discredit Yehenala. David respected her because she was, however grudgingly, a prime mover of China’s rapid progress.

  As David watched, the Emperor strolled alone to his mother’s golden palanquin. He bowed respectfully before speaking, and he listened attentively to the reply through the Imperial-yellow curtains. A small hand with long fingernails sheathed in blue enamel darted out so rapidly David almost disbelieved his eyes and patted the youth’s shoulder. While not a flagrant violation of Court etiquette, that gesture of maternal affection in the sight of others was highly irregular—as Aaron might have said.

  The spectacle David saw when his eyes ranged across the landscape proved that mother and son were also united by a common purpose. The seven hundred acres of the ravaged Garden of Crystal Rivulets had become a vast construction site, where hosts of coolies hauled building materials for armies of craftsmen. Never before had David seen such abundant energy expended on any public enterprise.

  Almost two years had passed since the Mandarin Li Hung-chang conceived his stratagem of engaging Yehenala’s excessive energy in rebuilding the Summer Palaces so that professional administrators like himself could reconstruct the nation undisturbed. Both Yehenala and the Emperor were now convinced that it was their own idea. The Mandarin had, unfortunately, convinced neither the conservatives, who opposed him in most matters, nor the moderates of his own camp—not to speak of the radical intelligentsia who flourished in the sanctuaries of the treaty ports. Such lavish expenditure on an unproductive project was denounced by some who believed the impoverished should receive that money and by others who demanded that it build factories and armaments. Moreover, Yehenala still intervened capriciously in affairs of state, though, perhaps, not as frequently. But the Mandarin had reconciled some of the differences between the Empress Dowager and the Emperor in their mutual passion for building.

  David Lee joined the stream of Princes and Mandarins flowing down the hill to the shore of Kunming Lake behind the Imperial palanquins. As the representative of a regional potentate among the grandees of the central government, he hung back from the front rank. As the representative of the Empire’s premier Viceroy, whom he could not demean by excessive modesty, he placed himself firmly in the second rank. Still, these pompous Imperial inspections were tedious despite their political significance. David was bored, and his thoughts wandered.

  A month after leaving Shanghai, he was still distressed—and bemused—by the tension between his sister Fronah and his friend Gabriel, both of whom he loved. When the family party at Jade House dispersed, Fronah had returned with her son Judah to the Nest of Joy, while Gabriel moved his belongings over to Willards Hotel. Though the lovers still spent their free time together, that separation was symbolic of the rift that divided them.

  David alone knew all the ramifications of their disagreement, since Fronah and Gabriel had confided in him individually. Fronah did not know that she was a widow—and free to marry Gabriel—because Saul still stubbornly refused to tell her. Saul did not know that Gabriel was Jewish by Mosaic law because Fronah would not tell him—and be forced to a decision when her father withdrew his opposition to the American.

  His sister was playing a dangerous game. She was lying to her lover, assuring him that she had already told her father he was an eligible suitor. That fact—and Fronah’s duplicity—might well emerge in conversation between Saul and Gabriel. The merchant’s secret was more secure. His wife would not betray it, though she thought him willfully wrong-headed. Filial piety bound his adoptive sons not to reveal Lionel Henriques’s death, though they were distressed by the impasse.

  Gabriel Hyde had found that Fronah was telling the proximate truth regarding the obstacles to divorce under British law. He had not asked Saul about the Talmud’s provision—or lack of provision—for freeing an abandoned wife. He was unlikely to do so, since he trusted Fronah. Besides, he would not embarrass her by approaching her father, the only authority on Jewish law in the Foreign Settlement to whom he could decently appeal.

  David winced when he recalled his tortuous evasions of the American’s inquiries regarding Lionel Henriques. Without lying outright, he had conveyed the impression that Aaron and he had searched in vain for any evidence regarding the Englishman’s fate after the fall of Soochow. He could in honor no more reveal Saul’s secret to Gabriel and to his sister than he could tell his adoptive father that Gabriel was Jewish.

  Knowing his sister so well, David shrewdly surmised that both Lionel’s presumably unknown fate and Gabriel’s presumably Gentile origins were in good part an elaborate diversion from her most deeply rooted reservations. He had watched with approval her transformation after she became militantly devoted to her children’s home, a transformation he had, he congratulated himself, stimulated. He had marveled at the competence and initiative with which she executed the assignments for the Mandarin Li Hung-chang that he had initially helped her obtain. She had, quite simply, become a different woman after shaking off her depression—and he fully sympathized with her grave reluctance to compromise her new personality and her freedom of action.

  David bowed abstractedly to the Imperial palanquins and wished he could force Fronah to behave sensibly. He sensed that she was afraid of the responsibility of marriage after one disastrous experience. He knew that she was also afraid of losing Gabriel. Her opposed fears canceled each other, leaving her frozen in indecision.

  David lifted his hand to scratch his head in perplexity. His fingers touched the upturned sable brim of his Court hat surmounted by a golden finial crowned with the sapphire of his rank and the peacock-plume decoration awarded for bravery against the Taipings. He dreaded the formal banquet the Emperor was to give later that day for a thousand Princ
es and Mandarins. The forced jollity would be exhausting, and the coarse drunkenness of the Manchus would be revolting. He would have a splitting headache the next morning.

  Yehenala and Niuhura were to give a banquet for their Court ladies. The women would not drink as strenuously as the men, but they would drink robustly. Probably Yehenala alone would remain relatively sober, for her excess was not wine but food. Her brigade of cooks had invented an extraordinary variety of fanciful dishes for the Grand Court Banquets of the junior Empress Dowager.

  Though he found bear’s paws stringy, greasy, and tasteless, they were respectable because the Sage Mencius had mentioned that dish with approval. What, David wondered, would the sages of antiquity have made of the ostentatious extravagance of camel’s hump, rhinoceros’s liver, elephant’s trunk, scaly anteater, and crushed baroque pearls? Those grotesqueries would appear on the Empress Dowager’s table among even more disgusting Manchu delicacies to fill out the two hundred fifty-four courses. Just thinking of that excess was almost enough to drive him to kosher food, though he considered the Hebraic dietary laws archaic in this modern age.

  The golden palanquins of the Empress Dowager and the Emperor had arrived at Kunming Lake, where state barges waited to carry them back to the Northern Capital. The conflict between that son and his mother, David mused, was a reflection in a crazed mirror of the impasse between his sister and her father. Both pairs were bound by deep love, and both were tormenting each other.

  Determined that her son must be a paragon among Emperors, Yehenala could not relax the domination that prevented his attaining maturity. Since she would not even allow him to live affectionately with his wife, the resentful Emperor fled to the dangerous pleasures of the Flower Quarters. That convoluted revenge and his mother’s concern might well destroy him.