The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  She removes her hat and shakes loose her hair, which is dark with streaks the colour of ripe pomegranate that I am guessing mask strands of silver. A lock of hair clings to her cheeks with static electricity. Her scarf has settled around her neck, the skin of which appears fine and soft. As she looks around I take in her small chin, heart-shaped face and high-bridged nose. She is almost certainly a hunxue’r, a Eurasian of some description. The years and something very like sorrow have left their marks and shadows on her face, which is not unattractive.

  Her lips are blue with cold and she is shivering. She seems to have come a long way. This is even more unusual. Most of my customers, with one or two eccentric exceptions, live in the general neighbourhood of the Drum Tower. No one would come out on a night like this, to a place like this, from any distance without a good reason, and certainly not alone.

  ‘Here,’ I say on impulse. ‘Give me your hands.’

  She looks at me strangely, and I wonder if she feels the connection. She tenders her hands suspiciously, making me doubt that this is such a good idea; in fact I wonder what kind of idea this is at all. But it’s too late for second thoughts. I tug off her gloves and, placing them on the bar, warm her hands in my own, chasing my déjà vu into her eyes. A current passes between us and I feel suddenly self-conscious. What am I doing? Her expression is enigmatic. She looks down at our hands. ‘I don’t even know you.’ Then she cocks her head to one side, and regards me with a sudden, intense curiosity. ‘Or do I? You look so familiar.’

  ‘I had the same feeling just now,’ I say and then, my tongue speaking ahead of my brain, ‘I thought maybe you might have been a model or an actress.’

  ‘Ha. That’s nice,’ she replies. ‘But I think maybe you need to get your eyes checked.’ Before I can reply, she shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure it’ll come to us eventually.’

  ‘I’m sure it will,’ I agree with a shrug. ‘Beijing. One of the biggest cities and smallest towns in the world.’

  I lay one of her hands on top of the gloves, and place the other on top of that. I pat the top one. ‘Stay there,’ I instruct it. Pouring out a mug of the mulled wine, I place it next to her hands. ‘Okay,’ I tell them. ‘You can move now.’ And to her: ‘This should warm you up.’

  ‘You’ve already warmed me up,’ she answers and coughs, or laughs, I’m not sure. Her Chinese is good; whether or not she’d intended the double entendre, she certainly recognised it once it was out there.

  You might think I’d compliment her on her Chinese at this point. It is the last thing I’m about to do. Not out of meanness. An English friend of mine who’d been here for years and was perfectly fluent once told me that if one more Chinese person marvelled aloud at the fact he could use chopsticks or speak the language he’d put on a bear suit and start dancing. He told me that no one in the UK would dream of making a big deal over the fact that someone from another culture could use a fork and knife or speak the language of the country they lived in. When people praised his Chinese, he replied, Ma ren, shima? Are you taking the piss? He had a point. Only non-Chinese with the shakiest grasp on the language took such compliments at face value. The truth is, we Chinese can be kind and we can take the piss, sometimes at the same time, but we rarely ever think that a foreigner’s Chinese is all that good. When it is, we simply treat the foreigner like a human being.

  So I reply, ‘Bici.’ Ditto. You’ve warmed me up as well.

  Her eyes transform into crescent moons, balanced on their points. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’ She is smiling at me over the top of the mug.

  Another obscure memory flits past, uncatchable, ominous. The thought comes to me: Zhuangzi, dreaming not of butterflies but of nets.

  ‘You’re the first. I swear.’

  ‘That’s the other thing about Beijing. World’s biggest flirts.’

  ‘I blame the language. It made me do it. How’s the wine, by the way?’

  ‘Xiang,’ she comments, fragrant, taking another sip before putting it down to loosen the scarf around her neck and undo her coat. ‘Where did you learn to mull wine?’

  I tap my fingers on a keyboard made of air. ‘The internet.’

  ‘Of course.’ Her voice is deep, a little husky. I’ve never understood why even grown Chinese women often choose to speak at the upper register of their voices, as if they were little girls. I’ve noticed that some foreign women in China pick up the habit as well. I probably liked it – I did like it – when I was young and feckless, but that was some time ago. Well, it was a long time ago that I was young, anyway.

  ‘You can find anything on the internet,’ she is saying. ‘I get a little lost on it sometimes.’ She looks around, as though searching for someone. Her eyes linger on the doorway.

  ‘Don’t we all,’ my words drawing her unsettled gaze back to me. ‘When surfing the internet,’ I say, ‘it’s good to recall the words of an ancient philosopher who said that life has limits but knowledge none. He cautioned that one shouldn’t pursue the limitless with the limited. I take that to mean we shouldn’t spend too much time online.’

  ‘I like Zhuangzi,’ she states matter-of-factly.

  ‘Not everyone would have recognised the quote.’

  She shrugs off the compliment. ‘He’s my kind of Daoist. And a good storyteller. But I’d assumed you’d be more of a Laozi kind of guy, judging from the name of your bar. Assuming it’s your bar. Or do you just work here?’

  ‘It’s my bar. And that’s a good point. It’s a long story.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it sometime.’

  The curtain goes whoomph a second time.

  When I dashed into Fei Chang Dao, the first person I saw, sprawled in an armchair as though he owned it, was a bespectacled Englishman, university don circa 1965, poring over a book of Song dynasty philosophy while a caramel pug snored in his lap. A Chinese man with glasses, not too much taller than me, was mulling wine behind the bar. He looked up as I entered. There was a doorway on the right that led to another room, the wing of what would have once been a small courtyard house, less spacious than Mrs Jin’s. This room seemed to be the bar proper. It held an arty mix of comfortable old mismatched sofas and chairs and second-hand tables – what in Australia you might call a Melbourne-style bar. It was packed. Music was playing, though I was barely aware of it at first, so anxious was I to see if my mysterious correspondent was already here.

  Inside, draped over an old sofa that somehow complemented the Qing dynasty architecture, was a trio of Chinese emos in Doc – or perhaps Moc Marten boots. One looked up and, finding me of no particular interest, returned her attention to her friends. A pair of stork-like fashionistas, one Chinese, one African, perched on stools at a high table, drawing elegantly on thin cigars and playing with their phones. My heart snagged on the sight of a tender-eyed young blonde listing towards a Chinese dandy with an explosion of multi-coloured hair and a wandering gaze; he toyed with her hand in a manner that could at best be described as reassuring. To complete a picture that could seem congruous only in Beijing, gathered around a large table towards the back was a merry tribe of Mongolians, members, I was quite certain, of a famous rock band, resplendent in traditional robes and with haircuts sampling both Genghis and punk. Or perhaps they were just a less-famous Mongolian band pretending to be them. It occurred to me that they could equally have been a Chinese band pretending to be Mongolian. Perhaps they were just pretending to be a band. There was a lot of that around.

  The only piece missing from this picture was anyone who could credibly have been my correspondent. I was relieved – I don’t mind waiting for people (as my relationship with Q more than amply attests), but I hate making people wait for me. I returned to the bar, reeled in by the seductive scent of wine, cloves, cinnamon and anise. Mulled wine! The bartender’s brushstroke eyebrows were drawn into an almost imperceptible frown of concentration; he didn’t seem to notice my return at first, which gave me the chance to study him. He was one of those men
for whom middle age was a comfortable fit: silvered, nicely worn and loose-limbed in a thick grey jumper against which pushed the hint of a belly; he looked more like an ageing artist or intellectual than a barman.

  His taking my hands to warm them disconcerted me. How long had it been since someone held my hands? I didn’t want to think. But I took to him quickly, to that subtle blend of roguishness and courtesy that has always drawn me to the Beijing character. I know that new people can sometimes give you the impression that you’ve known them forever, or ought to have, and that time has cheated you in only just bringing them to you. Xiangjian henwan. So you will them to become a part of your life. Under the slow burn of his gaze I even felt a faint shiver, a trespass of desire, against which I silently recited Q’s name like an incantation. But more than that, or perhaps interwoven, was that other thing, a spooky familiarity, a kind of a doubling, an inexplicable sense that Q was present, that he had something to do with this night. I felt unmoored. I told myself it was because my nerves were firing from the cold, from the effort of finding this place, from anticipation. The mulled wine was good. It calmed me down.

  Whoomph. A cold draught. I turned to see a large man, stooped, infinitely elderly, pass through the insulating curtain over the door. It was, beyond doubt, him. His eyes, cataract blue and kindly, were framed by the heavy asymmetrical folds of his hooded eyelids above and pouches of spider-webbed skin below that served as soft wrinkled pillows for those cloudy marbles. He pulled off his beanie and I noticed his feathery white eyebrows and the ethereal puff of hair floating above his speckled scalp. His aroma was that of centuries past, of age, of the futile, sweet stay of cologne against mortal decay, with a touch of soap-laundered clothing and cold. The years had erased virtually all traces of ethnicity and even gender. And yet if his face was antique parchment, one touch away from dust, it was, I knew, overwritten with history. In that first glance I saw alphabets and characters there, lost languages and libraries. There were whole volumes on Backhouse – for this, beyond doubt, was my correspondent. If his letter had told the truth, and his appearance suggested it might well have, there was an essay or two on me as well.

  My eyes fell on the document case of Morocco leather, as creased and ancient as its guardian, who held it clutched against his chest. A presence, a present, a gift from the past, enfolded in soft brown calfskin and cradled in the arms of age.

  The old man peeled off his gloves and unfastened his caped overcoat, from which wintry air pulsed like the breath of Stygian night itself, an icy, phantom expiration. If this ancient creature came bearing the night, however, it was surely the black-winged creature of the earliest Greek myths, that goddess Night from whose silver egg Eros sprang double-sexed, vital and unruly with the energy of cosmic creation. Eros, the mischievous, the irresistible. The life force.

  For most of his days, Edmund Backhouse had been an apostle of Eros. He even signed himself Bacchus, a trick of the tongue on an amenable surname. When, close to death, like his hero Oscar Wilde, like Baron Corvo, he converted to Catholicism and chose the name of the apostle Paul, it was not quite an exorcism. Nor was it as strange or distant a leap as people imagined, this curvet from Greek to Latin, from the cloven-footed revels of the Dionysian to the sensual, incense-soaked religion of Hadrian the Seventh and Rome. I thought I knew much about Edmund Backhouse, but standing in front of the last man to have been intimately acquainted with him in life – a man who had been mourned, eulogised and supposedly buried back when I was still in secondary school – I realised I knew nothing at all.

  ‘Dr Hoeppli,’ I began, and faltered. The wonder in my throat left no passage for my voice. I looked towards the bartender as though for help, but he was busy uncapping a bottle of aged scotch.

  The old man didn’t react. He continued to study me.

  ‘I got your letter,’ I started again, suddenly uncertain: had there even been a letter?

  It occurred to me that perhaps he was more comfortable speaking in Chinese. After all, this was the man whom the French diplomat Roland de Margerie had once described as a personnage assez curieux, a most curious man, tout à fait absorbé dans la vie chinoise. I switched languages and introduced myself in Chinese, the old-fashioned, respectful way – ‘humble surname’ and all that. Chinese often smiled to see foreigners from different countries conversing in Chinese but it wasn’t any stranger than, say, a Frenchman and a Turk meeting in New York and speaking to one another in English, which is to say, it wasn’t strange at all. (As the Chinese themselves say, shaojian duoguai, that which is not often seen seems odd.) I even clasped my left fist in my right hand and brought it up to my chest in the classic, albeit masculine greeting.

  This gesture elicited a glancing smile, or perhaps it was merely a nervous twitch of the lips. Hard to tell, but at last he spoke. ‘I know who you are, my dear. Otherwise, I should not have asked you to meet me, especially on such an inhospitable night.’ The Swiss-watch precision of his English contrasted with the craggy, tobacco-cured quality of his voice. ‘I have followed your career with great interest.’ As he said this, his hand, friable, corded with veins, folded itself around my own. It felt weirdly discarnate, colder than weather, his palsied grip that of congealed air. The nail on his little finger was long and sheathed by a nail protector of fine-spun gold. I’d only ever seen such a thing in photographs of the Empress Dowager and was so tested by the question of how it had fit inside his gloves – or had he slipped it on after taking them off and I simply hadn’t noticed? – that it took me a moment to react to what he said next: ‘And with no little curiosity besides. That novel …’

  I stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Novel?’

  ‘The Empress Lover, of course.’

  ‘You’ve … you’ve read The Empress Lover? But that’s … No one … However did you find a copy?’

  ‘I didn’t. I learned of it from your landlady’s micro-blog on Weibo.’ Mrs Jin! What else had she broadcast to the world about me? I wondered.

  He raised my left wrist up to his face, and examined my bracelets with a narrow, forensic gaze. Rotating them on my wrist, he examined them minutely, even lifting them off my arm slightly by balancing them in his palm as though to judge their heft. For a long time he said nothing. At long last he nodded. ‘I never did find a copy of your novel. The fact you wrote it was interesting, but it was only one clue among many. Your linguistic facility, your reclusive nature, your looks and, of course, the real key: these bracelets. They fascinated Mrs Jin. I could only hope that they were what they appeared to be from her description and that you hadn’t picked them up at Panjiayuan or some such place, in which case you would not be the person for whom I’ve been searching at all.’ He ran his finger over the dragon one last time and released my hands, which had now been held captive twice in one evening. Those vellum jowls parted around a smile of old ivory and teak. He seemed then to sigh, though perhaps his breathing was simply long with age. ‘Such rare and exquisite jade, so precious and so divinely fashioned.’

  ‘They belonged to my mother,’ I said, discomposed.

  Raising my hand to his lips, he laid upon it a kiss as delicate, dewy and suggestive as rose petals, the sensual kiss of le libertin ancien. ‘Actually,’ he replied, ‘they belonged to your grandmother.’

  ‘My grandmother?’ A chill ran up my spine. ‘Did you … did you know her?’

  ‘Regretfully, no.’

  A thousand questions tangled in my brain.

  The bartender put on a CD by Paris Combo. He had refilled my mug. Picking up a glass of amber spirits for my companion, he indicated for us to follow him into the inner room. ‘It’s warmer there, more comfortable.’ The music danced over the hum of conversation and laughter. On n’a pas besoin, de chercher si loin … The song was about discovering that what you’ve been looking for was beside you all along. I had the same album. I remembered, apropos of nothing, that the singer was called Belle and her husband, also part of the group, was Australian.

  Entering th
e room a second time, now in the company of the barkeeper and Dr H, I sensed the patrons’ eyes on me. I angled my shoulders back and my head upwards a discreet degree or two; my face mirrored the slightly jaded look of the habitué. Like any chameleon, I could make myself at home anywhere. I went instantly from being a wairen, an outsider, to a neiren, one of them. As we passed, the Mongols toasted the bartender: ‘To the Sage!’

  I questioned him with my eyes. He shrugged, smiling: ‘Xiao wo,’ he said, ‘they’re making fun of me.’ He led us behind a sandalwood screen into a cosy nook where two comfortable-looking armchairs sat angled as though deep in conversation. Behind them, against the wall, stood a Ming-style altar table. On the table was a lamp. Its shade depicted the ascent of the goddess Chang’E to the moon with her stolen elixir of immortality. Before the chairs stood another, lower table, on which the bartender placed our drinks. On a shelf by the window, a small electrical fish tank glowed blue as tropical fish made of metal, together with their bright blue layered waves, made their unhurried way around the central mechanism. It was one of those rare pieces of kitsch that had crossed to the other side and become strangely, soothingly lovely.

  Occupying one of the armchairs was a pair of snoozing cats, one black with a speck of white on her cheek, the other white with a speck of black on her forehead. They lay curled snugly one into the other, tummies pulsing with the mismatched breath of sleep, a softly thrumming wheel of yin and yang. ‘Qu,’ the bartender scolded. Get lost. ‘Qu, qu.’ The white one yawned, opened one eye and closed it again. ‘Impossible creatures.’

  Dr H flicked at their ears with a sheathed fingernail. Shaking their silky heads in feline disdain, they sneezed, one after the other, and dethroned.

  The old man shrugged off his coat and settled into the seat cushion like snowdrift, gesturing for me to take the other chair. The bartender left us.