The Painter of Shanghai (9 page)

Yuliang looks at Suyin, whose face registers the same shock she feels. But Godmother isn’t finished yet. ‘Also,’ she continues, ‘your hair-combing takes place in a week. Have Jinling mark it in her book.’

She turns to go. Then, remembering something, she turns back. Stepping lightly across the room, she slaps Dai on the face, hard enough to leave a red mark. ‘No dinner for you tonight, my piglet,’ she says. ‘Now go upstairs and change.’

‘It’s going to be Yi Gan.’

Yuliang stares at her friend and mentor. ‘No.’

‘Oh, Yuliang. Don’t act so surprised.’ Jinling shakes her head. But she steps back from the doorway and waves Yuliang in. Then, carefully, she shuts the door behind her. ‘Yes,’ she says, turning to face her. ‘He bid the highest.’

‘How long have you known?’

‘Godmother told me last week.’ The top girl walks slowly to the window, her white hands twisting and clasping at her waist. ‘I was going to tell you. But then…’ Yuliang hears rather than sees the gesture, the soft, rustling sound of a shrug. ‘It’s just skin.’

She staggers to the bed, pressing her palms to her eyes. She sees Yi Gan, his twining arms, his apelike hands.

‘You knew this was coming,’ Jinling says softly, touching her shoulder. ‘It comes for each one of us.’

I’m not one of you
, Yuliang thinks. But what she says, in a tiny whisper of a voice, is, ‘I don’t want him to touch me.’

Jinling makes a small sound:
‘Tsk.’
She strokes Yuliang’s hand, her arm. Then she puts her hands on Yuliang’s shoulders. ‘Lie down,’ she whispers.

Numbly, Yuliang lets herself be pulled, lets Jinling curl around her like a little cat. The top girl murmurs soft and comfortless phrases into Yuliang’s hair. ‘Think about the big party beforehand. All the nice things you’ll get to eat and wear. A red silk dress that’s so stiff with embroidery that it will stand up by itself. I’ve seen it! And there will be a big banquet – almost as big as tonight’s. Merchant Yi will pay for everything. The best food. Anything you ask for.’

‘I ask for nothing.’

‘Hush. Ask for
everything.
It’s the only way. You’ll be able to start saving.’

‘I can’t.’ She feels Jinling’s heartbeat through the thin cotton of her nightshirt. Beating, a small finger tapping her back. ‘Let’s leave,’ she says. ‘We can beg for a living. Or stow away on a boat. People would take pity on us and help us. I’m sure they would!’

‘They’d find us. We’re registered with the police now. They have lists and descriptions. Soon they’ll even have photographs.’

‘We’d just run away again,’ says Yuliang. ‘They’d give up eventually. They’d have to.’

‘They wouldn’t!’ Jinling says. ‘Listen to me, Yuliang.
Listen.’ She turns Yuliang around. Her breath is sharp and faintly floral. She spritzes her mouth at night with her special French cologne. Not to please men, but to clean her tongue of their taste. ‘The other night you asked what the worst case was,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you.’ Her finger’s pressure on Yuliang’s arm deepens. ‘There was another girl here, before you. The apprentice leaf you replaced. She said the same things, and ran away. And when they brought her back, she ran away again.’

‘You see?’

Jinling holds up her hand. ‘The second time, they killed her. No one says so. But everyone knows.’

Yuliang stiffens. In her brief time here she’s seen plenty of violence. Papa Gao has beaten Mingmei within an inch of her life, then offered her bleeding body to his friends. Whores have attacked each other too – it is even whispered that Xiaochen once hired someone to disfigure a rival flower from the teahouse. The man threw burning acid on the girl’s face. So far, though, Yuliang has never heard of anyone’s being murdered. ‘Who – who did it?’ she asks.

Jinling just looks at her meaningfully. ‘The police pulled her out of Wuhu Lake. They brought her here. Yuliang, I saw her. Her ankles were like puffed pig bladders. Her scalp – it was flaking off. Not just the skin, the whole thing. Bone and all.’ She shudders, shuts her eyes. ‘That was when I realized.’

‘Realized what?’

‘That the only way to escape this place is by doing it their way. You bring the men in. You buy your way out.’

Yuliang covers her eyes again. ‘How do you stand it?’ she wails. ‘Their hands. Their mouths. Their –’

‘Because you have to.’ Jinling tightens her pink lips. ‘You have to let them into your body.’ She strokes Yuliang’s hair. ‘But here’s a secret: you don’t have to let them into your head. Your thoughts are yours alone. You must just think of something else.’

Her words bring back, unexpectedly, the white ant who brought her here, the day her uncle so brutally betrayed her.
You’ll just have to endure
, she hears the broker rasp.
Try to think of something else.
For a moment she almost feels them: the crabbed fingers pressing her legs apart… ‘I should kill myself. I should eat opium. Right now.’

‘Oh. Oh, no.’ Jinling pulls Yuliang to her, harder this time, and starts to rock. ‘You can’t kill yourself,’ she croons. ‘What will I do then? What will I do without you?’

In the next room, maids debate over an old colonel, who has drunk himself completely unconscious. The manservant votes just to leave him: ‘Give him a dry bed in the night wing for the night. Just make sure he’s out before the old centipede wakes.’

The maids giggle. ‘Sir,’ they say. ‘Please, sir. Eminence. Wake up.’

Yuliang can’t breathe. The girl from the lake floats in the black space of her mind.

Jinling keeps rocking. Then she starts to sing. At first the tune is wordless. Then it isn’t. Words shape themselves from the humming like small pearls, formed by the ocean:
‘Shi shang zhi you ma ma hao… Mei ma de hai zi xiang ge cao…’

Your mama is the best in the world
Without her, you’re but a blade of grass
Away from your mama’s heart
How will you ever find happiness?

Mama
, Yuliang thinks numbly.
Mama, I’m so sorry
. The hurt doesn’t stop, but breathing becomes easier. Overwhelmed, she buries her face in Jinling’s white skin. For a moment she just lies there. Then, slowly, she begins to brush the soft expanse with her face. There’s a little dimple, she discovers. A soft nook that marks where chest becomes neck. She rests her lips on the spot, and finds they fit.

8

In the early mornings that follow, Yuliang retreats to sleep (or not-sleep) in Jinling’s room, in Jinling’s bed. She burrows between her mentor’s clean sheets and soft limbs like a small rabbit, seeking safety from a fox. There are names, she now knows, for the things that they do together:
laying slippery noodles. Polishing the mirror
. But these snide terms seem far removed from the warm, affirming acts the two girls share; and besides, they are terms the men give it. So Yuliang doesn’t think about them – any more than she thinks of the men themselves. For a few hours each night, in fact, it’s as though men don’t even exist.

In her own new room, as in her old, Yuliang keeps the wedding shoes hidden. As always, she has avoided looking at them. But on the eve of her arranged ‘wedding’ she parts the silken pile of her underthings and finds the little paper package.

She opens the tissue carefully and picks up the left shoe. Over the holidays she finally began to embroider in the little hole, although she practiced first, sometimes for hours at a time: couching stitches and chain stiches, split stitches and man-character stitches. Satin stitches, grass seed stitches, oblique stitches to make the stems of plants. She re-created each blossom perfectly on at least two or three handkerchiefs before even picking up the
unfinished slipper. Her eyes ached, and her tired fingertips stung with pricks by the time she was done. But her effort paid off. Studying the shoe by candelight now, she can hardly see where the past needle leaves off and her own picks up.

It should make her feel proud – that she’s attained such skill. And yet, all Yuliang really feels is ill. The irony of it doesn’t miss her – that she’s completed her mother’s gift, only to make a mockery of her dreams.

I should just burn them
, Yuliang thinks. She pictures it: red silk, orange flame. A final funereal rite. The slippers, now black ghosts, would float back to her mama. They’d return to their rightful owner. In their rightful state.

When Yuliang opens her eyes, the silk’s close enough to the candle that the flame senses fuel and shivers. Almost unthinkingly, she tilts the shoe a little closer, studying not the blossoms now but her own hands, these thin white servants that stroke cat fur and brush Jinling’s hair and clothes and – these past, new nights – her soft thighs. ‘You have such beautiful fingers,’ Jinling has said more than once. ‘They are like the hands of a true artist.’

Her mother’s hands were slightly thinner, as Yuliang remembers them. And they were almost always in motion: cleaning dishes, smoothing her hair, and of course stitching, always stitching. As she stitched, her mama wove stories: about finding her husband (although never about losing him). About the troubles of the year of the boar. ‘It was so much worse than anyone had predicted,’ she’d murmur. ‘The rains poured into the Yangtze for days and days. The river boiled, as though cooked on some huge stove. The floods soaked the streets and the
fields and washed the shoots of rice and corn until they were waterlogged, worthless. But we ate them anyway.’

‘Why, Mama?’

‘There was nothing else. When the fields were empty, we plucked wet bark from the trees. We tried to cook it into stews. Eventually that went too. So we ate clay from the riverbanks, special clay that filled you and almost felt like food, if you were that hungry. Sometimes we pounded bricks and swallowed the dust as if it were rice flour.’

‘Did you really eat
dust
?’

‘You were just out of my belly. And I was losing my milk.’ A gentle smile. ‘I did it for you. To save your life.’

One of the small stitched peonies roughens, turns brown. Yuliang watches, mesmerized by the spreading brown stain. Three rooms away Jinling cries out in something like pleasure, although Yuliang knows – she believes fervently – that it is not. ‘Listen, Yuliang,’ her friend has told her sternly. ‘You must never, never enjoy it with them.
That’s
what makes you a whore. Not their money.’

‘Does
this
make us whores?’ Yuliang asked her then, indicating their twined bodies, just half-teasing.

‘No,’ Jinling said, still quite seriously. ‘This keeps us alive.’

Yuliang doesn’t see what happens next – she doesn’t know quite how it happens. All she knows is that the candle clatters into the basin. The flame disappears in a wet and smoldering snuff. Molten wax sears her fingers and seeps through her shift, and the shoe tumbles right to the floor. Yuliang gasps. She snatches a hand towel, throws it over the flame. She stamps the sparks out,
grinding them with her bare heel and gritting her teeth against the blister. ‘Fuck you,’ she mutters – to her uncle, to Papa Gao. To the ‘godmother,’ who is no mother at all. Perhaps even to Jinling, who two doors down is now giggling. ‘Fuck you all, you slave-girl bitches. You yellow she-dogs. You cursed-from-birth
women
.’

She stamps and sobs long after the smoke has vanished.

The light she sees the next morning is sweet and watery, a melony sort of yellow. It takes her a moment to register that the sounds outside are early morning’s – a rooster’s self-righteous outburst, a man singing as he shaves. Elsewhere, a wet nurse coos to a baby Yuliang has never seen, although she’s seen the nurse. Her face, though young, is wide, brown, and lined. Her breasts are as plump as two little pillows. Yuliang always wonders about the nursemaid’s own child: Is it alive? Who gives
it
suck, once its mother’s milk is sold?

Outside her room she hears the madam’s short, cloth-soled footsteps. The plump fist lands on the door:
raprapraprapraprap.
‘Up, up, my little bride. It’s already late.’

Yuliang rolls over, hides her head. Clinking copper coins greet the movement: the other flowers tossed money on the spread last night, for prosperity. If she were a real bride they’d have tossed oranges, pomegranates. Fruit, to encourage fruitfulness. But for this union, a child is not the goal. For a week now, Yuliang has swallowed tadpoles like the rest, squiggling mud-flavored morsels taken after dinner. Godmother says that the cold elements in the
fetal frogs counter the warm elements that invite life to the body.

The rap comes again. ‘Yu-
liang
.’ A tiny note of question now. Yuliang savors its implication: that she’s not here at all. That after all the lessons and demonstration sessions, the new dresses commissioned and carefully columned in the black book, she isn’t here. She has disappeared. Run away. For good.

‘Don’t make me beat you, today of all days,’ Godmother shouts crossly.

Across the street the wet nurse coos again, then laughs. An image comes: Yuliang’s real mother, scooping up dust with her white fingers.
I did it for you. To save your life.

‘I’m coming,’ she calls, and throws off the quilt.

After a breakfast she can’t eat, Yuliang sits for the first time in a year in a bath that hasn’t already been sat in. Jinling has infused it with pomelo, sweet-sour juice, mottled rind – things to cleanse the new bride of evil elements. Jinling’s eyes are still crumbed with sleep. She has never risen to a servant’s schedule. But she’d insisted that she would do so today. ‘I want a chance to review,’ she’d told Godmother. ‘If she does poorly, after all, I’ll get the blame.’ To Yuliang, though, she simply murmured, ‘Don’t worry. I will be there to help you.’

Now she ladles fragrant water over Yuliang’s shoulders and, in a surreal-seeming role reversal, neatens Yuliang’s upper lip. The threading sends pin-like tears into Yuliang’s eyes. But she doesn’t complain: it’s Jinling’s touch. And this pain helps distract her from pain to come.

After the bath she is led back to her room, where
Jinling lights candles shaped like dragons and phoenixes. She helps Yuliang into silky things picked out for her last week, when the seamstress came with a selection of undergarments and sheer robes in soft shades of crimson and pink. The top girl untangles Yuliang’s hair, puts in oil to add gloss. She threads her hairline too, to make it ‘high’ with the wisdom of a married woman. She combs it three times. But she intones nothing about longevity or children, the way a real bride’s mother or ‘lucky’ woman would do. Instead she whispers advice. ‘Eat something,’ she murmurs as she draws Yuliang’s part. ‘You haven’t been eating. Eat something light, but not spicy. Pork buns. Rice. To settle your stomach. Have two, maybe three cups of wine. To relax,’ she says, as she pins the knot to Yuliang’s nape. ‘But no more. They get angry if you get too drunk. When you serve him, steer away from the garlic cloves,’ she says, as she helps Yuliang into the dress. ‘Otherwise, you’ll be breathing them all night.’