The Valley of Amazement (53 page)

He believed the reasoning of a madwoman, who lived with one foot in the afterworld. By telling me that Pomelo had made the same suggestion, I wondered if he was trying to pit us against each other. After all, she had been a courtesan as well and knew how to use humble subterfuge as her weapon. She had already told me that she could make me miserable if I didn’t know my place, and that was at the bottom.

Thus far, I had not been able to detect any trouble she might be stirring up for me. From time to time, she came to our courtyard, always with the pretense of providing hot tea to warm me on a cold afternoon. I did not appreciate her visits but could not refuse her. It was awkward avoiding conversations that I felt could be used against me. I was polite but offered little beyond meaningless observations.

“When it rains,” I said, “the ants make a grand procession across the floor.”

“Have you sprinkled them with chilies?”

“I did,” I said. “They enjoy eating Sichuan peppercorns the most.”

I did not appreciate her visits for another reason. My courtyard and its rooms reflected my station, which I was sure gave everyone a good laugh. Magic Gourd and I had recently increased the size of our rooms by knocking down the walls of two storage sheds. But there was little else we could improve. Our courtyard was farthest from the main house, and to go from our quarters to the temple, we had to walk down a gloomy passageway that was green with slippery moss, which had sent me flying onto my rump twice already. From there, we had to walk along corridors whose roofs had burned in the great fire. In the late fall, the north courtyard remained cold and damp, even during the day, and I had to use a brazier—one just big enough to either heat a teakettle or warm my hands. Magic Gourd had a brazier even smaller than mine. We often set the two braziers side by side to cast off a bit more heat for the two of us. One day, as we fed the braziers’ small mouths with coal, Magic Gourd recalled for me those days when I was the pampered daughter of an American madam. Right then, I decided I had had enough of cold misery and ill-treatment. I marched over to Azure’s room. Her room was warm and dry. “We are about to die of cold,” I said, “and the ground’s too frozen to bury us. So we’ll take a bigger brazier instead.”

“There’s none to give you,” she replied, then pointed to her brazier on the floor. “Mine is no bigger than yours.”

“That may be, but you also have heating flues under your
kang
floor, and the oven that warms it burns coal day and night.” She could have sat naked and still be in comfort.

Her face showed mock concern.
“Ai-ya!
You don’t have a
kang
floor? No oven? I didn’t know. No wonder you’re cold. I’ll have bricks for an oven and flues delivered to your courtyard right away.”

I was sure she was lying. But, the next morning, I found I was wrong. A pile of broken bricks blocked my
doorway. I had to push out the ones at the top, one by one, to make a hole big enough to crawl out of that grave. Magic Gourd pointed out that even if I had a brick
kang,
there was no coal to feed the oven, certainly none that Azure would spare. “And don’t expect me to chop kindling for you,” she said. “I’m not going to turn myself into one of those hunchbacked women who carry a machete and eighty pounds on their back.”

The windows in my room held no glass. They had been broken during the Great Disgrace. We had only shutters over the lattice screens, which had to be kept closed day and night because the window was a stone’s throw from the compound wall next to the road. It was the main thoroughfare into town and a gathering place for gossip and conversation. I heard hearty greetings at dawn, and arguments at all hours, and the yips of excited dogs. Magic Gourd said the neighbors stood next to our compound’s wall whenever Perpetual came to visit me. “They know exactly when he’s spurting.” She mimicked a donkey bray and a few pig snorts. “I have to chase away the boys who climb over the wall to look between the cracks of the shutters. Dirty rascals. I showed them a knife today and said I’d slice off their little stems!”

The shuttered windows made me feel as if I lived in a cowshed. Late at night, the watchman came by, calling, “Be careful of fire! Watch your fires!” He passed by my window so often I wondered if Pomelo or Azure paid him to do so to disturb my sleep. It made me nervous that he stood so close to our end of the house. To light his way, he carried two pans of burning coals suspended on a shoulder pole. One slip and those pans could swing out and send balls of fire flying. It had happened before. A month earlier a house across from my room had caught fire and part of a grain shed had burned. Perpetual said he wished all the houses around us would burn down.

I was nervous about the fire because Magic Gourd had heard a story from Azure’s maid concerning a concubine who had died of smoke after her brazier tipped over. This had happened in my room, and it was only small comfort that the woman had died over a hundred years ago. Ghosts didn’t get old.

“You used to feel the Poet Ghost come,” I said to Magic Gourd. “Can you feel any ghost now?”

“I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the cold breath of a ghost and the north wind blowing through this window.”

When I went to bed each night, I imagined I was laying my body in the ghost form of the woman who died of smoke. I tried to use Western reasoning to convince myself there were no ghosts. Whoever that woman was, she may have died by accident. Or maybe the story was made up to scare me. But when I grew sleepy, my Western mind drifted away, and the ghost crept in with her ashy face. I dreamed that she sat on the side of the bed and said to me: “You and I are the same, aren’t we? Like you, I was so miserable I thought I was losing my mind. The only way I could leave was on clouds of smoke. The other concubines—they were not as lucky.” When I woke, I knew it had been a nightmare, but I could not stop thinking about what the dream ghost had said: “The other concubines—they were not as lucky.” What did that mean? Magic Gourd poked around for clues, and Azure’s maid told her in a whisper: There were two other concubines who died, and they both belonged to Perpetual. She could not say more. I had been in Perpetual’s house for nearly three months and I was already nervous about everything. I had to stay strong and not give in to fear. What would my mind be like in another three months? In three years? If life became worse than this, would I be tempted to breathe in clouds of smoke?

I would not. I was determined not to weaken. Little Flora was my reason to live. She would keep me strong. I would do anything now to find her and I could endure anything to do so. Magic Gourd and I would use our clever brains and find our escape. We knew how to create opportunity, knew what to look for, knew the nature of risks and necessity. We had to be prepared to go through any sudden opening without question when it appeared. What clues did we have so far? A road to Wang Town. My money and jewelry, which were hidden somewhere. A concubine who died of smoke. Two other concubines who had belonged to Perpetual and were no longer here. What else? I felt as if I were picking up all the buttons that had popped off my blouses over the years, buttons that had rolled under the bed or a dresser, ones I had not bothered to pick up because I could hand my blouse to a maid to have repaired. I was now searching for any little thing that held a clue—and I found it, the button that had popped off my mother’s glove just before we separated. She had not bothered to look to see where it went. She simply threw off the gloves. But I had seen it, lying next to my foot, a small pearl button that had somehow remained in my mind all these years. I decided right then: I would not throw away any of my chances just because I was angry at her. I did not yet know how to reach her. But I would, and when I did, I would tell her to find Little Flora for me.

O
NE AFTERNOON,
P
OMELO
dropped by and insisted we come to her room to play mahjong and listen to music on her phonograph. “You have exhausted your excuses,” she said with teasing sternness. “Perpetual is away for two weeks, and there are no call chits tonight to dinner parties in Shanghai. I’m longing for company. You and Magic Gourd have each other, while I am alone and have run out of interesting things to say to myself. After many years of solitude, a prisoner desires company of any kind, be it rat or scoundrel. You are neither, but I would still enjoy an afternoon together.”

“Have you considered inviting Azure or Perpetual’s sister,” Magic Gourd said—rather unkindly, I thought.

Pomelo did not act offended. “Perpetual’s sister talks about the accomplishments of her son, and without a
breath in between. I was tempted so many times to tell her that the little brat was lazy, ill-mannered, and stupid beyond compare. That would have led to my demise. As for Azure, you know as well as I do that she keeps company only with statues of gods and the spirit tablets of her ancestors. I’m not inclined to bow down all day in that temple she’s fixing. She’s praying for another son.”

Magic Gourd snorted. “That’s nonsense. How can a baby come from her womb when Perpetual never visits her?”

“Oh, but he does, at least once a week. I’m surprised you didn’t know. It should be obvious. Her family gives her money to run the household. Without that money, everyone would have starved long ago. Her parents live in a big town and are well-to-do.”

I gave Magic Gourd a quick glance. We were both thinking the same thing: Wang Town.

“Her mother dotes on her,” Pomelo said. “And since she’s their only child, Perpetual’s son will inherit everything. Another son would give Perpetual double assurance he’ll inherit the family’s wealth when Azure dies. And he expects that could happen at any time. Her health has never been strong. Come by this afternoon, and I’ll tell you more.” She gave us a sly smile and left.

I could not imagine Azure and Perpetual writhing in bed. She never showed any affection or desire for him, nor he for her. Did he require her to act wild in bed? Or did they conjoin in a dutiful manner, like a name seal pushed into cinnabar paste before it’s stamped onto a scroll?

In the late afternoon, Magic Gourd and I went to Pomelo’s courtyard. “My flower sisters,” she said. “I’m glad you decided to come.” She sounded sincere. She gestured that we sit in the chairs by a table already set with mahjong racks and tiles.

“Let’s be honest with each other,” she said. “I know you’re still wondering if you can trust me. I am probably as wary of you as you are of me. But I promise you this: I will not harm you, if you do not harm me. Did you ever hear a bad word said about me in Shanghai? In all the houses where I worked, I treated everyone honestly. I didn’t steal their patrons. I didn’t spread rumors. That’s why the others did not steal mine. When you wound a sister, everyone feels free to wound you. This afternoon, we should let go of our suspicions and share a little amusement instead.”

Like me, Pomelo had been able to take only a few of her belongings from Shanghai. Her luxuries were the mahjong tiles and a small Victrola. I foolishly took a portable vanity table, which survived the journey with a cracked mirror and a broken hinge. It mocked me daily. She wound the phonograph and an opera aria burst out. It reminded me of my days with Edward, so few and so long ago. The old grief returned and I pretended that the smoke of the brazier was stinging my eyes. I glanced around her room and was sick with envy. All the furniture was polished and free of gouges and burns—her chairs, stools, table, and wardrobe. Her floors were covered with thick rugs. Panels of yellow and red silk curtains floated in front of her bed. Four lamps hung from the ceiling and purged darkness from every corner.

“I worked hard to have these things,” she said.

“I can imagine,” Magic Gourd said.

“They are not gifts from Perpetual.” She had found the furniture in the shed, she told us. They were the chairs and table that had been smashed and burned when the house was ransacked. She exchanged the broken leg of one chair with an unbroken leg from another, gluing it in with thick sap from a pine tree. She filled the gouges on the tables with sawdust, slivers of wood, and glue, then polished the wood with waxy leaves plucked from trees near the path to Heaven Mountain. To clean the rugs of stains and feces, she made a mud of fine dust and water and smashed it into the rugs and let it dry. She then beat the rugs for five days. To repair the scorched spots on the rug, she pulled out a strand of wool here and there from different areas, bunched them and glued them into place. The silk curtains for the bed, she said, came from two fancy dresses she had foolishly brought from Shanghai. The hanging lamps had been made by twisting together young twigs into the shape of a square then covering them with undergarments made of cotton gauze. Everything in the room, she claimed proudly, even the vases and mahjong tiles, had been repaired or fashioned out of useless belongings from either her trunks or the family’s former glory days. I now saw the room with different eyes. The curtains had clumsy seams, the mended spots in the rugs were uneven, and the patches on the table were obvious. I was no longer envious of Pomelo. Instead, I admired her ingenuity.

She made a wry face. “If I live another hundred years, I’ll be able to transform this room into the one I had in the flower house. I had a beautiful boudoir and was proud of it. I let pride get in the way of common sense. I waited to marry. I had patrons who asked me to marry, but I thought I could find a better man, a richer and more powerful one. One of my patrons turned out to be a gangster. He threatened to kill any man who looked at me. Word went around. The gangster soon took up with another courtesan a few months later. But all the old suitors avoided me out of lingering fear. All except Perpetual. And now you see, that’s where ambition took me—here. It’s dangerous to have pride and ambition together.”

“There’s no opportunity for that,” Magic Gourd grumbled, “unless your ambition is for a grave on a higher hill.”

“There are more chairs and rugs in the shed,” Pomelo said to me. “I can help you repair them. Don’t think I simply want to do you a favor. I’d rather be a carpenter than let my mind shrivel from boredom and lack of use.”