The Binding Chair (6 page)

Bored, she crept off to explore, tiptoeing painfully through room after unused room. The house was dark, the damp and poorly ventilated ground floor decorated with European-style paintings of pink, fleshy woman whose bodies overflowed from tight dresses. May found the pictures sad and pretentious; the rooms in which they were displayed smelled of mildew. The second floor was not so dark as the one below, but it was poorly insulated, the floorboards so cold that her feet ached all the more. Looking for an unobtrusive place to sit and rest them, May came upon her two fragrant cedarwood trunks and vanity table, her paper and brushes and bottles of ink, her black lacquer chest of cosmetics, and her set of red lacquer stools, all the things she’d seen stacked by the gutter. She knelt before the trunks and table, stroked the smooth surface of the black lacquer box. Why were none of these taken to the rooms where she had been exiled, a spartan suite not overfilled with furnishings?

At the sound of approaching steps, she hid behind some dusty draperies and then, when it was silent, returned to the chair by her bed. So now May had two images on which to dwell: a freshly shaven, cut cheek; and her belongings, still packed and piled, without any place allowed them.

On the seventh night, the silk dealer came to his fourth wife. Far from being eager to at last hold his youngest and most lovely, he was enraged by the trouble May had caused him. First wife had spent the week sulking, second vomiting, third weeping. He ordered May to take off everything except her foot bindings and to get on her hands and knees on top of her bed. Anticipating an inaugural beating to remind her that she had been born a woman in payment for evil deeds in a past life, May cowered. Not that she was afraid—she wasn’t—but she’d been advised more than once not to reveal her pride, lest its reward be rage and punishment, perhaps more than she was ready to accept. But her new husband did not beat her that night. Instead, he lashed her feet to the bedposts by their cloths. And there he left her.

The next night was the same. It was the same for her, but not for her maid, whom he took on the floor as May looked on from the bed. As he exerted himself, a vein stood out on his forehead, marring its handsomeness. Dispassionately, May catalogued her husband’s features: wide-set eyes, broad nose, strong chin. There was a statue of Ho Toy in the temple she used to visit with her mother, and he looked like that, except not so fat. The young woman, pinned down, layers of skirts pushed up over her face, thrashed her head from side to side as if suffocating. When the master left, she lay on her back, motionless. She wasn’t dead, though; she sat up when one of the other servants called her to return May’s dinner bowls to the kitchen.

On the following evening, the silk dealer arrived earlier. “Sing the songs you sang when I visited you at the home of your father’s mother,” he demanded, and May did. Afterwards, he dined with her, he poured her wine. Then he lashed her by the bindings to the bedposts, lashed her kneeling with her face down, her hips in the air. He was silent as he unfastened his clothes, silent as he rubbed himself stiff with oil, and silent as she bit the bedclothes to avoid crying out when he thrust and discharged himself into her rectum.

“H
AVE IT ANNULLED,”
she said to her grandmother and mother, home for the traditional visit one month after the wedding. “I’m still a virgin.”

Chu’en, her face as white and expressionless as spilled candle wax, said nothing.

“You must get a lock of hair from each wife’s head and with them line your shoes,” said Yu-ying.

“Mother! Holy Mother of Mercy!” May howled. She picked up a dish and hurled it across the room so that it broke against the wall and showered the hearth, the table, and cushions with white splinters of porcelain. “I never had a chance to do the other stupid trick! He doesn’t even take his boots off! He comes to my room and puts himself inside my … my … with his boots still on!”

May threw herself on her knees before her grandmother. “Did the matchmaker tell you I was to be the fourth? Why why why didn’t you tell me?”

“What you must do,” Yu-ying said. “Is to expel his seed into your chamber pot. Then, Chao-tsing, you can put it yourself into the right place.” And she gave May some powders that she said would help her to do this.

As May was leaving, Yu-ying followed her out into the courtyard. “Do not displease your father,” she warned. “We have consulted with the necromancer and his medium and your honored father wishes this marriage to succeed. He bids you to obey your husband.”

May looked at her grandmother. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

Back in her sedan chair, she left the curtains open, watched the spring landscape wither under her gaze, so scorched with anger were her eyes, so poisoned her heart. The chair pitched and jolted past the shrine of Ah Tai, and she remembered her mother’s telling her that years before, when Chu’en had failed to become pregnant, Yu-ying had taken her mother to that shrine, where Ah Tai’s supplicants provide her with more tiny shoes than she can possibly wear. From the pile at the goddess’s bound feet, Chu’en had selected one. At home Yu-ying burned its laces; with the ashes she brewed tea for May’s mother to swallow. The shoelace tea made Chu’en pregnant, and then Yu-ying sewed a new pair of shoes for Ah Tai, and embroidered them with gold threads. Then she carried the shoes all the way back to the shrine on her own bound feet.

Of course, it hadn’t been worth such effort. May hadn’t been born a boy.

…   

R
ETURNED TO THE
silk merchant, May brooded. Her anger shrank and cooled into sullenness, punctuated by fits of agitation and despair. How could it be that marriage, for which she had sacrificed all the pleasures and comforts of childhood, was to be nothing more than wretched servitude? How could she have been such a fool? How was it that she had looked every day at her mother, at beautiful, miserable Chu’en, without concluding the obvious: that her own fate would be no less unhappy?

Still, May was young, and youth invents optimism. Even as she suffered her new and uncomfortable clarity of vision, May waited to become a mother herself. To obtain what she needed to accomplish this end, she ate as little as she could and used the cathartics her grandmother had given her. She might be the last wife, but with luck she could yet be favored, she could grab hold of the legs of a son and pull herself up. She wasn’t afraid of childbirth. After all, she could stand pain, and what was death? For her it would mean release from insult, and from loneliness. And if the old stories contained any truth, were May to die and leave a son, then when he was grown he could make offerings on her death day, he could perform rites that a daughter could not.

He could free her from the underworld’s lake of blood, from the company of the drowned.

But as if in keeping with a curse, months passed and May still waited, while the silk dealer’s two older wives, long barren, became pregnant. In their excitement and confidence they consulted with diviners, they bestowed grand and propitious names on their unborn children to guard them against harm and evil spirits—against the ill luck May would not have hesitated to summon, had she only known how.

May paced. She abandoned herself to impatience, to acts of desperation. In the privacy of her room, she threw muffled tantrums, burying herself in the bedclothes, gagging her screams with her fists. One fall afternoon, when the sun sank and left dark hours to be filled before dinner, she lit a lamp and sat on the floor to tend her feet. But instead of removing her bindings, she found herself staring at the flame. After a minute, she snuffed it and lit a candle so that she could see into the lamp’s reservoir of oil. Not enough—she slipped down the corridor to a supply room and found more.

Once back behind her door, she locked it, understanding that what she was about to do was an act of vandalism, just as surely as had been her furtively scratching the finish of one of the silk merchant’s valuable tables, puncturing his wine casks, breaking a slender finger from one of his ivories. But these and all other amusements had lost their power to distract her; she was weary with her lot, tired out by monotony and cruelty. Now it would all be over. How calm she felt, having made a decision.

She took a deep breath. She poured and drank one, and then another, brimming cup of lamp oil, but this, after a few uncertain days, failed to kill her. Although it did make her sick enough to see death, to learn what it looked like. Death is a master of change; it has many guises: the death May saw was a white buck with silver antlers, a bridle set with jewels, a saddle of jade. As she recovered, the buck retreated, he danced over a hill, the saddle still empty.

After this disappointment, and the savagery of a punitive beating that dislocated her left shoulder—the silk merchant was calculating in his viciousness; he never left a mark on her face or her neck, her white hands and forearms—May hung herself from a beam in her room, but a servant found her and the merchant had her cut down. The buck had just reappeared, dipping his beautiful head and teasing her, his antlers bright, when she hit the floor.

This time, her husband made her kneel in the courtyard like a disobedient servant. No child, but a heavy stone in her arms.

A
PPARITIONS

L
ITOVSKY WAS SLEEPING WHEN
A
LICE KNOCKED
at his compartment door. As was often the case in his dreams, he had returned to the year 1895, to the Doks Expedition. Though he and the other four engineers had in fact been stationed near Sludjanka during a mild and forgiving April, the ground thawing and creaking beneath their boots, Litovsky’s dream transported him to a tent constructed of untanned hides and pitched on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal. It was night; he worked at a drafting table as the others slept in their sealskin bags. In a golden circle cast by a kerosene lamp, he drew plans for a viaduct, one that could not fail, as the actual one had. Flying buttresses—these were the key. Buttresses such as those that supported the roofs of cathedrals. He drew them in as supports for the piers that rose from the gorge.

Spread before the captain were equations, elementary formulas he had learned as a cadet for calculating the force of compression on a rigid structure in which mass
m
is supported by symmetric members, each forming an angle
θ
with the horizontal, all the while bearing in mind the train, the train moving forward on the track, and thus the coefficient of friction, horizontal force
F
applied to body of weight
W
resting on a surface at an angle of θ, and so forth. It was straightforward, it was simple, a child could figure it out. But then Ashmentov, one of the other engineers, woke; he drew a folded paper out from under the sealskin and handed it to Litovsky. On the paper was written the number 168.

What am I to do with this?
Litovsky asked, recognizing the number as the count of fatalities.

Ashmentov blinked. Why, you must apply it, he said. You must figure it in
.

But how?
Litovsky wanted to know. Ashmentov lifted his shoulders.

That’s your affair, he said
.

Outside the tent, the lake’s frozen surface broke with an explosive noise. Litovsky pushed aside the flaps and saw black rivers divide the ice, bodies float up from below. “Olga!” he cried aloud. “Olga!”

Alice watched as Litovsky brought his hands up to shield his sleeping eyes. She didn’t think to wake him; instead, she stared from the doorway. She counted the worn books arranged on the reading table beside him: a dozen, their titles indecipherable; they included those inspirational texts issued to every soldier, Skobelev’s
Gift to Comrades
and Lebedev’s
The Truth of the Russian Soldier
, as well as outdated manuals of strategy by Goremykin, Barons Medem and Jomini, a topographical survey of Russia, some of its pages missing, others loose; and two of the shorter novels of Dostoyevsky:
The Gambler
and
The Possessed
. It was between pages of this last that Litovsky had tucked a newspaper clipping dated 12 June 1899. Of course, even had she known to look there, Alice would not have been able to read the Russian words.

168 PERISH IN MOST RECENT OF
TRAGEDIES TO BLIGHT RAIL EFFORT
.

Difficulties connected with the construction of track around the southern perimeter of Lake Baikal have thwarted the realization of His Majesty’s plans for uninterrupted rail service across Siberia by the year 1900. A locomotive and three cars were derailed during Saturday last’s opening of the elevated viaduct traversing the Olkhana tributary. Among those who perished were Prince Kordenky-Novgorod, third cousin to Her Majesty the Czarina, and family members of engineers Doks, Litovsky, and Ashmentov, all gathered for opening celebrations. The viaduct’s failure is assumed to have resulted from design flaws. Investigations are pending.

The paper on which the article was printed had been folded and unfolded and refolded so many times that in places it was perforated, unreadable even to a Russian.

A large traveling clock ticked on top of Litovsky’s pile of books, its brass case engraved with the maxim
Prayer to God and Service to the Czar Are Never in Vain
. Against the table leaned a walking stick with a head that screwed off to reveal the mouth of a secret drinking flask. The other end unscrewed, too. Inside was a long, sharp saber.

Litovsky sighed in his sleep, a cadet again and back in school outside St. Petersburg, where his regiment was preparing for a review of the troops by the czar.
You must make it smooth, smooth, smooth
, the commander was saying in the captain’s dream, and he swept his hand back and forth through the air.
Not a rock. Not a molehill. Not a weed or a crease
. It had been the cadets’ duty, in the weeks before review, to prepare the parade grounds, to make the packed dirt as even as a ballroom floor.

Alice, growing restless, rattled the compartment door. “Smooth!” Captain Litovsky cried aloud. He opened his eyes, looked around in confusion.

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

“No. Not at all.” Litovsky straightened his rumpled tunic. “What
is
the matter, Olga?” he asked in response to Alice’s stare. She opened her mouth to correct him, but stopped herself. “You don’t want to go off to school?” he asked. Alice shook her head. She sat beside Litovsky. The light coming in the window had a faint pink cast, the light that presages a snowfall.

Litovsky patted Alice’s knee with an absent, fatherly benevolence. “When I was a cadet, the czar and his sons came to our summer encampment. And the czarevitch gave each of us a cake and a packet of nuts and two silver rubles. I have one still.” From inside his tunic he pulled a dingy gray silk cord on the end of which was a red embroidered pouch. He teased open the string that held the pouch closed and shook the coin into her palm. “And there were oranges. Baskets and baskets of oranges.” Alice handed back the coin.

“I don’t care about oranges.”

“Still,” said the captain. “You may like school.” He looked at his ruble in the pink light. “Perhaps you will.” But he was thinking, suddenly, of Ismailikov, the top-form student who had forced him, his first year, to drink his own urine. “Boys are cruel.” He put the coin away. “I like girls better.”

Alice scratched her nose.

“You are in heaven!” the captain cried suddenly. “Tell me it is so!” Beneath his hat his face was flushed, his forehead shone with perspiration. “You’ve just come to visit your old papa! To comfort him on his journey!” With surprising force Litovsky pulled Alice into an embrace, holding her so tightly that the buttons on his tunic grazed her cheek. “Olga! Olga! Forgive me!”

Alice shoved her hands against Litovsky and kept her eyes closed, afraid to see his face. As she struggled to get away, his chest heaved with violent soundless sobs; she felt her own squeezed by panic. Alice had seen a man cry only once, at David’s death, when her father had gone down on his knees holding the bedroom curtains. Gone down so slowly that whenever she thought of that morning it was the slowness she remembered. Slowness which taught her that death had the power to suspend lesser laws of nature, to interrupt gravity, to stop the earth in its transit around the sun. Shutters closed and curtains drawn, for weeks the house blazed with light; no one could stand for even one lamp to be extinguished, no one knew the hour. But this was a different kind of crying. Naked, jarring.

“A perfect child! As innocent as an angel!” Alice shoved again, and Litovsky fell against the table, upsetting the books, the clock. “Why! Why!” He rocked back and forth, hands clasped before his chest. “Why could I not have traded my life for yours!” Litovsky picked up his walking stick and banged its tip on the floor.

Before she knew what she was doing, before she heard another word, Alice was hurtling down the corridor, she was bumping into other passengers, grating her knuckles on a window frame. She didn’t stop until she had reached the frigid passage between the last two cars, her breath gusting out in clouds of vapor. The sound of Litovsky’s stick echoed in her head like the report of a gavel on a judge’s bench, as if the captain’s wish—that lives could be traded—had been mandated into law.