The Last Mandarin (15 page)

“Not now, now now!” she cried. “Then when! Am I not lovely as the night sky? Am I not fragrant as the jasmine? Must I suffer rejection and indignity at the hands of tourists?”

“Tourists!” Burnham was outraged.

“Well, we go now,” Yen said. “Not much to report, you or we. Good luck.”

“Bring him back alive.” Ming jiggled his brows. “Sleep tight, and—”

“Don't say it,” Burnham cut in. “Just this once, don't say it.”

He bolted the door and stepped to Hao-lan. On her face he saw a confused agony of need, love and gentle mirth, mirroring his own; he kissed her lightly on the mouth and said, “‘My heart is a silver bell, and my blood peals your name.'” She sighed happily and tugged him closer, and he wrapped her in a huge hug, and they kissed again, lips alive and flesh singing. Burnham went out of himself, and wandered remote, dark regions; it was an aching, obliterating kiss, a fusion of two ghosts, annihilating time and place, a chaos of thunder, sea foam, stars, tropical winds. He drew her head to his shoulder, and stroked her hair; he was overcome by a rude desire to cry out, to spill his love in speeches, but he kept silence and listened to the tremor of their blood. They clung as if drowning.

In time they surfaced. Neither spoke. Her mouth quirked; she had perhaps thought of a small joke, not worth the telling, as he had thought of a waggish rebuke for her shameless and stylish performance, and found it not worth the saying. They did what lovers do. He kissed her eyes, her nose, her lips again; she ruffled his hair and stroked his face. He sat on the bed and pulled her to him, laid his head between her breasts, stroked her back and her buttocks. She pressed his head to her, tilted it back and bent to kiss his face.

They paused, and smiled foolishly.

With fingers like melons he fumbled at her cloth buttons, and they laughed aloud, because all buttons everywhere resisted lovers' untimely ineptitudes. In time the buttons, indulgent after all, relented, and he drew the brocade from her and kissed her soft and silky breasts; one, and then the other, and then the one again, and the other, until she pushed him away and put him to shame by springing his own buttons in a jiffy. When his shirt was off she spoke: “You are a hairy bear.”

His throat was thick, so he only nodded. She untied his blue sash. He flipped his shoes off and stood upright; his padded trousers fell about his knees, and he laughed clownishly, stepping out of everything and standing naked before her. He went to his knees, stripped her quickly, and planted a lingering kiss on the warmth of her mound. “Why, you are indeed a redhead,” he murmured. Already he was huge and tremulous. Her touch instructed him to stand. She stared frankly, made a little girl's wide eyes and grinned in greed, mischief and open delight.

He stumbled backward to the bed, sprawled, plumped back onto the pillow and extended a hand. She took the hand and carried it to her lips. He saw sorrow in her eyes, and remembered that she was vulnerable. He pressed his fingers to her mouth, met her gaze and tried to show her his own defenseless melancholy. Setting a knee on the bed, she leaned to kiss him. His hands cradled her breasts; the kiss endured; her nipples budded, and she slipped down into the crook of his arm, body to body as he turned to meet her. They lay together, and were warm.

He stroked her sleek flank, and she his. They panted gently in rhythm, kissed, again, and he saw that she was happy and trusting. “In debauchery,” she murmured, “haste is a sin.” She spoke Chinese. Heeding her, and the poets, he lingered. Glaciers formed, covered the earth and melted away. Floods followed, and centuries of sunshine kindled their flesh. His breath deepened, hers quickened. His flesh throbbed, hers rippled. He grazed plains and meadows, and knelt groaning, his nose muffled in russet tufts. She cried out, hummed, chanted. Her body writhed and arched.

After a lifetime she took him in. At the sudden sleek, silky, wrenching heat he gasped, yearning scalded his loins like hot tears, and they strained together, rocking and pounding. When she purred, sang out and finally sobbed, he grew giddy with joy and relief, and soon his own fervor overwhelmed him; he burst within her like a summer storm, riding her, spending love, desire, ecstasy in throb after throb. He heard his own voice: “Unh! Unh!” and hers: “Nnn.”

They lay like moist sleeping pups for some time. Speech struggled to his lips and died; sweat mingled and trickled. Burnham shifted; for an instant Hao-lan's embrace tightened, and she sighed complacently. Burnham growled. They nuzzled. He kissed her lips and breasts, slipping from within her, and rolled onto his back. She scrambled to her knees and bent to kiss his wilting flower. She pouted and bemoaned the loss: “‘When the hare dies, the fox is sad.'” He seized the moment to swing her round rump into range, and kiss each swelling moon with a loud smack.

“Decadent foreigner,” she said.

“Like your Russian princes and American bristle merchants.”

She giggled, and hopped off the bed to stand gazing down at him. She ran a finger along a ridge of scar over a rib. “A bullet?”

“A knife. A bullet here.”

She kissed his scars and left him. Weak with love and gratitude, and scared half to death by both, he watched her walk, drank in her small body so beautifully formed, sleek and unwrinkled, golden in the low light. She sat naked in an armchair, and smoked, and they did not speak for a time—only looked and smiled and shook their heads as lovers do who cannot find the words.

They shared a drink then, and tried feebly to find the words, and slowly the sadness came, drifting into the room with hints of tomorrow. They did not speak of this future; there was no need. Later Burnham's manhood stirred again and they spoke of the mystery, awkwardness, homeliness and inefficiency of the human body, and yet, and yet. “Four legs would be so much better,” she maintained. “Good for the back and the balance.”

“But then we could not make love face to face,” he said.

“Seen in that light,” she said primly, “the suggestion loses force.”

“Seen in this light,” he said, “you acquire force. Come and lie beside me. Soon enough it will be time for cold salt fish and hot rice.”

She did, and he rose on one elbow to gaze upon her body. Bliss surged into him at the sight, the exhilarating geography of sex, the rounded hills of breasts, the cavern of an armpit, the soft slope of the belly, the tangled grove of love-hair and the invitation of thighs. He remembered his father preaching on eternal bliss. To Burnham this was the only bliss. He tried to imagine eternal orgasm. He sensed the noisy simmer of his blood, rushing and clanging, oh breathless love, the prickling and longing, but also—God, will you never learn mercy?—the agonizing foreknowledge, the bone-deep anguish of love's end, suppressed and denied but always impending: here or at the horizon, now or at the hour of death.

He was thirty-five, and all he knew about the heart told him that love was more vulnerable and evanescent than dew, was killed quickly by a word, a look, a smell, or slowly by the years, dying nastily, screeching out its life, withering, blowing away, ash. The fear of that, the secret pain of it, kept pace with love; great love was twinned to great torment.

He could hardly believe that he was in love, but he saw no other explanation. For once the word did not embarrass him. He was suddenly mortal, and it was worth the anguish. Chills and fever, pangs and spasms, and yet this sense of natural discovery, of permanence, of belonging.

He spent a moment of pity for men who died without ever loving, and he touched Hao-lan's cheek. “Shameless,” he said, to dispel the sorrow. “A wanton.”

“Oh yes,” she said. Her hands roamed his body; again she bent to kiss his manhood.

“You are merely trying to soften my heart,” he said sternly.

“Wrong on both counts,” she said, and they did not sleep that night, but made spring showers until dawn admonished them, and a fresh fall of lacy snow. They stood at the window entwined, and wished the world lost.

13

On a summer afternoon in 1943 Major Kanamori and Citizen Wang were celebrating Kanamori's promotion with a cup of Dragon's Well tea in Kanamori's garden. The hum of bees was loud, bucolic, comforting. Kanamori wore thin cotton Chinese trousers and a silk shirt open at the neck. Wang was his customary dry and deferential self, though he had ventured a joke: if the war lasted long enough, Kanamori would be a general. “If the war ends unexpectedly,” Kanamori answered, “I shall be a civilian, and Chinese at that.” He was tired these days, and inordinately jumpy. His visits to Olga's had become more frequent, his abasements deeper, his ecstasies sharper. Mornings after, he was shattered. He was ashamed now to be seen without a shirt. He understood that debauchery was taking a toll, but it was after all only a habit, like wine, that could be broken if his light anxiety turned to fear.

“Ah well, if the war ends sooner,” said Wang, and let the thought drift between them. American forces were progressing westward across the Pacific. Tokyo had actually been bombed over a year before—shocking news—and while the Japanese had continued to advance, occupying some mysterious islands in the far north near the icy wastes of a land called Alaska, the Americans had now retaken those islands, as well as some of the Solomons, and had won—if communiqués were read carefully—two or three considerable naval battles. Wang invariably asked Kanamori to locate these exotic spots; Kanamori suspected that Wang's geography was not at all deficient, but supplied the information anyway.

Kanamori was not so fierce now, and heard himself saying, “I suppose we could lose this war.”

“The prudent man,” said Wang, “fills his pocket with coppers and lines his shoes with gold.”

“If we lose this war I will be stripped of my shoes too,” Kanamori said.

“In the jails of Chungking,” Wang mused, “cockroaches thrived. The administration set the prisoners a quota: ten roaches per day per man, or no food. The roaches disappeared. Now the quotas could not be met, and the wardens laughed as they divided the food appropriation, and the prisoners starved.”

“So?”

“So the prisoners founded cockroach farms. Assets, exchangeable. In effect they lined their shoes with gold.”

“Parables and proverbs,” Kanamori said. “You are about to sell me a cockroach farm.”

“No, no, no,” Wang said, and they went on to speak of other matters: Communists in the northwest, and the local Vermilion Society, which had proclaimed itself responsible for several assassinations and promised more. But as the sun westered and conversationn flagged, Wang said, “You know Ho Tzu-kai the master steamfitter?”

“Of course.” Ho Tzu-kai the master steamfitter had not done a day's work in four years: he was a licenser of steamfitting projects, and was fat on bribes.

“His parents are in the unoccupied zone. They are old. He fears they will die before he and his wife and their four young ones can make proper obeisance.”

Kanamori took this news calmly, but among the lees of his samurai's soul contempt stirred. The first rat was fleeing the ship. “Surely he can find a way across the lines.”

“Ah, but he is a man of substance.”

“And wants to carry the substance with him.”

“You understand.”

“Let him convert it to gold, and line his shoes with it.”

“Generations of household goods? Ivories? Old porcelains? Furniture? Think of the loss, should he sell at panic prices.”

“Then let him stay.” This Ho annoyed Kanamori.

“Well, it is not merely the going,” Wang said. “And it is not merely the salvaging of his possessions. For that alone he has a porcelain chicken.”

Kanamori laughed. The laugh subsided, but a residual giggle bubbled to the surface.

“This porcelain chicken is painted green and yellow.”

Kanamori waited.

“It is perhaps a thousand years old.”

Kanamori said slowly, “A T'ang porcelain.”

“He also owns a porcelain peasant woman, hauling water by means of a yoke.” Wang was almost jolly now. “So great is Ho's filial piety that he will give a chicken to cross the lines, but he will give a peasant woman for a warrant.”

Wang was too clever. Irritating. “What is this warrant?”

“A warrant for his arrest,” Wang said, “denouncing him as a Chinese patriot and hero of the resistance. Perhaps even posters in the public square.”

Kanamori grinned like a thief. “Why not kill him and take his baubles?”

“Because,” Wang said patiently, “there are others. Would you destroy the cockroach farm?”

Kanamori's collection grew. So, he assumed, did Wang's. Yu Tsung-huang the cement king was denounced for communication with Chiang Kai-shek's armies. He disappeared; his poster graced the Central Post Office in Nanking, and Kanamori was the richer by a winged pedestal cup, of wood, lacquered, possibly an imitation, but priceless if real. Jung Meng-yu the coalyard king remained in Nanking, but his wife, a former opera singer, was denounced; shortly she was said to be in Chungking starring in patriotic dramas. Kanamori was fond of the gilt bronze bodhisattva that sat like an icon smiling at him; it was only four hundred years old but rare enough, after all. Chou Chun-yi the chemical king (sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, caustic soda, soda ash, sodium sulfide) remained in place, but a false dossier was prepared with care and filed away; should the Chinese actually win this war he would be found to have “sheltered criminal elements,” “maintained criminal contact with the Chinese government,” and “transmitted information of a confidential military nature.” Kanamori received a bronze oil lamp in the shape of a ram. His favorite piece proved to be erotic and Japanese: a top-knotted samurai grimacing in glee as he plunged into an acquiescent maiden from behind, horse upon horse, the figures were of painted hardwood, and the woman, her head upflung, seemed to be screaming in joy. After some days he noticed that her hands were not flat, but clawed the earth, that the cords of her neck strained, and that her scream might not be joyful. He was momentarily depressed, even sullen, but the features, limbs and joints were so delicately carved, the figures in such flowing balance, that his annoyance ebbed. Even when this piece invaded his dreams he cherished it. More, he became superstitiously attached to it, and stared at it for long minutes, as if in penance.