The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel (35 page)

Tada offered to take me to one of the new bars in Hsingking, where the wealthier of the Japanese immigrants in Manchukuo could drink sake and lie with Japanese prostitutes. I said that I would rather drink champagne with him in his quarters, where we might be alone. He picked up a bottle from the sideboard where they were lined up in neat rows, handed me two glasses and guided me towards the east wing of the house where he had a fine apartment furnished in the Chinese style. We drank the champagne, went back for more and then attempted to out drink each other with shots of sake. I discovered Tada to be an amusing companion who seduced with a quick humour and a talent for cruel mimicry. He had Pu Yi's voice and body language off to perfection. I knew that perhaps not that night, but soon, we would lie together and that he would be a good lover. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but I have found that men who make you laugh also make you moan in bed.

Tada told me that he had left his wife, with whom he was bored, in Osaka and planned never to return. He said that, unlike me, he was in love with China and could not bear even to think about what his life had been like in Japan. I felt sorry for his wife who had lost such a life-enhancing man and even more so when he told me that she was barren. For a Japanese wife to be barren is a disgrace that taints every minute of her life. It reflects on her husband, who without offspring cannot continue his bloodline.

Halfway through the second bottle of champagne, we clumsily undressed each other and lay naked on the bed. I wanted to make love, but Tada said we should wait until our senses were less saturated with alcohol. He asked me to tell him the story of my first coupling with a man and not to spare even the smallest of details. I could not bring myself to tell him of my breaking by old man Teshima or those that had followed him in the Kawashima household. He may have known of it, but if he did he never said.

I told him that my first lover had been Kanjurjab, but that the telling of that experience would bore him and so I would relate the story of Harry and the midnight swim at the Shanghai Club. I replaced the fat German's young male lover with a beautiful Chinese girl, knowing that Tada would find that more exciting. I modelled her on the fourteen-year-old girl whom I had watched through the carved screen servicing my father, all those years ago in my birth home. I said that the girl had long dark hair that coiled in the water like sea snakes, and that apart from a pair of silk slippers that covered her tiny bound feet, she swam naked. I described the water of the pool as the palest of blues, through which the girl's body gleamed like that of a mermaid. I said that as Harry and I made love in the cubicle, we could hear the guttural moans of the fat German as he entered his young whore, and hear too her tiny cries of feigned pleasure. By the time I had finished the tale we were both too drunk to make love and so we went on drinking until we fell asleep.

When we woke at sunrise he pulled me towards him and entered me without a word. I liked the weight and hardness of him. I tried to think of those things and not of Jack, and mostly I succeeded. I wanted to please Tada, so that he would remember me above all the other lovers I was sure he had enjoyed. It was a vanity on my part that I wanted the memory of sex with me to set the standard of encounters to follow. I accepted his tongue into my mouth as though I was savouring the most delicious oyster. Arching my body so as to give him more pleasure, I ran my nails down the length of his back and cupped his buttocks with my hands, helping him to push into me. It was not often in sex that I gave so selflessly. I wanted to leave him wanting more. I wanted too to replace my feelings of hurt at Jack's betrayal with those of revenge. Revenge is so much more pleasurable than pain.

Before I left Tada's rooms, I kissed the purple scar where his appendix had been taken out and asked him what would give him the most pleasure when I returned that evening.

'Come to me dressed as the Chinese princess that you are,' he said. 'But be as obedient as a concubine. Wear the same perfume, the same dark paint around your eyes and be barefoot.'

I liked a man who knew the game he wanted to play and I looked forward to indulging him and myself in the role. As a taster of my obedience to come, I knelt before him as he sat on the bed and took his member into my mouth, sucking as softly as I could until he came with a deep groan of satisfaction.

For what turned out to be the ten months of my stay with the Pu Yis, I never missed a night in Tada's bed. I played his Chinese whore and refused nothing that he asked of me. He was a man capable of losing himself in a woman's body in a way which, despite my little games of servitude, made me feel delightfully powerful. He loved the roundness of my earlobes, the crescent of my lips, the hollow in my throat and even the curved arches of my feet. He said that Chinese women had a delicacy of shape that could not be matched by those of any other nation. The General was in love with the idea of concubines, with Chinese legends of beauties so delicate you might crush them as they lay beneath you. His ambition was to live in China with a stable full of horses and a house full of concubines vying for the pleasure of his company between their sheets. I thought that he would be a strong master, respectfully kowtowed to by his servants, adored by his women. I had no desire to be one of them, but in his bed I came near to losing myself, to forgetting the girl in the blue dress whom Jack had said he loved.

It was lucky for me that I had my General for company, otherwise the time that I spent in Manchuria would have been very lonely. WanJung slept, locked in her plush bedroom, while Pu Yi wasted his days in endless meetings that were designed to keep him occupied, while Japan got on with running Manchukuo. Pu Yi had a Manchu tutor who was teaching him the language of his ancestors, but he preferred English and was attempting to make it the second language of the court. Of course, the Japanese would have none of it.

Outside the cold Salt Tax Palace, the world was full of intrigue. There was a war in Europe and Japan had allied itself with the axis powers of Germany and Italy. To the rest of the troubled globe the Qing Emperor and his number one wife must have seemed like relics from a dead past.

Tada frequently visited the nearby headquarters of the Kwangtung Army where, if Wan Jung was to be believed, he indulged what she believed was his cruel nature by devising terrible punishments for the captured bandits who challenged the Japanese in Manchuria. I believed her, but I did not judge him in the same way that she did. A General has to know how to use propaganda, as well as to be good at battle strategy. There can be no better message to a bandit than to use his fellows for bayonet practice. I never asked Tada about his treatment of prisoners; he had his work to do for Japan as we all did.

I often rode out with him on horseback and once or twice he left me to play stand-in general over a borrowed detachment of Manchurian soldiers. I chose the best-looking captains to sleep with and paid them for their services with Kwangtung gold. It was no secret to Tada that I used his men; in fact he encouraged it and would later ask for every detail, what they did and what they said. I had to make up stories for him for, strangely, when in those narrow barrack beds, I had begun to feel ashamed of myself and preferred a silent sort of union. I wanted Jack to come and save me from myself, but I received no word from him.

Heralded by the bitter winds that howled in the stairwells of the Salt Tax Palace, a ferocious winter arrived in Hsingking. The frosts were so hard that the giant pots in the courtyard cracked from top to bottom and had to be replaced with a pair of couchant stone lions. Some of the rooms in the palace were heated with open fires, but the halls were freezing and in the early morning ice could be found on the inside of the windows. I began to long for Shanghai with its central heating, hot water on tap, and streets warmed by jostling crowds.

In the summer months in Hsingking, I had taken to occasional walks in the gardens of Tatung Park, where the boys who rutted with Japanese soldiers strolled prettily. It was the only place where I allowed myself to dwell on Jack and sometimes to weep sorry tears for myself. But now, in the cold leafless season with the benches deep in snow, even that dubious pleasure was denied me. By mid-afternoon it was dark and, as in Mongolia, the white moon of winter kept its promise of nights so cold that they slowed the blood and made your eyes ache.

It was no longer a pleasure to ride out on horseback. The ground was so hard, the air so frigid that even the horses complained. I did sometimes drive with Tada to the Kwangtung Army's headquarters to play poker in the cell-like rooms of my favourite captains, where I felt obliged to reacquaint myself with them. Under their rough blankets, skin to skin in the pale warmth of their oil stoves, those friendly couplings only made me desolate.

I suggested to WanJung that perhaps it was time for me to return to Shanghai, but she wouldn't hear of my leaving. As I had no orders from Doihara to leave, I had to make the best of things and see the winter out in the dark Salt Tax Palace. I apologised to her for wanting to go, explaining that I had always hated the cold and that I had too little of her company for my liking.

'You should smoke with me more,' she said. 'Then your days would not seem so long.'

As it was, I was indulging in the poppy more than was safe. It kept the cold, and thoughts of Jack, at bay. Tada said that he could tell when I had smoked opium because my eyes were clouded and for days after my saliva tasted as bitter as melon seeds.

Wan Jung told me that she herself had begun to dream of the Forbidden City. In those comforting slumbers she said that she was at peace with herself, secure in the knowledge that she was the honoured Qing Empress. She slept in rose-scented linens and bathed in silvery pools big enough to swim in. In the company of her elegant ladies-in-waiting, she floated over ponds filled with water lilies of such unusual colours that she had no words to describe them other than that they were filled with light. She was so happy in those dreams that I feared her opium intake would increase to the extent that there would be no part of the day when she would be her real self. Tada said that he didn't think it mattered that much, for in his opinion Wan Jung wouldn't live for much longer; he thought she might as well spend the time left to her in a world where she could be happy. He had a way of getting to the heart of things that was difficult to argue with.

Pu Yi was talking about taking another bride, as Wan Jung, he said, was no longer fit to show herself in public. The idea of it added to WanJung's misery. If Pu Yi were to have a son by another consort, then she would have a stronger power base than the Empress herself. The thought of it turned the knife in Wan Jung's heart and made her more anxious and insecure.

Doihara visited only once from Mongolia. He greeted me familiarly and said that I had lost none of my beauty since he had last seen me in Tientsin.

'Your lover Tanaka does well enough,' he said. 'But I am not convinced that an officer so like his men in nature will ultimately succeed in his objectives.'

It seemed strange to me to hear Tanaka described as my lover. I had not seen him for almost three years, two of which I had spent with Jack. But his letters to me were frequent and they often spoke of our future together. Even though I had reluctantly made the decision to let Jack go, I could not get him out of my mind and every time I received a letter from Tanaka, I wished that it had come from Jack.

Pu Yi ordered a banquet to honour Doihara, which was attended by Tada and the senior officers of the Kwangtung Army, as well as some successful Japanese entrepreneurs doing well out of Manchukuo. Apart from Wan Jung and myself, the only other women at the meal were two geishas attending their owners. Like Wan Jung, they did not eat.

I think that Doihara, despising the Emperor's company, would have preferred to go without the banquet, where he was seated next to him, but for appearances' sake he had to attend. He could barely observe the formalities towards the royal couple and managed to make even his deep bow appear insulting. His attitude was abrupt to the point of rudeness and sometimes he would completely ignore the Emperor when he spoke, pretending he hadn't heard him. Upset and, as always, a little afraid of Doihara, Pu Yi reacted by drinking too much and resorting to the flattery that Doihara despised.

Tada had arranged for Doihara a liaison with a beautiful Japanese prostitute known for entertaining only those of high rank. In his impatience to be out of the Emperor's company and in that of the prostitute's, Doihara excused himself and left before the oranges were served. In the Forbidden City no one would have dared leave such an occasion before the Emperor and so it was not surprising that Doihara's departure filled Pu Yi simultaneously with fear and anger. When Wan Jung wished him goodnight, he told her spitefully that Doihara had left because he could not bear her company. She replied that Doihara could not bear the company of any Chinese, least of all that of the hungry- for-approval Emperor. I was pleased to see that even though her health was poor, her skill at fencing was as good as ever.

The next day I was called to a meeting with Doihara. I asked him if he had enjoyed the company of his night companion. He said that he had, and that she deserved her reputation, but she was a little too fleshy to be perfect. After the pleasantries were over, he quizzed me about the Empress. What did she talk about? How extravagant was she being? How anti-Japanese were her sentiments?

'For instance, Yoshiko, who in the house is loyal to her?'

'No one in this palace, not even the Emperor,' I replied.

Despite the fact that I was betraying Wan Jung's confidences, I was truthful with him. I confirmed to him that Pu Yi did not visit his wife's bed and he said it was a good thing that he did not, as a Qing offspring would only complicate matters. When I told him of her dreams he laughed and said that it would never be part of Japan's plans to return Pu Yi to his Dragon Throne.