The Russian Concubine

10

‘My name is Lydia Ivanova.’

She held out a hand to him and he knew what she was expecting. He’d seen them do it, the foreigners. Seizing each other’s hands in greeting. A disgusting habit. No self-respecting Chinese would be so rude as to touch another, especially someone he didn’t know. Who would want to hold a hand that may have just come from gutting a pig or stroking a wife’s private parts? Barbarians were such filthy creatures.

Yet the sight of her small hand, pale as a lily and waiting for him, was curiously inviting. He wanted to touch it. To learn the feel of it.

He shook hands. ‘I am called Chang An Lo.’

It was like holding a bird in his hand, warm and soft. With one squeeze he could have crushed its fragile bones. But he didn’t want to. He experienced an unfamiliar need to protect this wild fluttering little creature in his hand.

She withdrew it as easily as she had given it and looked around her. He had led her out of the settlement along the back of the American sector and down a dirt track out to Lizard Creek, a small wooded inlet to the west of town. Here the morning sun lazed on the surface of the water and the birch trees offered dappled shade to the flat grey rocks. Lizards flicked and flashed over them like leaves in a breeze. Beyond the creek the land stretched flat and boggy after last night’s rain all the way north to the distant mountains. They shimmered blue in the summer heat, but Chang knew that somewhere hidden deep within the crouching tiger was a Red heart that was beating stronger every day. One day soon it would flood the country with its blood.

‘This place is beautiful,’ the fox girl said. ‘I had no idea it existed.’

She was smiling. She was pleased. And that created a strange contentment in his chest. He watched the way she dipped a hand into the gently flowing creek and laughed at a swallow that flashed its wings as it skimmed the water. Insects hummed in the heat and two crickets bickered somewhere in the reeds.

‘I come here because the water is clean,’ he explained to her. ‘See how clear it is, it lives and sings. Look at that fish.’ A silver swirl and it was gone. ‘But when this water joins the great Peiho River, the spirits leave it.’

‘Why?’ She sounded puzzled. Did she know so little?

‘Because it fills up with black oil from the foreigners’ gunboats and poisons from their factories. The spirits would die in the brown filth of the Peiho.’

She gave him a look but said nothing, just sat down on a rock and tossed a stone into the shallows. She stretched out her legs, bare and slender, toward the water and he noticed a hole in the bottom of one of her shoes. The fiery hair was hidden away under a straw hat, and he was sorry for that. The hat looked old, battered, like her shoes. Her hair always looked new and he wanted to see its flames again. She was watching a small brown bird tugging at a grub in a dead branch at her feet.

‘Your English is excellent, you know.’

She spoke softly and he wasn’t sure if it was not to disturb the bird or because she was suddenly nervous alone with a man in this isolated spot. She had shown courage in coming here with him. No Chinese girl would ever take a risk like this. They’d sooner feed their pet turtles to a cobra. Yet she didn’t look nervous at all. Her eyes shone with expectation.

He moved to the edge of the water, keeping his distance from her so that she wouldn’t become alarmed, and squatted down on a patch of grass. It was still damp.

‘I am honoured that you think my English acceptable,’ he said.

While her attention was on the brown bird, he eased the rubber shoe off his right foot. Pain crashed around inside his skull. He began to unwind the blood-soaked cloth that was holding the flesh of his foot together.

‘I had an English tutor for many years,’ he told her. ‘When I was young. He taught me well.’ The putrid smell on the cloth rose to his nostrils. ‘And my uncle went to university at Harvard. That’s in America. He always insisted that English is the language of the future and would speak nothing else to me.’

‘Really? Just like my mother. She speaks God knows how many languages.’

‘Except Mandarin?’

She laughed, a bright ripple of sound that sent the bird up into a tree, but for Chang the sound of her laughter merged with the song of the river and soothed the burning in his foot.

‘My mother is always telling me that English is the only language worth…’ She stopped. A tight gasp reached his ears.

He turned his head and found her staring, mouth open, at his foot. Her gaze rose to his face and for a long moment their eyes met and held. He looked away. When he lifted his foot off the sodden rags and placed it into the swirling flow of the river, she said nothing. Just watched in silence. He started to rub his hands over the wounds under the water, massaging the poisons out and the life back in. Clots of dried blood drifted on the surface and were instantly snapped up by hungry mouths from below. A steady trail of bright blood drew a darting shoal of tiny fish that flashed green against the yellow stones of the riverbed. The water was cool. His foot seemed to drink in the coolness.

He heard a noise and swung around. She was kneeling on the grass beside him, her face white under the fraying hat. In her hand lay the needle and thread. The presence of her so close made the air between them flutter like doves’ wings on his cheek, and his fingertips longed to touch her creamy European skin.

‘You’ll need these,’ she said and held them out to him.

He nodded. But as he reached for them, she swayed away from him and shook her head.

‘Would it help if I did it?’ she asked.

He nodded again. He saw her swallow. Her soft pale throat seemed to quiver in a brief spasm, then settle.

‘You need a doctor.’

‘A doctor costs dollars.’

She said nothing more, but threw off her hat, letting loose the wonderful fox spirit of her hair, the way he’d once loosed the fox from the snare. She leaned over his foot. Not touching. Just looking. He could hear her breathing, in and out, feel it brush the jagged edges of his damaged flesh like the kiss of the river god.

He emptied his mind of the hot pain. Instead he filled it with the sight of the smooth arch of her high forehead and the copper glow of one lock of her hair that curled on the white skin of her neck. Perfection. Not pain. He closed his eyes and she started to sew. How could he tell her he loved her courage?

‘That’s better,’ she said, and he heard the relief in her voice.

She had removed her underskirt, quickly and without embarrassment, cut it into strips with his knife, and bound his foot into a stiff white bundle that would no longer fit inside his shoe. Without asking, she cut the shoe’s rubber sides, then tied it over the bandage with two more strips of cloth. It looked clean and professional. The pain was still there but at last the blood had stopped.

‘Thank you.’ He gave her a small bow with his head.

‘You need sulphur powder or something. I’ve seen Mrs Yeoman use it to dry up sores. I could ask her to…’

‘No, it is not needed. I know someone who has herbs. Thank you again.’

She turned her face away and trailed her hands through the water, fingers splayed out. She watched their movement as if they belonged to someone else, as if she were surprised by what they had done today.

‘Don’t thank me,’ she said. ‘If we go around saving each other’s lives, then that makes us responsible for each other. Don’t you think?’

Chang was stunned. She had robbed his tongue of words. How could a barbarian know such things, such Chinese things? Know that this was the reason he had followed her, watched over her. Because he was responsible for her. How could this girl know that? What kind of mind did she possess that could see so clearly?

He felt the loss of her from his side when she rose to her feet, kicked off her sandals, and waded into the shallows. A golden-headed duck, startled from its slumber in the reeds, paddled off downstream as fast as if a stoat were on its tail, but she scarcely seemed to notice, her hands busy splashing water over the hem of her dress. It was a shapeless garment, washed too many times, and for the first time he saw the blood on it. His blood. Entwined in the fibres of her clothes. In the fibres of her. As she was entwined in the fibres of him.

She was silent. Preoccupied. He studied her as she stood in the creek, her skin rippling with silver stars reflected from the water, the sunlight on her hair making it alive and molten. Her full lips were slightly open as if she would say something, and he wondered what it might be. A heart-shaped face, finely arched brows, and those wide amber eyes, a tiger’s eyes. They pierced deep inside you and hunted out your heart. It was a face no Chinese would find alluring, the nose too long, the mouth too big, the chin too strong. Yet somehow it drew his gaze again and again, and satisfied his eyes in ways he didn’t understand but in ways that contented his heart. But he could see secrets in her face. Secrets made shadows, and her face was full of pale breathless shadows.

He lay back on the warm grass, resting on his elbows.

‘Lydia Ivanova,’ he said quietly. ‘What is it that is such trouble to you?’

She lifted her gaze to his and in that second when their eyes fixed on each other, he felt something tangible form between them. A thread. Silver and bright and woven by the gods. Shimmering between them, as elusive as a ripple in the river, yet as strong as one of the steel cables that held the new bridge over the Peiho.

He lifted a hand and stretched it out to her, as if he would draw her to him. ‘Tell me, Lydia, what lies so heavy on your heart?’

She stood up straight in the water, letting go of the edge of her dress so that it floated around her legs like a fisherman’s net. He saw a decision form in her eyes.

‘Chang An Lo,’ she said, ‘I need your help.’

A breeze swept in off the Peiho River. It carried with it the stench of rotting fish guts. It came from the hundreds of sampans that crowded around the flimsy jetties and pontoons that clogged the banks, but Chang was used to it. It was the stink of boiled cowhide from the tannery behind the godowns around the harbour.

He moved quickly. Shut his mind to the knives in his foot and slipped silently past the noisy, shouting, clattering world of the riverside, where tribes of beggars and boatmen made their homes. The sampans bobbed and jostled each other with their rattan shelters and swaying walkways, while cormorants perched, tethered and starved, on the prows of the fishermen’s boats. Chang knew not to linger. Not here. A blade between ribs, and a body to add to the filth thrown daily into the Peiho, was not unheard of for no more than a pair of shoes.

Out where the great Peiho flowed wider than forty fields, British and French gunboats rode at anchor, their white and red and blue flags fluttering a warning. At the sight of them Chang spat on the ground and trampled it into the dirt. He could see that half a dozen big steamers had docked in the harbour, and near-naked coolies bent double as they struggled up and down the gangplanks under loads that would break the back of an ox. He kept clear of the overseer who strutted with a heavy black stick in his hand and a curse on his tongue, but everywhere men shouted, bells rang, engines roared, camels screamed, and all the time in and out of the chaos wove the rickshaws, as numerous as the black flies that settled over everything.

Chang kept moving. Skirted the quayside. Ducked down an alleyway where a severed hand lay in the dust. On to the godowns. These were huge warehouses that were well guarded by more blue devils, but behind them a row of lean-to shacks had sprung up. Not shacks so much as pig houses, no higher than a man’s waist and built of rotting scraps of driftwood. They looked as if a moth’s wings could blow them away. He approached the third one. Its door was a flap of oilcloth. He pulled it aside.

‘Greetings to you, Tan Wah,’ he murmured softly.

‘May the river snakes seize your miserable tongue,’ came the sharp reply. ‘You have stolen away my soft maidens, skin as sweet as honey on my lips. Whoever you are, I curse you.’

‘Open your eyes, Tan Wah, leave your dreams. Join me in the world where the taste of honey is a rich man’s pleasure and a maiden’s smile a million li away from this dung heap.’

‘Chang An Lo, you young son of a wolf. My friend, forgive the poison of my words. I ask the gods to lift my curse and I invite you to enter my fine palace.’

Chang crouched down, slipped inside the foul-smelling hovel, and sat cross-legged on a bamboo mat that looked as if it had been chewed by rats. In the dim interior he could make out a figure wrapped in layers of newspaper lying on the damp earth floor, his head propped on an old car seat cushion as a pillow.

‘My humble apologies for disturbing your dreams, Tan Wah, but I need some information from you.’

The man in the cocoon of newspaper struggled to sit up. Chang could see he was little more than a handful of bones, his skin the telltale yellow of the opium addict. Beside him lay a long-stemmed clay pipe, which was the source of the sickly smell that choked the airless hut.

‘Information costs money, my friend,’ he said, his eyes barely open. ‘I am sorry but it is so.’

‘Who has money these days?’ Chang demanded. ‘Here, I bring you this instead.’ He placed a large salmon on the ground between them, its scales bright as a rainbow in the dingy kennel. ‘It swam from the creek straight into my arms this morning when it knew I was coming to see you.’

Tan Wah did not touch it. But the narrow slits of his eyes were already calculating its weight in the black paste that would bring the moon and the stars into his home. ‘Ask what you will, Chang An Lo, and I will kick my worthless brain until it finds what you wish to know.’

‘You have a cousin who works at the fanqui’s big club.’

‘At the Ulysses?’

‘That is the one.’

‘Yes, my stupid cousin, Yuen Dun, a cub still with his milk teeth, yet he is growing fat on the foreigners’ dollars while I…’ He closed his mouth and his eyes.

‘My friend, if you would eat the fish instead of trading it for dreams, you might also grow fat.’

The man said nothing but lay back on the floor, picked up the pipe, and cradled it on his chest like a child.

‘Tell me, Tan Wah, where does this stupid cousin of yours live?’

There was a silence, filled only by the sound of fingers stroking the clay stem. Chang waited patiently.

‘In the Street of the Five Frogs.’ It was a faint murmur. ‘Next to the rope maker.’

‘A thousand thanks for your words. I wish you good health, Tan Wah.’ In one swift movement he was crouching on his feet ready to leave. ‘A thousand deaths,’ he said with a smile.

‘A thousand deaths,’ came the response.

‘To the piss-drinking general from Nanking.’

A chuckle, more like a rattle, issued from the newspapers. ‘And to the donkey-fucking Foreign Devils on our shore.’

‘Stay alive, friend. China needs its people.’

But as Chang pushed away the cloth flap, Tan Wah whispered urgently, ‘They are hunting you, Chang An Lo. Do not turn your back.’

‘I know.’

‘It is not good to cross the Black Snake brotherhood. You look as if they have already fed your face to their chow-chows to chew on. I hear that you stole a girl from them and crushed the life out of one of their guardians.’

‘I bruised his ribs. No more.’

A sigh drifted through the heavy air. ‘Foolish one. Why risk so much for a miserable slug of a white girl?’

Chang let the cloth fall back in place behind him and slipped away.

He let his knife do the talking. It pressed hard against the young boy’s throat.

‘Your badge?’ Chang demanded.

‘It’s… in… in my belt.’

The boy’s face was grey with fear. Already he had pissed himself when dragged into the dark doorway. Chang could feel the thick flesh on his bones as he removed the identity badge and see the sleek sheen on his skin like a well-fed concubine.

‘What part of the club do you work in?’

‘The kitchens.’

‘Ah. So you steal food for your family?’

‘No, no. Never.’

The knife tightened and a trickle of blood mingled with the boy’s sweat.

‘Yes,’ he screamed, ‘yes, I admit, sometimes I do.’

‘Then next time, you dog-faced turd, take some to your cousin, Tan Wah, or his spirit will come and feed on your fat stomach and burrow into your liver, where it will suck out all the thick rich oil and you will die.’

The boy’s whole body started to shake and when Chang released him, he vomited over his smart leather boots.