Читать книгу Shanghai - Christopher New - Страница 29

ON THE FIRS' DAY of Chinese New Year, all the family must have dinner together.' Wei paused while some firecrackers banged and flashed nearby. 'After thir' day visit relative'.' He was nursing a small potted tangerine tree on his lap, the little orange fruits quivering on their stems as the rickshaw jolted over the ruts and holes in the road. His spare, bony shoulders pressed against Denton's when the coolie suddenly swung the shafts round to avoid a sedan chair borne out of the little alley by four trotting bearers. 'Everyone must have new clothe' to wear and relative' give money to children. Good fortune token, it is called.'

Some grinning boys threw a firecracker at the rickshaw wheels and the coolie swore angrily at them as the explosion sent flame and smoke round his legs. Wei nearly dropped the tangerine tree which was wrapped in red paper.

'And after the third day,' Denton smiled, eager to display his know-ledge, 'students must visit their teachers and pay their respects.'

'You are very goo' pupil,' Wei nodded approvingly. 'You have learn' a very lot.'

'And the money packets are red for good luck, and the money inside them must be new money,' Denton went on. 'And that tangerine tree is for your family, for prosperity in the coming year.'

Wei began speaking in Chinese now, smiling encouragement. 'If you go on like this, you will become my best pupil.'

It was Denton's turn to act as host, so he paid the coolie when they reached the restaurant. Firecrackers were exploding again nearby and he covered his ears, recalling his first morning in Shanghai, when he woke up to the banging of firecrackers and thought it was gunfire.

Wei smiled, cuddling his tangerine tree with both hands in front of him, so that his face was half-obscured by the lattice of its branches. 'This is nothing. They are only practising.' He spoke in Chinese still. 'When the holiday really starts, it will sound like a battle.'

As they went up the stairs to the restaurant, where Denton's appearance was no longer a novelty, Denton thought of Su-mei, the sing-song girl. He visualised the curve of her cheek, the black fringe of hair across her forehead, the slightly roguish glances she'd given him the week before. Something quickened in him, a faint rippling thrill. He quite enjoyed her singing now, although she didn't seem to have a large repertoire and he knew all her songs. And it was only her clear, sharp voice really, he told himself, that he was eager for, not the way she held her head and smiled, or half-smiled, at him.

The waiter led them to the partitioned room where they always ate. Denton turned to Wei. 'I've never met your family,' he began indirectly, in his best Chinese, feeling for a way of finding out whether, as Wei's student, he should visit him after the third day of the holiday or not.

'Oh, they will not interest you,' Wei answered hastily, giving the tangerine tree to the waiter to put on the floor, 'They are only women and children.'

Was that merely a polite disclaimer or definite discouragement? Denton toyed with his chopsticks, probing for a more certain answer. 'Do all your students visit you on the third day?' he asked more directly.

'Not foreigners, it is only for Chinese students,' Wei said decidedly. 'I don't think foreign devils should do it.' He had used 'foreign devils,' the ordinary, derogatory Chinese epithet for foreigners, unconsciously, then, realising his error, laughed in embarrassment. 'As we are speaking Chinese, I forgot that you are a foreigner.'

Sometimes he was open and easy with Denton, sometimes reserved and polite. At restaurants, as he ate and drank, he usually became more open. This time, he drank more than his normal amount of wine, and began to talk freely, changing to English as his thoughts surpassed Denton's still limited ability in Chinese. His cheeks became slightly flushed and his voice louder as he talked above the clack of mahjong tiles and the boisterous laughter rising over the partitions all round them. He even applauded Su-mei when she came to sing for them and gave her a New Year's money packet - usually he scarcely acknowledged the sing-song girls he engaged except with a curt nod. While she sang, he told Denton about his two wives, who were always quarrelling, and about his family in their village in the northern part of Kiangsu. Once they had been big landowners, but his grandfather had mortgaged all their land except the ancestral house in his losing passion for gambling.

'What happened to him in the end?' Denton asked, his eyes on the curled strand of hair that fell cunningly down in front of Su-mei's ear.

'The creditor' take all the lan', and my gran'father kill himself. Throw himself down the well.' His eyes were misty behind his glasses, whether from emotion or wine, Denton couldn't tell. Wei's father had come to Shanghai when the British came and became a clerk in Jardine Matheson's. Now he was old, he'd stopped working and lived with his sons, smoking opium and waiting to die. He'd wanted to buy back all the land his father had lost, but he'd never made enough money. Besides, he'd always been too fond of opium. Some people should never take it, they found out too late that they couldn't do without it. Wei enjoyed it himself, but never too much. He held up the heavy pewter wine jug. 'You see, I drink, but I am not get drunk,' he said, beaming hazily at Denton. 'The same with opium - I take but no' too much. But if get drunk on wine like foreigners, you must not take opium.' He let the jug down with a thump and splash.

Su-mei sang again. Wei left to talk to some friends in another room, walking with a cautious steadiness that seemed to belie his confidence in his imperviousness to wine - yet he would never show any other sign of intoxication. Denton lolled in his chair, the wine fumes wafting through his own head too. He watched the rise and fall of the girl's breasts under her silk gown, the spot of rouge that emphasised her high, prominent cheekbone, the full scarlet of her slightly pouting lips. Demons slipped the idea into his mind of placing his hands over those breasts. He blinked the demons away. In his pocket he too had a red money packet for her, but he hadn't the nerve to give it. Now was the time, while Wei was out of the room, but though his fingers were round the little packet, he couldn't draw it out. The demons slipped the fantasy of his hands over her breasts into his mind again, and this time he didn't dismiss them so quickly. But still he couldn't get up and give her the packet with the customary words.

She stopped singing and sat with her head slightly bowed, her hands demurely folded in her lap. He sipped some more wine and cleared his throat. He kept glancing at her and then away again, his fingers closing and unclosing on the little red envelope. Then her glance met his as she looked up at him from the corner of her eye. 'You like me?' she asked quietly.

'Yes,' he answered lamely. 'You sing very well.' Her eyelids drooped again. 'Not very well,' she murmured conventionally.

Suddenly he hauled the packet out of his pocket, got up clumsily and gave it to her with both hands, mumbling the New Year greeting. Her fingers touched his as she took it. She inclined her head and smiled the response. She put the packet away without opening it, folding her hands demurely in her lap as Wei came back into the room.

Later that night, while Denton was leaning over the veranda in his overcoat, watching the anticipatory firecrackers flash and burst in the street below, there was a loud rap on the door. Ah Koo opened it as Denton turned round and, set-faced, with a flinty nod of the head, gestured Su-mei into the room.

Denton stared at her, startled, thrilled, alarmed. She stood looking at him with slightly bowed, submissive, head until the door had closed. He heard Ah Koo's long, phlegmy cough growling away along the corridor.

'What are you doing here?' he asked bewilderedly in Chinese.

She looked up with widening, surprised eyes. 'You said you like me. You didn't want me to come?'

'No - I wasn't thinking' - he couldn't recall the word for 'expecting' - 'you would come.'

Her shoulders lifted slightly. 'You want me to go?' she asked simply, as if she was about to turn and leave.

'No ... I don't know.... Sit down, please.' Had he secretly expected her to come? What else did it mean to say 'I like you' to a sing-song girl? Yet the idea hadn't even brushed the surface of his conscious mind. He felt himself trembling slightly, helpless, like a man dreaming he is teetering on the brink of some precipice.

She was sitting on the edge of the chair at his desk, perching as if ready to fly, glancing at the picture of his parents. 'Your mother and father?' she asked calmly.

'Yes.'

'How old are they? Are they very rich? How many sons and daughters?' She took the picture off the desk as he answered each question, frowning at it with a little smile at the edge of her lips. She held in gingerly, as if she thought it might play some trick on her. 'Is it safe to have these pictures made? In my village, people said the machine that does it makes you sick.'

He laughed, closing the veranda doors and taking off his coat. 'No, it is safe. Even the Empress Dowager has had a picture made of herself.' It was all right, he thought, he would merely talk with her a little, there was no danger of.... 'Where is your village?' he asked more easily.

'Beyond Ningpo,' she shrugged. It was the same with all of them - the boys, the rickshaw coolies, the cooks. Whenever you asked them where they came from, it was always 'Ningpo more far.' It was a kind of evasion, a drawing of the curtains over their own space, like the faint, shuttered rigidity that their eyes assumed when your probed too far. And yet they thought nothing of asking how much you earned or what your suit cost!

'How long have you been a sing-song girl?'

'Three years.'

'How did you become....' He faltered. 'How did you become this thing?'

'Sing-song girl?' She laughed, a fluting, mocking little laugh, 'My parents sold me.' She placed the picture carefully back on the desk.

He nodded vaguely. He'd seen the little girls standing in docile rows in the Chinese city, waiting to be sold as slaves. At first he'd been shocked and indignant; but then, as Wei had blandly explained things to him, he'd felt his moral certainties begin to crumble. It was part of their way of doing things, he began to think, a way that foreigners couldn't understand, but which they would accept as inevitable for ever - or at least until some cataclysm overturned the whole of society. And how could you expect that to happen? Everything was so fixed, so Immemorially old. Each succeeding generation seemed to have stamped the lines of tradition further in, so that now they could never be dug out. Impoverished parents sold their daughters, Wei had said, to buy food for those that were left. Sometimes they had a better life that way - they might become a concubine for one of their new family's sons, and so escape the life of drudgery they would otherwise have lived. Sometimes of course, he acknowledged with a fatalistic shrug, they might have a worse life. It depended on the family that bought them. At least it was better than starving or being killed at birth. Denton hadn't asked him whether he had girl slaves himself. It was one of the many things about Wei that he didn't know.

'My teacher was good,' she went on casually. 'I was with some actors first. I can act as well.' Her face turned to him like a schoolgirl's proud of her achievements.

'You sing very well. Your voice is beautiful.'

She smiled, holding her hand to her mouth to suppress a giggle.

'What is the matter?' he asked in his stilted Chinese 'Why are you laughing?'

She shook her head, glancing up at him under half-closed lids. 'You said my voice is beautiful-to-look-at,' she said at last, 'not beautiful-to-hear.'

He laughed and slapped his forehead. 'I always make that mistake. It is because in English there is only one word for both things.'

'Both things?' She gazed at him incredulously. 'How can one word mean two things?'

'Well....' He tried to think of an explanation, but his Chinese wasn't up to it. 'We just do have one word for both kinds of things,' he repeated lamely at last.

She shook her head, either in continued disbelief or in simple amazement at the existence of so primitive a language. Then she got up. 'May I look at your rooms?'

He followed her round the living room as she gazed at the chair-covers and antimacassars, fingering them wonderingly, the curtains, the veranda, the print of some European river scene that he'd bought in a junk-shop some weeks after his arrival and hung on the wall - to remind him of home perhaps during those first melancholy, nostalgic weeks. He stood close behind her while she silently regarded it. It was as though he could feel her body through the long gown she wore, as though it summoned him to touch it. And yet she seemed unaware of her body's attraction, standing oblivious, with her head tilted, without even a sideways glance at him. He could hear her breathing; he dared not step closer. His heart beat faster as she strolled unconcernedly into the bedroom.

She pressed her hand down on the bed. 'So soft!' she exclaimed, shaking her head slowly as if she disapproved.

Denton swallowed and licked his lips, his heart thudding wildly.

'I sleep on wood,' she said, turning to him. 'With a quilt. Do all foreign devils have such soft beds?'

'It's not very soft, really,' he got out breathlessly. 'They have softer ones in England.'

She sat on the bed and smiled up at him, and then, as if to tantalise him, got up and wandered back into the living room. He felt his heart slowing. A confused weight of both relief and disappointment seemed to drag on his chest.

She was fingering the chair-covers again, consideringly. 'This is expensive?' she asked. 'How much did you pay? Does all this belong to you?'

But before he could answer, she looked up at the gaslight hissing faintly beneath its shade and let out a little gasp of wonder. 'Is that the new Western light?'

He nodded, reaching up to touch the dangling chain with its ring on the end. 'If you pull this, the light is smaller.'

She hooked her forefinger delicately inside the ring and pulled cautiously. The flame diminished and the room grew dim. He was standing beside her, his eyes fixed on her ear, small and flat, with a golden ring gleaming softly in the tiny lobe.

'How do you make it bigger?' she asked, turning to him. The faint blue flame seemed to glow in the shiny pupils of her slanted eyes.

'Pull the other end.'

She smiled as the flame hissed, growing white and bright again. She began pulling first one and then the other, her eyes glistening as the light dimmed and strengthened. She looked round at him, her lips parted in a smile. Her teeth seemed to glisten too. He imagined his tongue thrusting between them. Still smiling, but mischievously now, she pulled on the chain till with a little plut the gas went out.

'Is it broken?' she asked, suddenly anxious.

He couldn't answer at first, feeling her breath beside him, the faint stir and rustle of her clothes. The firecrackers in the street outside, the cries and shouts, the booming of a ship's siren on the river, all seemed to take on a new distinctness in the silence between them.

'Is it broken?' she asked quietly again.

'No, we must burn it with a match,' he said at last.

'Burn it?'

'Light it,' he corrected himself. She was looking up at him, still smiling, although the child-like, contrite anxiety lingered in her pupils. His eyes were on her lips. Suddenly he had lowered his mouth onto hers. He felt that the dreamer on the precipice had fallen, was rushing downwards through the giddy air. He pulled her body close against his. Her arms twined round his back.

She leant gently away from him after a while, although her arms still held him. 'You want to be with me?'

He nodded, pulling her back towards him.

But she held her face away as he tried to kiss her mouth again. 'How much will you pay me?'

'I do not know. Twenty dollars?'

She nodded faintly, placing her hand over his mouth as he tried for her lips again. 'You give me the money now?'

She took the note from him and put it somewhere in her gown, then walked into the bedroom and started to undress. The lamp was unlit above the bed. She glanced up at it and paused. 'You like the light on or...?'

He shook his head. Now that she was undressing, he was tense and uneasy. He'd never imagined further than holding her naked in his arms, and he knew there was more to it than that. But how did you do it, exactly? What did you have to do? Her clothes slithered off her, revealing first her breasts, then her slender waist, then her slim shadowy hips. She looked at him questioningly as she stepped out of her underskirt and laid it carefully over the chair. In the dim, erratic light from the window, her skin looked so pale - not with an anaemic whiteness of Ching which was dry and sickly, but with freshness and life beneath it.

'Aren't you going to undress?' she asked.

He began pulling at his buttons, trying to appear nonchalant and experienced.

She had put her hands up behind her head to loosen her hair, and now, with a little toss of her head, she let it fall down below her shoulders. 'Do you like me?' she asked, with that faintly anxious look in her eyes again.

'Yes.'

'Am I like foreign women?'

'I don't know.' He thought of Emily. Su-mei wasn't like her. 'No, not like foreign women,' he said unevenly. 'Smaller. More beautiful.'

She shook her head and smiled, glancing down at her body wonderingly. He had never seen a woman naked before, not since the time when, coming home early from school, he'd opened the scullery door to find his mother standing in the old zinc tub washing herself. He'd no more than glimpsed the pasty flabby cheeks of her buttocks, the quivering flesh of her blue-veined thighs, before she'd noticed him and shouted him angrily out, muttering fiercely to herself behind the swiftly slammed and bolted door. Su-mei's body was so different: smooth, firm, small.

She lay down on the bed, one leg stretched out, the other drawn up. 'You would rather have a girl with lily feet?' She asked.

'No.' He was pushing at his shirt buttons, forcing them through the holes. Lily feet. He hadn't seen bound feet uncovered, but the sight of rich Chinese ladies shuffling along on them, supported by an amah at each side, had made him imagine they would look like deformed hooves.

She lifted her leg and turned the ankle, pointing her toes. 'I was not born to be a lady. None of my sisters' feet were bound either.' She looked down at her turning foot with a smile, as if she liked what she saw nevertheless, then lay back again, spreading her hair out on the pillow like a black shiny fan. One arm lay carelessly out-stretched on the bed, where he would have to lie, the other across her body, her hand just over her groin as though she were modestly covering herself. He'd got his shirt off now and her eyes surveyed his chest between half-closed lids. Shy and uncertain of himself, he turned his back to pull off the rest of his clothes, tugging fiercely at his shoelaces, which he'd stupidly pulled into a knot. He heard her giggle behind him and blushed, imagining he must seem as repulsive to her as his mother's body had to him. When at last he turned round, she had rolled onto her face. Was that the right way? He didn't know. He lay down beside her. She didn't move. But she wasn't laughing at him now, her eyes, between the long dark strands of hair, looked serious - grave, even. The firecrackers and street noises seemed louder again, each one sharp and distinct. What should he do? He noticed detachedly the soft gleam of the brass bedrail. Perhaps if he kissed her again, it would all happen, somehow. But instead of kissing her, he found that his hand was on her buttock, shaping itself round the cold smooth mound and slowly stroking it. Now I've started, he thought with that same detachment with which he'd just now noticed the gleam of the bedrail, as if his body were going of its own accord and he were merely a passenger in it. Now I've started. I can't go back. Her eyes were watching him still, there seemed to be the shadow of a smile about her lips. Should his hand move up or down now? He felt her leg move slightly under his palm, like a cat arching its back against your hand when you stroked it. He felt himself stirring too. He leant over to kiss her back and his hand slid down her thigh as he did so. Her skin was smooth and cold on his lips. But what next? It was between the legs, he knew, but where exactly, and how? In his demon dreams he'd sometimes imagined himself lying on top of a woman kissing her mouth, her breasts. But she was upside down for that. All the time he was wondering what to do, he was kissing and licking her back, his hand was caressing her legs with rising pleasure and desire, as if his body knew perfectly well what his mind did not. He pressed her side gently and she rolled over onto her back, flicking the hair out of her face and closing her eyes. He leant over to kiss her and as he did so his hand covered her breast. Another mound, smooth and swelling. He heard her draw in her breath as he pressed against the hardness of her nipple and her excitement roused him still further. Her lips opened for his. They seemed to grow warmer and moister the more he pressed against her, the more he brushed his palm across her nipple. Suddenly her tongue slipped between his teeth, withdrew, then slipped in again. He lay on top of her now, his stalk digging into her belly. She laid her arms lightly round his back. Her fingertips brushed delicately along his skin, up and down his flanks. That was as far as his imaginings had ever brought him. For a brief moment he paused, uncertain how to go on. Again that detached sense of being a spectator of his own body came over him. He seemed for a second to be seeing himself from above - he had a definite image of his own back as he sprawled on top of her - and he wondered remotely how such grappling could be important or exciting, and then, as she pressed up against him with her hips, he succumbed again. His lips found her breasts now, the hard little nipples were urging themselves between his teeth and he felt his stalk lunging at her thighs, blindly and wildly. But her legs were tight together and he couldn't get in. Was it the wrong place? he wondered uneasily.

But now she was moving beneath him, gently easing him over onto his back. She knelt over him while his straying hands stroked her head, her cheeks, her shoulders. Her hand was on his stalk, her hair brushing his chest as she kissed his throat, his nipples, his belly. Her hand was playing with the tip of his stalk, pressing and squeezing it, sliding her fingers softly up and down. Slowly he let go, surrendered, abandoned himself to this delicious sensation that seemed to be melting his body with pleasure. His eyes were closed, his fingers were tangled in her hair, she had her lips over his stalk, she was kissing it, licking it, moving down to the root and up again to the very, exquisitely thrilling, tip. Her lips were closing over the tip, were sliding slowly down it once more, further and further down till he could feel the back of her throat like a warm velvet cushion against the tip of his stalk. And all he'd known, the thought drifted like a wisp of cloud across his mind, was that you kissed in bed!

He felt his stalk thickening and trembling, the sap throbbing up, but then, as if she too had felt it with her agile lips, she slipped away and rolled over onto her back, pulling him close on top of her. Her legs were spread wide apart now, and his stalk was between them, probing and thrusting assuredly now, as if he'd known all along where the place was. He felt her take him between her finger and thumb and guide him into the warm, ready, moistness of her body while the other hand, behind his neck, pulled his mouth down onto hers.

Desire suddenly flowered in every fibre of his body. She led him on, rocked him, teased him, charmed him with her licking of his throat, his ears, with caressing movements of her legs, with the lift and surge of her whole body as he plunged wildly into her. At last, with a long moan, he spent himself in violent shuddering spasms that were echoed in her, quivering through them both again and again until, finally exhausted, his head on her shoulder, he felt his mind sliding away into a vast, empty calm.

The loud bursting of firecrackers and the strident angry yell of a woman in the street outside penetrated the heavy layers of his sleep. His eyes opened slowly. His mouth was half-open on her round smooth shoulder still, as though he'd fallen asleep in the act of biting it. The room seemed darker now, the street, after the outburst that had woken him, quieter. He wondered how late it was. He stirred luxuriously against her body and raised his head.

She was gazing up at the ceiling, her face still and reflective. He kissed her throat, sniffing the faint, unnameable scent of her skin, and looked into her eyes again. The dim light in her dark pupils changed as she pulled back from her faraway thoughts, whatever they were, to look up at him. She smiled slowly, her lips just moving at the corners, a lazy, dreamy satisfied smile. He let his fingers trail gently over her lips, her chin, her cheekbones.

'How old are you?' he asked.

'Sixteen Chinese style. Fifteen western style. Chinese children are one year old when they are born.'

He nodded.

'I would like to have a house with gas lamps like this one day,' she murmured thoughtfully. Was that where her thoughts had been? Her eyes slipped back to him questioningly. 'Do you want more?'

'More?'

'Me? If you pay, I will.'

A cold wave of disenchantment broke over him and he shook his head.

She seemed to sense his changed mood. She got out of bed with a little shrug and gathered her clothes together. He would not look at her. He lay with his head turned away, gazing at the bare wall. He heard her washing herself in the bathroom.

'Can you give me fifty cents?' her voice asked, small and clear by his head.

'Fifty cents?'

She was dressed, looking down at him, her hands deftly pinning her hair behind her head. 'For Ah Koo,' she said. 'Otherwise he will not let me in next time. I must give him something.'

He couldn't reach his jacket. She held it out for him. He pulled out a dollar and gave it to her.

She was ready to leave. He watched her dispiritedly.

She walked to the door, then turned and raised her hand to wave, with a childlike flutter of her fingers. 'Shall I come again?' she asked, almost shyly. 'Did you like me?'

He hesitated. 'I will see you at the restaurant,' he answered evasively. 'I will tell you then.'

When the door had closed, he listened for the sound of her footsteps, but just then the iron-bound wheels of a heavy cart were trundling past outside. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. The tiled floor was wet where she'd stood. He could see the dark print of her foot near the door. He stood in the same puddle and washed himself with the same cold water. Suppose she wasn't clean? He soaped and soaped, shivering in the cold night air.

He hurried back to the bed and covered himself with all the blankets, keeping away from the side were she had lain. Suppose he'd caught something from her? The wave of guilt and disgust that had been looming over him toppled and broke. He prayed for forgiveness, imagining God as an all-seeing Reverend Eaton. Yet even as he prayed, obscurely hoping that if he truly repented, God would protect him from disease, her voice came back to him - Shall I come again? - and with her voice, the image of her face, her body, reviving the memory of her lips on his, her thighs closing round his thrusting stalk.

Far away he heard firecrackers banging and crackling like distant gunfire and as his sore, exhausted lids closed, he imagined her being borne away in a rickshaw, flashes and smoke all round her while she turned and waved and asked, 'Shall I come again? Did you like me?'