Читать книгу Go Ask the River - Evelyn Eaton - Страница 15

IV

BEYOND THE WALL turbulence went rushing by like the River Min, but this was a river of feet, surging into the city. Sometimes the sound was cut by sudden stridencies, laughter, shouted words, street vendors’ cries. Mostly it flowed on, a water noise, not friendly like the fishponds in the court, dangerous, deep water.

Behind the wall the safe world was laid out, orderly, with paths to the pavilions, flower beds, and shrubs. Life moved through the garden. Birds flashed by. People came and went, her mother and the other women, aunts and maids; children ran and quarreled, her brothers, who would never play with her; sometimes a man in stiff silk robes rustled gorgeously, her father, to whom they all behaved as stiffly as the robes, as though they were afraid.

She was not afraid. She had a secret strength. When they were alone she could make her father smile. She could even make him laugh and call her teasing names. In front of the others he ignored her. She was a misfortune, inexplicably, for no one would explain it to her, born to be a girl.

But still she was the small daughter of the House of Hsueh, and she was not afraid, of her father, of the world over the wall, of anything. Her official name was Hsueh T’ao, but they called her mostly by her small name, Hung Tu, and she was seven years old, born, the women said, a long way from this garden.

She remembered, or from hearing the women she coaxed tell of it, thought she remembered, snatches of that journey from far-off Chang-an, taken when she was two. There, in the farthest east of the Empire she was born, in the great Capital, Red Phoenix City, glory of the Tang, where the Emperor reigned with all his court…“friend and protector of your father.”

“Why then did we leave?”

“I’ve told you.”

“Tell me again.”

It was a story that could always make her “be good and go to sleep,” “be good and eat your rice,” “be good and stop your pestering, play quietly.”

There was a rebellion. Rebels came and sacked the Imperial City.

“I’ve told you what sacked means.”

The songs the women sang to her, the tales they told, were full of heroic deeds by the Emperor’s warriors against Barbarians in the North. There was always war and trouble from the North, but this time it was in the East, in the Capital itself, and it was not Barbarians, it was the Emperor’s own army that rose up against him and sacked and looted the city and sacked and looted the Palace. It was mutineers.

“What is mu…”

“Hush, Pestilence, and let me do my work.”

The Hsuehs fled. So did the Emperor and his court, but the important thing was that the Hsuehs fled, and the most important thing of all was that they carried her with them.

Over hills, on horseback, by palanquin…

“What’s pala…”

“Never you mind.”

By boat, and across scorched plains on foot, through passes where the narrow road clung to the precipice, up cliffs so high you couldn’t see the sky, on roads of ladders, and bridges hooked together in the air…

“The yellow crane could not fly over these mountaintops, and the monkeys wail, unable to leap over these gorges; alas how precipitous, alas how high! The road to Shu is more difficult to climb than the steep blue heavens,” her father quoted. “That was written for us by the poet Li Po.”

“I know,” Elder Brother said smugly. “My brother and I are studying the works of my father’s friend Li Po.”

Hung Tu might have added that she was studying them too, but at ten she had learned to be silent. There was a value in silence. The privilege of studying the classics with her brothers was a most unusual indulgence. She was nervous that it might be taken from her.

The first time that she marched into the Pavilion of Calm Studies with her brush and scroll and sat down expectantly, her brothers, especially Elder Brother, protested hotly. She was a girl. She had no business there. Honorable Tutor must turn her out at once. But Honorable Tutor was amused, or else he had an inkling of what her father would say.

“Let the small dragon stay,” her father said. “She will tire of it soon enough.”

When she proved him wrong, he shrugged, as her brothers had to learn to shrug, and she was allowed to practice script and master characters according to p’ai-lü, so long as she kept quiet, in the background where she belonged, and so long as she was properly admiring of her brothers’ brushwork and did not put forward her own.

When the day came to advance to a study of the even and uneven tones of the five-character lines of the classics, there was another protest and a much stronger one. This time Elder Brother had a sharper weapon against her. This time she had made a great mistake. She had shown her first completed poem to Honorable Tutor, and he had read it aloud, pointing out the beauty of the brushwork and the sound composition of the form. It was called “Now Alighted.”

Now alighted on the shadowy pooltwo birds float together on the green water. They rest as one, they move as one, they cannot be parted, whose hearts and minds and bodies know only each other, who have never had a dissenting thought. Even the leaves and the rushescling together, bending above them. Happy birds! Happy birds!

Elder Brother was beside himself. “It is indelicate,” he said. “Why should she write of love? How should she know of love? I am contracted in marriage, and I…and I…”

Hung Tu smiled up at him. “You have been trying to write a poem of love now for a week. You are angry because my brushwork is commended. Shall I lend you my poem, Elder Brother, to send to your betrothed?”

At that he snatched the scroll from the tutor and ran to his father, and Hung Tu trembled, knowing she had gone too far.

When she was sent for, she arrived with downcast eyes and hands in her long sleeves and stood demurely before her father, while Elder Brother sputtered and scolded at his side, and—she could tell this from his feet, tapping beneath the robe—bored him with this vehemence.

Nevertheless, “Eighteen gifted daughters do not equal one lame son,” he told her sternly. “A due respect for your brothers is more pleasing than good brushwork.” He gave her back the scroll.

To his sons he said, “Teach the parrot to talk, some will do it well. Teach the girl to write, some will do it well. What then? What is changed? It is still a bird, it is still a girl.” He shrugged.

To Honorable Tutor he said, “Correct me if I quote the Master with inaccuracy. Did he not once say: ‘Women are indeed human beings, but they are of a lower state than men. They can never attain to full equality with men. The aim of feminine education therefore is perfect submission, not the cultivation and development of the mind.’” After a pause he added, “It has never been proved that women have a mind…nor disproved.” Then to his sons, “Let the small dragon live. It has no wings. What if it try to sing? It is not heard.”

He dismissed them. Elder Brother bowed and left the pavilion. Second Brother lingered sulkily.

“My father, when the time comes for me to part the curtains, do not choose for me a wife who can read.”

“It shall be remembered. Yet, my second son, a well-informed mind to share the pillow can be a source of strength and of comfort to a man.”

There was an awkward silence while they all remembered that his own wives could not read.

And to Hung Tu, waiting in the doorway for her betters to depart, he said unexpectedly, “Give me the scroll.”

Later she discovered from some gossip of the maids he had shown it to his friends, boasting of his daughter’s talent, and they had drunk toasts to her.

She was at the well when she heard it, with her mother’s pitcher to be filled. It was early in the morning, when the latest news went round, while the creaking buckets were hauled up on their ropes and the jostling servants waited, laughing together, relaxed and fresh for the day, the lord and the ladies of the house still safe in bed.

Sometimes they forgot that she was there and she heard things not intended for her, but this they wanted her to hear; they were pleased and proud of this small triumph, reflecting credit on the House of Hsueh.

She managed to smile demurely and to look on the ground as she should, and to make little gestures of polite deprecation to show how well she was trained, but her heart was thumping wildly and she needed all her strength to hold the pitcher steady and to watch it being filled and then to carry it away on her shoulder as though this water for the Second Lady was all she was thinking of, instead of her father’s approval of her poem and the knowledge flooding her that she was a great poet, the greatest poet in the Empire probably.