My Last Empress

  “Qu le!” The emperor’s voice rose with severity.

  Off the servant went, mumbling, casting me a low menacing glance. “Yang ren bu shou ting fa.” Translation: “That ocean man didn’t kowtow to the emperor.”

  Heads would have normally rolled for such a slight, but not on this day.

  As soon as he was gone, the emperor hunched his back, stiffened by his starched collar and snug suit, and bowed to me; his hands still held mine in a tight grip. The gentle manners had no doubt rubbed off from the obsequious eunuchs who had surrounded him since an early age, playing guards and angels, friends and teachers. Gratefully, I returned the favor, bowing back.

  “Come see my house,” he said, resorting to his English again, urging me indoors.

  I nodded.

  “But you have to be a blind first.”

  “A blind?”

  “Close your eyes, if you will,” he amended excitedly, and I realized he had meant to say “blindfolded.”

  I did, entering, his hand guiding mine, his gold rings cold to my skin.

  “Now open them,” he urged.

  When my eyes opened, it was not the somber schoolhouse my mind’s eyes had foreseen—one desk, two dull chairs, his facing north, mine east—but the sight of his crowded collection of foreign artifacts: long-handed clocks, stubby snuffboxes, and bicycles, all in multiple numbers and disorderly display.

  “They have all been gifted me by foreign kings and queens, princes, and female princes.”

  “You mean to say ‘princess.’ ”

  “Pince … ass?”

  “Prin … ce … sses”

  “You can’t begin my lessons without my permission,” the young man said with a giggle.

  “But learning is everywhere and anytime.”

  “Let me write that down.” He quickly whipped out a notebook and pen from his inner pocket. “Now who is it who says that?”

  “I did.”

  “You did.” He nodded, scribbling on his page, wrinkling his nose in all seriousness.

  How could I stop such a zealous youth!

  “There are many more, but they will ill-fit my chamber. Someday I shall show you the collection in its entirety. That clock is from the English queen … have you met her before?”

  I shook my head.

  “This vase is from the Emperor of the Sun—that would be Japan. The bicycle is a genuine Raleigh.” Upon which conjuncture he discarded me and leaped onto its saddle and pressed its bell, causing three rapid dings to echo the space. Then off he leaped. Led by the emperor through an open rear door, I suddenly saw a wavy mirage rising in the summer heat. In a green-lawned backyard, a dazzle of a nymphet blonde, thirteen and no older, was straddling over a beastly motorcycle, sun in her face, goggles in her hair, thin thighs apart, one long and booted leg resting on the gas pedal, the other on the ground.

  My heart instantly caved in.

  She gazed at me, long lashes blinking, head tilting to one side as Annabelle had been prone to do all those years ago. Her eyes instantly enlivened my abysmal darkness.

  A muted, gagging frog leaped out of my parched throat. “A-A-Annabelle.”

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” the emperor asked.

  “Beauty indeed,” I replied foggily.

  “It’s no Annabelle, sir, but an original Hildebrand & Wolfmuller gifted me by Emperor William of the German Empire.”

  My mind was awhirl.

  “And the girl riding it is my empress, Qiu Rong.”

  “Empress Qiu Rong, of course,” I said. Though dazed, I still possessed enough comity to bow.

  Qiu Rong—Oh, my Annie in blood and flesh! Where and how?—didn’t bow back. Instead she blew a kiss, forming her meaty lips round and then parting them wide on an airy smack that bared her whitened teeth and tip of serpentine tongue.

  The motor roared and smoke puffed, not by diesel or its throaty cry but by magic of its phantasmal rider clothed in a yellow robe and yellow silk scarf. She shot into motion: a bee blurred, buzzing around the girthy yard, round and round, bumping a hedge here and denting a branch there, screaming in trilingual gibberish—Giddyup, jen-ta-ma-ban (a Pekingese curse), and some undeniable Germanic fricatives—while the hem of her robe fluttered and pattered afore and asunder, bare thighs showing.

  Cloud-thick fumes transformed the dappled yard into a New England night in June, in May, aeons back—muggy, frothy, with faint sniff of haystacks and horse dung. Circling before me no longer was a bethroned empress but my very own virginal incarnation.

  “You like it?” asked the emperor, mistaking my spell as enchantment.

  I nodded dizzily, phantom perfume of opium clouding my judgment.

  “You ride it then. Qiu Rong, come here.” He waved her over.

  “I …” Circle one. “Am …” Circle two. “Not …” Circle three. “.… Finisheeed!” she screamed as her tires scratched near my toes. “Get your own bike, you Amerrrican mannn!” She pronounced the syllables with a German accent, man twisted to sound like mon.

  Casting her bike-handle outward, she suddenly threw herself between me and her consort to be caught, her budding bosom snug against my chest and tiny waist in the emperor’s hands.

  “You are quite naughty, you know,” the emperor teased lovingly.

  “I am a naughty child of yours, aren’t I?” his empress said, blinking her long lashes, her feet still tangled in the saddle of her bike.

  “Oh, big man you are. Feel his arms.” She clutched my upper arms for support, her long fingernails digging my skin, her eyes studying me with childlike indolence.

  I remembered little else but Qiu Rong’s laughter. I recalled even less of my initial tutelage with the emperor, yet her absence cut a garish gash in my heart.

  15

  In the gloaming, as I was dining alone in my apartment, the cursed eunuch reappeared, gazing at me with disdain, cunning in his cold eyes. I offered him a chair and a cup of tea. He kicked away the former, which movement knocked aside the latter, spilling the tea on my delicate tablecloth as he sat with arms folded, one hip on my dining table and one foot on the fallen chair.

  He minced no words. With a heavy Shandong accent tainted with garlic breath, he demanded an immediate financial remuneration to keep his silence about my earlier dereliction: failure to bow. I was rather amused. Agreeing to play along with this clown, I lay my bulging money pouch on the table like a gambler, causing his eyes to gleam with greed and foot to stop rattling the uneven chair.

  “What else have I done wrong? Tell me and all shall be yours,” I said, caressing the bulge of coins.

  His hip nearly slipped off at my pronouncement. Standing, he paced the room, tapping his knuckle on the polished windowpane as if inspecting its firmness, rubbing the tablecloth between his filthy fingers as he fondled the silkiness. He reasoned that I would be well served to appease the entire eunuch corps, the palace’s cogs and screws. What offended him the most in our earlier encounter, he recounted with the rather generous openness of a paid counselor, was my inclination to turn the young and temperamental sovereign against him, thusly against the entire eunuch corps. He paused for effect, recalling having been rashly sent away, costing him a day’s pay and three whip lashes by the chief eunuch.

  He leaned over my plates—sautéed celery; shredded chickens; three-layered pork of skin, fat, and meat; river escargots deftly shelled and pungently spiced—and picked up a shred of poultry with those same two grubby fingers, feeding it to his big-toothed orifice, chewing it noisily and unevenly, his lower jaw moving horizontally like a mule. Wiping his fingers on the chest of his robe, he preached on.

  Any corporeal punishment or monetary reprimand that resulted on his behalf meant that offense was taken by all eunuchs against such outside agitator. They, he added, as a whole, had a long memory, which in due course could serve to do or undo anyone within any rank in the palace. Pleased with his logic, he pinched three snails in a four-fingered pillage and dropped them down his throat, causing him to
gag with spasmodic contortions like a rooster choking on a kicking frog. All Shandong men were pepper men, but not this one. The sideshow went on a bit with him coughing up a storm. I was more than ready for his breathless death before he was himself again, aided by a douse of my neglected tea.

  “A palace girl was knocked up by the emperor once. It should have been a joyful occasion, but her nipples were cut off, and the infant gouged from her womb; she was left to die in isolation at the back palace. The service was not rendered by ghosts or spirits, which this palace boasts many of, but by us eunuchs. Why?” he asked rhetorically, helping himself to another pinch of my food. “Not that she was unkind to us, but that she was envied by a friend of ours. Vital it is not just to be good to us but more important to never be a friend of our foe or foe of our friend. Simple as that.” He picked up my soup bowl and chucked several mouthfuls before licking his lips with satisfaction and wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  “So how much will it be?” I asked.

  “The whole pouch as you have pledged, of course. And it would be worth all your while, for I have seen not just one item of dereliction but many.”

  “Enumerate them all.”

  “Well … you did not walk behind Him, you spoke without being asked, you didn’t kneel or bow to Her Honor, the fourth empress of his throne, and you were intimate with Her by touching and grasping Her in your arms,” he said, scolding me with his accusations like a cross governess. “I might not have seen it all, but others did from a tall tree outside the backyard, and more yet peeping through hedges and fences. Now part with your coins.”

  He was about to pounce on my pouch when I stole it out of his reach.

  His face reddened with rage. “Why are you withholding it?”

  “Allow me now to count the list of your derelictions ever since you entered my apartment.”

  “My derelictions?”

  “Yes. You stormed into the royal tutor’s residence without cause or permission, attempted to graft me for ill gain, stole from my dishes, ate with your dirty fingers, and chewed with your mouth open: all actionable samples of inhospitality and foul manners. Do you wish me to report all these to your emperor?”

  “You dare do no such a thing.”

  “Try me.” Our gazes locked.

  “No, no. Please, no.” He dropped to his knees, kowtowing fiendishly.

  “Leave at once!”

  Gratefully, he leapt to his feet. About to run off, he hesitated. “Perhaps you could spare me three tael of silver so I will be kind to your servant.” At which conjuncture In-In pushed open the dining room door. The left corner of his mouth was bleeding and his eyes glimmered with tears.

  “I shall only part with my coins if you can write me a receipt for such remuneration.”

  The dome-headed eunuch fled like a ghost.

  After cleansing In-In’s bloody lip with a dose of vinegar and sending him off to his quarters with a handful of candies, I burned three incense sticks on the windowsill facing a gray and ceremonial moon: one to bid farewell to my dead lover, another in gratitude to a certain ethereal hosting spirit, the last to the epochal ascendance of a long-promised mirage, my reincarnated Annabelle—she in flesh and blood, reborn on the other side of a forbidden wall, exhumed from the ashen bones of Andover.

  As the incense burned, permeating the night air, a fistful of butterflies suddenly flew in dashes and shafts of moonlight as if let free from an invisible fortress. They fluttered their wings, flying in pairs, dipped low, then rose high, appearing from and disappearing into a languishing bamboo grove like living spirits.

  Finally I sighed, dipping my finger, ashen from a new burn, at the fallen ashes: fallen on a fresh eve from which a new life would begin.

  16

  Glimpses of Q from the schoolhouse’s ajar door were dizzying. Riding the dinging Raleigh, a white pigeon on its front bar matching the color of her stockings and pleated skirt but not her schoolgirl shirt, which was blue in hue and cut low in full glory.

  Every so often she would run her front wheel into our study chamber, ringing her bell, ding, ding, ding, and inquiring, “When are you going to finish? I am so bored.” She dragged her syllables, punctuating each with great impatience, face sweaty.

  “Soon, child. Go ride some more,” the emperor would cajole her, waving his fingers.

  Peeping in another time, she asked, “Why can’t we ride our horses in here?” as she put one leg up on her front bar, skirt riding up, her pubescent thighs thin and lanky. Not even the copious and dubious geography text could douse my longing, causing me to lean forward as if nursing a bellyache or an intestinal rumble.

  “Grandpa won’t allow it, you know that. Off you go.” Her husband dismissed her, anxiously returning to study the antique desk globe that I had spun off a Tartar City pawnbroker.

  “Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa … that old hag. Why can’t we just call her that?” Q kicked off one shoe to bare wriggling toes, the pinkie poking through a hole in the sock squirming to its own tune.

  What I wouldn’t do to lick the little runty toe, stockinged or not.

  “Not another word about her, darling. Can’t you see I am busy?” He spun the globe slowly, frowning with puzzlement. “Our empire isn’t big at all.”

  Intrigued, Q rolled off her seat. Leaning the bike against the door, she strode into the small schoolhouse, rude feet thumping the oak floor, one shoe missing. “Hah! I told you so. You wouldn’t believe me. You are but a pithy chieftain, not even a minor warlord like your cousins. Henpecked by that dying bitch and surrounded by stupid half-men!”

  I noticed her inward gait, toes in and heels out, typical of sandal-wearing Japanese girls.

  “But Britain is even smaller,” I interjected, pointing at the sorrowful isle surrounded by a raised sea.

  “Let me see!” shouted the Asian deity, crowding his head toward mine.

  “Indeed, it’s tiny—no bigger than our Formosa Island.” The emperor pinched out a monocle, a Western affectation he had picked up. “How dare their queen send her armies to my shore!”

  “It’s got nothing to do with size, you dope.” Q pushed my head aside and inserted hers between ours, puffing her rattling fricatives into my left ear a thousand beats a minisecond. “They’ve got iron ships. What have you got?”

  “We could have built iron boats ourselves.”

  “Too late. Your auntie embezzled the navy’s money to build her own palace, which she hardly summers in.” She draped one arm over my shoulder, the other over her consort. “She must die and die soon or we’ll all go to hell.” The h in her hell was coarsely Parisian.

  “Qiu, darling! Mind your tongue before my tutor. He is a guest.”

  “A robbed and blackmailed guest, at best.” Q slyly rubbed her right cheek along my left ear as she huskily hummed, “You won’t mind telling us the truth, will you?”

  “What truth?” I asked.

  “Robbed and blackmailed?” The emperor put down his monocle.

  “He was fleeced by your eunuch last night.”

  “You were?” the emperor asked in concern.

  I remained mute, merely shaking my head, wishing to forget the ugly encounter.

  “Say something, you big wolf,” urged Q. Turning me to face her, she shook my shoulders with her twiggy hands. “Please, Pi-Jin the Pigeon. Last night, an order to swindle you was given by the chief eunuch—my maid said so, and she never lies to me. If you don’t tell us, and these half-men are not duly punished, what you will see next is the cover of your coffin.”

  “What pelf did he demand of you this time?” asked the emperor.

  “It was nothing,” I demurred.

  “Be truthful with me. Otherwise you are not fit to be my tutor.”

  “What would his punishment be for the offense?” I asked.

  “Can I answer that?” Q raised one hand like a schoolgirl, eager for attention, covering my mouth with her other hand, commanding, “You be mute, Pigeon.”

  Mute I was
, her hot palm sticky on my quivering, helpless lips.

  “Your eunuch didn’t get anything from him.”

  “Why not?” asked the emperor.

  Q pinched my nose bridge painfully. “Because Big Nose here demanded that he write a receipt for the sum of three silvers as proof of record, scaring him away.”

  “A receipt? How brilliant,” the emperor declared.

  “He should run this palace for us,” said Q. “Do you have the, shall I say, testicles for it?” With a gamine grin, she sank her bottom onto her husband’s lap.

  “What are testicles?” The young emperor turned to me expectantly.

  “These,” said Q, grinding her rump deep into her husband’s lap, a sly smile curling her lips, “are your testicles.”

  “You mean, I believe, to say courage,” I corrected.

  “In German we say ‘testicles.’ It means the same thing, you prude,” Q said.

  “Worry not, I will provide you with plenty of testicles if you will agree to accept my decree and help manage my affairs here,” pronounced the young emperor. “It’s so very chaotic at times that I think there is a conspiracy against me within my very own palace.”

  “Of course there is a conspiracy here against you, and me, and now, your new court jester is included!” Q gave her man a peck on his lips, her eyes slanting at me. “And you know why?” she asked, turning to me. “Because my husband loves me like no emperor has ever loved his woman before.”

  “No,” I protested. “I am here only to teach.”

  The emperor shook his head sternly. “No one is to say no to me. I will assign you your new tasks in due course. Now it is time for punishment. In-In, go fetch Elder Li and Dong Shan, and don’t forget to bring the squad.”

  The comedy had just turned tragic, I realized, as the boy flew out the door like a ghost.

  “No, please,” I begged.

  “Told you he has no balls. Be calm,” Q said playfully at me. “You will enjoy the spanking. It’s such a spectacle.” Whipping out a pack of Rothmans cigarettes, she tipped one into her mouth and lit it with a Dobereiner’s lamp.