My Last Empress (10 page)

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.

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.

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.