The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel (26 page)

As we sat a little apart in the dark interior of the Colonel's car, he shut his eyes and did not speak to me. There was that tension between us that comes before first-time sex, when you have yet to touch, yet to discover how things will be between you. In those enthralling moments the throat dries, the heartbeat increases and everything appears to be in slow motion. It is as if time actually stops. It is to experience that feeling again and again that I take so many lovers, for in its distraction I am as far from death as I can be without opium.

It took only minutes to reach my hotel in the car, which was driven by a young soldier who treated the Colonel with great respect, almost scraping the pavement with a bow as Doihara ordered him to wait and to keep his wits about him. The Colonel seemed nervous in the outside world. He had left his headquarters with a gun in his pocket and had pulled down the blinds in the car the moment he entered it.

'Perhaps it is a good idea you are in disguise, Yoshiko,' he whispered as we entered the hotel. 'Now that we are invading Manchuria, no Japanese can feel safe where Chinese roam at will.'

He followed me in silence to my room and watched as I lit the candles, pouring us each a glass of champagne. He didn't drink his, saying he thought it overrated, a drink only suitable for whores and westerners. Sake was his choice and he accepted my flask in the hope that the quality of the drink lived up to the distinguished receptacle it came in. Ignoring his criticism of the champagne, I drank both glasses quickly and agreed that sake, like all things Japanese, was superior.

Since Doihara had sliced through the fastenings of my coat, I had tied it at the waist with what remained of the obi sash. In the car the coat had separated, exposing my booted leg, which even though he showed no sign of it, I felt sure must have excited the Colonel. As I stood before him, I undid the knot of the obi and allowed the coat to slip to the floor. The Colonel told me to sit on the bed while he undressed, which he did slowly, folding his shirt carefully and hanging his jacket on the back of a chair. There was something insulting in the way he took his time, sipping his drink and staring at me as though to check for flaws. I started to remove my boots but he barked, 'Leave them.' I smiled and lay back on the bed.

Despite his reputation as a great womaniser, Doihara was a disappointing lover. He liked to be on top and laboured at it like a workman digging a trench. He was noisy too, grunting and moaning as though exhausted by the effort. He smelled cool like metal, which was not unpleasant, but I cannot say the experience of coupling with him surpassed any other that I had experienced. As he smothered me with his huge chest, covering my face so that it was hard to breathe, I found myself wishing that he had Tanaka's understanding of a woman's body. He seemed unaware that he had a living person under him. I may as well not have existed except as a receptacle for his seed. I would be able to tell him in truth that he was a true samurai, which I knew he would take as a compliment. His lovemaking was entirely selfish, so it was all the more amusing that he thought himself a great lover. I hoped that he was a better spy than he was a lover.

Doihara's scent was entirely new to me, but there was something about his body that seemed familiar, like someone I remembered from a long-ago dream. As he worked his way to his climax the sudden realisation came to me that it was my father Prince Su to whom Doihara bore a remarkable physical resemblance. It came to me too that what I had felt for my father was desire, a forbidden thing. Lust is often to be found where taboo exists. Yet how could I not have recognised those childhood aches to be desire? How odd that I should have discovered those forbidden feelings, so many years later, under the heaving body of the Colonel. I could not blame the child I had been for desiring my all-powerful father. He was, after all, the centre of the world I lived in. Only the most beautiful women lay in his bed. His concubines vied for his attention and prospered when they achieved it. As I lay by the Colonel I recognised where my desire for cruel and powerful men had its origins, and knew too that I was powerless to change those patterns bred in the bone so many years ago.

In homage to the stirred memory of the little bound-footed girl who had serviced my father and whom I had spied upon, I filled a bowl with scented water and carefully washed between Doihara's legs, all the time telling him what a masterful lover he was. He became so excited that we lay together for a second time and unfortunately he laboured at the task longer.

Doihara was as susceptible to flattery as any man despite his protestations, and the longer I spent in his company, the smaller in stature he appeared. Although I respected his office and understood that he had the power to influence my position I could not admire him. Yet, for entirely venal and ambitious reasons, I still wanted to impress him.

When we woke some hours later we ate the sour cherries and the honey, a sweet and sour combination of tastes I have always enjoyed after lovemaking. The Colonel washed his mouth out with the flat remains of the champagne, saying that was all it was good for. He told me that I was truly the horizontal delicacy my reputation had claimed but that he didn't like my short hair.

'A woman should have long hair, Yoshiko,' he said. 'It is the rope a man pulls her to him with.'

The room had chilled as we slept, the candles burnt to stubs, and the lamps still leaking their blue light shone dimly. Outside, the starless sky was coal dark and strangely disarming. I had dreamt of Jon, weeping as he lay in his wife's lap, while she, as ever, smiled her vacant smile.

I hate waking in rooms that have once been warm and ready for passion, but have become cold with reality when expectations have not been met. Not so for Doihara, who was puffed up and pleased with himself. He left the bed and dressed surprisingly quickly. He told me to come to his office after breakfast and he would inform me of the task he had in mind for me.

'I am pleased with you, Princess,' he said. 'I know you will do the job well.'

After he left, I woke the hotel's servant boy and told him to bring me soup with an egg in it, and some fruit. I knew that in what was left of the dark I would not sleep again. At dawn I saw a cluster of morning stars in the lightening sky and remembered that Sorry always thought of them as a good omen.

'There is nothing like the morning star for luck, little mistress,' she would say. 'It's a gift from the gods to the early riser.'

* * *

I am not a superstitious person but better a good omen than a bad.

My task was not as exerting as I had hoped, but as Doihara explained it was a vital one. He had mistakenly thought I was a childhood friend of Pu Yi's wife Wan Jung, and wanted me to join her and the Emperor at their villa, Quiet Garden, in Tientsin. I was to persuade the reluctant Wan Jung, whose beauty was legendary, to agree to go with her husband to Manchuria in the north-east of China, where Japan was extending its empire. There, Pu Yi would be proclaimed Emperor of that province, which was also the homeland of his - and my - ancestors. It was a bleak place, a land of hostile terrain and challenging climate.

Despite his longing to be restored to his throne and to regain his status, Pu Yi most likely would have wished that he had been offered somewhere other than the land that bordered Mongolia. Not only was there a dislike of the Chinese on those borders, but also a healthy strain of communism. Since the murder of the Romanovs by the communists, no emperor could feel easy about that particular philosophy. All the same, as I was eventually to remind Pu Yi, even China's Great Wall had not been able to keep out our own magnificent Manchu warriors. It was not without reason that those of our blood had been called the 'Eastern Tartars'.

'Perhaps, it is in the stars for a Manchu emperor to once again enter China from its borders,' I said, even though I knew that one such as he could lay little claim to our ancestors' courage. If he did achieve his ambition to restore his throne, it would be as Japan's creature.

The Sun Empire needed that Manchurian foothold in China, and under the pretence of being Pu Yi's champions they intended to make him their puppet and enlarge their own power base. Doihara was eager to fulfil his orders and remove the royal couple from Tientsin and place them where they would be the most useful for Japan. Pu Yi would live with the title of Emperor, under a big sky on a hard land, where he would come to know that it was the Japanese who ruled and not him. He would eventually know, too, that along with the privilege and power he had been born with, the Emperor of China's Qing dynasty had also been cursed with devilish luck. It may be that he would live in Manchuria more luxuriously than I had done in neighbouring Mongolia. Yet still, the climate and much of the terrain was so similar that had I been him, I would not have gone, even for a throne.

Doihara had nothing but contempt for Pu Yi; he thought him a weak man whose blood was so thin that it wouldn't nourish mosquitoes. Face to face he was deferential, but behind Pu Yi's back he decried him as a decadent and spineless man, who was the last and weakest creature of a dead dynasty. In truth, Doihara, despite being a scholar of Chinese history and fluent in several Chinese dialects, despised all Chinese whatever their rank. He warned me not to be seduced by the Emperor's fine manners. He said they disguised the true weakness of his character and that at heart Pu Yi was a spoilt child, a bully to his inferiors and a bad judge of character.

'Let me give you the mark of the man, Princess,' he said. 'When he lived in the Forbidden City, his greatest pleasure with his child concubines was to whip them until they bled, then to bathe them by candlelight while he cried in sympathy at their pain.'

Pu Yi had no concubines in Tientsin, as he was obsessed with restoring his throne and besieged by dreams of his assassination. Even though the Qing Emperor could only take one of his own clan as a concubine, he was mistrustful of everyone and saw the sword in every new face he came across. At that time, he could not find it in himself to trust even a Manchu girl. Doihara thought this state of affairs would not last long, as Pu Yi had always needed young girls to pamper his ego and to reassure him.

'His wife,' he said, 'is dull and disillusioned with him, she no longer sleeps in his bed. Wan Jung only stays because she values status above everything else in life.'

Wan Jung did not wish to leave Tientsin unless it was to depart Asia, or to return triumphant to the Forbidden City. Tientsin was the city of her birth, she had family and prestige amongst the community there. Her life was freer than it had been in the Forbidden City, and since her husband's consort Wen Hsiu had divorced him she was the only official woman in his household. In Tientsin, she could and did indulge her extravagant nature, buying anything western she could get her hands on. She spent a fortune on jewels, clothes and shoes, radios, imported tobacco and perfumes and, on one ludicrously extravagant occasion, two grand pianos,

In briefing me on the etiquette of dealing with the Emperor and his wife, Doihara told me that Wan Jung insisted on being called Elizabeth, a name Pu Yi had selected for her from a list of English names that his old tutor Sir Reginald Johnston had submitted to him. Pu Yi chose for himself the name Henry, and forever after in anti-Imperialist circles they were jokingly referred to as Mr and Mrs Henry and Elizabeth Pu Yi. Doihara said that Wan Jung was a stupid woman who wanted to go to America, where even though she wouldn't be a proper empress, she would be feted as one. He said with scorn that America was an indiscriminate country where, without royalty of their own, they fawned over royalty from elsewhere, no matter how minor. Even though I considered myself as patriotic as the Colonel when it came to Japan, I did not believe that the Emperor of China would be considered minor, wherever in the world he chose to live.

Doihara had no respect for any dynasty that wasn't Japanese. He considered western royalty pointless, as to him whether they be princes or commoners, all westerners were inferior beings. He was furious that he had to treat Pu Yi and his wife with respect and could hardly bring himself to speak normally to Wan Jung, let alone address her courteously.

'She's a weak opium addict, no longer beautiful, but she has a hold on her husband that I haven't been able to break,' he said irritably. 'As long as she resists their going, he will make no decision to leave Tientsin. You must convince her, Yoshiko, that Pu Yi has a loyal Chinese population in the north-east who are longing for his return. Persuade her that she can resume her life as Empress there, and eventually be restored to the throne in the Forbidden City. She will trust you as a Manchu princess and a playmate from her childhood.'

I was not at all sure that Wan Jung would remember me and I didn't care for Doihara's constant references to my Chinese background. But I could see that for this task my ancestry would, as it had often done in the past, work in my favour. My own recollections of WanJung were faint. I remember that she once came to our house with her mother, who was sister to one of my father's concubines. I think my mother told me to be nice to her, because she had come on a long journey and was a frail child. I don't remember playing with her, although I think my sisters might have. I could just about recall a pretty little girl I would have spurned for being too similar to my own sisters. Even if I had known she was destined to be an empress I would still have been unimpressed by her. Then as now, empress meant the same to me as wife, subservient and dutiful.

I decided not to tell Doihara of my own at best vague memories of the childhood of Wan Jung. I had no idea where he had received the information of our closeness, but I hoped that Wan Jung would at least have heard of me and have the good manners to greet me as an acquaintance. I hoped that Wan Jung's opium-influenced memory was poor and that she would take my word for what special friends we had been. I had confidence in my powers of persuasion and considered myself thoroughly up to the job asked of me. If Japan had decided that the Chinese Emperor should be a figurehead in Manchuria, then I would do all I could to encourage Pu Yi to return to the land of our shared ancestors.