My Splendid Concubine (40 page)

Years later
, Robert bought the house in Ningpo. He had the front door dismantled and the stove crated up with the woodcarvings and the lanterns. He kept all these items in storage behind his mansion in Peking. On lonely nights, and there were many, he’d take a pot of tea and go into the storage room and sit next to that stove. He’d smoke an Egyptian cigarette and remember.

Chapter 22

Bugs were everywhere, and the hotter it got the more they resembled a horde of blood sucking barbarians. The winter of 1856 was history and spring was flourishing. By the time summer arrived, the bugs would be in the food. If Robert left his mouth open, they ended in there too. The heat and humidity increased the sewer stench making it undesirable to breathe the putrid air through his nose.

The previous summ
er, before he had stayed with Patridge, he awoke in the night gasping for air as if his lungs had filled with hot, smelly water, and he was drowning.

As temperatures and humi
dity soared, he washed often. In Ireland, his family bathed once a month during the winter and twice in the summer. They had a large wooden tub. Every other Saturday the entire family carried buckets from the spring into the house where the water was heated and the tub half filled. The oldest bathed first. By the time Robert’s turn came, the water had turned gray and there was a grease line where the water’s surface met the tub’s wood. Robert wasn’t the youngest. Number twelve bathed last.

Since coming to China, he
had taken up the habit of bathing with a damp cloth. Though he had a large tub, he didn’t want the girls to work that hard heating the water. Instead, he used a bucket wide enough to fit his feet and a tin cup to pour lukewarm water onto his naked body. Then he soaped and rinsed.

“
I have watched you do this before, Robert,” Ayaou said from the kitchen doorway. “I kept my mouth shut, because I thought this is what you wanted. You should just go to the bathhouse. It costs the price of three eggs, and the water is clean and hot.”

Robert stood with his feet crimped in the bucket and water ru
nning down his naked skin. A mosquito landed on the back of his right hand. He swatted it away. “Bathhouse?” he said, bewildered. “Where is this place?”

“
It’s on the next street behind the teahouse.”

“
I’m going to try it,” he replied. “What is it like? There are no bathhouses where I grew up.”

“
How can that be?” she said. “England is a powerful empire. You must be wrong.”

“
No, I’m not. In England before 1800 the church outlawed bathing as a mortal sin.”

Ayaou
’s mouth dropped open. “And I thought the English were sensible people since they had so much power. I am disappointed, Robert. This means the English are not as civilized as the Chinese. If your God’s church said bathing was a sin, the British made a bad choice in the God they worship.”

“
Being clean has nothing to do with being powerful or what god is worshiped,” Robert replied. When he picked up the pitcher of rinse water and poured it over his head, he gasped from the cold hitting his warm skin. “Hand me that towel, Ayaou.”

While d
rying himself, he said, “Queen Elizabeth bathed maybe three times in her life, and in 1588 her navy defeated the Spanish Armada, which established England as the dominant sea power in the world.”

“
England must be a smelly place,” she said. “If you have to stink to be powerful, maybe the Chinese should stop bathing too.”

“
Your logic defies explanation,” he replied. He was rewarded with a blank look.

“
Logic?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

On Saturday Ayaou led him to the public bath behind the teahouse. The tiger stove that heated the water for tea also heated water for the bathhouse. They just opened the water taps and let the water poor into the grated traps. From there the water ran through a pipe under the floor toward the baths.

After a long conversation, Ayaou paid the attendant guar
ding the entrance to the public baths. She had assured him Robert spoke fluent Mandarin and was not like other foreigners. The man tested Robert and was satisfied when he answered several questions. He was allowed in.

That first experience started as a shock. Back home in Ir
eland when he bathed, he went alone into a small room off the kitchen and stepped into the bathtub everyone else used. He dried himself and dressed before leaving.

When
Robert stepped through the door at the back of the teahouse after Ayaou deserted him, he entered a short hall with both men and women coming and going. He joined the line going in on one side of the hall while clean men and women went the other way to the teahouse. He had no idea what to expect. He was the only foreigner. Almost everyone stared at him as if he had just arrived from the moon or maybe Mars.

The hall turned
and went down a staircase descending into a room below ground. When the line reached the bottom, the hall branched at the foot of the stairs. Robert relaxed when the women went to the left and the men turned right. He eventually walked through a door into a steamy room with twenty to thirty naked men of all ages. There was a large pool in the center and several big wooden soaking tubs against the walls. Most of the men were in the pool.

A burly, older woman with the arms of a wrestler and stumps for legs stepped
forward, demanded that Robert take off his clothes, and hand them to her. “I will see they are brushed clean and sprayed with a jasmine scent to make them fresh,” she said. He stared at her waiting hand. She looked like a witch with frizzy, dry hair protruding in all directions. He didn’t want to undress in front of her.

“
After you take your clothes off, you will get in the number three wooden hot tub and join the two men already there.”

For
an instant, he was tempted to leave. All he had to do was turn and run. He’d never taken his clothes off in front of a group before and never in front of a woman except for Ayaou and Shao-mei. The only other time anyone had seen him naked was when he was a baby. All his seductions in college had been at night in dark rooms. Usually he’d been half drunk.

He had no desire to be in this room full of strangers, but what would Ayaou say if he left without taking a bath?
He was sure if he came back sweaty and dirty, she’d scold him for being stupid and accuse him of cowardice. He thought of what she’d said about the English being a dirty, smelly people. He had to prove her wrong.

Robert pressed his lips together in a rigid, straight
line and pulled off his clothing as fast as possible. He stared straight ahead at the wall avoiding the woman attendant’s eyes and the eyes of everyone else, who must have been staring at him as they had in the hall. The skin beneath his clothing hadn’t seen the sun for most of his life and was a pale, slug white. Only his hands, face and neck were tanned. He must have been a disgusting, sickly sight.

Once
naked, he hurried to get in the tub and gasped when he sunk into the steaming water. He was sure it was going to scorch the skin off his bones. With his body below the surface of the dark water, Robert investigated.

On the far side of the room beyond the pool were tables. When a man left the pool, he went to a table and crawled on top where a male or female attendant used a rough towel wrapped tightly around one hand to scrape all the skin clean. Then the massage started, which looked more like a beating. Since h
e’d never had one before, he did not know what a massage was like.

What was going on in the common pool fascinated him the most. The pool was more li
ke a small community. All he had to do was focus to hear each conversation. On one side of the pool several old men were arguing about the best types of fighting insects. Across from them two younger men were playing a board game of some kind while others watched or waited for their turn to play. A few slept with their heads propped on the side of the pool. Most surprising of all was the singing. Two of the men were singing songs in an unfamiliar peasant dialect.

Then an ancient looking man, stooped, no hair, facial skin sa
gging as if it were already falling off the bones, was moving toward the pool from one of the wooden hot tubs. He was so close to the end of life, he couldn’t lift his feet. He had to slide them along inch by inch on trembling legs. He wasn’t alone.

On one side was probably his middle-aged son, who already had gray hair at his temples. On the old man
’s other side was a young boy about ten, probably his grandson. The father and son were gently helping the grandfather toward the pool, so he could take the next step in his bath. This was a part of the Chinese culture unlike anything Robert had encountered before. It not only cleansed the body, but it helped cleanse the soul too. It made life more bearable.

The look of love and affection on the grandchild
’s face as he looked up at his grandfather put a lump in Robert’s throat and tears in his eyes. He dipped his head under the hot water to wash the evidence of his emotions away before anyone noticed.

Robert was hooked and resolved to get over his embarras
sment. If he hadn’t walked through that door and forced himself to strip naked in front of the female attendant—something no one would have done back home—he would never have discovered this precious jewel of life.

It never stopped impressing Robert how much dirt and dead skin those attendants at the massage tables scraped off him each Saturday. Before going to the baths, he must have carried severa
l pounds of the filth with him.

Once he was
used to being clean, it was difficult to be dirty again.

It became a ritual that every Satur
day he went early to bathe, be scraped clean and pummeled on the massage table until he ached.

After his bath, he spent time in the teahouse taking part in the traditio
nal Chinese
lao-jen ch’a
, the old man’s tea ceremony and was introduced to the game of
Weiqi
, known in English as Go. The first time he sat at a table where the game was played, he watched. The second time, he asked questions. One of the men playing was a poet and the other a watercolor artist.

“
This game is not for ordinary people,” the poet said. “It is complicated. You must have a strong mind to survive.”

“
Would you like to learn the game?” the artist asked.

“
Tell me about the game’s history. Then I want to learn,” Robert replied.

“
It is believed that the game was created by Emperor Yao more than two thousand years ago to help his son Dan Zho learn how to think.”

“
Others say the game was created as early as four thousand years ago during the Shang Dynasty,” the poet said. “No one knows the truth.
Weiqi
is a game where the two players start out equal. It is based on Confucianism, which stresses the rule of Golden Mean that people should not go to extremes. You will learn this game teaches you that if you want to take something from others, you first need to give up something of your own.” Although Robert lost many games of
Weiqi
, eventually he started to improve and win. He even bought a set and taught his girls to play.

In time, he shared tables with scholars, artists, and
workers. He joined in the discussions, which ranged from Imperial politics to which governor was cheating the Emperor the most to who had the best prices for fish that day. His favorite discussions were those that centered on Chinese literature.

The tea boy took care of all the tables, and he never moved from his spot. He filled everyone
’s cups from a teapot that had a three-foot spout. The spout waved above everyone. The boy managed to fill the cups with boiling water without spilling a drop or burning anyone. At first, having a stream of boiling water appear from above made Robert nervous, but he got used to it.

Against one wall was the person-tall tiger stove. It was made of brick but shaped and painted like a tiger. Near the front were the
tiger’s eyes
that were two faucets where containers were filled with boiled water to be carried home. The containers were placed on the tiger’s mouth, which was a deck. Inside the tiger’s jaws he saw the flames, which looked like bright-orange tongues. At the far end of the stove, a man was feeding coal to the fire.

“Ayaou,” Robert asked one Saturday morning before he left for his weekly bath, “why do they spend so much effort and fuel to boil the water people buy?”

She looked surprised.
“Do they boil drinking water in England?” she asked, a suspicious look in her eyes.

“
No. We just take it from the nearest well, creek or river. We only heat it to cook food like soup or to boil tea. The water we drink at home comes from a spring near our house.”

“
Smelly and stupid too,” she retorted. “Don’t the English know if you don’t boil the water, you will get the running sickness?”