Please Enjoy Your Happiness (23 page)

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Number 10? In Japan that means it is very bad. It is the worst possible thing. In Japan, number 1 is the very best.’

‘That may be,’ said the displeased child. ‘But here at the Hall of Flowers, number 10 is Heaven. And I can see that you are a virgin. It is written in your face. V-I-R-G-I-N! V-I-R-G-I-N! I got top marks for spelling at Catholic school. Virgins are very important to Catholics. My English is good, I think.’

Indeed, Cloudlet’s English was good. Not only was it precise and daintily spoken, she was a profound child: small, yes, but also strangely and prematurely adult. I was startled. I felt like an idiot. My face turned bright red, and I brushed it with my hand several times, wondering whether I could erase what Cloudlet had seen there. Gunther was looking anxiously back at me over
his shoulder. He paused in front of door 4. He knocked. The door, covered with mysterious stickers and red and gold good-luck charms, creaked open, and a thin naked arm shot out, grabbed Gunther’s sleeve, and pulled him inside with a whoosh, followed by a series of high-pitched giggles.

Oscar rubbed his hands joyfully. ‘Now,’ he exclaimed. ‘Now!’ He knocked at number 6. A thin voice came drifting out of the room like a puff of smoke – ‘Yesssss? Yesssss, please,’ the voice said – and again a hand appeared and pulled the eager Oscar, who was grinning so hard there were tears in his eyes, inside the room. There was a muffled crash. There was something that sounded like a bounce or a bump. And then there was silence.

Cloudlet gripped my hand more tightly and led me to the end of the hall to number 10. The child insisted that she be the one to knock on the door. She spoke in English. ‘Madame,’ she announced. ‘A guest for you.’

Ooooh, I thought, my heart almost flying apart. Madame! Madame! Actually, I thought that would be a perfect form of address for you, Yukiko! Yes. I liked the sound of that and I was sure that Commander Crockett and maybe even Chaplain Peeples would be impressed.

The door opened slowly. Very slowly. I heard the shuffle of feet away from the door. I could smell cabbage being boiled and maybe a hint of onion. Some kind of highly emotional piano concerto was playing, almost drowning out a voice that I will never forget. ‘For me, a guest?’ the voice said. The voice sounded Russian. The music sounded like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, maybe. A homosexual composer! My father had always derided Tchaikovsky for that and for being ‘too emotional, like a girl’. Now my heart was panicking. Russians! Communists! Spies!

‘Is
he a very nice young man?’ the voice asked.

‘Oh yes, Madame,’ Cloudlet said with a little dance. ‘I am holding his hand. He is a virgin, guaranteed.’

‘Come inside,’ the Russian voice demanded. ‘Let me see this virgin man.’

I pushed the door open. Silk gossamer scarves in many colours were hanging from the high ceiling. They dangled all the way to the carpeted floor. To get to the sofa near the window I had to bend this way and that. The scarves felt like cobwebs.

‘A spider,’ I thought. I was alarmed. ‘Another spider!’

I separated the scarves in front of the shape reclining on the velvet cushions of the ornately carved sofa. There, in the sunlight, was a woman in her forties or fifties in a billowing lime-green nightgown with a series of bright peach ribbons down the front. The nightgown was swollen with her enormous breasts. The woman’s green eyes glinted in the merciless light. Her dyed blonde hair was spread out on the sofa behind her head as if she were a corpse floating in a cold, cold pond. She extended an arm in my direction, nodded her head to me, and then lifted her hand for me to kiss.

‘I am Veronika,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I will take care of you. Sit down with me. Close your eyes. Dream.’

I did not close my eyes because they were fixed on a series of sepia-toned photographs taken sometime long, long ago. The portraits were hanging on the wall behind the old cast-iron bed whose mattress was so high off the floor I would have had to climb up there even though I was six feet tall. The women in the photographs wore large hats with ostrich feathers and were dressed in long high-necked gowns with very tight bodices. They had imperial looks on their thin faces. The men wore uniforms from another age bearing clusters of medals. Their
faces were arrogant. They had waxed their long moustaches. Some of them wore monocles. The women in the photos sat on chairs and the men stood behind them, rigidly at attention, as if they had abducted these women from looted palaces.

‘My ancestors,’ Madame Veronika said. ‘My uncles and grandfathers. My mother and aunts and grandmothers. We are White Russians. We fought for the czar against the accursed Bolsheviks. Now we live in exile in this shithole of a place. A shithole! And to think we were counts and countesses!’

There was sudden colour in her otherwise pale, pale face, as if she had suddenly applied rouge to the layer of talcum powder dusted all over her body.

She rose to full height in front of me. She was taller than I was. She pulled me towards her. Her nightgown was floor length as if she had dressed to go to a ball. There was no warmth in that body. I did not get the same rush of mad heat and musk from her that I did when you were close to me, Yuki-chan. There was no sweat, no moisture at all on this body. She was using her long fingers to pull my sailor’s jumper over my head.

I stared at her and she flinched. ‘Do not look at me with such eyes,’ she said suddenly. ‘Do not look into my eyes. Do not look at me. Do not look . . . Enjoy!’

This was not what I expected.

This was no sing-song girl. This was not a River Blossom or a Belle Tang or a Flora Zhan shyly tempting me. There was no slit skirt, no cheongsam, no golden legs, no teasing, no featherlike touching or sudden groping, no deep kissing, no rubbing, no writhing, no clutching, no ecstasy at all.

‘I am sorry, Madame,’ I said. ‘This is not what I was looking for.’

I expected her to be angry. But she looked forlorn and gave a smile of regret.

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘You are polite. That is nice. Go quietly. Leave me now.’

She went back to the sofa and arranged her body and her nightgown and her hair as if she were laying herself in her grave.

‘One of these long, long days,’ she said, ‘after you get much older, you will know what it is like to lose your precious youth.’

‘This is not about youth,’ I tried to explain. ‘This is about something I wanted to remember forever, and that something does not exist. I guess I was looking for paradise.’

I looked down at her.

I reached out to touch her hand. She flinched.

‘No. Please,’ Madame Veronika said. ‘Don’t do that. Don’t be gentle with me. If you do that I will cry, and that will never do. I do a lot of weeping on bright sunny days like this when I am shut up in the Hall of Flowers.’

17

Inappropriate Thinking

I made a quick exit from the Hall of Flowers. Cloudlet was not visible, but I could hear her singing somewhere, a cheerful children’s song that found its way out through the iron bars over the open windows. It was a lullaby, maybe. But who would sing lullabies to a baby who would end up working in a place like this? What would be your opinion, Yukiko? I was left with such a strange feeling. What a world it is, I told myself. The song went on and on, and in the streets below young sailors were making pilgrimages to the Hall of Flowers, as we had done. They were laughing and shouting. None of the Chinese in the street appeared to pay any attention to them. They were too busy hawking their dumplings and pocketing coins. This was all commerce and profit. I vowed to try to find Paul Feng and to thank him once more for
An Outline History of China
,
which examined the many humiliations China suffered at the hands of foreign powers but did not mention the existence of anything like the Hall of Flowers.

I was embarrassed and disgusted and intrigued, all at once. Was there an adjective for that triple combination, I wondered? If not, maybe it was my responsibility to invent one. What kind of human being would employ a child who got high marks at school to guide sailors at a place like that? I was hit by an involuntary shudder, mixed with guilt, thinking about it. Cloudlet, skilled at sizing up clients and selecting appropriate prostitutes, was in some ways more of an adult than I was. What would be her fate? Where were her parents? Would she get a scholarship to go to university? Or would she become a sing-song girl, and then a madam, and was this how capitalism worked?

I remembered something else Cloudlet had told me on the way up the stairs, Yuki.

‘Sing-song girls are like the moon. Doesn’t it make you feel good to look at that new moon? But then the moon becomes an old moon. No one wants to look at that. Do you know what I mean? Have you tried looking at the moon?’ She said the girls looked at it all the time at the Hall of Flowers. They saw the moon when they looked in the mirror. A moon face stares back at them. It is a very long stare indeed.

Was Cloudlet talking of the impact that the wear and tear of a hard life had on one’s beauty, or was she talking about the nature of beauty, I wondered? Was she talking about beauty and tragedy, or are those two things related, Yuki? Maybe I should have asked her. Child that she was, she probably would have known the answer. I thought of you and all those phases of your life I knew so little about, despite many hours of
conversation, despite friendship, despite an intimacy I did not understand.

I was picking my way among a squatting swarm of street vendors who had steaming white dumplings packed with shrimp and other morsels of the sea laid out on huge bamboo trays. I was heading first for the Hong Kong ferry and the short trip across the harbour to Kowloon, where Chaplain Peeples had asked me to meet him at three o’clock sharp to help distribute toys from Operation Handclasp to orphans housed on the edge of what he called the Walled City. It was like the Casbah of Pépé Le Moko, he said: a six-acre citadel of ten thousand people off-limits to foreigners and full of Communists and criminals who were so dangerous that the Hong Kong police did not dare to enter its densely packed hideouts where even sunlight did not penetrate. And yet Hong Kong was a British crown colony. The British – my countrymen – knew about the Hall of Flowers. They knew about the Walled City. They knew about the gambling, the opium, and the regular Triad gang killings done by the 14K and the Sung Yee On. But they welcomed our sailor dollars. They had their clubs, their privileges, their cricket pitch, their churches, their mansions. Some kept Chinese mistresses. They were comfortably pink and fat. They claimed to be champions of democracy. But it was all a house of cards, I decided in a fit of rage. It was a lie, as was the slogan used by the
Shangri-La
in the publicity for Operation Handclasp: ‘Man o’ War with Men of Peace.’ I was so embarrassed by the fact that I dreamed up that slogan without much thought, not understanding that its contradictory nature could give comfort to those who might wage nuclear war. Maybe I should ask Chaplain Peeples about these facts of life, I thought. ‘These are moral issues, right?’ I was in an
indignant hurry now. ‘These issues are packed with moral contradictions.’ But who can define what is moral and what is not? The United States? Britain? China? Japan? Who could I ask about this? So far, no one was listening. If Chaplain Peeples could not enlighten me then I would turn to you, I decided.

The chaplain had given me some Hong Kong dollars to pay for a taxi ride to the orphanage. I arrived just before the appointed hour. The staff was gathered in front of the small brick building with about thirty of the children, who ranged from infants to teenagers. When I stepped out of the cab they began applauding, but then the applause stopped when they saw it was just a sailor, and the sailor was not hauling a big bag of candy and toys. A small man with a raisin-size pimple on the tip of his nose shook my hand. He was talking to me rapidly. I could only understand bits and pieces of his English. And I was distracted by the pimple. So I smiled and nodded and hoped that Chaplain Peeples would not be far behind.

A couple of the little boys were curious about my uniform, Yuki. Oh, you would have laughed, you would have laughed! They pulled at the white cotton legs of my pants. One boy lifted up the cuff and began pulling at the hair on my leg. I looked at the small man for help. He used the flat of his hand to whack the boy behind the ear, and the boy began howling. Then a lot of the children started crying. It did not seem to be a very auspicious start to what the chaplain believed would be a joyous occasion of great benefit to the public image of the United States and its navy. About thirty minutes went by, and I was becoming anxious. A young woman who appeared to be a nurse asked me in good British English if the gifts were really coming. She was annoyed.

‘I told our director that this would be a publicity stunt,’ she
announced. She looked at me: ‘False promises. Late. They don’t telephone to say sorry . . . typical Americans,’ she said.

‘I agree,’ I said.

‘What do you mean by “I agree”? You are one of them.’

I shook my head. ‘I am wearing this uniform but I am not an American citizen.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I am sorry. Well, look. I look as if I am Chinese and I am wearing this nurse’s uniform. I am a nurse. But actually I am British.’

‘I am British too.’

We started laughing. She threw her hands in the air and directed a stream of rapid-fire Cantonese at the small man with the pimple, who was obviously the director. He clapped his hands and laughed, and the children started laughing too.