Shanghai (29 page)

The Confucian lifted his eyes from the civil service examination papers that littered his polished wood desk. Something about the paper he had just graded tweaked a memory. He allowed his mind to drift.

The White Birds have come. They brought the Europeans who built up our village at the Bend in the River. Europeans brought the beginnings of power. Without that, what possibility of rebirth is there? But bringing the Europeans must be only the first part of the plan,
he thought.

He knew that on the Holy Mountain blood had opened the first window of the ancient Narwhal Tusk—but what would open the second, and further, what would make the prediction of the third window, the Seventy Pagodas, come into being? He thought again of the second window. Why was it closed to them? He knew that a previous Carver had tried to force the window open but had achieved nothing more than damaging the surface of the Tusk. Like so much else, the contents of the second window would have to wait “until the time was right.” He sighed, then looked at the civil service examination paper again, and now he knew of what it reminded him—a paper he had marked some ten or twelve years ago and failed outright. Then another exam four or five years after that, which he'd clearly seen was written by the same candidate. Once again he'd failed the incompetent, but this examination paper he'd kept. And now he extracted if from the hidden slot in the side of his desk and looked at it.

The calligraphy was harsh—crude—full of fury. He turned the paper so it better caught the light. The childish way that the candidate made his characters was surprising but the content of his answers was astonishing. The Confucian had been marking civil
service entrance exams since he was admitted to the upper echelons of the civil service himself some twenty-eight years ago. Usually inadequate answers were filled with apologies and excuses, but the answers on the paper in his hand were nothing of the sort. They were angry—an outraged exegesis on the unfairness of the examination system itself. He finished reading the first two answers, then sat back in his chair. He had never heard anyone claim to be the brother of Jesus Christ before. Let alone claim such a thing on the entrance exam to the civil service. He sat very still for a moment, allowing an idea to percolate upward from his depths. He was a Confucian scholar, but he respected the promptings of his heart. Chinese people did not speak of intuition; they knew these instinctive promptings to be a truth. They knew that intuition was nothing more than knowledge in search of words.

He checked the access number on the paper and cross-referenced it with the district in which the exam had been written. He knew the proctor and no doubt, with a little money, he'd be able to find this “brother of Jesus Christ,” should he want to. But why would he want to? The Confucian remembered the ancient adage “Two thoughts in one place, like two fruits in one garden, often share a parent.” But what shared parent was there between this “brother of Jesus Christ” and the Narwhal Tusk's vision of Seventy Pagodas? Seventy Pagodas would need thousands upon thousands of workers to build—many more than those presently working in the Foreign Settlement and the French Concession. Where could such a vast number of workers be found? There were legions of unemployed in the countryside. He posed himself a simple question: What could cause those peasants
to leave the countryside and chance living near the
Fan Kuei?

He put the paper down and crossed to the window of his study. The Huangpo River turned just to his right. Below him to one side a small wharf on the Bund was doing modest business. His own small warehouse, run by his youngest brother, Chen, was at the edge of his view. He took the exam paper and hurried out of his room.

Quickly crossing the dirt path down by the water he made his way northward toward the British Concession—the Foreign Settlement. Although he usually took his walks in the Old City, that day something pushed him toward the
Fan Kuei
's territory. The streets, often little more than mud paths (at best rows of boards), were, as always, pretty much empty. He thought of signalling for one of the rickshaws that always awaited the command of the British warehouse managers but decided against it. He needed to walk. To think.

Bubbling Spring Road was hardly worth the appellation. The only traffic it had was due to the fact that it connected the British and the French Concessions to the Bend in the River. There were a few carriages closed up tight in an effort to keep the British women they carried free of malaria.
Good luck
, he thought.
Better to chance the malaria than die of the heat in one of those devices the British insist on painting black
. A few European men on horseback and several Chinese men bent beneath heavy loads passed him as he made his way.

A European riding a fine dappled mare tipped his hat to him. The Confucian bowed his head slightly. The Europeans knew him as the nominal authority of the town but had no idea that this day he was bent on figuring out how to make this town into a bustling
city—bustling with thousands and thousands of Chinese workers from the country.

A Black Robe approached from an alleyway with three young Chinese men trailing behind him. The Confucian had to choke down his initial disgust with these self-righteous Christians who endlessly tried to bring their God to his country. One of the young men was wearing a filthy robe like the Jesuit. Ridiculous. Hot black sackcloth in the dead of summer heat. What fool doesn't know to wear light cotton or silk in the depths of a Shanghai summer? These fools, evidently.

He stood still, tickling an idea forward, and allowed his imagination to generate the hundreds—no, thousands of peasants needed to complete the dream of the Seventy Pagodas.

Pieces began to fall into place. Bubbling Spring Road—Seventy Pagodas—peasants flooding in—and the fury of a young man rejected by the civil service who believed himself to be the brother of the Black Robes' God—at the very least, interesting.

That night the Confucian's wife couldn't find the right things to say or the right food to present him. She put a small bowl of sweetened rice outside his study door and headed toward her sleeping mat.

In his study the Confucian carefully reread what he was beginning to think of as “the prophet's paper.” Such anger. Such incendiary rage. Many had led with much less. But before he did anything, he needed to understand the man's bizarre religious claims.

He had no real contact with the Black Robes and didn't know anyone who did but Jiang, through her connections with the French. Most of the brothels and opium dens were in their Concession. It was the
French who had brought the Black Robes to Shanghai. He carefully folded the exam of “the prophet” and placed it in the interior pocket of his robe, then took his lacquered umbrella and headed out into the nighttime drizzle.

His polite knock was greeted with giggles from the women within. Then a harsh “shush” and the giggles stopped. The door opened. Jiang, the courtesan, stood with one hand on her hip and the other held high up the side of the door. Behind her the Confucian heard the muffled sounds of merriment and smatterings of a language he assumed was French.

“You can stand out in the rain if you wish or enter along with all the other clients of this establishment.” Jiang's Mandarin was already becoming the strange argot that would eventually become known as Shanghainese. Her features were truly beautiful, but her smile was such that, with the movement of even the smallest muscle, it could well turn cruel.

“There is a tea house down at the end of this alley. Would you permit me to purchase you a cup of tea there?” He noted that his always precise speech was even more so when he spoke to her.

“Sure, why not?” she said, noting in turn that her language took on a whorish tinge when she addressed the Confucian.

At the tea house both refused Indian tea in favour of the dark, musky mixture grown in the south near Annam. The tall, capped cups arrived with their elegant, slender tea leaves dancing erect in the liquid, like eels in a pond.

Finally he said to Jiang, “You know the French.”

“Yes. I know them. They are in business with me, as you well know.”

“Indeed, but it's not that part of the French that interests me.”

Jiang looked at the Confucian for a long moment. What kind of man was this? Power and distance, but no joy, no release. She had heard rumours that his family had been badly hurt by the easy availability of opium. Something about a youngest son and a wife, she remembered, but that would have been this man's mother and his brother, not his wife and his son—or maybe his grandmother and grandson. Then she took a closer look at the Confucian. Already his face was older, much older than just five years ago when he had first come into her brothel with the Mandarin from Beijing on the day of the auction.

“I have many contacts in the French community here.”

“From opium and …”

“Women. Yes, from my trade in opium and women.”

“Ah,” he said, clearly uncomfortable.

She reached across the table and touched his hand. He looked up and almost fell into her eyes. Then she smiled. “What can I do for you?”

“You know the French?”

“Some, yes, as I indicated.”

“The whores or the priests?”

“Both.”

“Ah, I had heard as much.”

“And you're interested in a priest, not a whore?”

“I am.”

Now it was her turn to say, “Ah.” She lifted the hot tea to her lovely lips.

“A specific priest—a powerful priest—who would be willing to talk about a young Chinese man who believes himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ.”

She put her teacup down and looked at him. He wasn't fooling. There never was, nor would there ever be, any jest in the Confucian. “So you have interest in the rebels?”

The Confucian was surprised by Jiang's quick surmise and nodded slowly but didn't elaborate. That was fine with Jiang. She too had interest in the rebels, some of whom frequented her house to watch the opera performances that her brilliant daughter, Fu Tsong, wrote and directed. The rebels never drank or went into the back rooms with the girls, but they seemed almost transported by the players on the stage who nightly performed their unique magic for her clientele.

“You would like to meet the powerful priest from the big church?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For him to explain how this Jesus, who was born so long ago, could now have a brother who lives amongst us.”

* * *

“AS DOGMA it couldn't be more wrongheaded,” Father Pierre said through his translator, putting the Taiping religious pamphlet that the Confucian had given him far to one side of his desk, as though it should not infect anything else of value on the teakwood surface.

The Confucian took note of that. He'd had limited dealings with what the
Fan Kuei
called “priests.” He was himself, at times, treated as though he were a priest by the
Fan Kuei
. He was no priest, no fanatic Taoist monk! He was a civil administrator, a literate man versed in the classical works of the Middle Kingdom and hence a follower of the only logical system of
thought and social organization in the world: Confucianism.

The Confucian picked up the pamphlet and said, “Ah.”

Father Pierre rose from behind his large desk and strode to the window, his hands clasped firmly behind his back, his whole body vibrating with anger. “I thought you were a man of intelligence and learning,” he said.

The Confucian was both of those but had no desire to discuss such matters with a man who wore a black wool cassock in the midst of Shanghai summer. And such an arrogant man. To be so sure of one's opinions while living in someone else's country was beyond the Confucian's comprehension. So the Confucian rose and simply repeated, “Ah.”

Father Pierre turned to him. “You do realize that this is blasphemy and will not go unpunished?”

The Confucian wanted to ask, “Who will do this punishing?” but was afraid that the silly
Fan Kuei
priest would invoke some sort of deity who took words as personal insults. What kind of God could care what a human being wrote or thought about Him? What God could be so insecure in His own power that He could waste a moment of His time over such irrelevancies? Perhaps the same God that didn't seem to care that opium was destroying the lives of millions of people, or that millions were caught and in danger of losing their lives between the forces of the Taiping and the fury of the Manchus. Finally he said, “So these texts are not of your faith?”

“They are the inevitable product of those who have lost their way.”

The Confucian hoped that Father Pierre wasn't going to launch into a tirade about sheep. What was it with
Catholics and sheep? Sheep were particularly stupid animals. Why did Catholics insist upon calling the people who followed their faith sheep and those who led the faith shepherds—perhaps the job requiring the least amount of skill or intelligence in the entire Middle Kingdom.

“… Who have turned their backs on Rome.” Father Pierre completed, or at least believed he had completed, his thought.

Ah, yet another reference to that village in the midst of one of the barbarian's insignificant countries. It had been explained to him that Rome was a city in a place called Italy. When he'd asked for further information about this fabled place he was surprised to learn that it was just a small town, that China had fifty or sixty cities that were far bigger. When he mentioned that, he was told that Rome was really a metaphor. When he inquired, “A metaphor for what?” he was given the answer that these Christians always seemed to fall back on—“For faith”—which naturally enough was then followed by the Christian catch-all, “God's ways are beyond our comprehension.” The Confucian found such convenient elliptical thinking beneath contempt, so he smiled at Father Pierre and asked, “Would the Americans believe the matters discussed in this pamphlet?”