The Binding Chair (8 page)

“Hey!” the bandit-king cried. But she waved and hurried determinedly away, stiffening her back with false courage, willing herself to ignore what felt like broken glass and molten lead, spikes, salt, boiling oil—any and every torment imaginable—devouring her broken feet. She walked away, and the king made no move to stop her, perhaps realizing that the amount of wine he had drunk would have unmanned and embarrassed him.

M
AY SAT ON
a curb, feeling the ache in legs that for two nights had been spread across a gardener’s broad back, then folded in a ditch and jounced on an armored carriage. She had crept as far as she was able—barely a quarter of a mile—and so she broke the string of her last necklace. A triple strand of pearls, it had been a wedding gift from her mother, and she’d never yet taken it from her throat, not even on the day she’d tried to hang herself. The pearls were large and of obvious value, and for one of them she hired a spot on a wheelbarrow, wedged between two girls heading for work in a cotton mill.

As they drew nearer to the center of the city, the houses grew larger and grander and then abruptly disappeared. Now everything was commerce, and commerce of every description. On the corner of Ningpo and Honan roads, May saw a large red sign offering her the opportunity to pawn the remains of her necklace, and she called for the barrow to stop. She got off stiffly, ducked under the banner, and went inside, watched two transactions before stepping up to where the broker sat. The shop’s counter was five and a half feet tall; May had to reach over her head to lay all but two of the pearls on its sticky surface, two that she’d hastily unknotted from the string in a spasm of sentiment. Then she backed up several feet to see the broker behind his cage. With one eye he peered through a magnifying glass at what she offered, tested several of the pearls against his stained teeth, and gave her a receipt and less money than she had hoped. She counted it twice, folded it, and hid it in her clothes before going outside.

Using a discarded laundry pole as a cane, she limped slowly toward the river, clotted with barges and ferries and junks. A ship was moored at every jetty; customs houses larger than temples, and banks far more grand, looked down as goods were unloaded. May had never seen so many people, nor so many different kinds of people. Tall people, from the tall buildings, with hair that was brown, red, yellow. And people with skin burnt black. All of them walked through and past the crowds of natives, Chinese who seemed busier than those May had left behind in the villages. Squatting and washing clothes in the creek, eating as they walked, quarreling as they worked, beating dogs, plucking chickens, hurrying, hurrying. The nervous trill of Shanghai, its frantic restlessness, as if a wind of desire passed through all its denizens, making them itch and jig with anticipation—although May was tired, the city made her stand at attention.

With her money she bought one week at the Astor House Hotel, a smug and substantial pile of stone and mortar that overlooked the Whangpoo just north of the point where the Soochow Creek poured its silt into the river’s clouded yellow waters. She considered the expense of her small room not so much an extravagance as the necessary cost for a period of consecration. What good would come to her from a month in a cheap inn? Her plans required a good hotel, a perch from which she could watch the kind of people from whom she could learn what she needed to know.

Upstairs, resting with her elbows on her windowsill, she could see the Garden Bridge, and on it a coolie hurrying over the creek with a harp on his back—a gilt harp six feet tall. May watched the man jog on under his fantastic burden and understood that she had come to a place where anything was possible.

T
HE
S
HORT
H
ISTORY OF A
P
RODIGY

A
S THE TRAIN CONTINUED WESTWARD, EVEN THE
elements conspired toward elegance. Storms sheathed the coaches’ external fittings in bright ice and hung silver stalactites from the window frames. To the solitary auburn-haired woman writing letters at her table in the dining car, the engine appeared like a horse in a funeral cortege, except that in such case the white plumes of steam would have been a respectful black. The woman, thirty-nine years old and unmarried, was returning to Paris after settling her recently dead brother’s affairs in Vladivostok, and her mind, which had always suffered from morbid imaginings, now found images of death everywhere. Still, she kept these to herself and wrote the kind of glib and cheerful letters her mother had taught her to write when she was a girl.
Chère Lisette
, she began to a friend in New York,
The coffee on the famous Russian train is as good as the vodka! For dinner last night I had toast points with caviar, two glasses of champagne!

She did not mention her brother’s bankruptcy (he’d been an exporter of furs, but the extravagance of his mistress had outstripped the profit in sable skins), nor that he’d poisoned himself with prussic acid. (Had the poison imparted to his skin an unnaturally white smoothness recalling the cheap celluloid collars worn by gendarmes on their evenings off? Or was this an effect of the climate?) Nor did she say that she had been the one to wash his corpse, which until her arrival had lain untended in his apartments overlooking the steep, twisting Znamensky Road, the rooms of which (fortunately, under such circumstances) had remained unheated since his failure to pay the coal bill the previous month. In the letter to her childhood friend, the woman from Paris referred to her younger and only brother’s demise as a
departure
, a
passage
, invoking travel and literature. Diversion rather than death.

In fact, when she reached his home, summoned by a cable from his business partner (who described Sergei as dying, not dead), she had been shocked to find his body frozen to the rug, which was now cleaned, dried, rolled, tagged with her address, and wedged into the baggage compartment between the door and two blue trunks with brass hardware belonging, as an abundance of tags and labels proclaimed, to Alice and Cecily Benjamin of Shanghai, China.

The red and blue and black wool rug, hand loomed in Bokhara and as good as new save for two silverfish holes, was bound for Paris along with its former owner’s still-frozen corpse (in a pitiably inexpensive pine casket—she’d spent all her savings on the express ticket), a mahogany armoire, a set of lamps with solid malachite stands, and a silver christening cup engraved with the initials S.S.P., all that the woman from Paris had managed to secure from creditors, partner, and mistress—equally greedy forces. At the last moment she’d taken a muff, so large that at first she’d thought it an obese cat curled on the shelf. Whose it was she didn’t know; she hoped it belonged to the mistress. She’d found it in her brother’s pantry, between two canisters of stale tea, and as each passenger on the train was allowed a full set of furs without paying a coat tax, she’d carried it on board with her and for the past four nights had slept hugging it to her stomach in the cramped berth.
I bought a sable muff
, she lied in her letter,
quite
exquisitely supple and soft, the kind you can find only in Russia. But where else would you have need of such a thing? I’ve been using it at night, to keep my hands warm in bed. The cushions in my compartment are of green brocade. A writing table with a lamp and an inkwell that does not spill no matter how the train lurches. And the library car has embossed leather walls.

The woman from Paris dipped her pen into the exemplary inkwell and finished her letter, signing it with a flourish that betrayed her love of pens, ink, fine paper. Her name was Suzanne Petrovna, and she and Alice Benjamin would meet again, fourteen years later, on Avenue des Fleurs, 72, in Nice, where, failing to recognize each other, the two of them would reminisce about the express train’s generous supplies of writing materials. Suzanne would have forgotten the scandal of the girl abducted from the train by an army engineer; and Alice wouldn’t remember the woman whose hands had almost always been hidden in a muff. Even though she had spied on Suzanne, Alice’s memory of the French woman would be obscured by the trip’s subsequent, more forceful impressions.

Upstairs, in the pink villa behind the black wrought-iron gate, on the same night she and Alice had idly discussed stationery, Suzanne would take one of Alice’s aunt’s red silk sleeping shoes from the high shelf on which they were kept and ask May to use the pointed slipper on her.

The Suzanne in the dining car of the train would probably not recognize her older self, a self who had torn off her clothes, who was pacing naked and ranting in a room whose every light was lit. This Suzanne had lost all calm; she wasn’t careful or reflective, nor was she self-possessed. She threw things, and some of them broke. She didn’t bother to fetch a step-stool to reach the high shelf; but in the throes of a destructive, irreversible passion, she yanked open a drawer and stepped inside it, her feet sinking into piles of carefully folded lingerie.

Enleve-moi!
Suzanne demanded that May force the red shoe between her legs.

Enleve-moi:
not the vulgar
Baise-moi
, nor the angrier
Saute-moi. Enlever
was a literary choice, a verb that even the bookish Suzanne might not have used if she had been thinking clearly. If, in her usual deliberate fashion, she’d rehearsed her lines before daring to speak them.

A calmer, more familiar Suzanne would have considered
enlever
and its suggestion of plunder. She’d have remembered that the word can mean
peel
, as with an orange. Was that what she was asking for?

By that time—if not already, on the train, and even during the years before her brother’s death—innocence was no longer clarity; it was confusion. It wasn’t freedom but entrapment. And at last, in 1927, on Avenue des Fleurs, 72, Suzanne had found her deliverance. In a rash, furious, spluttering, and exultant instant, she recognized the one person who might change everything. May.

So perhaps she was asking for plunder. After all,
enlever
suggests transformation, and what Suzanne wanted—it wasn’t sex, exactly, but a different life. The chance to start over, from the beginning, under other circumstances.

S
UZANNE FOLDED HER
letter and looked up to find the Benjamin girls’ governess taking a break from her charges and approaching the seat opposite her own. For several days Miss Waters had had the idea of cultivating the woman from Paris as a means of improving her French. Another week and she’d be back in London without employment.

“Do you mind if I join you?” Miss Waters sat down without waiting for an answer.

Suzanne shook her head and soon found herself entertaining the usual questions about the Ile de la Cité, the Place Vendôme, the Musée du Louvre, the Jardin du Luxembourg, and all the other landmarks of her celebrated home.

“Tell me about la Tour Eiffel.” Miss Waters’s grammar was correct but her accent thickly Scots. It took Suzanne a moment to decipher the request.

“I haven’t seen it, actually. Not close. From a distance, yes.”

“But, but it’s been—well, the exposition was more than twenty years ago!” The governess looked at Suzanne as if she’d admitted to a serious lapse in hygiene, as if, for example, she’d said she never cleaned her teeth.

Suzanne nodded. “You are right, I’m sure.” But, she explained, she lived far from such places, and far from the Seine, in the shabby fifteenth arrondissement, where she made her living as a translator of Russian texts. Both she and her brother had grown up speaking Russian because their father had been an acrobat from Kiev. “My father, he came to France with a troupe of performers and never left. My mother was the daughter of the concierge across the street from the room he rented. And so now my father is—he is gone, my brother is dead, and my mother, she died, too. I am alone.” Unconsciously, she brought the muff up to her face as she spoke, hiding her mouth but not her eyes.

“Ah,” Miss Waters stammered, flustered by so naked and absolute a bereavement.

Suzanne began to cry, surprised to find herself, after the cheery performance of her letter, so suddenly and publicly stricken. She did that sometimes—it wasn’t intentional, but what Suzanne hid from her few friends she shared with strangers. “My brother,” she began, by way of explanation. “My brother learned to play the piano with astonishing speed. We had no money, no piano, but the father of one of his companions was a musician who played in a restaurant. Not a
boîte
, it was a respectable establishment. It had linen on the tables. Sergei spent many afternoons at the home of his friend, and one day the father reported that Sergei sat at the piano and played. He played perfectly a sonata he had heard the father practicing.

“The father came to our home and he told us that Sergei was a prodigy. What were we going to do, he asked.” Suzanne stared at the window, the curling fronds of ice on its pane. She used the muff to blot her wet cheeks.

The governess was a person who grew impatient during any silence. “What happened then?” she asked.

Suzanne spoke without looking at Miss Waters. “My father beat Sergei. After the musician left, my father hit my brother. Sergei tried to defend himself; he did not cry, but finally he went down onto his hands and his knees. And then my father stepped on my brother’s fingers.” Suzanne turned from the frozen window back to the governess; she searched Miss Waters’s face as if she expected some explanation of her unhappy story. “This was the first act of violence I had witnessed from my father,” she added. “Never before had he struck me, my mother, or my brother. Never once, before that evening. Although …”

“Although?” Miss Waters prompted.

Suzanne shook her head. “Ours was a family in which the mother loved her children too dearly. It would have been better to hide it, to appear to be wife first, mother second. But she was not clever, and our father understood her devotion and was envious, especially of Sergei. Mother would touch the back of Sergei’s neck sometimes when he was at the table eating, and a look would come into my father’s eyes. Ugly, worse than anger. Hatred.

“When the musician told us of Sergei’s brilliance, I think my father saw some pride or hope in my mother’s face, and it must have been that which inspired such rage. He never recovered, my father. From that night forward, he was a violent man. One day, mercifully, he left. Without a word.”

Miss Waters examined her left hand. With her thumbnail she pushed back the fingers’ cuticles. “What happened with your brother, his talent?”

“Nothing,” Suzanne said.

“Nothing at all?”

“He moved away, from our home and from Paris and finally from France. He moved out as soon as he could support himself. He would do any odd job. Shoe-blacking. Brick-laying. Menial jobs that degraded his brilliant hands. He never played the piano. I had hoped to see one, when I came to his apartments. So far away from home, so many miles, I imagined that I would. I pictured it. In my mind, it had a red fringed cloth over the lid, and on the cloth were a vase and a lamp. A photograph of our mother. Odd, how clearly I could see it, because this piano, it didn’t exist. It was only in my mind. And Sergei never did a thing except love the wrong women and lose all his money.”

Once again Suzanne fell silent, and the sadness cast by her story smothered every comment Miss Waters thought to make.