The Painter of Shanghai (15 page)

But he simply shakes his head. ‘No, thank you,’ he says.

They move on, passing fish stalls, their rainbow-scaled offerings dying and drying in piles, and pause before
tumblers tossing and bending as though they had no bones at all. ‘When I was a child,’ he tells Yuliang, ‘I saw a pair of Mongolian twins doing this. One of them gave me the prettiest smile from between her toes.’ He laughs. ‘I’d just spent ten hours in a dark study, writing and rewriting classics. The girl looked like heaven. For weeks after that I dreamed of joining the troupe.’

‘Could you have?’

He shakes his head. ‘My father was a scholar – a
jinshi,
under the old system. His father had been too. It would have dishonored him immeasurably.’ He looks at her sidelong. ‘What was it you said about fate last night? That you didn’t think you’d been given a choice?’

It’s the first time he’s mentioned last night. Suddenly for some reason, Yuliang looks away, toward an old woman at a table that is covered with charts of hands and faces. ‘Do you think others can read it?’ she asks. ‘My uncle called them tricksters.’

Pan Zanhua laughs. ‘There are women who can do anything, if you pay them enough.’

She stops again, feeling herself flush. He looks back, at first surprised and then, registering the gaffe, visibly shaken. ‘Zhang
xiaojie
. You must – surely you know I didn’t mean that.’

‘Of course not.’ Yuliang’s eyes are glued to the ground.

‘Please. You mustn’t think –’

‘This is foolish,’ she interrupts harshly. ‘You must know it only hurts you to be seen with me like this.’ She drags her gaze back to his. ‘Why did you bring me?’

To her surprise he looks pensive, as though he’s actually
pondering her question. ‘I suppose that also comes back to what you said to me last night,’ he says at last.

‘About fate?’

‘About rooting ourselves in the present.’

It’s such an absurd answer that she almost laughs. But then he steps toward her, his face still somber. For the first time since they’ve met, he touches her intentionally, placing his hand gently on her forearm. Yuliang flinches. But she doesn’t pull away.

‘It’s always been my belief,’ he says softly, ‘that if heaven
does
hand us our fate, it also hands us the tools to shape it.’

‘“Man is his own star,”’ she murmurs slowly. ‘“And the soul that can render an honest and a perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate.”’ The thought of her uncle brings a quick lurch to her stomach.

Pan Zanhua stares at her a moment – again that look, as though trying to grasp something just beyond his reach. Then, shaking his head, he turns to the blacksmith’s table they’ve stopped next to. ‘I was wondering where these came from. I’ve received half a dozen as gifts.’ He picks up one of the wares on it: a small picture of a lotus, forged entirely from black metal.

This, at least, is something she can speak to. ‘It’s a tradition here. They say it began with an argument between a blacksmith and a painter. The painter told the blacksmith that his work wasn’t art, that a hammer could never do what a brush does. The blacksmith said he was wrong. He went right to his anvil and created Wuhu’s first iron picture.’

He picks up one of the palm-sized images: a bulky
orchid. It seems to suck in the sunlight. ‘That painter may have been right.’

Yuliang feels a flash of empathy for the artisan, a big-handed young man with resigned eyes. ‘I don’t think they’re all bad,’ she says. ‘It takes some talent to bend hard metal into something beautiful.’

‘At the very least, a strong supply of determination.’ He holds it up. ‘May I buy this for you?’

Yuliang gazes at the souvenir, recalling suddenly the very first iron picture she ever saw. She sees her uncle staring at it intently while behind his back, a strange woman stares at his niece…

‘Is something wrong?’ the inspector is asking.

Yuliang looks at him. For one inexplicable instant she almost wants to strike him. But she just shakes her head. ‘No… no. It’s just…’ Looking away, she spots another vendor. He is handing a roasted yam to a young monk. The latter’s robe, she can’t help noticing – for she always notices these things – is almost the exact same shade as his free meal.

‘I’d rather you buy me lunch,’ she says.

They go to a riverside teahouse Yuliang went to with Jinling, on one of her bimonthly consultations with the palmreaders. The inspector orders tea, steamed fish with chilis, shrimp dumplings. He adds bamboo shoots to the list, although they’re expensive and out of season. The little hut teeters on the river, just feet from where the town’s poor thrust their dirty babies and clothes into the brackish flow. As the proprietor brings the teapot, sounds of laughter and splashing filter through the walls.

‘You look thoughtful,’ the inspector comments.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t apologize. What’s in your head?’

A small thrill: it’s still such a new question to her. Yuliang pulls out her handkerchief, rubs a charcoal smudge on her nail, then the red crust left behind when she scrubbed off her nail polish last night. ‘The sounds,’ she says. ‘The laughter.’

‘What about them?’ When she looks up, his eyes are like newly turned earth.

‘My mother used to do washing like that.’

‘She did the washing herself?’ he asks, cracking open a shrimp.

‘We had been well-off at one point. My parents were very skilled at their work – her embroidery was among the best in the whole county. But my
baba
couldn’t read, and was tricked in business. We lost everything.’ She picks up a shrimp and begins peeling it. ‘He’d hoped for a son who would become a scholar and support him in his old age. My mother said his spirit was broken.’ She pauses. ‘I don’t remember having any servants until I went to my uncle’s house.’

‘Ah. The scholar who fell from the boat.’

‘Yes,’ she says, wiping her hands carefully on her handkerchief.

‘And when he died, you came here… how?’

‘A man whom Uncle knows – knew – arranged it. There were debts.’

He just nods, then picks up the handkerchief she’s just put down. ‘Very fancy,’ he comments, examining the rumpled field of flowers and birds.

Yuliang nods self-deprecatingly. ‘My mother was much better at it. Although I thought when I came here that I was coming to make a living at it.’

‘Perhaps you could have,’ he says, looking at her intently. ‘Perhaps you still can. Perhaps that’s one of your tools.’

‘No, I couldn’t have,’ she says, with so much vehemence that he blinks. She snatches the bright square from his hand. ‘Here, look. I made a mistake – see? This petal’s too small. I didn’t plan them properly. And here, the same problem. And here. And here too. You see? I’m just a woman – so stupid. I keep doing the same things wrong. I can’t
learn
.’ The words keep flying, like bees angered by a shaken nest. ‘Here I ran out of purple thread, had to finish it in red. It looks
terrible
.’

He pulls his hand back. ‘You’re right. It’s woman’s work,’ he says quietly. ‘Men don’t understand these things.’

They eat for a while, not speaking. Eventually the man comes to clear the dishes. He sets down a plate of pomegranate: soft white wedges jeweled with garnet. The tiny seeds glisten from their wounds. ‘I’m sorry,’ Yuliang says quietly, handing Pan Zanhua a section. ‘It’s just… I’m very tired. I haven’t been sleeping properly.’

He takes the fruit, avoiding her fingertips. ‘I didn’t sleep last night myself. Perhaps it was something in the banquet food.’ He smiles. ‘The abalone the old Dragon Lady loved so much.’

Their eyes meet, part. He spits out a pip. ‘Where to from here?’ he asks.

ẓ

As the afternoon lengthens they leave chair and carriers and walk the last block to the cathedral. For a few moments they simply stand outside, gazing at it. Workmen scramble and holler. A Jesuit shouts in Beijing-accented Chinese to a man sitting sullenly on a barrow. The two-barred Christian symbol rises sternly above neighboring rooftops, a stretched-out number ten pointing at heaven.

Yuliang knows the cross is meant to represent the frame on which the Christian god died. She’s received several pamphlets on the subject, both from a Christian client and from streetside evangelists. Most people throw the cheap booklets away, although the very poor use them as winter shoe insulation. Yuliang saves them sometimes, though. Their reproductions of foreign paintings interest her, though Yi Gan maintains they’re in bad taste. ‘All that blood and pain!’ he once said, tsking. ‘Who wants to see it? A good painting – say, that one – should leave you with a sense of peace, not disgust.’

He’d waved at Jinling’s old scroll sketch of a lotus and a frog. Yuliang didn’t point out that one could find identical works in every room of the Hall, or that she liked the feelings the pamphlet paintings gave her. Their very visceral nature – the blood and bone and blue veins – seemed strangely vital. Almost refreshingly rude.

‘Is there only one church here?’ the inspector asks now, bringing her back to the moment.

She shakes her head. ‘But this is the biggest. Actually, it’s a replacement. They’ve been working on it forever.’

‘What happened to the first one?’

‘The Boxers burned it down. They say the government
gave the French a hundred and twenty thousand silver taels to rebuild it. Otherwise they’d have declared war.’

He gazes up at the steeple. ‘A hundred and twenty thousand taels. At a time when twenty million of our own were dying of famine.’ Abruptly he gestures toward the door. ‘Shall we go see what such riches can buy?’

Yuliang hesitates. She’s been inside only one church, in Zhen-jiang: the one her uncle went to when trying to break his habit. He did this every few years, resolve gradually capturing him like sleepy net. He’d pace back and forth a little, then take a rickshaw to the church clinic, where he’d take belladonna and something else called
sacrament.
He’d come back with foreign proverbs and a full appetite, and would eat two or three enormous meals. But within weeks, sometimes days, he’d be back at the dens.

Now together, they climb the marble steps and push past the enormous wooden doors. Inside the light is cool and dim, richly stained by Spanish glass windows. Yuliang had half expected to find the church packed with milky-skinned
yangguizi
, but the huge hall is almost empty. A Chinese handyman sweeps around the carved wooden altar. A woman in a gray headdress kneels, her hands bound by wooden beads similar to those Yuliang’s mother had held for her prayers. She whispers almost soundlessly, a soft reply to the clanging construction outside.

‘Do you know much about him?’ Pan Zanhua murmurs, indicating the statue of the foreign god on his cross.

Yuliang shakes her head. She knows his name – Jesus. And that he’s very different from Chinese gods like the Jade Emperor and the First Principal. This god looks like
a man, died like a man. He is dying in almost all the depictions she’s seen – except for those in which he’s just been born. The sculptor has tried to capture his pain and humiliation. But with his curled toes and eyes rolled up toward the room’s high, arched ceiling, Jesus looks more like he’s in ecstasy. ‘A missionary tried to explain about his being not one god but three.’

‘A father, a son, and a ghost.’

She darts him a glance. ‘Are you Christian?’ The thought, which hadn’t dawned on her before, suddenly strikes her as not unlikely. Many forward-thinking, high-up families are these days.

But he shakes his head. ‘I studied Western religion and thought in Tokyo. It’s where I read
Self-Reliance
.’

Yuliang nods, eyes dropping absently to the statue’s barely covered privates. Sheathed by a chiseled rag, they nevertheless give the impression of a sizable manhood. She stares at them, suddenly fascinated – not by the hidden stalk, but by the way the stone’s been shaped into such a delicate semblance of linen. Then she feels his eyes on her and looks away.

‘How does a son become his own father?’ she asks quickly. ‘I’ve heard of fathers who are also grandfathers to their children. This certainly isn’t something people should worship, though. Don’t you agree?’

He laughs. ‘I’ve never thought of it in that way. But I don’t think you’re supposed to understand it. You’re just expected to believe.’ He points to another sculpture, the mother with the baby. ‘You’re also to believe that she never… had relations. Before giving birth.’

‘He’s fatherless?’

‘Yes. And no.’

Yuliang studies this statue too: the curving maternal arms that seem to exude both delicacy and strength. The pudgy yet strangely adult infant. She finds herself thinking of babies; then, almost too easily, of her mother. Not the mother who lied to her and then left, but the mama who raised her. Who crooned her to sleep. The mama who sang her songs and told her stories. Closing her eyes, Yuliang can almost hear her speaking of the celestial Weaver Girl, of the Heavenly Cowherd. Of the Emperor of Heaven, first joining and then parting them, because their love led them both to cease their duties…

A pigeon explodes from a rafter, a flurry of purple and white tail feathers. Then the bell in the half-finished steeple chimes.

The inspector pulls out his watch. ‘Is it really five o’clock? Astonishing. This must be the fastest day to pass by me in months.’ He shakes his head. ‘But I’m afraid I’ll have to go. I’m due at the magistrate’s.’

He’s walking toward the door before the words fully settle. When they do, Yuliang feels blood draining from her face. Over the past few hours she hasn’t given a second thought to the day’s end – to what will happen when it is time to complete their tour. Now she hears Godmother’s voice again, as oil-smooth and cruel as ever:
If you come back without his seed inside you…
‘I – I’ve enjoyed it as well. Must you go so soon?’ It comes out a squeak.

He turns back, surprised. ‘Believe me. I’d prefer to remain home with my poems. Or with you.’ Her pulse skips. ‘Unfortunately, that’s not what they sent me here
for.’ He smiles. ‘Where shall I take you? Back to – to your home?’