The Red Chamber (22 page)

She goes into the kitchen to make tea. When she enters the familiar room, she is struck by the lowness of the ceiling, the simple rough shapes of the table and cupboards, the dinginess of the paper windows. This must have been how her mother felt when she first arrived from Rongguo. She opens the cupboard and runs her finger along the rim of a familiar blue-and-white bowl, picturing her mother picking it out twenty years ago when she was a new bride. Her mother is gone. From now on she must preside over this kitchen alone.

That afternoon, before setting off for the Jia estates, Lian arranges for her father’s examination by a well-known doctor. Dr. Hu confirms the diagnosis of the previous physician: Mr. Lin’s
qi
has been damaged by worry and poor sleep and diet. He is suffering from excessive fire in the stomach, and his spleen has been harmed, resulting in acute fatigue and digestive problems. Although her father’s condition is serious, with proper care and medication, it may not be irreversible.

Daiyu settles in to caring for her father. She goes to market to load her basket with winter bamboo shoots and and fresh carp from the lake. She makes soups and rice porridge, and spends hours hovering over the stove brewing her father’s medicines. For the first time, she forces herself to kill and pluck a chicken. When she feels the frantic leaping of the pullet’s heart beneath her fingertips, she almost gives up and calls Granny Liu. Then, thinking of Baochai’s calmness, she firms her trembling hands and twists the poor creature’s neck. As she plucks the now limp body, she wonders what Baoyu would think if he were to see her. Although she missed him passionately all through her barge trip south, he has receded from her thoughts now that she is home. Still, sometimes she wonders if he misses her, and whether she will ever see him again.

Fortunately, her anxiety about her father is fading. His color is better. He has gained weight. Although he says little, he is tender and gentle to
her. In the evenings, she asks him to read aloud from the histories and poets that he likes, while she does the mending. If she does not ask him, she will often catch his gaze drifting from the book before him, a sad and distant expression in his eyes.

And then the New Year is upon them. For the first time she must clean and decorate the house, prepare the offerings, and make new clothes all by herself. Her father’s health excuses them from entertaining guests or making New Year’s visits among his colleagues. Lian, however, has written that he will return to Suzhou for the holiday, and then, if Mr. Lin’s health appears stable, he will make the return trip to the Capital.

On New Year’s eve, she and her father and Lian burn incense and make offerings before the small altar in the corner of the front room. As the evening darkness gathers, her father says for the first time that he feels strong enough to take a short walk in the streets. She bundles him up, and they walk out onto Bottle-Gourd Street, Daiyu holding one arm, Lian the other. The streets are full of neighborhood children, racing around shouting and setting off firecrackers. The light of the firecrackers falls on her father’s face, and she sees him smiling at their antics.

Two days after New Year’s, a messenger comes from the Jia estates to say that one of the barns had caught fire during the celebrations. The fire spread to the adjoining barn, and both buildings had sustained significant damage before the blaze could be extinguished. Lian, cursing that the mishap must delay his trip back to the Capital, sets off to the estates. Daiyu and her father are left alone, and pass the first two weeks of the New Year quietly. On the Lantern Festival, Daiyu decides to hang up a few paper lanterns. It had been one of the family’s favorite holidays. Her mother and father had always delighted in stumping each other with difficult riddles. When Daiyu grew old enough, she had participated as well.

“I’ll bet you can’t guess my riddles, Father,” she says after dinner, putting one of the lanterns in the middle of the table to hold the riddles, and setting out paper and brushes.

Her father looks up from his book with a smile, and comes to the table. “Don’t be too cocksure. I have lots of experience guessing riddles.” He sits down to grind some ink. “In fact, I’m pretty sure that you’ll have trouble with
mine
.”

On her mettle, she does not answer, and sits there trying to devise a riddle while she grinds her own ink. She decides that her riddle will be about an incense clock, and takes up a brush and begins to scribble on
her paper. When she reads the four lines she has written, she thinks that her clues are too vague. She decides to make it an eight-line poem. She writes two more lines, but then cannot think of any more rhymes. After about half a minute, a way of ending the poem occurs to her and she quickly jots down the last couplet.

“I’ve got it!” she says triumphantly, and holds up the paper to read it aloud:

At court levee my smoke is in your sleeve:

Music and beds to other sorts I leave
.

With me, at dawn you need no watchman’s cry
,

At night no maid to bring a fresh supply
.

My head burns through the night and through the day
,

And year by year my heart consumes away
.

The precious moments I would have you spare:

But come fair, foul, or fine, I do not care
.

“Can you guess it, Father?” she cries, looking at him.

He is sitting with a sheet of paper before him and a brush in his hand, but the paper is blank and his face is wet with tears.

6

“How are you feeling today?” Xifeng asks Ping’er, returning to her own apartments after serving breakfast at Lady Jia’s.

“Pretty well, thank you.” Ping’er sits on the
kang
, embroidering golden plum blossoms on a tiny red vest.

Because she wants Ping’er to do her a favor, she refrains from commenting on how Ping’er is squandering her time on embroidery while she wears herself out running the household. The dishes from Ping’er’s breakfast have not been cleared. She sees the spiny, finely reticulated neckbones of chicken that Ping’er has left behind after gnawing off the meat, and feels a touch of satisfaction that they are the pale color of ordinary chickens, not the black-boned kind. “Then would you mind running an errand for me?”

“Of course not. What do you want me to do?”

“I need something delivered to the Abbess at the Water Moon Priory. Would you mind going? I’ve already ordered a carriage. I’d take it myself, only I still have to go through all those presents we received for New Year’s.”

“That’s fine,” Ping’er says.

“And then you can pray to Guanyin for a safe childbirth, like you wanted to.”

As Xifeng watches Ping’er struggle clumsily off the
kang
, she is struck by the size of her belly, pressing tautly against the waist of her gown. Even her legs look swollen, her feet bulging plumply over the tops of her shoes like rising dough. She turns away in disgust and goes to her bedroom to check the money she is delivering to the Abbess. It is her largest loan yet, three thousand
taels
, neatly wrapped in six bundles on the
kang
. In one of the bundles is the loan agreement Xifeng had stamped with Lian’s chop when Ping’er was out of the room. It is so much money that she prefers to send it with Ping’er in charge, rather than an ordinary servant. Her only fear was that Ping’er would ask what it was, but Ping’er no longer takes any interest in household matters.

As soon as Ping’er has been sent off in the carriage with the money,
Xifeng goes to Ping’er’s bedroom. She flings open the wardrobe door. She does not know what exactly she expects to find, but she flinches at the sight that meets her eyes. What remain of Lian’s clothes have been pushed to one side. In their place are meticulously folded piles of tiny robes and jackets, a mountain of snow-white diapers, and, on top of that, a pair of minuscule slippers. They are barely longer than her pinkie, and yet every inch is covered with painstaking embroidery. She turns them over and looks at the soles. Even though shoes for so young an infant will never touch the floor, Ping’er has quilted together four layers of cloth with countless tiny stitches, to make a thick, sturdy sole. She has an urge to cut them to pieces.

She hears a sound from the front room. Ping’er must have forgotten something and come back. Quickly she replaces the slippers, arranging them at the precise angle at which she had found them. She gently shuts the wardrobe door. At random she grabs a pair of shears off the side table.

She hurries to the front room, saying, “I couldn’t find my scissors, so I went into your room to look for yours—”

It is not Ping’er, but Jia Yucun. He stands a few feet inside the front door, slouched and uneasy. Her throat is suddenly so dry that she hears the rasp of her breath. She had caught glimpses of him at the New Year’s celebrations almost a month ago. In the Hall of the Ancestors, when Uncle Zheng burned the silk offering and made the libation, she felt Yucun staring at her from the male side of the courtyard. When she helped Granny make the food offerings to the ancestors’ portraits, she picked him out from among the watching masses of servants and relatives. He was gazing at her with an almost painful intensity. It made her so nervous that her hand slipped and nearly dropped the dish of cakes that she was passing to Lady Jia. Two weeks ago, at the Lantern Festival, knowing he would be there, she had dressed and made herself up with more care than usual. Under the pretense of seeing that the servants were doing their job properly, she slipped around the partition onto the verandah where the male guests were seated. As she stood there in the light of one of the great tasseled palace lanterns, she saw him staring at her from a corner table. She knew she could get him in trouble, even for just looking at her. Instead she had kept silent. She had never imagined he would dare come to her room like this.

“I came to see you.” He tries to speak jauntily, but in the late morning light filtering through the paper window, she sees how scared he is. The part of her mind that can still think rationally, that coolly observes
the scene like an uninvolved witness, tells her that she has nothing to fear from a junior official from the country. The rest of her body, her heart, her breath, is throbbing to a panicky rhythm. She does not move from where she stands a few steps from the hallway. The quality of the light this morning is merciless, she thinks, revealing the stubble on his cheeks, the pale purple under his eyes.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says.

“You think I don’t know that?”

He does not move. There is a brief silence. He rubs his hands together, and she notices that his knuckles are raw and chapped. “Could I have some tea?” he says. “The wind is blowing fit to freeze a man.”

She hesitates, then slowly crosses the room to the stove, placing Ping’er’s scissors on the desk. “You must go as soon as you’ve had it.”

“All right.” He remains standing close to the door.

Her fingers shake a little as she gets out the tea and spoons some into a pot.

“Where is your maid?” he asks.

“I sent her to the temple.”

As she pours the steaming water, the spout of the kettle knocks uncontrollably against the teapot.

“I want to tell you something,” he says, still standing awkwardly on the other side of the room. “That time I ran into you in the Garden wasn’t the first time I had seen you.” He speaks with an intensity that makes her stare at him, wondering what he is trying to say.

He looks down. “I was only pretending I didn’t know who you were. Lian talked to me about you before.” He smiles wryly and she sees the intelligence and quiet humor in his face. “He used to complain about you. He told me he was tired of you, and that he’d taken your maid as a concubine. Even then, I thought it was strange—marrying his wife’s own maid.

“One night, he invited me to go to a party. He was supposed to meet me in the outer part of the mansion, but he didn’t show up. I asked the women at the Inner Gate to let me go in to his apartments. I didn’t want to disturb anyone if he wasn’t there. It was a warm night and the window was open. I peeked in and saw you weaving at your loom.”

On his face is a strange and dreamy expression, as if he has just read a poem, or is gazing at a beautiful painting. A part of her wants to laugh, but another part of her is moved.

“I couldn’t believe you were the person he had been talking about.
You were bent over your weaving, concentrating so hard that you never even heard me. You looked so beautiful, so untouchable.” He laughs, a little bitterly. “In my world, the women are very different. There was my mother. She took in sewing to keep the two of us alive. She was always bad-tempered and tired, and never took care of herself. It was all she could do to comb and put up her hair.”

This remark about his mother surprises her. While she knew he was from a less wealthy branch of the Jias, she had not guessed the extent of his poverty.

“When I came to the Capital, I met other sorts of women. Not women like you, of course—upper-class men lock up their wives and daughters—but singing girls. Now,
they’re
quite ornamental, but …” He pauses as if groping to find the right words. “You can never really know them, because they have to sing and be merry no matter how they feel.”

She wants to tell him that she is no different from the singing girls; all women have to smile and chatter and charm.

“And yet,” he continues, “when I saw you there weaving, looking so beautiful, I felt sorry for you, too.”

“You felt sorry for me?” she repeats, taken aback, and wondering whether to be offended.

“Yes.” Again he struggles to find the words. “You looked so frail and alone—” He breaks off, with a deprecatory laugh. “This must sound ridiculous to you.”

Despite herself, tears come to her eyes. She shakes her head.

“That was when I realized what Lian was like, what the Jias are like. They’re selfish. They think they’re entitled to anything they want, and will trample everyone else to get it. To have a wife like you—a woman whom most men would die to possess—and to treat you like that. Making you compete with your own maid.” He looks away from her, as if ashamed by his own words. “And then, after that time I spoke to you in the Garden, I couldn’t think about anything else but seeing you again.”