The Red Chamber (42 page)

Baochai takes a few quick steps into the room. “How are you?” she says. Impulsively, she climbs onto the
kang
to help Daiyu up. Through the jacket sleeve, her fingers feel how thin and fleshless Daiyu’s arm is.

Daiyu tries to pull her arm away, but is overcome by a fit of coughing. The sound of the cough fills Baochai with foreboding. It is dry and
hacking, originating deep in Daiyu’s chest, racking her whole body. She coughs for a minute or so, doubled over, her face and eyes growing red. The fit gradually passes, and she leans back against her cushions. She gives a tiny shrug. “I am as you see me,” she says at last.

In her horror at Daiyu’s condition, Baochai speaks without thinking. “Isn’t there anyone here to take care of you? Don’t tell me that you lie here by yourself all day!”

She immediately regrets her words. Daiyu looks coldly at her. “Who would there be to take care of me? Mr. and Mrs. Zhen work as servants in other households in the daytime. Snowgoose stops in when she can, but it isn’t very often, since the Princess’s is on the other side of the Capital.”

“But who cooks for you? Who makes your medicine?”

Daiyu looks at Baochai with her lips compressed, as if considering whether to answer. At last she says, “Shiyin does almost everything for me, and he comes in and sits with me when he isn’t busy.”

The thought that Daiyu is looked after by a man, and a rough laborer at that, sharpens Baochai’s guilt to an almost unbearable point. If not for her, Daiyu would still be with the Jias, surrounded by and nursed by her cousins. Squatting on the
kang
, she looks about the small, close room, its walls darkened by leaks and smoke. The air is foul and damp because of the poor ventilation. Zhen Shiyin has begun working again, and Baochai can clearly hear the metallic striking of his hammer.

There is an awkward silence. To break it, Baochai says, “You know that Uncle and the others are in prison.” She cannot bring herself to mention Baoyu’s name.

“Snowgoose told me.” Daiyu is silent for a while, leaning against the pillows with her face expressionless. Then, as if feeling she must make some effort to talk, she says, “How is Qiaojie?” She struggles to prop herself up higher, and after hesitating a moment Baochai helps her shift the pillows so that she is half sitting. “Let’s see. She must be more than six months old by now.”

“Actually, she’s very sick.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s had a terrible cough all autumn. Her lungs are congested, and she seems to be growing weaker and weaker—” Baochai, realizing that what she is describing may closely resemble Daiyu’s symptoms, breaks off abruptly. Now there is an even longer silence.

“If—if there is any way I can help you—some more clothes, or some food that you would like, I could bring it for you—”

“No!” Daiyu shakes her head, and the vehemence of her refusal brings on another fit of coughing. This fit is worse, and longer, than the previous one. Daiyu lies back again, gasping against the cushion.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Yes, some tea,” Daiyu pants, pointing at the stove on the other side of the room. She begins to cough again.

Baochai scrambles off the
kang
. Frantically, she lifts the covers of the pots and pans lined up on the ledge beside the stove. There is some leftover rice, some lumpy-looking stewed grain—millet, perhaps—some boiled mung beans, and a pot of murky brown liquid that she takes to be medicine. “I don’t see any tea.”

“It’s that one,” Daiyu gasps, jabbing her finger at the last pot.

Baochai pours the liquid into a cup and rushes back to the
kang
. She finds Daiyu retching into a spittoon with a cracked rim. When Daiyu is done, Baochai hands her the tea and takes the spittoon. As Daiyu gulps the tea, Baochai’s eyes fall on the contents of the spittoon. The viscous liquid is filled with dark clots of blood. On top is a coiled snake of fresh scarlet. Daiyu is in the last stages of consumption.

“Yes, this is what we call tea here,” Daiyu says, wiping her mouth with a crumpled handkerchief. “Although at Rongguo, it wouldn’t even pass muster as mouthwash.”

Baochai says nothing. She stares at the spittoon, wondering whether Daiyu has any idea of how soon she will die. She takes her cousin’s hand. She is afraid that Daiyu will pull away, but the thin hand lies unresisting in her own.

“You must take better care of yourself.”

Daiyu shrugs, sighing wearily.

“You must listen to me. You’ve always neglected your health. Remember how you didn’t take care of yourself when you came back from Suzhou after your father died? I know you. You never take care of yourself when something is bothering you—” She breaks off, realizing that she cannot speak of the emotional wound from which Daiyu suffers, her separation from Baoyu and abandonment by the Jias, because that wound had been inflicted by Baochai herself.

“What’s the use?” Daiyu looks up from her pillows into Baochai’s eyes. “I know I have consumption. It’s what my mother died of. I’ve heard them say the nurse often catches it as well. I seemed all right, until this winter. I suppose the seeds of the sickness were in my body all along.”

Daiyu’s words reproach her. She has heard that sometimes consumption
lies dormant in its victim until coldness and damp and poor nourishment provide the disease the conditions in which to take root. The tears start to her eyes, but she blinks them away before Daiyu notices. She grasps for something to say to give encouragement and comfort, and a memory from what seems a long time ago comes back to her.

“Do you remember when we had a picnic, on the day of the Grave Sweeping Festival?”

Daiyu stares at her a moment, before nodding her head. “Yes. All the men were at the family burial grounds, and we girls were at the pavilion on the lake. That was when we got the news that Silver had drowned herself—”

“Yes, that’s right. We were talking about girls, and whether they had any choices in life.” Baochai’s mind unspools the scene, remembering what everyone had said. “Xifeng said they didn’t.”

“Yes, and I agreed with her.”

Baochai nods. “I’ve thought about that conversation more than once since then,” she stumbles on, in a hurry to get the words out. “I didn’t think so at the time, but I’ve come to believe that you and Xifeng were right.”

For the first time, Daiyu smiles, a little mockingly. “
We
were right? Imagine that.”

Baochai ignores Daiyu’s interjection. “A girl’s husband is chosen for her, and whatever he does, she has to accept. If he commits a crime and ends up in jail, even if she doesn’t know anything about it, she suffers for it just the same.” She is speaking not just of her own experience, but of all the Jia women. It is unlike her to express her opinions and feelings like this, her shock at Daiyu’s condition overcoming her reserve. “It made me unhappy. I used to think if a woman was virtuous, she could control what other people did, by teaching and example. But that’s not what people are like. They’re not so easy to control.”

“No, they’re not.” Daiyu smiles again. This time her smile is a little sad.

“I suppose I should have realized that long ago from Pan,” Baochai says, with a touch of bitterness. “But now I think that women do have one choice, that no one can take from them.”

“What is it?”

“They can choose whether to live or die,” Baochai says. She catches Daiyu’s gaze with her own, holding it insistently.

Daiyu’s eyes slide away from Baochai’s after a moment, and she gives
a nervous laugh. “Do you mean that they have a choice whether or not to commit suicide, like Silver?”

“No.” Baochai suspects Daiyu of willfully misunderstanding her. “I don’t mean that. I mean,” she says, trying to put her thoughts into words, “that a woman can just give up, or she can struggle to survive and make the most of her life.”

Daiyu is silent for a long time. She shuts her eyes, moving her head restlessly against the pillows. At last she opens them and looks directly into Baochai’s eyes. “If you are saying that I have given up hope, you are right. I don’t have any reason to live. My parents are both dead. I’ve been nothing but a burden on the Jias, and now I’m a burden on Snowgoose’s family. Besides—”

She breaks off. Baochai has the distinct impression that she was going to say something about Baoyu, but stopped herself. She falls silent again.

Baochai reaches for her hand. “Things are difficult now, but who knows what they will be like, if you can only get through this?” Even as she speaks, she feels she is being falsely optimistic. Her mother has used the same words to comfort her, but her own and Daiyu’s positions are very different. What does Daiyu have to look forward to? Since she has left the Jias, who is there to arrange a match for her, or provide her with a dowry? What sort of life can she possibly have now?

Daiyu receives Baochai’s homily with a shrug. “No, I don’t think that way. I am already resigned. In fact, I have only one remaining wish before I die.”

Baochai stiffens at Daiyu’s seemingly casual reference to her own death. “What is it?”

“To see my home again. But, of course, it can’t possibly be fulfilled.” Daiyu smiles. This time her smile is wistful. Then she closes her eyes, as if exhausted. Lacking the animation it had taken on while she was speaking, her face looks wasted, mask-like.

Baochai squeezes Daiyu’s hand again, wanting to say more, when she notices Zhen Shiyin standing inside the door. He looks much more presentable, having taken off his stained leather apron, and washed his face and hands. He approaches the
kang
and whispers to her that it is time for Miss Lin to rest. She is amused by his protective air, but then she looks at Daiyu and sees that she seems to be drifting off to sleep. Looking back as long as she can at Daiyu’s still figure, she follows Zhen Shiyin out into the front yard. When she passes through the door, the sunlight and wind and noise of the fire strike her like a blow. She stands there in the yard,
blinking and trying to regain her composure. She sees that Zhen Shiyin is beside her.

“How long has she been like this?”

“When it started to get cold in the Eighth Month, she got a bad cough, and it’s gotten worse and worse.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He says there isn’t much we can do, other than make her comfortable.” Looking up at him, she sees his eyebrows puckered into an expression of such patient suffering that it occurs to her that he is in love with Daiyu.

She slips her hand into her sleeve, where she has put the two silver
taels
she had gotten from her mother, under the pretense that she wished to buy a small gift for Jingui. “Is there anything that she needs? Perhaps you can use this, to make her more comfortable—”

Before she can take the money out, he stops her, with a stern look on his face.

“I insist,” she says, thinking that he is merely making a show of being polite.

When she takes the silver out, however, he looks positively angry. She feels humiliated by the rebuff, and understands that he refuses out of loyalty to Daiyu, out of a sense that it would be wrong to accept money from someone who has injured her. And yet, she cannot leave without doing something for Daiyu. If only she could make her more comfortable, make her death easier—how much it would appease her own conscience. She slips her hand into her collar. Her fingers close on her gold pendant. She draws it over her head and thrusts it into Zhen Shiyin’s hand.

Bewildered, he refuses to take it.

She uses her other hand to grip his wrist and forces the pendant between his fingers. “Take it. Use it for her burial expenses.” She starts to cry. “I know that she would want to be buried down south, with her parents. Use this to take her body back to Suzhou.”

He takes the pendant. He bows his head, seeming to acknowledge the truth of her words.

6

“Does Qiaojie feel hot to you?” Ping’er says, frowning, as she puts the baby to her breast first thing in the morning.

The morning is bitterly cold, and Xifeng is hurriedly pulling on her own robes. She stops with her robes unfastened and leans over to feel Qiaojie’s forehead. It strikes her as a little warm, but not terribly hot. She pushes up Qiaojie’s jacket and feels her belly. Again, the skin feels slightly warmer than usual.

“She might be a little feverish,” she says, puzzled. “But I don’t think the fever is very high.” Qiaojie had appeared to be getting better the last few days. Though she ate no more than usual, she had actually slept through the past two nights without coughing or needing to be nursed.

“Should we send for the doctor? He said we should tell him if there was any change in her condition.”

Xifeng hesitates. She has been appalled at how quickly the doctor’s and druggist’s bills have mounted. She has already had to pawn three more pieces of jewelry. “I don’t think we need to,” she says slowly. “It really doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about.”

After breakfast, she is restless, watching Qiaojie, wondering if she seems a little sluggish. Unable to abide by her own words, she goes to see Dr. Wang. When she tells him that Qiaojie has a slight fever, he seems unconcerned and says he will come by the following day if the fever persists. Relieved, she hurries home to Drum Street. When she feels Qiaojie’s forehead, it seems no hotter than earlier. She and Ping’er begin the morning routine of giving Qiaojie her medicine and bird’s nests, and of clearing her lungs. Although she braces herself for the unpleasant tasks, they go more easily than usual. Qiaojie does not cry when Xifeng gives her the medicine. She hardly struggles when they hold her over the steaming pot. When Xifeng pounds her back afterwards, Qiaojie coughs up a large blob of putrid yellow phlegm so thick that it is almost solid. Instinctively she whisks it away without saying anything, not wanting to scare Ping’er.

After the “steaming,” Ping’er sits down with Qiaojie, and Xifeng tries
to feed her a bit of stewed carp. To their delight, Qiaojie consumes four or five bites.

“Look at her trying to chew,” Ping’er says.

Qiaojie’s two bottom front teeth, just emerging from her gums, are barely visible.