The Red Chamber Read online

  At that moment Baoyu himself enters the room.

  “Oh, good. You’re back. We had your favorite pudding for lunch today,” Tanchun tells him. “I got Snowgoose to put some aside for you.”

  “You mean that almond custard?” Baoyu puts a careless arm around his half sister’s shoulders. “That was sweet of you.” He is wearing tall black boots and a camlet cape, as if he has just ridden home.

  As Baochai sends Oriole to fetch some more tea and snacks, Baoyu flings himself into a chair and looks around the room. “It doesn’t look like you’ve made much progress,” he says to Daiyu.

  “We’ve just decided where to put the furniture,” she tells him.

  Sighing, he pushes himself up from his chair by its arms, as if exhausted. “What can I do?”

  “You’re going to help? You’re still in your ‘going-out’ clothes.”

  “Sure.” He notices the half-unrolled red Kashmiri rug, and heaves it to his shoulder. “You want this on the kang?”

  “How about that green one?” Huan says.

  Baoyu glances at it over his shoulder. “This one is much better quality.”

  He unrolls it on the kang, and then throws himself down on it, pillowing his head on his hands. “I’m resting from my labors.” As Oriole comes in with food boxes, he calls out, “Bring them over here, that’s a good girl. Set them right next to me.”

  Giggling, the maid sets a small table on the kang next to him, and places the food boxes on it.

  “Mmm! Bean curd dumplings!” He reaches for one with his fingers.

  The maid gives his hand a playful slap. “Eat properly, Master Baoyu! Wait till I bring you a plate and chopsticks.”

  In a moment she comes back with a full tray. “Here you are, Sir Baoyu.” She hands him a plate, chopsticks, and a napkin. “And here’s a candle, too, so you can see better!”

  “It really is getting dark,” Baochai says, glancing out into the back courtyard. “We’d better hurry up if we are going to be done before dinner.” She orders the maids to put Daiyu’s clothing in the wardrobe, and tells Daiyu to choose a set of bed hangings.

  Tanchun says, “I’ll put your books on the shelves for you.”

  Daiyu has just chosen some pale green bed hangings when Tanchun exclaims, “It’s getting so dark I can’t read the titles to arrange them. Bring me that candle, Huan.” She points to the one next to Baoyu.

  Huan climbs onto the kang to get it. He has to crawl around Baoyu, who is still lolling on his back eating a dumpling and chatting with Xichun next to him. As Huan walks on his knees around Baoyu with the candleholder in one hand, Daiyu notices a strange expression on his face in the yellow glow. The candle topples over onto Baoyu. He gives a hoarse cry, throwing his arms over his face. Someone screams. Daiyu cannot move, thinking of Jia Huan’s expression. He did it on purpose. She scrambles onto the kang after the others.

  “Are you hurt?” Baochai cries, leaning over Baoyu.

  Slowly, Baoyu removes his arms from his face. The right side of his face, from his forehead to his cheek, is covered with wax, hardening on his skin. Horrified, she looks away. Some of the maids start to cry.

  “It’s all right,” he says. She is startled by how calm his voice is.

  “Oriole, get some almond oil,” Baochai says. She has regained control of herself, and though she speaks more quickly than usual, her voice is equally calm.

  When Oriole brings the oil, Baochai pours the whole vial onto her handkerchief. Daiyu forces herself to watch as Baochai massages the oil into the wax. The wax softens and breaks up, revealing skin bubbled with red blisters. Baoyu opens his right eye slowly, and blinks the swollen lid.

  “Can you see?” Baochai says.

  “Yes, it’s fine.”

  “Thank Heaven! If that eye hadn’t been shut you would have been blinded!” Tanchun says, trembling. She climbs off the kang down to where Jia Huan is standing. “What happened?”

  Huan looks flustered. “I don’t know. It just slipped out of my hand.”

  “Xichun, you were right there,” Tanchun says. “Tell us what happened.”

  Xichun looks scared. She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. We were talking and the next thing I knew Baoyu was screaming—”

  “I bumped against him, and he lost his balance,” Baoyu interrupts. His eyes are shut. Baochai is still dabbing at his face.

  How can he cover up for Huan? Daiyu thinks indignantly. Doesn’t he know the truth? She is about to speak, then realizes Baoyu might want her to remain silent in front of so many people.

  “What’s going on here?” Xifeng, followed by Snowgoose, comes in. Her voice sharpens. “What’s happened to your face?”

  Baoyu pushes himself to a seated position and starts to explain. Xifeng bends over to examine his face. “Save your explanations for Granny.” She glances over her shoulder at the others. “I wonder when someone would have been good enough to inform me of Baoyu’s injury.”

  “We didn’t have time. It just happened,” Tanchun protests.

  “Let’s take you to Lady Jia’s. Come here!” she barks at a couple of maids. “Help me support him! Lady Jia will want to send for the doctor. And I’m sure she will have something to say to you, Huan,” she adds unpleasantly.

  “It was an accident,” Huan says, looking frightened.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Baoyu says. “And there’s no need for a doctor.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. Have you seen your face?”

  Xifeng supports him off the kang with the help of the maids and leads him away. Everyone follows until Daiyu is left alone with Snowgoose, who, Daiyu now notices, carries a box full of objects for her toilet: soap, a hair string, coarse salt for cleaning her teeth.

  As Snowgoose stows the items in the dressing table, she pauses and looks up. “What exactly happened just then?”

  Daiyu pours out the story, including the queer expression on Huan’s face. “I’m sure he did it on purpose!”

  “Yes, I imagine he did.”

  “Why didn’t Baoyu tell on him?”

  Snowgoose stoops to put hand towels in a lower drawer. “Who knows why Baoyu acts as he does?”

  “It’s noble of him to protect his younger brother like that. Don’t you think so?”

  Instead of answering, Snowgoose says, “Huan wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t constantly being overshadowed by Baoyu. In another family, he would probably be considered a promising boy.” She sighs. “But Lady Jia doesn’t care what he does. As for Lord Jia, even though he is so strict with Baoyu, he never seems to pay Huan any attention at all.” Snowgoose pushes the drawer shut. “But why are you so worried about other people? The person you should worry about is yourself.”

  “I? What should I worry about?”

  “Why don’t you try to spend more time with Lady Jia? You’re here to get to know your mother’s family, after all. Try to get on her good side.”

  Daiyu laughs. “What does it matter? I’m going home in a month or two, anyway.”

  11

  “Your eyebrows are still a little messy,” Xifeng tells Ping’er, looking at her critically. She cuts another length of white thread, loops it around a fine black hair above Ping’er’s brow bone, and jerks the two ends.

  “Ouch!” Ping’er winces.

  “Hold on. I see a few more hairs.”

  Ping’er’s eyes turn nervously towards the clock. “But it’s almost—”

  “Hold still. Don’t you want to look perfect on your wedding day?” Xifeng yanks out another few tiny bristles. “There. That’ll do.”

  She steps back to observe the effect. She can hardly recognize Ping’er, her eyes downcast in her red wedding gown on the chair before Xifeng’s dressing table. All that is left of her brows are two high, faint crescents, as delicate as moth antennae, giving her a slightly startled expression. Her skin, covered with a powder made of crushed garden-jalap seeds, instead of the usual lead, glows with a lustrous pallor,
accented by the blood-red carmine on her lips. Her head rises like a beautiful flower above the high, stiff collar of her dress. Her hair, which she has worn all her life in the maid’s style, with one bun on either side, like horns, and a long tail down the back, is gathered for the first time in a sleek knot at the back of her head. Only she seems ill at ease with the reversal in their roles, sitting passively before her reflection while Xifeng attends to her.

  Xifeng senses a tensing in the muscles of Ping’er’s face. “They’re coming. Can’t you hear them?” Ping’er says.

  Xifeng has to listen a moment before she hears it herself, the distant clanging of the gongs in the silence of the clear autumn morning.

  Ping’er kicks off her old slippers, thrusting her feet into red high-heeled shoes. Now Xifeng can hear the wailing of the suonas above the gongs. Ping’er grabs a handkerchief from the dressing table, and presses it to her nose. Only now does Xifeng see that her eyes are filling with tears.

  “Don’t cry. You’ll ruin your makeup.”

  Ping’er nods. She presses the handkerchief to the inner corners of her eyes to absorb the tears before they escape down her face.

  With a shrill blast and the rattle of gongs, the wedding procession comes through the front gate.

  “Hurry. Blow your nose,” Xifeng says.

  While Ping’er buries her nose in the handkerchief, Xifeng runs to get the red silk square. She flings it over Ping’er’s head. Her last glimpse of Ping’er’s face is of her staring blindly ahead, biting her bottom lip. Her front teeth are stained with rouge.

  The wedding party fills the room with cacophony. Two old women take Ping’er’s hands and escort her out the door. Unable to see under the veil, she stumbles on the threshold. She steps into the wedding sedan, festooned with garlands and ribbons. The red curtain is let down behind her. As the bearers heave the sedan to their shoulders, the musicians reform into a little procession. Striking up a different tune, they lead the sedan out of the courtyard. And then Ping’er is gone.

  Daiyu slips into Lady Jia’s apartments. The front room is empty, the chairs lined up neatly against the wall, all evidence of the lunchtime meal cleared away. She tiptoes down the hallway to Lady Jia’s bedroom. Snowgoose comes out through the door curtain. When she sees Daiyu, she puts a finger to her lips. “Shh. I’ve just gotten Lady Jia to fall asleep,” she mouths.

  She leads Daiyu back to the front room. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I was just coming to see you. I never see you now that I live with my cousin Baochai.”

  “Really? That’s nice of you,” is all that Snowgoose says, but Daiyu can tell that she is pleased. “Unfortunately, I can’t stay. Lady Jia wanted me to bring this over to Master Baoyu’s. It’s an ointment for his burn that the Abbess of the Water Moon Priory sent over”—she takes a small parcel out of the cupboard—“and then I have to come back and sit with her. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “Is Baoyu well enough to see people?” she asks, following Snowgoose out of the courtyard.

  Snowgoose nods. “He was in a great deal of pain the first few days, but he is much better now.”

  “Was the burn very serious?”

  “It looked terrible, covered with blisters and pus. Then a lot of the skin sloughed off, and it doesn’t look too bad now. Lady Jia wants to keep him home from school until the skin is healed.”

  “Was Huan punished?”

  “Yes. Lady Jia said he wasn’t allowed in the Garden anymore. He can come into the Inner Quarters to see his mother at Lord Jia’s place, but he isn’t to go anywhere else. She was furious. It was lucky for him she didn’t have him beaten.”

  They are walking in the Garden now, amid the leafless trees that fringe the banks of the pond. Instead of the clear azure of the summer, the water is now a fathomless green. On the far side of the lake a gardener in a punt skims dead leaves off the surface with a net.

  “Have you heard from your father yet?” Snowgoose asks.

  Daiyu shakes her head. “I haven’t gotten anything but that short letter after I arrived. I’m starting to worry.”

  “You told me you are going back before New Year’s. Perhaps he isn’t writing because he knows he will see you soon enough.”

  “Yes, but I should be getting ready to leave in less than six weeks. I still haven’t heard from him about how I’ll travel, or whether he’ll send someone here to fetch me. It’s not like him to leave such details to the last minute.”

  Now they have arrived at Baoyu’s apartments, across the lake from Baochai’s. She has seen them only from the outside. They must walk through a circular opening in a bamboo trellis before they reach the whitewashed walls of the compound, surrounded by weeping willows, now leafless. They pass through the front gate into a forecourt planted with broad-leafed plantains on one side, and Sichuan weeping crab apple on the other. Snowgoose leads her up the verandah and through the front door.

  They enter a room of a design that she has never seen before. Some of the walls are paneled with exquisite carvings in the shapes of bats, and clouds, and sunflowers, or the “three friends of winter”—pines, plums, and bamboos—all inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl and gems. Other walls are pierced with window-like perforations in the shapes of zithers, swords, vases, or screens, through which you could peep into the adjoining rooms. Lying on the kang under a gold-embroidered quilt, with his head and shoulders propped up by cushions, is Baoyu. The top right third of his face is covered with a patch of blotchy, scaly skin. He looks pale, and seems to have lost weight, but his eyes are bright, and he speaks in the same lively way.

  Jia Lian is sitting on a chair drawn up to the kang, talking about a party that Baoyu had missed. “The Prince of Beijing was there. He asked how you were. Shang Pingren sent his regards, too.”

  Baoyu grimaces. “Shang Pingren! If ever a person deserved to be called a career worm …”

  “A career worm?” Her attention is caught by the unfamiliar phrase. “What’s that?”

  “Don’t tell me that you’ve lived in the household for over a month without learning what a career worm is!” says Snowgoose playfully. “It’s what Master Baoyu calls people who study hard for the Exams!”

  Daiyu looks at Baoyu, curious. “What else do you expect them to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what else can they do to make a living? Your family is rich and powerful—”

  “I never asked for any of that,” he says quickly.

  “You are the beneficiary of it, just the same,” she points out, surprised at his thoughtlessness. “You’ll inherit a position, or your father will buy you one. Who are you to criticize people who aren’t so fortunate, who have to work hard to get ahead?”

  “Getting ahead!” he cries, seizing on the phrase. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? They go on and on about ‘civic duty’ and ‘moral cultivation’ and the ‘love of wisdom,’ when all they want to do is get ahead.”

  “It’s on the Exams; that’s why they study it. I don’t think there’s any secret about that.”

  “But it’s so hypocritical—”

  Lian laughingly intercedes. “Don’t get him started!” he tells Daiyu. “He isn’t supposed to get excited.” He urges Baoyu to rest, and leaves. Snowgoose steps forward with the parcel. “This is from Lady Jia.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s supposed to prevent scarring. You’re to put it on twice a day.”

  As Snowgoose places the medicine on a table already crowded with ointments and dressings, Baoyu smiles at Daiyu. “So you have finally come to see me.”

  She says nothing, embarrassed by his suggestion that he has been eager for her to visit.

  “Sit down.” He pats the kang.

  Instead, she takes the seat Lian has vacated. “How are you feeling?”

  “Pretty well. Mostly I’m bored.”

  “Can’t you get out of bed?”

  “The doctor says I have to stay in bed
the rest of the week.”

  “I’m afraid I have to go back to Lady Jia’s,” Snowgoose says.

  Daiyu rises. “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, don’t go,” Baoyu says. “You’ve hardly stayed for five minutes.”

  “You’ve just been tired out by another visitor. Why don’t you get some rest?”

  “I’ll be so bored and lonely after you go.”

  She hesitates. She wants to stay and talk to him, yet feels shy about being alone with him.

  He stretches out his hand beseechingly. “Please stay.”

  Daiyu looks at Snowgoose, who gives a tiny shrug.

  “Oh, all right,” she says, sitting back down. “I’ll stay for a little while.”

  There is a brief silence after Snowgoose leaves. Then she asks, “Why did you defend Huan? You know he dropped that candle on you on purpose.”

  She half expects him to contradict her, to insist it was an accident, but his eyes meet hers directly, seeming to acknowledge the truth of her words. “Why should I make things harder for him?”

  “You know he hates you. Don’t you want to protect yourself against him?”

  He seems to consider the question. Then he smiles, and shrugs. “He can’t hurt me.”

  “He did hurt you. He burned you.”

  “Don’t say that in front of anyone else, will you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’ll get in even worse trouble. What do you do to amuse yourself all day?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject.”

  He sighs. “What do you want me to say?”

  What does she want him to say? She understands. He follows his own particular code of honor: knowing that the others treat his brother unfairly, he tries to protect him, without necessarily liking Huan or being nice to Huan himself.

  “What do you do to amuse yourself?” he repeats, smiling.

  “I read a lot. Sometimes I talk to Baochai.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Strange Stories from a Do-Nothing Studio, by Pu Songling.”

  “What stories do you like best?” He pushes himself off his pillows and sits upright, drawing up his knees and clasping his elbows over them, as if settling in for a long talk.