Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Though human in her third life, Yida is still a parasite. She saps your energy as you sleep, Driver Wang, so you wake exhausted, feeling as though another decade has been dumped on you in the night. She weakens your immune system, which is why your lungs are losing the battle against the carcinogenic air. Yida has a degenerative effect on her customers at Dragonfly Massage too. They lie on the massage table and she kneads her hatred and malcontent into their backs. She pummels their muscles and they become knotted, misshapen and wrought. Under her fingers, cells fissure and spilt. Benign lumps of tissue turn malignant. Blood pressure rises and the blood thickens with thrombosis clots. Yida’s customers hobble out of Dragonfly Massage bent out of shape, but they think that the stiffness and aching is part of the healing process. Unaware of the damage Yida is doing, they return to her week after week, caught in a deteriorating cycle of pain.

We are all dying, Driver Wang, degenerating cell by cell. But living with Yida is hastening your demise. Only when you leave her will your life expectancy recover. Only by leaving her will you survive.

As your biographer, I resurrect our past incarnations. I summon our scattered ashes with my beckoning hand and they gather on the creases and fate furrows of my palm. I breathe life into our remnants, bringing about a slow reversal of death. Our dust turns into bones. Our skeletons calcify and grow plump with meat and blood circulates in capillaries and veins. Our muscle fibres strengthen and reattach to ligaments and bones. Our skin, teeth and hair grow back, lustrous and strong. Our hearts resume beating, and we rise up once more as living, breathing vessels of soul. Writing your third biography has been more punishing than the others. Deep, scalpel-carved wounds, stitched up hundreds of years ago, have been reopened with much darkness and agonizing pain. But I am willing to endure. For this torturous journey through the suffocating dark is the only way to get to the light.

Ming Dynasty, 1542

I

AFLEDGLING, NOT YET fifteen years old, borne in a palanquin through the Forbidden City’s west gate. Chair-bearers lower poles, the curtains divide and you emerge. Girl in a silk robe, plaits coiled into spirals, three-inch lotus feet bound tight as buds. The harem-keepers greet you, usher you into the Inner Palace. Through peepholes poked in the wax-paper windows of the Palace of Earthly Tranquillity, we peer out. We see through your eyes the magnificence anew. The acres of grand halls, deepest red with thrones and ceremony within. The endless armada of yellow-tiled roofs.

Whispers Imperial Consort Luminous Moon, ‘She has an inauspicious face. A widow’s peak. The harem physiognomist must be sleeping on the job.’

Elsewhere in the chamber, tea is sipped, ivory mah-jong pieces shuffled about. A eunuch messenger appears at the door. The Emperor requests three bedmates for tonight. Names are named in a falsetto, and blood drains from faces, fingernails digging crescent moons in palms. The tea soothes me with breath of steam, the coal-fired kang warms my backside. I have not been summoned to the Leopard Room in years. I am one of the fortunate few.

II

The Imperial Gardens on a midwinter day. Frozen silver-baubled spider-threads dangle from the gnarled branches of the juniper trees. The winding pebble-mosaic path is slippery with frost. I sit on a chair of deer antlers in the Belvedere of Crimson Snow, the seat polished wood, the chair-back entangled horns curved to embrace the sitter, threatening to stab the sitter in retaliation for any false move. My fingers fiddle with embroidery, fumble with needle and thread. I abhor needlework and would like to read stories instead, but they keep us harem slaves as illiterate as she-goats.

The tapping of wooden-heeled slippers on the stone path disturbs my thoughts. Every so often the wooden heels cease tapping as one of the twenty pavilions is peered into. The Pavilion of Melancholy Clouds. The Pavilion of the Immortal Birds. The Pavilion of a Thousand Autumns. I scowl as you enter the Belvedere of Crimson Snow. Why have you come to disrupt my peace? I risk influenza for these solitary hours. To flee the idle gossip and stifling unhappiness of concubines.

Your pretty face is pink with cold, and a shawl of winter mink is thrown over your robe. You bow deep and low. ‘Boundless happiness to my Elder Sister Concubine Swallow.’

I murmur, ‘Boundless happiness to you, Concubine Bamboo.’

Needle and thread jerk up. You peer curiously at my embroidery: tufty feathered mandarin ducks on little slippers for maimed feet. You stand respectfully but within pace restlessly to and fro.

‘Concubine Swallow, I saw a girl dash out her own brains last week.’

Your voice is tight and high. Thread slips from the eye of the needle. Saliva glistens on the tongue-dampened thread as I poke it through again. ‘Ah yes, Imperial Consort Virtuous Purity.’

‘Yes. Her. Aged only twenty she charged into a lacquered pillar of the Gate of Divine Prowess. Staved in her own skull. I saw her brains splashed scarlet in the snow.’

I tut. ‘I know. I saw. A dreadful mess.’

‘Ethereal Dawn scraped the gold paint from her jewellery box. Swallowed it and died from poisoning.’

‘So I hear.’

‘Pale Sapphire slit her wrists with a jade-handled letter opener. She survives nursed by eunuchs in the palace infirmary. But when she recovers she will be executed for betraying Emperor Jiajing. Two deaths, back to back. .’

You tremble with fear and say, ‘Beloved Elder Sister, why do so many girls in the harem want to kill themselves?’

Needle tugs thread taut. The second web-footed duck is nearly complete. Yellow-beaked bird with feathery tufts of green and blue.

‘Brain fever,’ I say.

A glare. Another tug of cotton thread.

You whisper, ‘I hear things about His Majesty. That he tortures concubines in the Leopard Room. That he “operates” on them with scalpels. That he has dispatched two hundred palace ladies early to the grave. .’

Chin quivers and tears fall. O why did you come here, foolish child? Spoiling my solitude with your woes. One of the eunuch servants, Hunchback Guo, creeps near, cowering beneath his craggy hump of spine, sweeping the already swept pebble-mosaic path.

‘What do you want from me?’

Silence. More tears. Sprinkling tear ducts that rouse disgust.

‘Listen to me, Concubine Bamboo. To be born a woman is to be born into suffering. Our feet are mutilated claws. Our cunts bleed. Wombs suffer cramps, childbirth. Sex too brings pain, but a night with the Son of Heaven is an honour worthy of the Death by a Thousand Cuts. Pray to the Goddess of Mercy if you must. Grow a spine. Endure.’

Gathering up embroidery, I leave the deer-antler embrace of the chair. Out of the Belvedere of Crimson Snow, I spit at the feet of smirking Hunchback Guo. I hiss, ‘You crooked teapot with a broken spout. Repeat a word of what you just heard and I’ll cut out your tongue and boil it for soup!’

Without a backward glance, I go to the Pavilion of a Thousand Autumns. Sit on a stone bench by a statue of the Lord Buddha. Embroidery hoop on lap, glaring at the arched doorway. Pull the thread so hard it snaps.

III

Drumbeat in Drum Tower signals the fall of night. The beginning of First Watch.

‘Draw the bolts! Mind the lanterns!’ cry the eunuch guards, as the Forbidden City seals its gates.

In the bathhouse, concubines wallow in bronze tubs of petal-bestrewn water. Maidservants pour water over their mistresses from pretty cloisonné jugs. It cascades over dark raven’s hair, shoulders and breasts. The elder concubines wag their tongues. The younger novices are silent out of respect. ‘Toilet!’ I call before I bathe. A chamber pot appears. A maid offers, on a velvet pillow, a silken sheet manufactured by the Department of Toilet Paper. They shroud me with screens as I crouch over the pot. When I am finished, they whisk away my leavings for the eunuch scribe to record in the Ledger of Bowel Movements and Menstrual Cycles of the Concubines. I lower my chilled, goosepimpled skin into the water, slipping into the circling conversation. Steeping in our baths, we poach ourselves pink and talk of the famine that blights the empire.