Beasts of a Little Land(10)
“You’d be pretty if your teeth weren’t so bad. They look like tombstones,” the older girl taunted.
“And you have a brain like tombstones,” Lotus said without missing a beat. But even the flush of rage did nothing to mar Luna’s face and only made her look more like an adolescent empress. Despite her physical resemblance to Silver, Luna was more lively and cruel, with none of Silver’s statuesque graciousness toward the less fortunate.
“You unruly girl. This is why no one loves you, even Mama,” Luna said. Her younger sister just held her gaze until she swept away in contempt.
That night, Jade lay awake in her cot, wondering how she would last a month at the school, let alone graduate and become a courtesan. If she failed her exams, perhaps Silver would turn her into a servant after all. Even now, she was not far ahead of a servant in the household’s hierarchy, and making an enemy of Luna was an inauspicious beginning. Complete obedience to the older students and courtesans was surely the most basic tenet at the school. Jade could tell that there were numerous other unspoken rules and expectations at play, and Silver was the undisputed judge who presided over them all.
Nevertheless, Jade soon learned that the mistress didn’t take her position for granted. Nor was she a mystical being who never raised her voice except to pronounce platitudes. She exacted punishment on young apprentices who defied older courtesans, and older courtesans who spread gossip or hid their earnings from the house. Bedspreads soiled with menstrual blood, a filched hairpin, even a pot of honey from which a few spoonfuls kept disappearing—nothing escaped her notice. Although she became involved in the pettiest issues, her face remained gravely detached with the impassive attitude of a pale-faced beauty in a seventeenth-century painting. Jade saw that in all aspects Silver cultivated an antique aura, by both natural disposition and conscious decision. Her huge braided crown—a mix of her own hair and wig—would have been old-fashioned and fattening on many women. On her, it spoke to a romantic attachment to the past, a poetic sensibility.
The mistress of the house rarely complimented or took notice of Jade during the first few months. The only one who took any interest in her was Lotus, who was herself not a favorite in the house. Whenever she fought with her older sister, Silver always favored the latter. In their mother’s eyes, Lotus was lazy, sneaky, and impetuous, and Luna could do no wrong. Knowing this didn’t stop Lotus from trying to swipe back at her sister with tenacity and cunning, like a cat hiding behind a wall to spring out and attack. But with Jade, she readily retracted her claws. She could talk for hours about things of which she had only the faintest idea: the latest fashions, gossip circulating around PyongYang and Seoul, types of men, types of women, and what went on behind certain doors of the establishment where they were forbidden to go. Jade found her flagrant interest in male company shocking, not because she was young but because she was not pretty. Lotus had a bland moonfaced look that was more common in the South—not the oval delicacy of her mother, an archetypal PyongYang beauty. Until then, Jade had supposed that attractive women and girls had greater sensual appetites, and she now saw that this was not necessarily true.
Once they became better friends, Jade thought of this surplus of desire as not a peculiarity but just a quality. She no longer saw her friend’s face as plain, but intriguing. Jade came to appreciate Lotus’s gift of gab, the way she could make anything sound like shooting stars—unexpected and marvelous phenomena of which they were the only two witnesses. They were the perfect complements, because Jade liked to think endlessly and Lotus liked to talk constantly, and between the two the right balance was struck. Lotus also had a talent for transgressions: one afternoon, she stacked pillows, climbed to the top of the wardrobe, and nonchalantly pulled down the jar where Silver kept her personal stash of honey. Jade watched in amazement, until Silver came in and caught Lotus in the act. Even while being punished—made to stand on one foot or kneel with her arms high over her head—Lotus would cross her eyes and stick out her tongue behind her mother’s back, making Jade laugh.
Shortly after their first monthly exam—which Jade had passed despite her worst fears, even Japanese—Lotus answered the question Jade had been too delicate to ask: why she and her sister were so unalike.
“The only man Mama has ever loved is Luna’s father. They met when she was nineteen. She still wears the ring that he gave her. Even though she’s had other patrons, she has never taken off that silver ring in years and years,” Lotus told her. Jade remembered seeing the shimmering band, not as expensive or ornate as Silver’s other jewels but noticeable for its heavy, rounded elegance.
Whereas Luna was born out of tragic love, Lotus was simply an accident left behind by a careless patron. Jade secretly believed that this was why Silver treated her younger daughter with such indifference; Lotus was the only thing in her life that had happened completely against her wishes. If a woman like Silver couldn’t end up happy, Jade thought it was unlikely she herself would wind up better. Courtesans were considered past their prime by twenty-five and geriatric by thirty. If they didn’t manage to become a concubine or a madame before then, they could end up no different from a common prostitute. Naturally, the senior courtesans in Silver’s house excelled in the art of falling in love with wizened landlords and decrepit bankers. This was a game at which the men and the women participated in harmonious complicity.
Jade—a few years away from becoming a provincial courtesan of middling looks—still couldn’t imagine bedding some landowner with gold teeth and terrible breath. Instead, she dreamed of handsome young aristocrats with a weakness for poetry. According to Silver, the best and most admired courtesans in history could agitate the noblest gentlemen just through poetic correspondences. They often fell deeply in love without even seeing each other’s faces, so intensely heightened were their epistolary skills. Sometimes these passions were consummated; other times they tragically went on their whole lives burning with longing. Jade daydreamed often about these romances, sighing as offerings to these thwarted loves. Perhaps this was why her mother had warned against the corruptive power of education—even without any man in sight, language itself seduced her. She fluttered with the knowledge that certain words in a certain order could rearrange her on the inside, like moving furniture. Words changed and remade her constantly, and no one else could even sense a difference. So after their lessons, while other girls busied themselves with strolling in the garden or steaming their skin with rice water, Jade practiced her letters alone.