With a new writing-brush and fresh ink, on paper which seems almost the Imperial yellow, I, Han Im, of the Palace at Chang-an, write this.
Hate, they have said, has no sons. Daughters tend Hate’s tombs and set funeral bowls on the altar—daughters, whose names are not Hate’s name and in whom, soon, Hate’s very name dies. Yet, while they live, these daughters hate, too, in their withdrawn shoulders, their averted eyes, their long, straight, narrow lips. In little, they would be what their father was.
At Chang-an, in snow or summer, there in the Palace, and at the Palace’s centre, the Emperor. Round him move guards and gardeners, slaves and favourites, men and half-men. At Chang-an, in snow, no beauty is so white as Yang Kuei-fei, the Favourite. In summer, no blossom nears her cheek’s perfection. On painted fan, on pencilled bamboo, on chased stone, a thousand poems ape immortality to tell that she is unsurpassed. Since the great emperors of six hundred years ago, no love poems have been allowed to outlive their subject. Instead, men write now of Earth and Heaven, of travels and loneliness, and their poems are preserved. In the breath of the living, only, live the love songs which I no more can truly sing.
I write of what happens near me, making sons of my words, where my loins can never serve me. In these frettings of a paper surface I set my unruly offspring, to bring a sigh to later years or perhaps to curve in laughter the narrow, lovely lips of such as shall follow Mistress Yang Kuei-fei in the years that must be to come.
HAN IM.
I am a woman of a village which I shall not name. My given names are Winter Cherry, and the name of my family does not matter, for when once a girl has entered the palace of the Emperor, her name and her origin may be forgotten.
I am eighteen years old.
When I lived with my parents I was brought up to read and write, to know what was good poetry and what was not. On my father’s estate I learned the elements of husbandry: in my father’s house I learned to play the flute, to embroider silk, to weave and sew. All these learnings are now of no use to me, who must strive only to attend to those things which go to joy the Emperor, whom I have only seen at a distance. The Empress lives, unseen, in her own palace: only sometimes do we hear the shout of bearers as she goes, screened, to diminish boredom by movement.
Here, in the Palace Park, there are no men that are men, save the occasional poet whom the Emperor fancies for a quarter-of-an-hour walk and who is supposed, when in the Emperor’s company, to be no more of a man than are the others, like Han Im, who organise and rule this world of girls.
Capricious, beautiful, willow amongst weeds, Mistress Yang Kuei-fei occupies and has long occupied the Emperor’s time and thoughts. So it has been since she first came. No more does the Son of Heaven attend to matters of State: these are swept from his attention by her immediate presence.
Sometimes I see two swallows together, and envy them. Then I weep.
WINTER CHERRY.
When Han Im came to her under the plane-tree, Winter Cherry sat on the soft turf grieving. Now, at the hour of the cock, under the fingers of a lengthening shadow, idly playing with the edge of her goosefeather fan, she wondered why, against the shadowed walls of the courtyard, she could conjure up no clearly-remembered face of her parents.
“The guard has been changed,” Han Im told her in his high, fluting voice. “A new number of bowmen, fresh spearmen, pretend to protect us.”
In the growing shade of the plane-tree it seemed to him that the strawberry colour of her garments merged into the old-gold of their trimming ribbon, and from the high windows of the Pepper Rooms one could hear the chatter of other girls, busied with their infinite futilities of adornment and gossip. He imagined their heads as empty drums of treble pitch, their eyes as little vacant windows to empty rooms. . . .
She sang softly; her thin face lifted:
Then she stopped singing and looked at Han Im. He knew that she was feeling vaguely, as she admitted she always felt when she looked upon him, that his face and her father’s had been cast in the same mould. The sober browns and greens of his silk skirt seemed almost grey in the shade of the plane-tree.