Chapter 121 The House of Ju Hua
Under normal circumstances Ju's home would have been less than an hour's
walk from the neighborhood in which Qieu had spent the night, but it took the
two women much longer to cover the distance owing to Qieu's weakened condition.
As she limped haltingly through a succession of narrow, winding streets, leaning
against Ju for support, Qieu could sense the sounds and smells of the crowded
city intruding themselves upon her weary consciousness. As the day drew to a
close, vendors with pushcarts packed up their wares and joined a legion of
laborers returning home from their day's work in textile mills and warehouses,
produce markets and fisheries. As the condition of the roads and buildings in
that part of the city seemed to worsen by the block, the high-pitched cries of
reed-thin children at play echoed off the walls of the buildings lining the
narrow streets.
Qieu's father, Cheng Wu, had always been a proprietor of small shops, a
man on the lower rungs of the merchant class, but while Qieu and Luk Yee lived
very simply, Qieu had never experienced first-hand the grinding ravages of
poverty on a day-to-day basis. But here, in these streets, the faces of
destitution were everywhere - sickly children, deformed beggars with faint
voices and outstretched hands, old men and women with lifeless faces and
emaciated bodies.
"Forgive me, miss," Ju murmured, as they approached a narrow doorway.
"Most of the people of my district are very poor. But they try to live by the
words of the Master and to help each other." Qieu pondered that, wondering
whether Confucius could possibly have imagined the teeming streets of Shanghai,
the temptations of opium and gambling, the woeful misgovernment and the other
social ills that plagued modern China. But then she realized that each
generation has its own vices, all stemming from the heedless pursuit of pleasure
rather than principle that the Master had warned against so often. Perhaps the
world had not changed so much in two thousand years after all.
Ju tapped softly on a weathered wooden door, and a moment later a
round-faced young woman with sparkling eyes opened the door.
"Ju Hua - I'm glad you have finally come! The little one has been
asking for his mama." The good-natured woman reached behind her and picked up a
toddler whose hands, mouth, and face were smeared with crimson, and handed him
to his horrified young mother. "Don't worry, Ju," she smiled cheerily. "It's
not blood - Li was hungry and I was just feeding him a few berries. But most of
them are on his fingers and his face, not in his mouth, aren't they, little
one?" she teased the child jokingly, chucking him under his red-stained chin.
As Qieu watched the color return to Ju's face, she saw Li's little arms
tighten around his mother's neck, as if they had been apart for days rather than
only hours. Would she ever know that type of unconditional love? Luk Yee's
face suddenly flashed before her eyes and she felt a pang of regret that,
fearful of his reaction to the scars on her body, she had not yet given herself
unreservedly to him. Until she could manage to do that, how could she ever know
the contentment which she read in Ju's eyes as her benefactor spun around
playfully, basking in her child's embrace.
"Forgive me, Mrs Pei," Ju was saying, "for being so late. I ... I
stopped to help my new friend," patting Qieu gently on the arm.
Mrs Pei looked at the disheveled young woman in the tattered dress
doubtfully. "Are you sure she's ..."
"Yes, Mrs Pei," Ju assured her. "She is a respectable lady. I am sure
of it. We are going to my house now. And here," Ju reached into a small
handbag, removed an envelope and extracted one of the bills from the envelope
Erika had given her, "is the money that I have owed you for so many months.
Thank you for being a second mother to my son."
"I am sure that you would have done the same for me, Ju, if the stars
had placed you in my shoes." The moon-faced Mrs Pei reached for the bill
nervously but gratefully. "But what about your husband - won't he ask you for
the money?"
"Ahh, but my husband doesn't know about this money, Mrs. Pei," Ju
responded with a smile. Then she glanced up at the sky, guessing at the time by
the amount of sunlight remaining. "I am sorry, but we must go. I will drop Li
off on my way to the embassy tomorrow."
Mrs Pei continued to eye the bill disbelievingly; she had long since
given up hope of receiving any compensation for looking after the child. But
she had not had the heart to refuse Ju, whom fate had cursed with a churlish
husband. "I will be happy to do it, Ju. Good night, little one," she smiled,
opening and closing her hand in the toddler's face.
********
When they arrived at Ju's home a few minutes later, Qieu was surprised
by its size. Her own rooms, like those of most Chinese, were cramped and small.
But the lodgings of Ju and her husband made her own home look spacious by
comparison.
"Here," Ju said, as she unrolled a thin mat and spread it on the floor
of the room. "Lie down, while I make some green tea. It will make you feel
better."
Qieu sank down onto the mat thankfully. Though hardly plush, it was
both safer and softer than the dismal cranny in which she had spent the day.
Despite the fact that she had slept much of the day away, her ordeal had shorn
her of her strength, and the walk to Ju's home had exhausted her.
"Li, be a good boy and lie down next to this nice lady, while I make her
some tea," Ju cajoled as she wiped the sticky berry residue from the toddler's
hands and face with a damp cloth. Then she lay the child down next to Qieu, and
retreated to a kitchen area not much larger than a closet.
Li looked at Qieu shyly, gave the matter some thought and then his
chubby face formed itself into an angelic smile. He reached out a tiny hand and
placed it against Qieu's bare arm, and then popped the thumb of his other hand
into his mouth, and snuggled closer to her.
A few minutes later Ju returned. "The tea is almost ready. I'm glad to
see that you two are becoming such fr ..." she began, before realizing that her
son and her new friend had fallen asleep in each other's arms.
"Poor thing," she murmured to herself, looking down at Qieu's slender
form. When she had asked the mysterious young woman in the red gown how she had
come to be sleeping in the streets, she had blushed and pretended not to hear.
The blush had been one of humiliation, not mere embarrassment, and Ju had
inquired no further, not even so far as to ask her name.
Ju knelt down on her haunches next to the sleeping woman, admiring the
exquisite tailoring of the red dress. Clearly this was a woman not used to
sleeping in the streets. But how had the dress come to be torn in so many
places? Sewing being one of her own talents, Ju reached forward, hoping to
undress the sleeping woman without waking her, so that she could repair the
dress.
Ju gently slid the gown off of one soft shoulder, and removed the two
red-stained needles that Qieu had used to hold the gown together in back. Then
she parted the scarlet fabric at the shoulders, revealing an expanse of bare
skin. But as she tried to slip Qieu's arm through the sleeve without waking
her, the dress fell open down the back and Ju recoiled in dismay. A latticework
of thin, livid streaks decorated her guest's buttocks and thighs.
Ju reached forward with one hand to touch the soft flesh, and the
muscles in the sleeping beauty's buttocks quivered at her touch, as if they
feared that another stroke of the wicked denxia cane was forthcoming. Shaking
her head sadly, Ju resolved to bring a vial of the green powder that had had
such a salutary influence on Erika's recovery, home from Doctor Kauffmann's
office.
After pulling the sleeping child out of the way, Ju rolled Qieu over
onto her back, and gasped softly as she slid the gown down off of Qieu's
shoulders, revealing the angry marks that Dao's cane had etched into her soft
mounds and the cruel gouges that the Mongolian Nipple Gag had left on ther
delicate tips of her breasts. Ju's thoughts turned once again to Ming-tsu, the
stunningly beautiful young woman whom she had seen the black-shirts take from
her house that very day, and she shivered. It did not seem unlikely that a
woman like Ming-tsu could be swept up in the dark underworld of Shanghai. But
this slender, innocent-looking creature, into whose arms her son had nestled?
Had it been the black shirts who had tortured the young woman she had found in
the streets? And if so, why? And what about Erika Weiss? Had the mysterious
European beauty been a prisoner of the Scorpions, too, before being deposited on
the embassy steps?
Ju finished easing the dress off of the body of the sleeping woman, and
set it to one side, replacing it with a well-worn blanket which she tucked under
the chins of the scarred woman and the sleeping child. She smiled as she looked
at Li's angelic face, and listened with a mother's ears to the gentle, rhythmic
breathing of her son, who lay with his open mouth pressed against the woman's
shoulder.
Then Ju took up the tattered gown and rummaged in a tiny chest for
needle and crimson thread. Finding some, she settled into her only chair and,
despite her fatigue after a long day's work, began to sew. As she did, her
thoughts turned to escape. Escape from her boorish, opium-smoking husband,
escape from the embassy at which she had been brutalized by the vice-consul and
belittled by his chief aide. If it had not been for the kindness of Dr.
Kauffmann, she would have left long ago. But now the money that Erika had
given her would provide a fresh start, somewhere, for her and her baby. But she
would need to go to the embassy once more, to get the medicinal powder. But
soon ... very soon, she would begin her new life.
