The Blue-Eyed Shan (17 page)

Wrestling with tableware was Yang's most serious undertaking in World War I until he met Florence. She was the daughter of a steel magnate whose holdings, in northeastern France, should in logic have been leveled by a determined enemy but remained intact, positively humming, thanks to the highly civilized mutual courtesy that left also intact the German industrial works across the border, a refined arrangement that, in a reasonable world, would have proved definitively the superiority of commercial intelligence and morality over political or military. The paradox reinforced Yang's conviction that the flower of Europe was being—almost literally—ground into the earth by brutish politicians and generals. Believing that Asia was sure to predominate as a result, and in his own lifetime, he felt rather cheerful about this. Florence's father could only be an inhuman ogre; another paradox.

By then he was besotted. He had met her at dusk in the late fall of 1917. Paris was gray and drizzly, streetlights on early, an occasional quick waft of rummy fumes from a yellow doorway reminding homeward-bound pedestrians that cafes were oases. Yang went coatless deliberately because he enjoyed the attention his puzzling uniform drew from the bourgeoisie; more than once he was taken for Japanese or Indochinese. He was on leave and had been invited to a soirée at the apartment of a French colonel on the Avenue Ségur; the colonel was one of the few French officers to whom Yang was required to report directly, a just officer who had complimented the young lieutenant and taken a serious, even paternal, interest in this sprig of an alien culture.

Yang arrived cold, his uniform damp; spoke gallantly to the astounded concierge, who actually pressed the light button for him so that he could march up three flights without groping; and entered a crowded flat, sensing immediately that he was among sophisticated and cosmopolitan friends because conversation did not extinguish itself at his entrance, only fell for the briefest moment from fortissimo to mezzo forte. The colonel's wife came to shake hands, then took his left hand in her right, smiling virtuously as she demonstrated that holding hands with Oriental gentlemen was all in a day's—No. Yang rebuked himself for cynicism. She was doing what any hostess would do. Furthermore, she was a colonel's lady; to hear he was not a Chinese but a lieutenant.

Then she presented him to Florence. “Mademoiselle de Morvan, Lieutenant Yang de l'armée chinoise.” Florence de Morvan was young, small and short-haired, with happy greenish eyes and a mobile, quirky face. Yang was half in love even before her first words: “I never met a Chinese before, but I've always wanted to
be
Chinese.” They were shaking hands. Yang, highly educated, well-traveled, man of the world, crack shot, linguist, connoisseur, wanted only to gape and dote yet summoned inner forces to ask, “But why? In China a woman as beautiful as you would have been betrothed at twelve and probably married at fifteen to some aging tycoon.” Actually he had said “gros industriel d'un certain âge,” relieved that he had managed to speak at all and pleased by the aptness and fluency of his remark, and he was full of joy until she said, “Mais mon père est un gros industriel d'un certain âge!”

He fumbled for apologies, but she was laughing sweetly, laughing in merry delight, hooking her arm through his and saying, “Now you must let me find you an apéritif, and promise not to leave without me. You're the catch of the evening, you know. Vermouth? Whisky?” He said, “Pernod, thank you,” and she said, “How vulgar! Where is your Oriental delicacy?” And he said, “I never knew what delicatesse was until this moment.”

It was the coup de foudre, the lightning bolt of love. He was lost forever. He sipped his milky Pernod. About him the buzzing chorus of French, the frequent peal of laughter, warmed the room. Florence spoke of Lao-tzu, he of Victor Hugo; challenged, he improvised a translation into Mandarian of Hugo's famous quatrain about flame in the eyes of youth and light in the eyes of age. The incomprehensible syllables charmed her. She spoke of philosophy, serenity, order, art; he of war, destruction, revolution, death. “I suppose we must circulate now,” she said. “Meet me at the door at seven.”

They dined, they set a rendezvous for tomorrow, they prowled a flea market, they drove through the Bois in a horse-drawn carriage, a day passed, two, a night passed, two, and he could not say if he suffered more in her absence or gloried more in her presence; and then it was evening and they were in her father's flat—that gentleman was in Metz—and it was all amazingly simple. Despite his limited experience, he was versed in theory; classical pornography was high art in China and he rejoiced her avid soul with the Chinese names for this and that: the fish with two backs, horse upon horse, the two snakes, bamboo syrup, bird's-nest soup. “Oh that's
nice
!” she announced with a moue of pleasure, a gleeful frisson. He was slightly bewildered; whores feigning ecstasy had whimpered, arched their backs, screamed and moaned, but his little Florence warbled and twittered. She was indeed his bird of paradise. When she did pant, did cry quickly, “Ah oui ah oui ah oui,” he rejoiced; but he was never sure when, or whether, or how hotly, the true ecstasy came upon her. Perhaps it was none of his business. How puzzling and difficult to be a gentleman of the West!

His own ecstasy was, nevertheless, constant. He was permanently intoxicated, perhaps insane. He no longer lived on earth but in some starry realm, lovers' heaven, gods' madhouse. In sober moments, when at work or writing dutifully to his father, he feared retribution. With her in public places, he could barely breathe for joy, pride, immortality. In private he knew impulses to weep, rage aloud, hang himself—it was all too much for one poor heart to withstand. He was not sure always that it was
she
, precisely; perhaps it was the loving and not its object that he loved. He knew so little. He learned so much. Winter passed. Toward Easter he took a furlough, and they traveled in the Pyrenees, less ecstatic now and more occupied with tickets, reservations, bathrooms, more aware of the sullen disapproval in Gascon glances, more oppressed by a small-town waiter's condescending stare. He gobbled his whitebait, mopped the bowl with good French bread, tossed off the last of a local white wine and said, “Let's go back to Paris.”

Her relief was almost palpable, so he exacted a price: he wanted to meet her father. She agreed, giggling in mischievous expectation, and one day late in spring they made a date with Monsieur de Morvan. They were to dine at one of Paris's internationally beloved culinary landmarks where, in the words of Yang's by now good friend the colonel, “the doorman dresses like a field marshal and the gourmets unfold napkins three feet square, tuck them into their braces at the collarbone, and perform, for two hours, a gastronomic Götterdämmerung.”

Yang bathed, shaved and dressed with care and elegance. He powdered his joints. His leather gleamed. His ribbons—both of them, one for being in Europe at all and the other for a visit to the front during which he and his party were, by only a moderate stretch of the imagination, shelled—proclaimed valor. He flagged a cab. En route he made a desperate effort to calm himself. This man, he mused, is rich because others are poor or dead. You love his daughter, who is only twenty-two and may or may not love you. You will be courteous and cautious until your moment comes. You will not, however, cringe, lie or prostitute your toothy smile. Entudu, mon lieutenant?

His imagination raced ahead: Florence, tearstained, was forced to choose, decay with her father and bourgeois capitalism or build a new world with Yang Yu-lin. Hands crossed on her heaving breast, she—But the thought of her breast distracted him. Would her father be kind enough to leave early? The apartment was surely out of bounds but there were comfortable hotels. Only to be with her. Moonlight rippling on he Seine. By the time he reached the restaurant he was almost frisky. He overtipped the taxi driver and strode briskly toward his fate.

Morvan greeted the lieutenant heartily; Yang recognized the dinnertime camaraderie of the international businessman. The mâitre d' bowed, addressed Morvan by name, led them to the royal table, secluded in a windowed corner, the windows curtailed now, Paris by night blacked out. They ordered. Conversation proceeded along amicable and conventional lines: the war, the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the possible Bolshevization of Europe, the future of America. Yang would never forget the grilled trout, the Macon 'II, the tournedos, the Richebourg '06, or his own voice saying, out of nowhere, someone else impersonating him, some fool, some clown, “Monsieur de Morvan, I am in love with your daughter and would like to marry her.”

He knew instantly that he had failed to slay the dragon and was doomed to bitter exile, wandering the earth without his beloved. He looked disaster in the face and reminded himself that he was an officer and gentleman.

Morvan was simply incredulous, finding voice finally and blurting, “My dear sir! You're
Chinese
! It's not even a real army! You're only the head coolie!”

Florence's face had blotched red and white. “I didn't
mean
that!” she pleaded with Yang. “I never
thought
of marriage!”

Yang rose and dashed the remains of his wine in Morvan's face. He spoke to Florence: “Then think of it now. Let us leave this place hand in hand!”

Morvan was a cartoon of Gallic exasperation; Yang wondered—idly, it was amazing how much time one seemed to have in these moments of comic melodrama, these flashes of eternal verity—if he was about to thunder, “My dear sir!
That was a Richebourg of nine-teen-oh-six
!” But Morvan snarled, “Independent! Modern! ‘Papa, I'm a grown woman!' This is what comes of it, you foolish girl! Shame and humiliation, for us and for him!”

“I'm sorry,” she said helplessly to Yang, and tears started. “I'm so infinitely sorry.”

Yang shrugged. He said, “Adieu, Florence.” He bowed coldly to her father. He strode away. The last words he ever heard her say, and he heard the tears too, were, “Papa! Papa! He was very nice and he was my first Chinaman, and you hurt his feelings!”

Hurt his feelings! By the gods! Whether tears sprang first to his eyes or nervous laughter to his lips he could never remember, but he remembered the iron entering his soul. He collected his cap and gloves, leaving no tip, and marched stiffly down the red carpet and out the door; in his distraction he saluted the field marshal.

He walked all the way to the Avenue Ségur and craved audience of the colonel. By then his small, miraculous reserve of icy control had melted away; almost gasping, knotted in pain, he broke every code he knew, Oriental's, officer's, gentleman's, lover's, and sought the truth. He had judged his man well, a fighting colonel and not a desk colonel, a lover of God, country and wife and not merely a Sunday Catholic, wartime patriot, or lunchtime husband. The colonel was gentle. With his own hands he poured cognac for Yang. “There are so many like her now,” he said softly, understandingly, forgivingly. “The war excites them, you see. They are young and rich and full of hot blood. Yes: her first Chinaman. After her first Frenchman and her first Belgian and her first Englishman and her first American and probably her first German, Italian, Senegalese, Algerian, legionnaire, spahi, aviator. I am sorry. If you love her, none of that matters, I know. Believe me. I know. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.' You know the verse? All you can do now is suffer.”

Yang returned to the front next morning and applied for immediate repatriation. His application was denied. On his next furlough in Paris he joined what was in effect the East Asian Section of the French Communist Party.

He did not do that “because of Florence.” Had she loved him, he might have remained in France, persisted in his suit, married her, advanced himself en bon bourgeois; or carried her back to Peking in a grand gesture of private revolution. Betrayed by love, he rebounded not to another woman or to idiocies like whoring and drink, but to thinkers and writers that French Catholics, and later French cafés, had taught him to love: La Bruyère, Saint-Simon, Tom Paine, Marx, Michelet—even, with a pang, Victor Hugo. He rebounded to a world of men and egalitarians. He attended meetings in public halls and private rooms on the sixth floor without water. He debated with French professors who stank of cheap tobacco and with wiry young Orientals who sniped butts from the gutter. One of these he liked extremely, a skinny Annamite barely older than himself who had changed his name from Nguyen Tat Tan to Nguyen Ai Quoc, lithe and quick, as confused about methods as any of them but surer of his goals: self-rule for Asia and equality for all men and women. “They argue, which must come first,” Nguyen Ai Quoc scoffed. “I tell you, both come first. With the left hand we level wealth, income, wages, land holdings; with the right we level privilege and power. And if it proves impossible, or too slow, then we shall use both hands at once and in them will be weapons. Your Sun Yat-sen is a great man but he is no soldier.”

“But you want power yourself,” Yang protested. “You want to make a privileged class of revolutionaries.”

“I want to destroy power! What man has a right to power over another? And as for a privileged class of revolutionaries, their privileges are poverty and exile and jail and torture and firing squads!” Then the Indochinese said more reasonably, “
Someone
must lead.
Someone
must make a society run. The question is, What is it to be run for? Those who are most selfless must lead; those who demand nothing for themselves, only justice for others. Their reward will be pain and sorrow and, in the end, freedom.”

Pain and sorrow and, in the end, freedom. Yang did return to China, in 1919. There was no sign of serious socialism in North China, only a few professors, a debating society. There were adventurers, ignorant and barbarous, who became footnotes to history before his eyes, or warlords who lasted many years and were fascinated by certain aspects of the Occident, like flashlights and motorcars; not adventurers but true warlords, with roots in the region and limited territorial ambitions, but nevertheless ignorant and barbarous, they too.