Like all Nakhi women and girls, Atsousya and Anisya were absolutely uninhibited and frank to a point of brutality. They were steeped in local scandals and related them to me with such gusto and enthusiasm that I, hardened as I was, could not suppress a blush. Soon they seized upon my sessions at Madame Lee's shop.
'You are in love with her, that's what it is,' they announced triumphantly one day. 'Be careful! Her husband is very jealous,' they warned. Silly as the joke was, the whole town picked it up, and some people winked at me knowingly when I said that I was going to Madame Lee's for a drink.
Both Atsousya and Anisya could not believe that I was unmarried.
'I am still looking for a wife,' I jokingly assured them.
'Atsousya, why not marry me?' I asked her one day.
'Phew!' she spat. 'It's better to be a young man's slave than an old man's darling,' she said.
'Am I really so old and ugly?' I insisted.
'Of course, with your bald head and eye-glasses you look like eighty,' she replied brutally.
'What about Anisya?' I continued.
'Anisya has a husband already and the marriage will take place soon,' she confided to me.
Indeed, in a few weeks' time Anisya disappeared, and only much later I caught a glimpse of her in her married woman's attire. She looked unhappy and was much thinner. In a month's time she resumed her old place by the bridge.
'What happened?' I asked Atsousya.
'I'll tell you,' she said, 'but don't tell her I let you know.' Then she whispered, 'Anisya is being divorced.' I was surprised.
In a week or two one of my friends, Wuhan, who also knew the girls, told me that there had been a court case about the divorce. 'Why do you want to separate from your husband?' the judge asked. Anisya boldly stepped out and said, 'Your Honour, my husband is only a small boy and I shall be an old woman by the time he grows up. I cannot wait.' As this was more or less the truth, the judge granted the petition at once. Then, stepping down from the dais, he approached Anisya, and according to Wuhan said, 'Anisya, all my life I have been waiting for a woman like you. I am a widower and I want to marry you.' The marriage took place in a fortnight and this time Anisya abandoned our little circle for ever. But sometimes we saw her, as a richly dressed young woman, the wife of a judge, passing through the market and greeting her old friends.
After six o'clock the market gradually emptied, and at seven the shops put up their shutters. The market stalls were gathered into a pile again. The streets became deserted, and it was time for dinner.
It was only after eight o'clock in the evening that Main Street began to fill up with people again, and the shops reopened. Some had ordinary oil lamps flickering with reddish light; others were lighted with pressure lanterns or carbide lamps. Pine torches were put up at intervals, while crowds of people promenaded to and fro, cracking sunflower or pumpkin seeds. On bright moonlit nights the street was jammed. Unmarried girls, locally called pangchinmei, in their best dresses and adornments, walked arm in arm in rows of four or five girls, just wide enough to block the street. In this way they charged up and down the street, giggling, singing and cracking their sunflower seeds. The unwary young man was soon engulfed by these Amazons and led away to an unknown fate. The more sophisticated boys lined the walls and doors of the shops and made comments on the marching beauties. From time to time a group of girls paused before one of them, there was a scuffle, a brief and ineffectual struggle, and off he was led, imprisoned in the ring of giggling and screaming furies. The destination of these prisoners, probably only too willing, was the park where dancing continued till midnight on the meadows by the river around the brightly burning bonfires.
Madame Lee's shop was usually open at night, but with a different clientele, made up mostly of the local blue-bloods, who refreshed themselves with wine before venturing into the perils of promenading, unescorted, on the street. The ordinary villagers and Tibetans, awed by these elegant, love-making crowds, walked slowly, also in rows and with arms linked. They usually scattered when the girls' brigades crashed purposely into them. There was some screaming and laughter, but no one really minded. The silvery moon smiled down from above, and fragrant smoke floated up to it from the pine torches. Later the market square was slowly transformed into an encampment by the erection of several large tents. Stoves were set up and benches and tables spread out on the stone floor. Delicious odours began to rise from a mass of pots and pans.
I would sit in one of these tents sometimes till midnight, browsing over a bowl of dumplings or noodles and watching heavily armed Tibetan caravan drivers or tribesmen. Eating in these tents was considered by the more sedate townspeople as a little dangerous. Sometimes bandits were present in exotic disguises, and brawls between drunken men were not unusual. On a very dark night, one of the girls near Madame Yang's shop would give me a bunch of the brightly burning mingtze to help me to find my way across the hill.
Down in the Tibetan quarter was Madame Ho's bar, high-class and exclusive in the sense that she catered mostly for the Tibetan trade. Her house was one of the most palatial mansions in the Tibetan section. Two of her sons were in Lhasa where they had a prosperous import and export firm. The youngest son, who was at school, was a silly and cheeky youth and always teased me with tactless questions. Her husband was a podgy, middle-aged man, who smoked opium most of the day and was seldom seen in the shop. Her greatest help came from her grown-up, apple-cheeked daughter, also called Anisya.
Madame Ho was a plump and motherly middle-aged woman, full of gaiety and risque jokes. Her shop was a replica of Madame Lee's and she kept it really as a retreat from ennui, in addition to her legitimate business. Her house was one of the largest in the town and it had three separate courtyards, neatly paved with stone slabs and decorated with flowers and shrubs in huge porcelain pots standing on carved pedestals. The whole house was exquisitely carved inside, spotlessly clean and beautifully appointed, and there were spacious stables attached to the main building. She had taken me early under her wing and afterwards assisted me to solve many of my problems. Her information was in no way less reliable man Madame Lee's but, unlike that prim old lady, she loved to discuss scandals, and punctuated her lurid recitals with pithy comments on the parties involved. The result was that I always left her shop with my sides aching from laughter. She showered me with gifts, sometimes a cut of ham or a pot of specially brewed wine or some new cabbages she had received from Atuntze. I repaid her with free medical advice for her children or with seedlings of American flowers or vegetables especially beetroot, though the Nakhi did not like them to eat saying that they were too sweet for a vegetable. One evening Anisya appeared with flaming red cheeks, and I remarked that she used too much rouge. It was not the rouge, Madame Ho explained, but the juice of beetroots which Anisya had applied to advantage. The crazy fashion spread, and afterwards the beetroots were cultivated by Anisya and her friends not for eating but for the sake of the cosmetic value of their juice.
The best time to go to Madame Ho's bar was after dinner. It was then crowded with the Tibetan merchants who stayed at her house. She always made a point of introducing me to them. These were very pleasant encounters and we always talked late into the night. Obsequious Tibetan servants appeared from time to time bringing some delicacies to go with the wine. Once there appeared a lama from Tongwa, with a big caravan and many trapa servants. He was as gross as he was powerful, and was, in addition, a great flirt. He scandalized even free and easy-going Likiang and the pangchinmei scattered, screaming and laughing in mock fear, when he tried to charge into their groups in the park. He even made eyes at Madame Ho, while drinking wine with me, and this reduced her to loud laughter. I teased Anisya afterwards. 'Why don't you marry him, you would be an abbess?' I suggested.