As Max Saw It by Louis Begley

alone with his sons and women lived in the Imperial Palace, and the sons only while they were small children. Afterward, they were moved out, away from the Forbidden City, until the son who had been selected to succeed returned to ascend the Peacock Throne. It was the fear of assassination: where two males meet, one will try to kill the other. For that same reason, the choice of the heir remained occult; should it become known, his envious brothers or their mothers might assassinate him. So within the walls of this enclave no one but the emperors’ women—wives, concubines, women servants, and, of course, eunuchs. Men who had stopped being men. The women the emperor fucked each had her name inscribed on an ivory marker. Like your backgammon pieces! In the evening, an important eunuch presented all the markers to the emperor and he chose one. Then the eunuchs went to the woman’s house, stripped her so that she had no place to conceal a knife or a vial of poison, and brought her, wrapped in a blanket, to the imperial bed.
    Why only one a night, Miss Wang? he asked abruptly. Why not many? After all, it’s said that they hardly ever came, you know, ejaculated, just wanted to bathe the member as much as possible in a woman’s juices. Absorb them throughthe rigid phallus. Juices bringing health and longevity, like vitamins! Do you know the answer? I may be wrong: perhaps every night they brought one woman after another!
    I am so very sorry, it isn’t mentioned in the guidebooks I have studied.
    Having delivered this standard reply of a well-trained guide to most questions about Chinese history before liberation, Miss Wang giggled very hard.
    How curious what guidebooks will omit, Miss Wang. And what is the present position with regard to women’s juices? Do you know that?
    Now Toby was giggling as well, besides having turned beet red, while I wondered whether each time I met Charlie it would be necessary to think of braining him.
    I needn’t have bothered. Miss Wang could take care of herself. It can’t matter, Mr. Swan, she replied, family planning is obligatory in China, as you probably know, and it requires Chinese men to use contraceptive devices.
    Quite right, I should have thought of that myself. And a good reason for substituting the pill! But we must get on with our eunuchs. These were volunteers, Toby, often married and fathers of families! I don’t know that there was a competitive examination, as with other offices in China. Men who applied for the position, and were lucky enough to be accepted, sat down on a stool rather like a
chaise percée
, and someone underneath went snip. The testicles were placed on a shelf, in an individual jar marked with the owner’s name. That way the eunuchs could be buried with their balls and be complete again, a matter of crucial importance for the Chinese, right Miss Wang?
    Charlie had not noticed that he had lost the indigenous part of his public. Miss Wang had apparently decided to walk ahead of us. He raised his eyebrows in what could have been a sign of disappointment and continued.
    The superstition led to a comical scene when the last emperor fled and this establishment was shut down. The old eunuchs all departed, a suitcase full of spare pajamas in one hand and the jar containing the balls in the other. What a ball!
    Balls, said Toby, why is this stuff supposed to entertain or instruct me? It’s disgusting from beginning to end.
    That’s the point, baby, that’s the point. A woman is a hole filled with juice that starts to smell like fish upon contact with air. Happiness, comradeship, cannot be built upon the cult of the hole.
    Here Charlie threw his arms wide open and shouted to the empty space:
    But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends’: there’s hell, there’s darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!
    And looking around him with great satisfaction, because his memory had