The Princess’s First Love: a Poet (page 6)
At that moment the door to Villa Undine was opened from the outside, and a man rode in on a tiger.
Leisurely, he surveyed the room, and with a smile on his lips beneath two enormous mustaches, he spoke to Wilhelmina Wang, in verse:
”While your hair was still cut straight across your forehead/
You played about the front gate, pulling flowers./
I came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,/
I walked about your seat, playing with blue plums./
And we went on living in the city of Chang’an:/
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.”
She had tightly closed her eyes and pressed her lips into a painful white line when she heard his first word, intent on shutting him out. But now she turned to him with imperial fury, and answered him in the same Tang style of speech:
“At sixteen you departed,/
You went into far Rom, by the river of swirling eddies,/
And you have been gone five years./
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.”
“I dragged my feet when I went out,” the man on the tiger protested.
“By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,/
Too deep to clear them away!”
“I hurt you,” the man on the tiger said with genuine sorrow.
“I grow older,” said the girl who could not possibly be more than nineteen or twenty.