Staring at the Sun (13 page)

Somewhere over the blacked-out Mediterranean, as the aeroplane slipped its lead, a rhyme came into Jean’s head, something taught decades earlier by her Scripture teacher at the village school:

The
Pyramids
first, which in Egypt were laid;
Then
Babylon’s Gardens
for Amytis made;
Third,
Mausolus’ Tomb
of affection and guilt …

She got stuck. “Third,
Mausolus’ Tomb
of affection and guilt …” Guilt, guilt … 
built
, that was it. “Of Ephesus built.” What was built at Ephesus—or did it mean by Ephesus? “Fifth,
Colossus of Rhodes
, cast in brass, to the sun”—the fully formed line suddenly came to her; but she couldn’t get much further. Jupiter’s something, was it, and something else in Egypt?

Back home, she went to the library and looked up the Seven Wonders of the World, but couldn’t find any of the ones from her rhyme. Not the Pyramids even? Or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? In the encyclopedia it said: the Coliseum of Rome; the Catacombs of Alexandria; the Great Wall of China; Stonehenge; the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the Porcelain Tower of Nankin; the Mosque of St. Sophia of Constantinople.

Well. Perhaps there were two separate lists. Or perhaps they had to update the list every so often as new Wonders got built and
old ones fell down. Maybe anyone could make up their own private seven. Why not? She didn’t think the catacombs of Alexandria sounded up to much. They might not even be there anymore. As for the porcelain tower of Nankin: it sounded extremely improbable that anything made of porcelain could have survived. And if it had, the Red Guards might well have knocked it down.

A plan came into her head to visit these Seven Wonders. She’d already seen Stonehenge; and the Leaning Tower and the Coliseum, for that matter. If she replaced the Catacombs with the Pyramids, that made four. Which left the Great Wall, the Porcelain Tower and St. Sophia. She could do the first two in one trip, and then if the Porcelain Tower didn’t exist she’d swap it for Chartres, which she’d already seen. That left St. Sophia, but Uncle Leslie had once told her that they ate hedgehogs in Turkey, so she changed it to the Grand Canyon. She was aware that this was cheating a little, as the Canyon wasn’t exactly man-made, but she gave a little shrug. Who was there to check up on her now?

In June she joined a package tour to China. They went first to Canton, Shanghai and Nanjing (as they now seemed to call it), where she asked the regional guides about the Porcelain Tower. There was a Drum Tower, and a Bell Tower, but nobody had heard of a Porcelain Tower. Just as she had suspected. Her guidebook was also silent on the matter: it told her instead that Nanjing was proud of “Zu Chong-zhi, the mathematician who made an approximately correct calculation of
pi
” and “Fan Zhen, the philosopher famous for his essay ‘The Destructibility of the Soul.’ ” How very strange, Jean thought. Wasn’t the soul meant to be some sort of absolute? Either it existed or it didn’t exist. How could you destroy one? Perhaps it was just a bad translation. And as for
pi
—wasn’t that an absolute as well? What was the point of celebrating an approximately correct calculation, and wasn’t this in any case a contradiction in terms? She had expected the Chinese to be a bit different, but this all seemed back to front.

They stayed in Beijing, as Peking now seemed to be called, for three days. On the first they visited the Great Wall, stiffly
walking up a short stretch while in the distance the Wall itself airily hurdled the hills. It was the only man-made object visible from the moon: Jean tried to remember that as she ducked into a dark guard tower which smelt as rank as a public lavatory. She also noticed the large number of graffiti cut into the top stones of the Wall. Chinese graffiti, so they looked elegant and appropriate. A jovial, red-bearded fellow from the tour, noting Jean’s interest, suggested that one of them meant “Don’t shoot until you see the yellows of their eyes.” Jean smiled politely, but her mind was elsewhere. Why did the Chinese cut graffiti into their Wall? Was this a universal instinct, to cut graffiti? Like the universal instinct to try and calculate
pi
, however approximately?

On the second day they visited palaces and museums; on the third, temples and antique shops. At the Temple of Heaven, they were promised, there would be a treat: an echo wall. Jean thought she had once been taken to a whispering gallery—perhaps there was one in the dome of St. Paul’s—but could no longer tell whether this was a false memory or not.

The echo wall was to the south of the main temple buildings: circular, some thirty or forty yards in diameter, with a single gateway on one side. Groups of Chinese were already trying out the echo as Jean’s party arrived. The guide explained that two people could stand at opposite points on the wall’s circumference and, by speaking in a normal voice but at a slight angle to the bricks, could be heard perfectly by one another. Whether this effect had been planned or was fortuitous nobody knew.

Jean walked to the nearest section of the wall. She felt tired now. The air in Beijing was extremely dry, and the fine dust which blew everywhere came straight, they were told, from the Gobi desert. Don’t let the club head drop, Uncle Leslie used to say, or there’ll be more sand flying than on a windy day in the Gobi desert. Michael had thought her as barren as the Gobi desert. Dust got in her eyes, and she felt a brisk sadness descend upon her. An echo wall was not something you should visit alone, any more than you should take a solitary ride in the Tunnel of Love. She missed … 
somebody, she didn’t know who. Not Michael; perhaps some version of Michael, someone still around and still companionable, who might tramp across to the other side of the wall, cough into it in her direction, then wander back to the middle and grumble that the thing didn’t work properly and hadn’t they ever heard of Indian tea in China? Someone a bit grumpy but who was never serious about being grumpy. Someone who might bore her but would never frighten her.

Small hope. She leaned against the wall and pressed her ear close to the bricked curve. There was some indistinguishable muttering and then, with sudden clarity, a pair of Western voices.

“Go on.”

“No, you first.”

“Go on.”

“I’m shy.”

“You’re not shy.”

The voices presumably belonged to a couple of Jean’s tour, but she couldn’t yet identify them. The wall seemed to drain off individuality from the voices, leaving them as all-purpose Western, male and female.

“Do you think this place is bugged?”

“Whatever gives you that idea?”

“I think there’s a chap listening in. Do you see, that fellow in the Mao cap?”

Jean looked up. A few yards in front of her an elderly Chinese in an olive jacket and Mao cap was tortoising his head towards the wall. The Western voices were beginning to be recognizable: they belonged to a young couple, brash and rather too recently married for the general comfort of the tour.

“Mao Tse-tung had a big yellow ding-dong.”

“Vincent! For Christ’s sake!”

“Just trying it on to see if old Mao-cap understands English.”

“Vincent! Say something else. Say something clean.”

“All right.”

“Go on then.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“You’ve got great legs.”

“Oh, Vincent, have I?”

Jean left them to it, with the elderly Chinese still craned into their conceited endearments. Which was better: to understand nothing, like him, or everything, like her?

Apart from
pi
and the question of the soul, Jean found China less strange and more comprehensible than she had imagined. True, parts of it were like listening to some gnomic voice come muttering off the great curve of a dusty wall. But more often it was like hearing your own language spoken confidently and yet with different emphases. “In Asian times …” The tour guides would often start a sentence like this; and at first Jean believed what she heard—that the Chinese referred to the old days as the Asian times, because that was when their civilization had been at its most dominant. Even when she knew they meant
ancient
, Jean preferred to hear
Asian
. In Asian times …

“In the fields we grow wheat and lice.” Other members of the tour, especially that brash young couple, giggled; but Jean preferred this alternative language. “In the fields there are sugar beet, potatoes and ladies.” “In 1974 the temple was repented.” “Now here we are at the sobbing centre.” Even Jean smiled at that one, heard in Canton; but she smiled at its aptness. Westerners descended from their buses to spend money on things most Chinese would never be able to afford. Rightly was it called the sobbing centre: Canton’s wailing wall.

No, this land wasn’t really so strange. There was much poverty and simplicity in the countryside, but it struck Jean in images which might almost have come from her own childhood: a pig, roped to the pannier of a bicycle, on its way to market; an old woman, buying two eggs from a stall, holding them up to the light in fierce examination; the verbal clatter of bartering; the damp, straddle-legged ritual with the plough; and the patching of clothes. This activity, which since the war had largely died out in the West,
was vigorously alive: in a tiny Szechuan village, where the bus stopped for lavatories and photographs, she saw a patched tea towel hanging up to dry. The washing line was a bamboo pole slung between the branches of a banyan tree; the tea towel contained more patching than it did original cloth.

Old poverty looked familiar; and the images of new money were even more familiar: the large radios, the Japanese cameras, the bright clothing which avoided blue and green, those drab impositions of the recent past. Sunglasses, too: the youths whose radios bellowed even as they filed round Sun Yat-sen’s memorial in Nanjing were not complete without sunglasses, even though that day the sky was low and the clouds heavy. Jean noticed that it was considered stylish not to remove the small sticky label bearing the manufacturer’s name.

In Nanjing zoo there were two Persian cats in a cage, labelled “Persian cats.” At a commune outside Chengdu they saw a small workshop where fur coats were made from dog skins; the honeymoon couple dressed up in Alsatian for each other’s cameras. At a circus display in Beijing they saw a conjurer juggle with goldfish, producing them with proud aplomb from the baggy sleeves of his silk jacket—a trick which did not seem very difficult to Jean. In Canton, at the Trade Fair, they saw plastic bonsai.

Among the tour guides, it was an indication of status to carry a battery-powered megaphone. At Yangzhou a courier climbed aboard the minibus and welcomed them to the city while the party—none of them more than ten feet from the boomingly amplified voice—quailed in their seats and tried not to laugh. At a jade factory the introductory talk from a forewoman was translated by a guide whose megaphone declined to work. Rather than lay his instrument aside, however, the guide preferred to keep it to his lips and shout through it. At question time, someone asked how you could tell good jade from bad jade. Shouted through the impotent instrument came the reply: “You look at it and by looking you tell its qualities.”

Jean expected that air travel in China would be blandly international;
but even that was quietly Easternized. The air hostesses looked like schoolgirls and didn’t seem to know what to do; as they landed in Beijing one of them, she noticed, remained standing all the time and giggled self-consciously when they struck the runway. There was no alcohol served on Chinese airways; instead, you were given bars of Peanut Crisp, pieces of chocolate, packets of sweets, cups of tea and a souvenir. On one flight they gave her a key ring; on another, a tiny plastic-covered address book whose size suggested that the typical traveller on Chinese airways was a misanthrope.

In Chengdu she asked one of the local guides—a tall, courteous man somewhere between twenty and sixty—about his life. He replied with a mixture of precision and vagueness. He had recently returned from spending ten years in the country. There had been difficulties. He taught himself English by using records and tapes. Every morning before breakfast he takes the night soil to the neighbourhood dump. They have one child. Often the child stays with its grandparents. His wife is a garage mechanic. She works different shifts from him, and this is quite useful as he likes to practise his English with his records and tapes. He does not drink at the banquet in case he disgraces himself and is not invited to join the Party. He wants very much to be invited to join the Party. There have been difficulties but now the difficulties are over. You have one day a week off, plus five days spaced through the year, plus two weeks when you get married. In those two weeks you are allowed to travel. Perhaps people want to divorce so that they get married again and have more holiday.

There were two questions the guide was unable to answer. When Jean asked how much he earned, he seemed—though his English was excellent—not to understand. She repeated the question in more detail, aware that perhaps she was committing a faux pas. Eventually, he replied, “You want to change money?”

Yes, she replied politely, that was what she was trying to ask; perhaps she would be able to change money at the hotel that evening. Perhaps tomorrow would be better, he replied. Of course.

Her other question seemed to her less contentious.

“Do you want to go to Shanghai?”

His expression didn’t change; but neither did he reply. Perhaps her pronunciation of the city had been misleading.

“Do you want to go to Shanghai? Shanghai, the big port?”

Again, an attack of temporary deafness. She repeated the question; he merely smiled and looked around and didn’t reply. Later, thinking the incident over, Jean realized that she hadn’t been tactless, as when asking about his income; just inattentive. She had, in fact, already received her answer. He got only single days off; he was married, and had already taken his lifetime’s two weeks; you couldn’t get to Shanghai and back in a day. Her insertion of the word
want
into the sentence had made it meaningless. What she had been asking was not a real question.