Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

“What do you do?” he asked. “For a living.” And immediately upon it, he kicked himself. Most English didn’t do much for a living. A sentence often heard floated up through his mind: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

  But she grinned brightly up at him. “I’m a student,” she said. “Art. Something other than the stiff icons of communism, which are no better than the stiff icons of Christianity before. I’d like to draw people as they really are.” Her hands moved in the air, making drawing motions, and the clouds lifted from her sky-blue eyes.

  * * *

  At the door to the hotel, she handed him back his newspaper. “My family…. We could get in trouble if they found this in our house.”

  Under the watchful eyes of the doorman, he bent closer to her and spoke in her ear, as if whispering sweet nothings, “I thought it was better now. I thought the BSS were”

  But she shook her head. “Sometimes it is the bear’s dying moments that are most dangerous,” she said. She grinned brightly up at him.

  She still smelled of rancid sweat, of unwashed flesh constricted within artificial clothes. But her eyes reminded him of the sky over his hometown, and when she smiled it was easy to forget how crooked her teeth were.

  “Listen,” she said. “Thanks for the newspaper.”

  She stepped away from him, turned to go.

  “Wait,” he called. “Wait. Tomorrow. For dinner. Same time.”

  Emma turned around, looking surprised, then grinned and nodded once.

  Walking down the steps of the hotel, she broke into a little run. She wore ballerina shoes that appeared to be made of cardboard and falling apart.

  Not looking either way, she crossed the street chances of any traffic were minimal and the all-plastic Morris suffered a greater chance of injury than any pedestrian they might strike.

  On the other side, Emma turned again, and waved at him.

  Lin watched her walk away, along the corrosion and pollution stained opposing wall. At one point the wall had been painted with a big, heroic socialist mural.

  The words Iron Maggie were still visible and, from amid the grime and the dirt, stared the mock-heroic figure of Britain’s former general secretary. A horse-faced woman, she’d come into the party echelons via the union of iron workers. Hence the name.

  She’d been the most draconian of all the previous secretaries. While allowing foreign companies like the one Yu Lin worked for into the country, she’d cracked down on all and any political unrest or religious dissension.

  When she’d died, her coterie of followers had taken over, and continued in the same direction.

  Staring at her portrait on that wall was like staring at an ill-developed photograph, or a ghost of Britain’s past.

  * * *

  “The problem is your religion,” Yu Lin said. He’d known Emma for exactly two weeks. They’d seen each other every day and today, Lin’s day off, they sat by a lake in what remained of a city park.

  It wasn’t a park like what he remembered from Hangchow, of course. For one, Europe had a much higher population density than China, and, besides, centuries of government-abetted pollution, centuries of no one caring what the people felt or wanted, had left every tree sooty grey and the grass stunted, moribund. The water in the lake, itself, was an angry grey and looked vaguely gelatinous.

  Emma looked up from her sketch pad. “My religion?”

  “Not yours exactly,” Lin said. “The country’s. Europe. The fatalism of Christianity shaped your beliefs, your way of seeing the world. You expect a reward after death, not here. You believe in the poor, the virtues of poverty. No wonder Europe took to communism like a duck to water.”

  Emma raised her eyebrows. She had golden eyebrows, very fair and yet dark enough to be seen against her pale skin. They looked like golden arcs over the blue sky of her eyes. “I doubt it,” she said. “Russia is Christian. And it never took to communism. It wavered, perhaps, and tried mixed programs, but it never gave in.”

  Lin sighed. He was putting it badly. Or perhaps he was wrong. The more he talked to Emma the more he felt that,

  indeed, she was more like him than not like him. So, why this vile submission? Why an history of aristocratic dictatorship, maintained until toppled only by the worse dictatorship of communism? How could a people live like that and never discover the rights of the individual, the value of a human life? “Russia was near China,” he said. “They didn’t dare….”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Emma said. “I think oh, I think something happened, somewhere, something that twisted us. I mean there was Rome, and Greece. They had democratic institutions at one time. By their lights, of course.”

  Yes, there had been Greece, and Rome, though little was known about them.

  Lin sighed. “Let’s not talk about that,” he said. “Tell me about your dreams. What you think the future will bring.”

  Emma grinned. Her blue-sky eyes cleared. She talked of what she envisioned her generation, blessed with faster communications than ever before, would not be kept prisoner to a dying ideal. They would move forward. They would move on. They would acquire right to vote. Listening to her, it was almost easy to believe.

  And all the while he kept pondering the question. Should he go back home? He wanted to go back home. And he had the chance now that his first term abroad was up. He could go home to a nice promotion and a whole lot of hardship pay. He could find a girl, get married.

  But who would lend Emma the daily paper then?

  * * *

  “I’ve signed up for another year,” Lin told Emma.

  He sat on his bed in his hotel room. He’d been telling her all about the youth movements in his own city, the opposition to the war in France.

  Sitting on the floor, cross-legged, she listened to him like a child drinking in a fairy tale.

  It was raining outside, a dark, sooty rain. It left black stripes on the yellowed glass of the window, and it seemed to reverberate mournfully throughout the building.

  “I thought you missed home,” Emma said.

  “I do,” he said. “But I couldn’t leave you. Who’d lend you his paper then?”

  Emma laughed. Her eyes looked very blue like a slice of sky from a springtime London had never known.

  * * *

  They became lovers, almost incidentally.

  Around lovemaking in his hotel room, they talked fervently. Of the rights of man. The hope for the new world that would belong to them. A world where Chinese companies started industries other than cigarette factories in blighted England.

  A world where each English peasant had a small cottage.

  “I think it was that you never formed colonies,” Lin said. “I mean, China colonized a whole new continent, formed three countries in the Land of the West. And sent enough people to Africa too. But Europe just stayed within its tight confines, getting tighter and tighter in space.”

  They walked side by side down a darkened street. Emma had promised to take Lin to a nightclub run by people their age. A very secret nightclub, where you could only enter if your knew someone.

  She looked back at him, surprised, almost shocked.

  She was wearing a pair of harem pants and a short tunic that Lin had bought mail-order from home. Her clean hair sparkled. “Maybe,” she said. “That and the fear of losing all your descendants. After the great invasion and the plague, when so many died, I think Europeans just got used to the idea that they must have a lot of children.”

  He asked how many brothers and sisters she had. She counted them on her fingers. “And there’s Nigel, he works in a foundry in the north. And Arthur who was two years older than I…” she stopped. Her eyes filled with tears. “Arthur was killed in Poland. In the war….”

  And there Lin was quiet too, because the war in Poland had been won by China. By the skin of their teeth, but Chinese had won the war. And Lin remembered how close they’d come to wavering.

  * * *

  “No, bloody hell, he’s not like u
s,” said the blond creep who guarded the door to the nightclub a dark doorway distinguishable only from other dark doorways around by the faint sound of a tinny tape player, and a small crowd of British teens. He looked Emma up and down. “He might give you what you need, sister, but he’s an im-pe-ria-list. Running dog of capitalism.”

  He spit on the ground.

  Lin tugged on Emma’s sleeve. Emma looked like she’d fight, but he pulled her away.

  They walked back, silently, to the hotel.

  “I would have fought,” she said, coming out of his hotel bathroom, stark naked, her hair dripping.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course. And what would it have earned us? I wouldn’t want to go somewhere I wasn’t wanted.”

  He understood the young tug, even. He, himself, not so long ago, hadn’t been sure the Englishmen were like him at all. And China had been exposed to more racial minorities what with trade with Africa and India and immigrants from both in China than any Briton in the last thousand years.

  Emma’s hair sparked under the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It sparked with a red sheen.

  Mongol red, it was called. Few people knew that the Mongols had started their pillaging looking much like the people from India, like other Indo-Europeans. But in Central Europe they’d lingered and intermarried, before descending on western Europe, arriving there pale and tall and, more often than not, red haired.

  By the time they’d destroyed Iberia and moved on to decimate Britain, they weren’t that much different from the Viking predators. Only they’d stayed. They’d destroyed the economy. They’d imposed their system of hierarchic rule and rigid obedience on all of Europe for a hundred years.

  Europe had never got over it.

  Lin folded Emma into his arms and kissed the little golden hairs at the back of her neck.

  What if the Mongols had taken the other way around?

  What if they had gone into China instead, just when Chinese culture was breaking out of its early, rigid mold? What if it had squashed China’s democratic roots before they ever could develop?

  “I’m sorry, Lin,” Emma said. “I should have stood up to him better, anyway. I should have fought. But we need them their faction. They’re racists, but they are willing to stand with us. We’re going to have demonstrations and shame our government in the eyes of the world. They’ll have to give us the right to vote then.”

  * * *

  Students marched up and down in Trafalgar square. It was known as the heart of London. Though to Lin the place looked much like any other square around the older houses having long been demolished and immense, crumbling cement sky scrapers built in their place.

  But it had been named after the battle in which the French had been stopped from taking over all of Europe, like new Mongols.

  As such, it had symbolic value as the most English of all squares.

  Students descended on it, with signs, with chants, with an improvised p.a. system. Day and night they marched up and down.

  Emma was one of the leaders the leader of one of the two factions involved in this.

  Lin brought her soap and food and, sometimes, stayed and listened to her, kept her company.

  But never too long. Never long enough. They couldn’t afford to have the cameras pick him up. The government would claim Chinese agitation.

  And the cameras were coming: from Russia, from China, from the newly freed France, and Iberia, and Germany, even.

  Filming the demonstrations, the yelling.

  “Each day the government endures it,” Emma said. “It’s a sign that they’re weakening. We will win, Lin. I can feel it. And then….” She smiled at him. “Maybe you won’t need to go home.”

  He nodded, handing her a bag with onions and cucumbers, all he’d managed to buy in the hotel.

  The entire city seemed to be under siege, troubled, and the influx of camera crews had stressed the already fragile supply lines. “There is hope,” she said. “See, there is hope. We can win.”

  * * *

  Maybe they could have. Maybe. But the government didn’t relent. It talked of mercy to the students if they surrendered, but not of giving in to their demands. Government men explained to the foreign crews that this was all a misunderstanding.

  “I don’t know Lin,” Emma told him, sounding exhausted. “Every day more and more students leave. They’re tired. They thought it would be easy. Quick. Now….” Smudges of tears showed on her face. “I tried to convince them to retreat by May

  25. Leave the square, having made our point. I think we could do that.”

  “And?” he asked.

  “Mark,” she said. Mark was the guy from the club, the leader of the nationalistic faction that wanted the vote so they could deny it to anyone else. “He says we can’t retreat without having won some points.”

  Lin held her arm. It felt very thin after almost a month here, on the barricades. “Forget this,” he said. “Forget all this. Come with me. Come home with me. Marry me.”

  “Oh,” she looked at him, her sky-blue eyes filled with tears. “I can’t Lin. It’s my land. It’s my battle. I can’t run away.” He walked away feeling defeated. He’d always thought Englishmen were like sheep. But Emma wasn’t. More the pity. Emma wasn’t.

  * * *

  He woke up with the phone ringing, and reached for it, without seeing.

  “Pack up, Lin,” his boss said. “Pack up. We’re going home.”

  “Beg your pardon?” He couldn’t go home. Not without Emma.

  “We’re going home. They’ve brought out the tanks, and Dragon Clouds Unlimited is pulling everyone back home. They don’t want to risk the lives of Chinese nationals.”

  “Tanks?”

  He turned on the light. He turned on the TV, but nothing was playing on any of the stations, nothing except a static pattern and a droning music.

  Lin ran out of his room, to the elevator, down the darkened streets to Trafalgar square.

  Two blocks away he heard screams, cannon booming and the staccato stuttering of machine guns.

  He could swear he smelled the blood.

  But a police cordon stopped him. Shock police, armed, though no one seemed to be trying to break through.

  They identified Lin as a foreigner, as a Chinese, and escorted him meekly back to his embassy, from whence he was shipped home by the next plane.

  * * *

  He didn’t manage to go back until two years later, when it had all calmed down.

  Two years later working for a new employer.

  The images of the massacre in his mind tanks advancing on unprotected Englishmen the images he’d seen on TV at home, he went to Trafalgar square.

  There were no blood stains on the pavement. Britain’s government, still holding on to the ideological remnants of communism, had become in all but name a free-trade society.

  Dark cement giants still surrounded the square, but they’d been painted bright colors. Tourists ambled amid street vendors.

  And yet, Britons still couldn’t vote, and from the interior stories of brutality and dark prepotence leaked, now and then.

  Lin wondered lost in the square, as if he were in a foreign world.

  He’d had an agency looking for Emma, for any trace of her. They found nothing save that she was missing, presumed dead in the Trafalgar square massacre.

  The detective had rescued one thing, though Emma’s book of sketches. He’d sent it to Lin in Hangchow. It had arrived just before Lin left for London.

  Opening it, Lin had been surprised. The pictures were unmistakably of England: there were the old monuments, the trees that seemed to hug the ground, the rolling hills.

  But it was an England of cottages and pretty little towns.

  An England as England could have been? As Europe could have been without the Mongols?

  Lin didn’t know. But he carried the notebook around with him as he set about establishing an office for the international organization that monitored human rights abuses.


  To prevent the Mongols from continuing to destroy everything in their path a thousand years after their defeat.

  He would work for this small agency against overwhelming evil.

  This would be his gift to Emma.

  The Green Bay Tree

  While doing research for my novel Ill Met By Moonlight, I came across everything that was happening around the time this story is set. The biographer was sympathetic to Judith and her strange marriage, but I started wondering how all of it made her straight-laced sister Susannah feel. In fact, how would Susannah, married to the very religious Doctor Hall feel about her eccentric family life?

  Susannah Hall stood in her spacious, oak lined front hall, and looked through the little, thick glass squares amid the lead panes.

  Her husband, Dr. John Hall, was late from his round of visiting his patients around Stratford. Susannah had given dinner to their daughter, five year old Elizabeth, and sent her to bed, and she’d set the mutton joint in the kitchen, close enough to the fire to keep it warm. Jane, the kitchen wench, had gone to bed, also.

  Blurred through the window, Susannah saw the square building of the Guild Chapel, stark and dark-looking, under the grey sky of late March. Just out of sight, out of the corner of her eye, to the left, she saw a glimmer of light, no doubt from the many tapers lighting up the hall of New Place and shining through the big windows onto the street.

  When Susannah had been a child, she and her brother and sister had lived, with their mother, in a much more modest house, in Henley street, and made their own tapers of mutton grease. Her father had lived in London, and who knew how or in what conditions. The only joy the little house had known came with her father’s sporadic visits, his stories of London, of the theater.

  Now, Hall Croft, where Doctor Hall had brought Susannah when he married her was yet a different type of house—large and spacious, but sparely ornamented. No painted cloths on the walls, such as had graced her parents’ home. No colorful cushions. Only, everything cleaned and polished and right, beauty coming from a preservation of order and Spartan organization, rather than from that excess her father’s house now displayed.