Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

Trafalgar Square

This story came while researching for a Chinese Fantasy novel which, of this writing, is still not finished. The misfortunes of China make interesting reading but in the situation just before the Mongol invasion—the ascension of a middle class, the falling in disuse of old ways, I caught a glimmer of the same type of situation before the French revolution. I wondered if the very concept of freedom as we hold it was an accident of history that might never have existed at all. Or might have existed in quite a different way. Since what I was reading was—of necessity—written in the nineteenth century, I started getting very tired of references to the mysterious oriental mind. Being convinced that human races have cultures but human individuals do not inherit these by birth, only by raising, this statement annoyed me. I wondered if, perhaps, things had gone differently, the Chinese might not be more like us than we might be like ourselves….

“Please, Mister.” The girl slid up to Yu Lin, as he entered the London Liberation hotel. “Please Mister. May I read your paper?” She spoke awfully accented Mandarin and reached a small hand towards the Chinese newspaper that he carried, rolled, atop his briefcase.

Yu Lin stopped, his business-casual long green tunic rustling around him.

He’d heard it all in his year and a half as a business executive in London. Please Mister, do you have soap? Please Mister, have spare cash? Please Mister, I’ll go up to your room and make you feel good.

He was sick and tired of London, the misery of London like a sore, infected wound upon the face of the world. He longed for home, with a near physical desire.

But that, May I read your paper? was a new one.

He forgot his last business meeting, the ever-present question of when he’d get to go home, and looked wearily at the girl.

She wore dark blue peasant style loose pants, and the type of tunic that used to be called a worker’s tunic. Both had the uneven shine of polyester much in need of washing. Her lank blond hair fell to her shoulders in unwashed clumps.

Around them, the would-be sumptuous hotel bristled with early evening activity. Business men, mostly Chinese, but a few Russians also, walked past in groups or alone, talking loudly of new ventures, capital transactions amid the scraggly potted palms, the sagging plastic-looking sofas, the already-flaking faux marble columns.

Which explained how this English girl had managed to sneak in here. Doormen were usually better than that at keeping locals away.

Had to be, what with the skinheads and radicals forever ready to murder the businessmen they considered interlopers in their native homeland.

“You,” One of the two doormen a too-thin, too pale Englishman in a too large grey uniform, approached running. “You.” He pointed a finger at the girl. “You, get out of here. You don’t belong here.”

“No.” Lin stood in front of the girl, conscious of her smell of rancid sweat and dirty clothes. “No. She’s with me.”

The guard stopped, confused. “With you?” he asked, in the very bad mandarin such people spoke.

“With me.” Even as he said it, Lin wondered about his mental health. He’d never before tried to protect an Englishman. He didn’t even like Englishmen.

He wanted to go home to China.

The girl looked startled, then smiled, showing crooked teeth.

“She’s not registered to practice here,” the doorman protested, at the same time casting Lin a puzzled glance, as if wondering what Lin could see in such a creature.

Prostitutes, like everything else in Europe, were registered, accounted for. And paid a fat fee to be allowed to practice in hotels where foreigners congregated.

Everyone else, the amateurs who offered themselves every ten steps, practiced in alleys, behind garden walls or in their own communal apartments, with all the neighbors looking on.

Lin sighed. He reached into the pocket inside his broad left sleeve and retrieved three copper cash, which he flung at the man. “She is now.”

The imbalance of currencies was so great that such a meager tip made the man bow three times. “Certainly, certainly, mister, miss.”

But, as he walked with the girl towards the elevators at the far end of the lobby, past the potted plants and strangely granitic sofas, Lin could feel the man’s eyes on the back of his skull, analyzing him, wondering what a well-dressed, up and coming Chinese businessman could want with a scruffy, dirty piece of baggage such as that.

Lin wondered too.

It was the newspaper, he decided later.

Had she asked for soap, or money, or offered herself, Lin would not have given her a second thought. But her odd blue eyes—Lin still couldn’t think of blue eyes but as being odd full of greedy speculation, while she asked for the newspaper that he carried folded atop his briefcase. That had disturbed his thoughts.

Later he sat in the restaurant of the hotel, across a grease-smeared table from the Englishwoman and watched her greedily turn the pages of the newspaper, while the steak he’d bought her lay forgotten in its chipped plate, at the side of the table.

“You’re not eating,” he said.

He himself had scant appetite. Beef in England always smelled spoiled and was a color only slightly lighter than gunmetal grey. The result of being imported over who knew what distances.

But he knew how scant meat of any kind was in England and what a treat the locals considered it.

Strange, he thought. He’d come in with Dragon Clouds Unlimited, a cigarette factory. Unable to sell cigarettes in the free world where doctors had made the ill effects of tobacco too well known, Chinese cigarette companies preyed on Europeans and, instead of the many things Europe needed, exported this one vice, this one bad habit, this added bit of pollution.

She looked up at him, glanced at her steak, cut a piece of it and ate it quickly, then returned to the paper.

“It says here,” she said. “It says here that students have rebelled in France. That the government conceded and agreed to the right to free elections.”

Lin nodded, fascinated at her reaction. “You didn’t know?”

“One hears….” She shook her head. “Rumors. But one can’t be sure. Can never be sure. The news never mention it.”

“But” Lin started. Oh, sure, Europe had been in the grip of communism for almost fifty years, and communications had been severely restricted. But now things were different. It was the 1990s, as the Europeans counted time, from the death of their crucified God. “It’s been happening everywhere. Surely you know that? France, and Iberia, and Germany. One after the other, their governments have collapsed, and free elections….”

“Free elections!” She looked like a child hearing mention of a forbidden sweet. Her eyes sparkled, and her mouth opened in wishful desire.

Her eyes looked the color of the sky over Hangchow, his native town, he thought. He smiled at her, though he fancied that at her words there had been a lull in the conversations around them, a stop in the chatter of businessmen and hookers at the other too-close together tables.

She laughed at his smile. “My name is Emily Dorset,” she said. “I probably should have told you that before.” She looked down at her steak, smiled at him. “Since you bought me dinner and everything. My friends call me Emma.”

“Mine is Yu Lin,” he said. “I come from Hangchow, a provincial city in central China.”

Just the thought of home, the thought of houses not pressed together, the thought of houses that weren’t rabbit warrens in the monolithic cement of totalitarian countries, brought with it a wave of longing. He thought of sailing on the reservoir of Hangchow, and sighed.

He’d given it all up to come to England. It had seemed such a good idea. Go to England. Introduce them to free enterprise.

Instead, he was working for a monolithic corporation in exile amid the barbarians.

And he smiled at that, because that was exactly what his ancestors had called the rest of the world. Barbarians. And Yu Lin who’d thought himself so modern had, over the last year, come to think of them just that way.

He’d thought Englishmen were just like Chinese, only with different customs, religion and politics. Now he wasn’t so sure.

He wasn’t so sure there wasn’t something wrong, servile, subservient, at the bottom of the European soul.

Emma was smiling into his abstracted expression. “You’re thinking of home, aren’t you?”

He felt himself blush, a heat on his cheeks.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I often feel that way too, only I have no home to return to, except….”

“Except?” Lin prompted. Her sky-blue eyes had darkened, as though a cloud passed over them.

“Nothing. I was going to say if I had a home, it would be a home more like China, with human rights, with vote, with freedom.”

Now Lin was sure of it, an almost palpable listening silence in the hotel.

England was supposed to be freer now. England couldn’t touch him. But what would they do to Emma?

“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 us,” 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.