I stood transfixed, soaking in my thoughts, listening to the wind and the scrape of my own strangulated breathing. Clouds slid by. The light shifted. The mountainsides turned from green to gold. Eventually the sun sank into my line of vision, refracting into blades of copper. I turned and started to make my way back down to the populated section of the wall. In the distance, I could see Trevor and his ragtag friends climbing together over the crumbling stones with their sleeping bags, their musical instruments, their knapsacks bulging with liquor. They were going to camp for the night in a guardhouse.
It would be so easy to call out his name and hobble after him. He would wait for me, I knew. He’d take me in his arms, slide his hand down my back, kiss my neck hungrily. For weeks, I’d been teasing myself with licentious fantasies. Now I could do it, really do it with him, right here. Watch the sun go down, then voom! How wild would that be? What kind of a story would that make? Think of the bragging rights. There didn’t seem to be anyone patrolling the wall at all. We could truly get away with it. Trevor and I: we could fuck right here under the stars, with a view to Mongolia—then titillate ourselves with the memory of it for the rest of our waking lives.
But the Great Wall was a cathedral. I could see that now. Partying on it, strewing the place with empty liquor bottles and milky condoms, was a desecration. As much as I liked to see myself as some sort of erotic outlaw, the truth was, I couldn’t bring myself to do something so obnoxious and illegal. I found myself instead slowly descending the wall one step at a time, taking care not to twist an ankle. In the distance, I could make out Trevor’s muscular V-shaped back, receding over the stones.
The next evening, I would sit beside him in his Beijing hotel room as he packed for a morning train to Xian. He would tell me that I missed the most amazing night of his life—and when he kissed me tenderly and murmured, “God, you’re gorgeous, girlie. The things I could’ve done to you up there,” I would feel a huge kick of regret.
But that afternoon I simply made my way back down to the entrance, forked over fifty yuan for a crimson souvenir sweatshirt reading I Climbed the Great Wall of China, and obediently boarded the bus back to Beijing with the other docile, law-abiding, gum-chewing tourists.
———
Back at the hotel, Claire was gone. All our belongings were gone. Our room had been vacated, the beds stripped, though the door remained ajar and the lightbulbs still burned, casting ghoulish reflections over the wallpaper. “Claire?” I shouted.
Stupidly I checked inside the closets and the bathtub, as if she might be hiding in them. Just as I began to panic, she appeared behind me in the doorway.
“Oh, there you are,” she said dully. Her newly washed hair was tucked up in her towel, and she was dressed in her pin-striped pajamas, which had started to pill and turn gray. Her eyes were puffy and pink-rimmed. “I got us moved to a better room.” She turned on her heels and headed down the hallway, her flip-flops slapping against the linoleum.
Our new room was a mirror image of the first, except that the wallpaper was an angry red and the bathroom fixtures were mustard colored. “No bugs,” she said, blowing her nose. “I made sure.”
She’d taken the liberty, I saw, of unpacking our things and arranging our toiletries neatly on one of the shelves. Plopping down on the bed she’d claimed for herself, she picked up Lonely Planet and resumed reading, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I stood there, not knowing quite how to respond. I was beginning to feel like I needed a TV Guide just to keep track of her moods.
Slowly I removed my day pack and unpeeled the Velcro straps of my Reeboks. Inexplicably I felt compelled to do all of this as quietly as possible.
“Oh,” she said finally, looking up, “I forgot to ask. How was the wall? You didn’t sleep out?”
I shook my head and sat down on the mattress beside her. “Oh, Claire. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Please. I want to go back there with you. I want to spend my birthday on the Great Wall of China. Not like Trevor. No wild party. Just you and me. You really have to see it.”
I expected her to fight. But she just shrugged limply. “Sure. Okay. If that’s what you want.”
Then her voice broke. She started to weep.
“Claire?”
Her cry gave way to a wail. She covered her face with her hands.
I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Claire, what is it?”
For a moment she heaved with emotion.
“Oh, God,” she said at last, blowing her nose, “the day went so well at first. I rented a bicycle and went to the Grand Hotel Beijing and had tea, okay? Proper tea, like they might serve at the Plaza. They serve it with cream and gingerbread, and you sit in Western armchairs and listen to classical music, and it’s clean and warm and quiet, and it feels so civilized. Civilized and elegant—nobody’s spitting. Nobody’s frying vegetables in the gutter. And the waiters speak English. And then? Then I biked over to the Main Post Office, by Tiananmen, and put in a collect call home. It took an hour and forty-five minutes for them to put me through, but my father was there, and Dominic and Alexander were home for the weekend, so I got to talk to all of them. And it was just so great to hear their voices, you know? It was evening there, and everyone had finished dinner. And then, later, after I went around and did my research, and, you know, stuff, and did some reconnaissance and all that, I came back here, and I just really, really wanted to talk to them some more. And the hotel can book collect calls from here, too, I found out—it just takes longer. So I waited in our room for, like, two hours, and the call finally came through—and, and I heard my father’s voice again, and oh, Susie. He was really upset. It was, like, four o’clock in the morning back there, and he was crying to me and shouting and begging me to come home. And I just felt… I felt… there were all these cockroaches running all over the walls and this awful banging from the courtyard—I could barely even hear him—and I hadn’t had anything to eat except for the cookies at the Grand Hotel, because when I was out on the bike, the only dumpling house I could find along Qianmen—the Chinese in it were all just staring and staring at me like I was some kind of freak—and then I heard my father’s voice, and he sounded so worried—”
She keeled forward, hugging her stomach, and let out an anguished sob.
“Oh, Claire.” I reached over and stroked her hair. “I get homesick, too.”
Claire sat up. “No. It’s not that.” She blew her nose again. “It’s—so I get off the phone with him, right? And I go downstairs and demand that we get another room because I just can’t take another minute of the cockroaches crawling all over the place, and it’s this huge hassle, Suze. The guy at the front desk doesn’t understand a word of English, and it takes an eternity, and finally I check out this room and move all of our stuff into it, and I sit down, right? And I just try to calm myself down for a while, right, so I open the guidebook and a map I got to figure out a plan for tomorrow. And then I see—I see this… ”
She unfurled a Chinese tourist map of Beijing and jabbed her index finger in the middle. There, amid little dots corresponding to names on the legend, was one for a small building labeled “PLO.”
“PLO,” she cried. “What the fuck is the PLO doing here?”
I studied the map. The PLO building appeared to be in an area crammed with embassies and government buildings. “Are you sure it’s the ‘PLO’ PLO and not, maybe, I don’t know? The People’s Leadership Office or something?”
It seemed unlikely to me that the People’s Republic of China had much to do with Yasir Arafat. It seemed even less likely that the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in 1986 was still widely classified as a terrorist organization, would have one of its headquarters openly listed on a tourist map.
Claire glared at me. “Yes, it’s the PLO!” she yelled. She grabbed the map away and threw it on the floor. She buried her face in her hands and let out another sob, her blond hair tumbling forward.
“This is not good,” she cried
after a moment, blowing her nose. “We could be in terrible danger.”
I sat there, stunned, not sure what to say. On September 5, two weeks before we’d left for Hong Kong, a Pan Am flight had been hijacked in Pakistan. While I’d been serving Harvey Wallbangers and answering telephones in New York City, and Claire had been basting herself in Ban de Soleil in Hilton Head, terrorists had gone through the cabin of Flight 73 collecting passengers’ passports and singling out Israelis and Americans. Three other hijackings had taken place the previous year, including one of a TWA flight by Hezbollah, who’d killed an American, and another by Palestinian militants, who’d taken over a cruise ship and murdered a disabled American Jew. For days, the news had reported on how the terrorists had thrown him and his wheelchair overboard.
Yet although these incidents were alarming, none of them resonated that much or transformed the American national psyche. The Cold War was at its height, and everyone in the United States was far more preoccupied with the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The culture was full of it. “No Nukes” rallies and rock concerts. Movies like Top Gun and War Games. An apocalyptic made-for-TV movie The Day After that was screened nationally, with call-in psychologists on hand for viewers traumatized by scenes of atomic Armageddon. President Reagan tested a microphone once by saying, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes” (Ha-ha! Just kidding, folks!), and people went batshit. Certainly, nuclear annihilation was the foremost fear in my mind. For years, every night before I went to sleep, I prayed, Please, God, don’t let everything blow up in a mushroom cloud.
Even if there really was an outpost of the PLO in Beijing, it didn’t seem to me like much to worry about. The PLO, ETA, the IRA, the Brigada Rosa, Abu Nidal, the Contras, the Shining Path, skinheads: someone was always building a bomb in a basement somewhere. The PLO, to me, seemed like the least of our problems.
Granted, two years later, in 1988, a friend of mine would be blown up aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, and I wouldn’t be nearly so sanguine after that. And after September 11, 2001, I would become so hysterical and traumatized I’d require medication.
But at that precise moment in history, I was still young and unfazed. Even if there actually was a PLO office in China, why on earth would the Palestinians waste their time on two backpackers holed up in a fleabag hotel with a bunch of tampons, some paperback novels, and an astrology book?
“Look,” I said gently. “I don’t really think they’d be targeting us, Claire. I mean, for starters, your last name is Dutch and mine is English. It’s not like we’re named Shlomo and Lipschitz, and we’re going around waving American flags or anything—”
She stared at me with alarm. “Susie,” she whispered, “you don’t know what these people are capable of.”
She wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands, sniffled, and readjusted herself on the bed until she was facing me.
“Okay.” Taking my hand, she cleared her throat. “You know how you told me you have a secret mistrust of Germans? And you know how I got on your case about it? Well, I guess I owe you an apology. Because I have the same sort of prejudice. Except that mine’s toward the Arabs. They’re dangerous, Susie. They’re crazy and fanatical. I don’t trust them, and Adom doesn’t trust them, and neither does my father. He says that they’re going to cause more trouble in this world than anything we’ve seen so far. And, Suze, he knows things. And so do I. I have special information, Suze. I have information about what’s coming up.”
“What’s coming up?” I said warily. Her tone was suddenly chilling. “What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “I can’t say. Just promise me we’ll be careful? If I say not to talk to someone or to stay away from someplace, do you promise you’ll listen?”
I stared at her. It seemed to me she was being completely irrational. For a moment I was utterly dumbstruck. I felt a flood of anxiety.
But then I realized.
The small daily privations and discomforts of China were becoming cumulative, wearing Claire down like iron filings, messing with her head. She was sleep deprived and possibly malnourished. For nearly three weeks, she’d been subsisting mostly on toast, dumplings, rice, malaria pills, and beer. I’d seen her at meals: She hadn’t been eating. Our socks and shirts were crunchy with grime. Bundled in layers, we were always either freezing or sweating. And then of course she’d been sick. China was exhausting her. It was like three weeks straight of pulling all-nighters. It could make anyone paranoid.
I decided to humor her. “Okay. I promise. We’ll be careful,” I said, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “But in return, promise me something? That you’ll eat a little more? And try to get some sleep?”
———
The next morning, Claire announced that she wanted us to leave Beijing as soon as possible; we should celebrate my birthday on the Great Wall, then skedaddle. “We’ve got to go someplace peaceful, someplace in the country, with rivers and trees,” she said. “Let’s go south to Guilin. Everyone says it’s beautiful there, and warm. I just know I’ll feel calmer.”
This sounded like a fine plan to me. Every time I inhaled now, it felt as if I’d cracked a rib, and the pollution was giving me headaches. A few more days in Beijing were about all I could handle.
As soon as we finished breakfast, we rented bicycles and headed up toward the train station to book tickets. It was so cold that pedaling felt like whiplash. By the time we reached the City Moat, we’d lost all feeling in our fingers. The clothing stalls along the canal sold vinyl jackets trimmed with fake fur and old army surplus overcoats. Claire propped her bike up against one of the booths and tried on an enormous military coat. It enveloped her in padding; she no longer looked human so much as like a big olive-colored sausage roll.
“This is perfect,” she said, drawing the hood up. It was so big, it fell down over her forehead, visually scalping her. “Camouflage. No one will be able to tell who the hell I am in this, what nationality.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that putting on a Chinese army coat did nothing to hide the fact that she was five-nine and blond. Her hair peeked out of the hood in yellow-white filaments.
Meanwhile, the only outerwear I could find that fit over my breasts was an ugly bubblegum-pink acrylic sweater. I looked like a giant powder puff. The two of us now made quite a sight. If we thought we’d garnered looks from the Chinese before, I suspected we really were in for a shock now.
By the time we reached the train station, there was a long line just to get the little paper tickets that entitled us to wait in the CITS line. When we finally got those, we sat on the wooden benches interminably. The cavernous waiting room was smoky and dank. I couldn’t stop coughing. Everyone who walked by openly stared at us, chewing, spitting. “What?” Claire snapped at them. “What are you looking at? What is so fucking interesting?”
“Easy, Genevieve,” I said.
Another hour went by. The woman behind the CITS ticket window was no more than six feet away from us. Although fully aware of our presence, she slid beads around on an abacus for a little while, then thumbed through a stack of receipts wrapped in a rubber band, licking her fingertips and moving her lips as she counted. When she was finally finished, she stared off into infinity. After a good fifteen minutes, she checked her watch and rearranged herself on her stool. Just when we thought she would finally deign to help us, she reached below the counter, pulled out a small apple, and began coring it with a pocketknife.
Claire grew more and more agitated, which made me oddly Zen-like. Back in New York City, my impulse would’ve been to beat the ticket seller to death with her goddamn abacus, but now that we were deep in the People’s Republic of China, I thought: Well, what can we do, really? A certain philosophical resignation set in. Or perhaps the Communist bureaucracy had simply worn me down.
Finally Claire snapped, “Okay. That’s it.” Grab
bing her wallet out of her shoulder bag, she pulled out a fistful of FEC notes and stomped over to the CITS desk.
“Look, don’t tell me you don’t speak English because I know that you do,” she said, pounding the ticket counter. “And don’t act like you don’t see us sitting over there, because I know damn well that you do, too. We have been waiting for almost two hours. And I don’t know who you think you are, but you should know one thing. My father is a very important businessman back in America. And once I tell him how you people have ignored us and abused our goodwill, you will not hear the end of it.”
I stepped up behind Claire, took her by the elbow, and tried to guide her back over to the bench. She flailed angrily, jerking her arm away. “No, Susie. This is bullshit.” She turned to the CITS representative, who now sat so motionless, she appeared to be fossilized.
“We’ve filled out the forms, we’ve brought our passports, we have all the correct change, we’ve got our wait-on-the-goddamn-bench tickets, and there’s nobody else here. So what’s the problem? Why the hell are you ignoring us?”
A CITS manager with a gold nameplate reading “Ed” came scurrying over.
“Yes, miss?” he said uneasily. “Can I help you?” He swung open the little half door that separated the waiting area from the ticket counter and made his way around to the CITS window.
“Well, gee. Let’s see. I’m at the train station. And I’m at the ticket counter. So, as radical as this may sound, I’m here because I actually want to buy some train tickets—not just sit on a bench all day with my thumb up my ass,” Claire said.
“Okay, you give us forms. You give us passports, please,” Ed said.
“We want two hard sleeper tickets to Guilin. Leaving the morning of October 23. Is that too much to ask?”
“Yes. You give us forms. You give us passport.”
As soon as we handed over our documents, he disappeared.
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Page 20