by Lily Pond
Closer now, against a few puffy clouds, the hot air balloons are lined up like bloated exclamation points. Ruth’s freckled arm reaches into the cooler and pulls out a beer. You worried me out there yelling, she says. I’ve never seen you like that.
Dominick takes the can she offers, and it’s moist and cold, a stunning, joyous cold.
Ruth, he says.
II. From the East
“Under the silk of a sari so fine.”
Not an Angel
Paulann Petersen
Wings of my desire grow—
I swear, they do—
from my breastbone,
under my very eyes,
from this uneasy place
easing out, easing in
with each dizzy swell of breath.
Unholy at best, they sprout,
they spread feather by feather,
each plume escaping
its gaudy sisters
like fingers of an opening fan.
Enough to have such wings
and not be an angel.
But here! between
my breasts—their wild rustle
coaxing my nipples into
fierce knots of unrest.
Why can’t these wings
sprout from my shoulders?
Then if I turned
my back away, I could be
a little discreet.
But no. Lifting away
to pump in front of my body,
they wag me around as if
I were a wisp of smoke.
Of course I wear oversized coats.
Of course I keep my arms
Folded across my chest.
I’m afraid their huge
flapping will churn
the air in this room,
will set forth
an irreparable storm—
first here and there
and over there—of sighs,
of heartbeat racket
wherever I go.
The Angels of Tian-An-Men Square
Ingrid Hill
MASSED AGAINST THE GATES of heaven: angels’ wings, a dense profusion. This is truly a mass: hierarchy is nowhere. They push and they press, with profound desperation. The gates—high-burnished bronze set with mother-of-pearl and with stones, precious and semiprecious (for these are earth’s classifications, not heaven’s)—are shut quite as tight as the valve of the shell of some celestial mollusk, and nothing will pry them apart. It might as well be that interminable, bottomlessly sad time in between Adam’s weakness and Christ’s hanging limp on the tree at Jerusalem, but it is 1989, counting from that same Christ’s birth.
From below, the great massing of wings is lit with a red glow, sinister and infernal. Tanks burn in the streets of Beijing. There is the smell of urine in concrete that wafts heavenward from these long two months of the peaceful occupation. There is the white sticky smell of rice, the pungent brown smell of soy vinegar. There is the smell of the aftershave of Western adventurer-journalists. There is the smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken: the franchise abuts the square, and the billboard Colonel smiles out benignly above the crush. There is the smell of blood, student blood, soldier blood; there is the smell of birth-blood of a baby born in the heart of the Square just before midnight the third of June, the mother unable to leave in the crush of the thousands, and then of the baby’s death-blood mingling with the mother’s, the child dying in the wild firing of rifles.
These angels range from the earthliest to the most gossamer, close-to-the-throne, and ethereal. The feel of their wings is this way: the archangels and guardian angels’ are most like swans’, solid and silken of surface; beneath that, a wry muscularity. These angels are the closest we know to earthly birds: the same principles of flight apply, and they seem to have a fleshly and quasi-human weight.
Angels from the Second Heaven—the Virtues, whose job is to bring all things embryonic to fruition—are there, too. Their wings have the insubstantial feel of old rags used to wipe chalk from an ancient classroom’s blackboard. These angels hum. The Dominions, also from the second rank, seem not to have wings but rather to be apparitions of rings, light that glows like the neon sunset bottom of an old Wurlitzer jukebox.
There are Seraphim, too, the highest: they have wings next to which those of dragonflies seem heavy armor. These wings are spun of air too thin to breathe: they flash gold, and their humming is out of the range of our hearing.
But these are all angels imported from the West, perhaps trailed along clamped to the hems of the cassocks of missioners.
There are also the xian, the “feathered folk” who in Han times dosed themselves with the germ of gold and jade—magical elixirs—and ate the fruit of purple polypore fungus. Wang Chung, first-century Chinese philosopher, spoke of the xian. “By eating what is germinal,” he wrote, “their bodies are lightened, and so they are capable of spiritual transcendence.” The book of Chuang Tzu describes them: “divine persons … whose flesh resembles ice and snow, soft and delicate like sequestered girl-children; they do not eat the five cereals; they suck the wind and drink the dew; they mount on clouds and vapors and drive the flying dragons—thus they rove beyond the four seas.”
“In the hearts of girls,” says Liang Xueping, “there is a special thing that is not in the hearts of men. I think men do not have …” She cannot think of what the word is in English. She is speaking to Julia Rowe, on the train heading north from the provincial capital to Beijing. Liang Xueping wants to buy a skirt with the money she has earned from giving English lessons to an elderly surgeon. It is the first of June, 1989.
Liang Xueping teaches English classes at the Medical College. Her students are driven. They study with a passionate schizophrenia: they learn everything that their teachers imagine that a Western doctor should know, and they study traditional Chinese medicine as well: how to concoct pills from fern-leaves and goat-dung, how to follow the flow of life-energy, qi, through the body, and heal patients by sticking them full of needles, into their cheeks, their temples, the backs of their hands. Liang Xueping teaches them the word “porcupine” in English when they are talking about acupuncture. All but the most sober of them laugh at her impression of the animal.
She is a beautiful woman. Her hair falls sleek and evenly cut about her collar. She has a deep dimple that somehow belies her intelligence. Her students’ English is choppy and their accents are at one farther remove from “real” English because they are learning the tongue from a non-native speaker. Her worst student—from the “countryside,” the bleak nowhere out there in the provinces—sounds as if there were an avalanche in his mouth. All his r’s tumble and roll like rocks. She thinks it is a mercy that he will not be teaching English to anyone else.
She says, “Girls have heart. Girls have pity. I think men do not.” Her husband, she says, “is not clever at pleasing a woman.” She tells this to Julia Rowe, who has come from America—from a small town in east Iowa—to teach English at the teachers’ college. Julia Rowe laughs. “Is this everywhere the same?” Xueping asks. “Are all men so unclever? If it is true, it is a very sad thing.”
Julia Rowe laughs again. “I think it is generally true,” Julia Rowe says, “but not always.”
“Ah,” Xueping says. “Then. I believe that the meaning in what you say is this: that your American boyfriend must be very clever.” She flashes her dimple. Julia Rowe’s boyfriend Martin is, like herself, a teacher, a “foreign expert.” They are meeting him in Beijing. He has gone ahead of them into the city with Ellen the older professor, a widow, whom all the Chinese students call Mrs. Ellen, in deference to her age, which they revere.
Julia Rowe looks up at her, questioning, from beneath her eyebrows.
“One evening I came on my bicycle,” Xueping says. “To your room in the hostel. It was late but I thought you might be up. It was the time I had that little good luck statue for you. But your light was out. I could see through the transom. I did not knock.
“
Then I heard sounds through the door. You were giggling, and then it was quiet. It was not a very Chinese thing for me to do,” she says, making a sheepish face that, with her dimpling, becomes a flirtatious one. “I stood still and I listened. And then there was sobbing, and then there were unearthly sounds. It was all your voice. I do not know how long this was I listened. I did not hear Martin.”
Julia Rowe sits with her head in her hands. Xueping cannot see her face.
“I think you were happy,” says Xueping, with some finality. “I have never experience this kind of happiness.”
Julia Rowe lifts her head. There are tears in her eyes, but Xueping cannot tell whether they are tears of joy or sadness. Perhaps they are both, or something else entirely. “Martin is clever,” says Julia. Then she begins laughing and crying at the same time. “Do you think anything will happen in the Square? With the soldiers?”
Xueping shakes her head. “No. This is the time that all flowers will bloom. Not like Mao’s time. I have seen nothing so beautiful as this in all my life. We have no religion in China, but this has been two months’ religion. To me. All this peace. All this happiness. All this time. Deng Xiao Ping has lost the mandate of heaven. Is this odd, that we talk this way? Mandate of heaven, we say, when we say there is none, is no God, no heaven?”
“The world’s full of such contradictions,” says Julia Rowe. She hears her own stilted syntax. This is how one winds up talking, she thinks, intensifying the awkwardness, finding herself calling herself “one,” laughing to herself.
“Do you truly love Martin?” says Xueping.
“Very much,” says Julia Rowe. Outside the train window, the grey China light hangs over a field where a peasant plows bright green rows springing from earth that is pale and dry. It might as well be a millennium earlier. “Truly,” says Julia Rowe.
Xueping thinks of Li Yi, a friend of hers about whom she has had news this past week. Li Yi, a college roommate, a woman of passionate melancholy, has thrown herself off Huang Mountain in Anhui Province because her lover has left her for the daughter of a prominent official.
Xueping thinks of Li Yi sitting on her bunk in their dorm room, seven other bunks crowded into that small space, tattered dishtowel fabric curtaining off her bed. She remembers the pictures of old American love movies taped to the wall in Li Yi’s bed-space.
Xueping thinks of bone like thin fine porcelain shattered, flesh broken over rocks, delicate brain tissue splattered. Xueping has known such intensity only in books. She looks over at Julia, who is watching the peasant plow. Julia’s eyes still seem wet.
In the year 1058, C.E., during the reign of the Emperor Jiayou, in that same Anhui Province, an object as bright as a pearl appeared in the sky, over a lake. A man who lived on the shore of the lake was out fishing. The fish were not hungry tonight. Suddenly, not far from him, illuminating the night, there was an apparition, a pearl-shaped something the size of a kang, a communal bed, in the sand near the water. A door opened up in the pearl, and inside was another pearl the size of a fist, which emitted a silver-white light. It lit the trees, shadowing everything; the light from the fist-pearl reflected off mica that glinted in shoreside rocks.
Then suddenly the door closed, and the thing took off over the water, descending finally like the sun into the distance, seeming to sink into the lake. It reappeared again and again. In the town of Fanliang, the people built a pavilion near the highroad and congregated there to watch the pearl in the sky late at night. There was fine woodwork in ancient patterns supporting the delicately shaped roof. They called the structure the Pearl Pavilion.
Martin has told Julia this story. “UFO’s?” he has suggested.
“Angels,” she has answered. “Maybe they’re the same thing.”
“My Chinese professor said there are no angels in China,” says Martin.
“Your Chinese professor is wrong,” says Julia.
“Humph,” says Martin, disputing, denying. “Uppity woman.” He grabs her around her waist and puts a Fleetwood Mac tape from home—someone has sent it for Christmas—on their Panda-brand boom box. The blaster comes with the room, along with a color television. Luxury for the foreign experts. The song is “As Long as You Follow.” He dances her over the richly spread feathers of the phoenix woven into the rug that warms the concrete floor of their room. His hand is firm at her waist.
“You bet,” says Julia Rowe. “Uppity. The only way to fly.”
“Eighteen-ninety,” says Martin, in the tone that says here comes one more story. She loves all his stories. “The years of the railroad barons and vaudeville back home. In Nanjing, at the Zhu Que Bridge, one more apparition, egg-shaped, glowing red, in the twilight sky. There is a famous painting of this, by a guy named Wu Yu Rou. It’s called ‘Red Flames in the Sky.’ I saw the painting in Shanghai. Some people said it was a meteor. Some said a children’s kite. Wrong-o, babe. A UFO.”
“Angels,” says Julia Rowe.
The chords of the bass guitar vibrate between the dancers. Fleetwood Mac keeps on singing.
Mrs. Ellen is walking the streets—she is quite a walker, she wears highly sensible and ugly walking shoes—waiting for Julia and Xueping to arrive. The transit workers have been striking for two weeks now. Word had come down that Deng meant to send the army into the cavernous subway halls, to keep them there until he might send them storming out upon the city. So workers cut all the power lines in the subways, and the buses sit now disused, gathering dust at their barn.
An ambulance makes its way slowly through the crowds who fill the streets near the Square. Its siren is urgent but powerless. It is carrying a hunger striker to hospital. Mrs. Ellen buys a pale, flavorless popsicle from a street vendor. The street vendor addresses her in choppy English. Mrs. Ellen asks what the woman thinks of the protest in the square.
“The student are always right,” the woman says solemnly. “History say this. The student are always right.” Her head is wrapped in a white kerchief. Its tail waggles as she shakes her head. “I wish only that they save their health. I give them many popsicle. I say them that they must not die of hunger. Or what is to live for?”
Mrs. Ellen tries to untie the knot of that odd, oblique question, fails, and keeps on walking.
In the Forbidden City, beside the Square, soldiers mass, waiting. They are young, very young, and their uniforms are mostly far too big. Their faces are bony or babyish. They come from the outlying provinces, so far away that the dialect of Beijing is but a mystery to them. None of them knows anything of the mind of these privileged students. They are peasants. The army is all they have ever aspired to, if they have even aspired to that. They cannot imagine anything else. The last time they imagined anything was when an old grandmother told them a pre-Maoist folktale when no one from the Party was listening.
They have been told little about the protests. They have been sequestered in their brown shadowy garrison, in the same city where Julia and Martin and Ellen and Xueping teach, one hundred seventy miles to the south, and news of the many weeks of peaceful sit-in has been kept from them.
All that they know is that there are many students in the Square. They are told that the students are violent, dangerous. They are told there is a dreadful disease rampant in the Square. They will be given shots to prevent their contracting this dire virus. The shots will contain no immunity: they will contain concentrated adrenaline and hallucinogenic drugs. The soldiers will enter the Square in a frenzy, shooting everything that moves. Many will die never knowing what happened.
The Christmas before, Martin has starred in a movie at this very garrison, an army training film. It has been quite a joke. While the filming goes on, Julia has sat embroidering a pillowcase with orange and cerise and Prussian blue lily-shaped flowers twining a border of vines. The studio is just a room in the compound. Paint peels from the walls in the dampness. The light is bad.
All sorts of hangers-on sit around, smoking, in uniforms, Mao jackets, flowered polyester shirts Martin says must h
ave been stolen by undertakers off the corpses of ticket-takers at X-rated theaters in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1972.
“Maybe they got them off UFO’s,” Julia says.
Martin has been recruited by someone who hears that this foreign expert is a friendly one. Martin plays a Western spy trying to buy military secrets from a young cadre. The director of the film makes large pantomiming hand motions about the ridiculousness of their enterprise. You, a spy!?! We, your enemies?!? How preposterous.
In America, preparations are being made to film a script which will be called “Jacob’s Ladder.” Audiences will find the film’s premise amazing: that the United States Army in Vietnam tested drugs like the drugs which are being shot now into the arms of the young Chinese soldiers. Amazing! they think, these Americans, who think the world runs on white bread and righteousness. Some of them will think Preposterous!
Hovering over the square, high above the makeshift tents, above the cans of sweet pale orange sections and plums and lychee fruit, above the tape recorders playing decadent music from Taiwan, above the buckets of piss and shit, there are the angels.
The archangel Michael is there, the Angel of Death, who drove the first humans from Eden. Could anyone see him, there might be more fear of what is coming. But no one can see him. In Muslim tradition, Michael is described as having “wings the color of green emerald, covered with saffron hairs, each of them containing a million faces and mouths and as many tongues which, in a million dialects, implore the pardon of Allah.” No one can see him.
The Koran says that out of the tears Michael sheds over the sins of humankind are formed the cherubim. Michael cries copiously, hanging over the Forbidden City where the innocent, ignorant army is playing cards, smoking its cigarettes. Cherubim spring from his tears as they fall. Were they built of flesh, they would eclipse the sun totally, there are so many of them.
Individual angels can be singled out. Kasdaye, the Angel of Abortion, hovers: he has presided at eighty-odd million abortions in China these past few years. Gabriel, Angel of Dreams, stirs above the dreams of the students: he whispers to them to write in their badly-bound thin-paper notebooks all of their fondest hopes. He prompts them with lines of poems he thinks they might write. When they close their eyes, they feel a fever behind their lids. Yroul, the Angel of Fear, is there; Tabris, the Angel of Free Will; Teiaiel, the Angel of the Future; Phanuel, Angel of Hope; Zad-kiel, Angel of Memory; Achaiah, the Angel of Patience; Matriel, Angel of Rain; Shatiel, the Angel of Silence.