by John Updike
“He means the Arabs,” Jane muttered into Alexandra’s ear. The Chinese bus driver, perhaps losing patience with this American’s unintelligible, amplified voice, took a curve especially fast, without braking. The lecturer staggered and nearly fell down the steps where passengers boarded and disembarked. “We’ll be there in half an hour,” he announced into the microphone, and sat down in the front row.
The day had begun under a pearly overcast, but by the time the buses parked and the tourists trudged up the steep dirt slope, the sun had worked its way through and infected all things visible with dazzle. The path up to the Wall was lined on both sides by stalls selling silk scarves, cotton T-shirts lettered in Chinese characters or Roman characters, and trinkets—painted tops, toy acrobats, birds of plastic and wood that fluttered and chirped at the end of a stick, carved balls within balls, miniature pagodas, images of the Great Wall painted on porcelain ovals or stamped on round medallions—that glittered in the sun. Oppressively, the proprietors of each stall called out to the shuffling tourists, and a few intruded into the roadway, desperately thrusting some gaudy useless thing into a likely-looking Western face. Alexandra kept moving, spurning importunities with a regretful half-smile. Jane didn’t bother with a smile but kept making a sharp hand motion as if brushing away midges hovering in front of her face. Sukie smiled tentatively, with a round-eyed look of piqued curiosity, so the vendors congregated around her, shouting and upholding their wares. Her two companions thought it most politic to keep moving upward, to the Wall’s top. When Sukie, puffing slightly, caught up with them, she was wearing a conical straw hat, tied beneath her chin with a soft red string. Further, she had two more such hats in her hand, and held them out for her friends to don.
“Sssuzanne Mitchell,” Jane admonished her, emphasizing each syllable. “Think of all the germs and filth that have been breathed on it. You shouldn’t touch it, let alone buy it. They still have tuberculosis here. People sspit everywhere; I saw them doing it in the airport.”
“Oh, Jane, don’t be such a pain,” Sukie said breezily. “How often are we going to be in China? Lexa, here, take yours. They were asking fifty each but gave me three for a hundred yuan. That’s about twelve dollars. And they’re so classic. Don’t you like it on me?” She flirted her head this way and that, and tipped the hat back. Her long hair, pulled back over her tidy small ears, was a brassier imitation of its old orange color; her bangs flashed in the sun, on the edge of the shadow of the Great Wall.
“Very much, Sukie,” Alexandra said. “But maybe it’s you more than the hat.” She set her own on her head—one size fit all—and tied the crimson cord beneath her chin. She felt safer in the hat’s weightless shade. Floating motes of sunshine filtered through. Jane doubtfully followed suit, slightly out of step with her sisters in mischief.
Sukie told them, a little breathlessly, “Once I put it on, the other vendors stopped pestering me. It was magic.” Alexandra saw her lips tense, to get more air, after that little climb. They stayed open, expelling breath, trying to clear her lungs for the next breath. Pity squeezed her friend’s heart.
Alexandra said, “If you listened to the lecturer, the whole Wall is magic—a ten-thousand-mile charm against barbarian invaders.” On its top, attained by stone steps, the view of it—a broad brown-brick dragon snaking its way along a ridge from one squat tower to the next—excited in Alexandra the same sensation of lightness, of being on high, that she had felt in Canada on the boardwalk to Sanson Peak. The Great Wall, she had once read as a child in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, is the only work of Man that could be seen by observers on the moon.
A little distance away, the Wall’s broad top held a pay-telephone booth with a sign advertising in many languages and scripts that from here you could call anywhere in the world. Though the vicinity was thronged, the booth was empty. “We could call some of our children,” Alexandra suggested.
“They wouldn’t get the wonder of it,” Sukie said. “They live in a world where when you dial the local airport for information you get somebody in India reading from a card in an accent you can’t understand.”
Jane told them, “My older son plays bridge on the Internet with a group that includes a man from Ulan Bator and a woman from Albania. They talk entirely in cards.” Alexandra tried to recall Jane’s children—there had been an obese boy and a scrawny girl and two others. The girl had a dirty face with food always stuck in her braces. They had, none of the three witches, been ideal mothers—not by the standards of today’s obsessive parents, who never let their children out of their sight, even at a bus stop just across the street—but even by the laxer standards of their less careful era Jane had been scandalously neglectful.
“But we’re not them,” Sukie insisted, trying to keep their party spirits up. “We’re pre-electronic, and thrilled to actually be here. To us the Earth is still enormous, right?” She took each companion by one hand and dragged them with her, walking and then racing, downhill, three abreast, on the top of the Wall, to the next tower, where the emperor’s soldiers had kept watch and slept and cooked, leaving smoke stains that could still be seen, centuries later. Beyond that tower, the German restorers had lost interest, and the Wall was more loosely repaired, and in another hundred yards, they could see ahead, it turned upward into an untraversable rubble, guarded by barriers. Out of breath with running and giggling, having flown on pattering feet through the askance glances of other tourists and stony-faced guards, the widows took time to peer out through the Wall’s battlements at the territory beyond, the terrain of the dreaded nomadic barbarians. Blue mountain ranges, each dimmer than the one before it, receded into the hazed sky without yielding a speck of visible habitation or a patch of cultivation. On the other side, the side to the east and south that they had come from, every slope had been terraced and flooded, every valley cupped a village, and a gaudy mess of shops and quick eateries spilled downhill from the Wall’s foundations. This was China, teeming under Heaven’s mandate.
Exhilarated by their romp along the edge of the civilized world, Sukie asked a plump American, a grotesque barbarian in Bermuda shorts, billed baseball cap, and running shoes, to take their photograph on her little digital Nikon, the newest thing, bought specially for this trip; he rapidly took several and showed them on the viewing screen what they looked like in China, their three coolie hats tipped back to show their gamely grinning elderly faces. Three magi, framed in preposterous oversize haloes of straw. “That will be our Christmas card,” Sukie promised, laughing.
How quickly, Alexandra thought, they had slipped back into being a trio, a trinity coming together to form a cone of power. It was not that she liked the other two women better than her leathery, bohemian, long-haired, jeans-clad female friends in Taos—comparatively, Sukie and Jane had narrow, Northeastern horizons—but in their company she felt more powerful, more deeply appreciated, more positively enjoyed. They had known her at the height of her desirability, in a society that, isolated from urban narcissism and yet partaking of the sex-centered excitement of the times, had valued desirability above all else. Compared with Sukie she had not been promiscuous—rather, lazily loyal to her hopeless husband and her long-term lover, the would-be husbandly Joe Marino. Compared with Jane she had been motherly and conventionally observant of traditional decencies. Yet she somehow reigned over the others, as a broader conduit into the subterranean flow of Nature, that dark countercurrent to patriarchal tyranny which witchcraft drew upon. It was chemistry: without her as catalyst, the dangerous, empowering reaction did not occur.
The next day was allotted for a bus tour of Beijing. Cleansed by setting foot on the Wall and viewing from its parapets the unpeopled blue majesty of the barbarian realms, which no wall was able to exclude, and refreshed by a night of solid sleep (Sukie did not snore, drawing breath into her damaged lungs with the lightness of a kitten, a near-inaudible sound that merged with the Western-style hotel’s fan-driven ministrations of thermal comfort; yet having another person i
n the room with her relaxed Alexandra, as if this other weak widow could protect her), the three tourists were led through the stately labyrinth of the Forbidden City. It was built, their lecturer told them in the lurching bus, by the third Ming emperor, to strengthen the always vulnerable northern frontier nearby. “Talk about giving a party!” he said into his microphone. “Two hundred thousand laborers slapped it up in just fourteen years, ending in 1420. It was first named the Purple Forbidden City. The North Star was called ‘the purple palace’ and thought to be the center of the universe. The emperor by association was meant to be a divine instrument of universal power. The emperors of two dynasties ruled from here until 1911, when the boy-emperor Pun-yi abdicated—poor little Pun-yi. No doubt a number of you have seen the movie, some of it filmed right here. The Forbidden City is quite a survivor. It has survived fire, war, civil war, and the Cultural Revolution, which not much else historical did. Mao thought China’s past was a dead weight on the country and had been for ages. The Forbidden City was laid out on principles first devised in the Shang Dynasty, three millennia ago, at which time our own Caucasian ancestors were painting themselves blue and chipping away at flint arrowheads.”
The bus driver, having failed, through many abrupt turns in the city streets, to throw the lecturer off his feet, braked to a stop next to Tiananmen Square. The tourists dismounted. The lecturer stood his ground in a flood of other tourist groups at the Tianan Gate, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and shouted, “Everything is symmetrical, as you can see. All the courts and ceremonial halls are built on a north-south axis. The marble walkway is for only the emperor’s sedan chair. Everybody else, no matter how important—ministers, scribes, concubines, the empress herself—walked through side passages and doorways. Now look at us—tourists, barbarians, jengin—standing in the dead middle, where only the emperor’s sedan chair used to go! When Starbucks applied for a permit to build right next to the Gate of Heavenly Purity, Starbucks got it! Good-bye feng shui; hello, half-caf latté!”
Alexandra studied the lecturer: a short, soft-bellied, pasty man in rimless glasses, his thinning hair standing up in dry clumps, a dishevelled academic on semi-vacation, tieless and coatless and the cuffs of his white shirt rolled up in the late-summer heat, yet with something passionate and even defiant in his loud, insistently instructive voice and his beetling black eyebrows. She liked to look at men and ask herself if, when she was nubile, she would have been attracted enough to this one, that one, to go to bed with them. Sex had faded from her life years ago; even when Jim was still there it had ceased to make urgent claims; yet the reflexes, the frame of reference, remained.
Gates, courtyards, halls—of Supreme Harmony, of Preserving Harmony, of Mental Cultivation, of Complete Harmony, of Clocks and Watches—succeeded one another stupefyingly. Double eaves tiled in shiny imperial yellow curved up at the ends, against the sky. At the Gate of Heavenly Purity, even the emperor’s most trusted ministers could not pass, but had to gather outside at dawn to deliver a report. Could he hear it? Could he act upon it? Who heard his edicts, read with ultimate pomp at the Gate of Heavenly Peace? Boxes within boxes, a paralysis of harmony. Life must have collected, Alexandra sensed, in little pockets, in murmurous furtive drifts. The little wooden rooms, almost cages, in which the concubines passed their lives, made her smile in a sort of recognition: captive women, bored, filling the interminable minutes with jealous quarrels and desperate spells, their small hearts trembling in fearful hope of the emperor’s fickle favor alighting at last.
The long morning became afternoon. The lecturer led them back out, past the two-hundred-ton marble relief of nine dragons, past bronze cranes symbolizing longevity, sandalwood thrones cushioned in pale silk, and cloisonné screens, through musty treasuries of candleholders, wine vessels, tea sets, imperial seals, carved jade and coral, across floor after floor of golden tiles, and released them back at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, to the vastness of Tiananmen Square, the largest such public space in the world. The lecturer pointed out that the huge portrait of Mao hung above the gate was squarely on the imperial axis; even the Great Helmsman’s asymmetrical facial mole had been realigned. Their trip’s own helmsman, whose name was Mr. Muir, looked at his wristwatch, a big cheap one, and shouted out, “Be back at the bus in one hour. Don’t do anything barbaric.”
While Chinese children and peddlers of gimcrack souvenirs stared at them as if at exotic, human-size animals, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie debated whether or not to get into line for Mao’s Mausoleum, at the far end of the square. “Do they still adore him?” Alexandra asked. “I thought that other one, Deng somebody, had overthrown him.”
“Not quite,” Jane snapped. “Honeymooners come, and other people in from the country. The poor, yes, still adore him. Like Sstalin in Russia—the losers under the new system sstill adore him.”
“Oh, we must do it!” Sukie said. “We’ll never have the chance again. I want to see honeymooners!”
Young newlyweds, touchingly well dressed and discreetly touching hands, did indeed compose an element of the two long lines. But also there were children, one each per pair of parents, and elderly people in pajamas, and Taiwanese businessmen in sleek dark suits, joking and smoking among themselves. The lines, kept in order by uniformed guards, moved swiftly; before she could quite believe it, Alexandra was in the hushed hall, her eyes actually resting on the globally famous face, the implacable Other, absolute ruler for twenty-seven years of a quarter of the world’s population, an emperor at last accessible to his people. The body lay in a crystal coffin, blanketed by a red flag. The face was smaller than she had expected it to be, and didn’t look like him. For all his cult of personality, Mao looked impersonal, evenly coated with orange makeup not quite the color of living skin, his face deflated and generic: it could have been anybody, at least any stolid Chinese man immobilized by taxidermy, his hair combed straight back. As Alexandra stared at the orange profile, Mao’s eye opened; its black iris seemingly slid sideways as if to see her, and then shut again, quick as a wink, the eyelid sealed like glued paper.
Her heart leaped in her chest; a soft high-pitched grunt escaped her, and the young couple behind her glanced at her resentfully, their sacred moment with the corpse marred by a female barbarian. Don’t do anything barbaric. Visible on the other side of the crystal coffin, Sukie and Jane, in the other line, were already moving by, with set respectful expressions. The lines passed through the official souvenir shop and into the clamor outside, of vendors hawking obsolete Little Red Books and paperweights preserving Mao’s image. Alexandra asked her two companions, “Did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Make Mao wink at me. I nearly died of fright, right on the spot. If I’d fainted or screamed we all would have been clapped into jail for disturbing the peace.”
Sukie laughed gaily. Jane seemed determined not to apologize. She said without smiling, “We couldn’t ssee if it worked or not. Nothing happened on our sside of his profile.”
Sukie tried to soften the trick, explaining, “It was just that we could see you wearing this look of fake solemnity, like an atheist taking mass, so we cooked up a little tease.”
Alexandra protested: “I was just blending in. They can see I’m not Chinese, but maybe they can think I’m a fellow traveller.”
“Lexa,” said Sukie fondly, “you’re such a darling goody-goody. And so conceited, really. Why would he wink at you, especially? He’s been lying there for years, with millions going by.”
Jane added, rather angrily, “They know why you’re in line. Ssimple, sstupid curiosity. You don’t give these people credit for being as sophisticated as they are. They have the Internet now—they know all about the West. They know how childlike we are, wanting to see Mao’s body. They know how we used to have his picture up in all the college dorms, even though he’d promised to bury us.”
“That was somebody else,” Sukie said. “That funny bald Russian with all the consonants in his name. I loved him when he was in
Hollywood, acting up. Remember?”
Alexandra continued to protest. “But he did wink,” she said. “I wondered if the couple behind me saw it, but I didn’t know how to ask them. They acted a little annoyed.” She was jealous, in truth, that the other two women had ganged up on her, bewitching her, if only for a second.
And the other two sensed that they had trespassed, however playfully, against their trinity. With their reunion their powers were returning as prickings, foreshadowings, a girlish relish in malice, in maleficia. They agreed, over dizzying plum brandy in the hotel bar, that their next illusory projection—this faintest, flimsiest exercise, scarcely more supernatural than hypnosis and female intuition—would come from all three, united under their cone of power, against an outsider.
Next day, the tour flew in two hours to ancient Xian, the emperor Ch’in’s capital city, site of matriarchal neolithic settlements dating back to 4500 B.C.: Xian, birthplace of Chinese pottery and, much later, of Chinese Communism. North and west of the city lay many imperial tombs, including Ch’in’s, not yet excavated, though it held such rumored wonders as rivers of mercury. His buried army of terra-cotta warriors was discovered, a mile away, in 1974, when farmers digging a well unearthed some sculpture. Mr. Muir (“Not D. Muir,” Jane punned), swaying and nearly toppling at the front of the bus, told them all this. Then he led them into the great shed, equipped with touch-screen computer displays and a 360-degree movie, erected over the pits containing ranks of terra-cotta soldiers, numbering in the thousands, though only a thousand or so had been completely pieced together by archaeologists. “Pit One,” Mr. Muir told them, as they clustered tightly around to hear him above the noise of other tourists and other lecturers on the walkway around the pits, “consists of eleven parallel sunken corridors. They were originally roofed with wood covered in straw matting and clay. The roof collapsed over the years, and the soldiers were crushed. Their legs are solid, but their torsos are hollow. Hands and heads were added later, with features like ears and beards sculpted last. No two faces are said to be alike, but I doubt this. I think there were four or so basic types and the system was mix-and-match. A range of ethnic types is indicated—perhaps the emperor’s boast of his empire’s diversity. The infantrymen have no armor or helmets; it was more to the point militarily that they could move fast. Bowmen had chariots. Queen Elizabeth II, one of the few Westerners ever allowed to stand down there with the army, was given a replica of a chariot as a souvenir. Well, what else can I say? The attempt at individualization is interesting, isn’t it, coming from a legalist tyrant? Compare it, those of you who have been, with the art on Egyptian tombs—everybody but the pharaoh and his queen is interchangeable, standardized. The thing about these soldiers, that makes them such a hit, is how natural they look. I’ve had women, widows, who tell me they’d like to take one home as a husband. He wouldn’t snore, I promise you that.”