Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  On the second day they visited palaces and museums; on the third, temples and antique shops. At the Temple of Heaven, they were promised, there would be a treat: an echo wall. Jean thought she had once been taken to a whispering gallery—perhaps there was one in the dome of St. Paul’s—but could no longer tell whether this was a false memory or not.

  The echo wall was to the south of the main temple buildings: circular, some thirty or forty yards in diameter, with a single gateway on one side. Groups of Chinese were already trying out the echo as Jean’s party arrived. The guide explained that two people could stand at opposite points on the wall’s circumference and, by speaking in a normal voice but at a slight angle to the bricks, could be heard perfectly by one another. Whether this effect had been planned or was fortuitous nobody knew.

  Jean walked to the nearest section of the wall. She felt tired now. The air in Beijing was extremely dry, and the fine dust which blew everywhere came straight, they were told, from the Gobi desert. Don’t let the club head drop, Uncle Leslie used to say, or there’ll be more sand flying than on a windy day in the Gobi desert. Michael had thought her as barren as the Gobi desert. Dust got in her eyes, and she felt a brisk sadness descend upon her. An echo wall was not something you should visit alone, any more than you should take a solitary ride in the Tunnel of Love. She missed … somebody, she didn’t know who. Not Michael; perhaps some version of Michael, someone still around and still companionable, who might tramp across to the other side of the wall, cough into it in her direction, then wander back to the middle and grumble that the thing didn’t work properly and hadn’t they ever heard of Indian tea in China? Someone a bit grumpy but who was never serious about being grumpy. Someone who might bore her but would never frighten her.

  Small hope. She leaned against the wall and pressed her ear close to the bricked curve. There was some indistinguishable muttering and then, with sudden clarity, a pair of Western voices.

  “Go on.”

  “No, you first.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m shy.”

  “You’re not shy.”

  The voices presumably belonged to a couple of Jean’s tour, but she couldn’t yet identify them. The wall seemed to drain off individuality from the voices, leaving them as all-purpose Western, male and female.

  “Do you think this place is bugged?”

  “Whatever gives you that idea?”

  “I think there’s a chap listening in. Do you see, that fellow in the Mao cap?”

  Jean looked up. A few yards in front of her an elderly Chinese in an olive jacket and Mao cap was tortoising his head towards the wall. The Western voices were beginning to be recognizable: they belonged to a young couple, brash and rather too recently married for the general comfort of the tour.

  “Mao Tse-tung had a big yellow ding-dong.”

  “Vincent! For Christ’s sake!”

  “Just trying it on to see if old Mao-cap understands English.”

  “Vincent! Say something else. Say something clean.”

  “All right.”

  “Go on then.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “You’ve got great legs.”

  “Oh, Vincent, have I?”

  Jean left them to it, with the elderly Chinese still craned into their conceited endearments. Which was better: to understand nothing, like him, or everything, like her?

  Apart from pi and the question of the soul, Jean found China less strange and more comprehensible than she had imagined. True, parts of it were like listening to some gnomic voice come muttering off the great curve of a dusty wall. But more often it was like hearing your own language spoken confidently and yet with different emphases. “In Asian times …” The tour guides would often start a sentence like this; and at first Jean believed what she heard—that the Chinese referred to the old days as the Asian times, because that was when their civilization had been at its most dominant. Even when she knew they meant ancient, Jean preferred to hear Asian. In Asian times …

  “In the fields we grow wheat and lice.” Other members of the tour, especially that brash young couple, giggled; but Jean preferred this alternative language. “In the fields there are sugar beet, potatoes and ladies.” “In 1974 the temple was repented.” “Now here we are at the sobbing centre.” Even Jean smiled at that one, heard in Canton; but she smiled at its aptness. Westerners descended from their buses to spend money on things most Chinese would never be able to afford. Rightly was it called the sobbing centre: Canton’s wailing wall.

  No, this land wasn’t really so strange. There was much poverty and simplicity in the countryside, but it struck Jean in images which might almost have come from her own childhood: a pig, roped to the pannier of a bicycle, on its way to market; an old woman, buying two eggs from a stall, holding them up to the light in fierce examination; the verbal clatter of bartering; the damp, straddle-legged ritual with the plough; and the patching of clothes. This activity, which since the war had largely died out in the West, was vigorously alive: in a tiny Szechuan village, where the bus stopped for lavatories and photographs, she saw a patched tea towel hanging up to dry. The washing line was a bamboo pole slung between the branches of a banyan tree; the tea towel contained more patching than it did original cloth.

  Old poverty looked familiar; and the images of new money were even more familiar: the large radios, the Japanese cameras, the bright clothing which avoided blue and green, those drab impositions of the recent past. Sunglasses, too: the youths whose radios bellowed even as they filed round Sun Yat-sen’s memorial in Nanjing were not complete without sunglasses, even though that day the sky was low and the clouds heavy. Jean noticed that it was considered stylish not to remove the small sticky label bearing the manufacturer’s name.

  In Nanjing zoo there were two Persian cats in a cage, labelled “Persian cats.” At a commune outside Chengdu they saw a small workshop where fur coats were made from dog skins; the honeymoon couple dressed up in Alsatian for each other’s cameras. At a circus display in Beijing they saw a conjurer juggle with goldfish, producing them with proud aplomb from the baggy sleeves of his silk jacket—a trick which did not seem very difficult to Jean. In Canton, at the Trade Fair, they saw plastic bonsai.

  Among the tour guides, it was an indication of status to carry a battery-powered megaphone. At Yangzhou a courier climbed aboard the minibus and welcomed them to the city while the party—none of them more than ten feet from the boomingly amplified voice—quailed in their seats and tried not to laugh. At a jade factory the introductory talk from a forewoman was translated by a guide whose megaphone declined to work. Rather than lay his instrument aside, however, the guide preferred to keep it to his lips and shout through it. At question time, someone asked how you could tell good jade from bad jade. Shouted through the impotent instrument came the reply: “You look at it and by looking you tell its qualities.”

  Jean expected that air travel in China would be blandly international; but even that was quietly Easternized. The air hostesses looked like schoolgirls and didn’t seem to know what to do; as they landed in Beijing one of them, she noticed, remained standing all the time and giggled self-consciously when they struck the runway. There was no alcohol served on Chinese airways; instead, you were given bars of Peanut Crisp, pieces of chocolate, packets of sweets, cups of tea and a souvenir. On one flight they gave her a key ring; on another, a tiny plastic-covered address book whose size suggested that the typical traveller on Chinese airways was a misanthrope.

  In Chengdu she asked one of the local guides—a tall, courteous man somewhere between twenty and sixty—about his life. He replied with a mixture of precision and vagueness. He had recently returned from spending ten years in the country. There had been difficulties. He taught himself English by using records and tapes. Every morning before breakfast he takes the night soil to the neighbourhood dump. They have one child. Often the child stays with its grandparents. His wife is a gara
ge mechanic. She works different shifts from him, and this is quite useful as he likes to practise his English with his records and tapes. He does not drink at the banquet in case he disgraces himself and is not invited to join the Party. He wants very much to be invited to join the Party. There have been difficulties but now the difficulties are over. You have one day a week off, plus five days spaced through the year, plus two weeks when you get married. In those two weeks you are allowed to travel. Perhaps people want to divorce so that they get married again and have more holiday.

  There were two questions the guide was unable to answer. When Jean asked how much he earned, he seemed—though his English was excellent—not to understand. She repeated the question in more detail, aware that perhaps she was committing a faux pas. Eventually, he replied, “You want to change money?”

  Yes, she replied politely, that was what she was trying to ask; perhaps she would be able to change money at the hotel that evening. Perhaps tomorrow would be better, he replied. Of course.

  Her other question seemed to her less contentious.

  “Do you want to go to Shanghai?”

  His expression didn’t change; but neither did he reply. Perhaps her pronunciation of the city had been misleading.

  “Do you want to go to Shanghai? Shanghai, the big port?”

  Again, an attack of temporary deafness. She repeated the question; he merely smiled and looked around and didn’t reply. Later, thinking the incident over, Jean realized that she hadn’t been tactless, as when asking about his income; just inattentive. She had, in fact, already received her answer. He got only single days off; he was married, and had already taken his lifetime’s two weeks; you couldn’t get to Shanghai and back in a day. Her insertion of the word want into the sentence had made it meaningless. What she had been asking was not a real question.

  In Nanjing, where it was hot and damp, Jean had experienced her own attack of deafness: she developed a snuffling cold, and one ear refused service. They were staying at a hotel built by an Australian company: a eucalyptus-leaf pattern raged across the bedspread, and koala bears swarmed up the curtains, making her feel even hotter. Half asleep in the dark, Jean thought she heard a mosquito’s thin whine of interest. She wondered why mosquitoes didn’t give up on victims who had reached a certain age, and hunt for younger flesh instead; as men did. She pulled the bedclothes up over her head. After a while this made her too hot; but the moment she gave herself air, the mosquito started up again. Irritated, Jean played this drowsy hide-and-seek a few times, then realized what was happening: the snuffle in her nose when filtered through her bad ear was coming out as a mosquito’s whine. She woke up completely, checked the genuine silence of the room and laughed at this little echo from the past. It was just like Sun-Up Prosser: setting off his own guns and wheeling about the sky as it attacked. She too was producing her own source of fear, and she too was really quite alone.

  Aeroplanes—in homage to Prosser she went on calling them aeroplanes long after they had been shortened to planes—never frightened Jean. She didn’t need to cram music into her ears through a plastic tube, order stout little bottles of spirits, or probe a heel beneath her seat for the life jacket. Once she had dropped several thousand feet over the Mediterranean; once her aeroplane had turned back to Madrid and circlingly burnt up fuel for two hours; once, landing from the sea at Hong Kong, they had bounced along the runway like a skimming stone—as if they really had put down on water. But on each occasion Jean had merely withdrawn into thought.

  Gregory—studious, melancholy, methodical Gregory—did the worrying for her. When he took Jean to the airport he would smell the kerosene and imagine charred flesh; he would listen to the engines at takeoff and hear only the pure voice of hysteria. In the old days, it had been hell, not death, that was feared, and artists had elaborated such fears in panoramas of pain. Now there was no hell, fear was known to be finite, and the engineers had taken over. There had been no deliberate plan, but in elaborating the aeroplane, and in doing all they could to calm those who flew in it, they had created, it seemed to Gregory, the most infernal conditions in which to die.

  Ignorance, that was the first aspect of the engineers’ modern form of death. It was well known that if anything went wrong with an aeroplane, the passengers were told no more than they needed to know. If a wing fell off, the calm-voiced Scottish captain would tell you that the soft-drinks dispenser was malfunctioning, and this was why he had decided to lose height in a spin without first warning his cargo to put on their seat belts. You would be lied to even as you died.

  Ignorance, but also certainty. As you fell thirty thousand feet, whether towards land or water (though water, from that height, would be the same as concrete), you knew that when you hit the ground, you would die: you would die, in fact, several hundred times over. Even before the nuclear bomb, the aeroplane had introduced the concept of overkill: as you struck the ground, the jolt from your seat belt would induce a fatal heart attack; then fire would burn you to death all over again; then an explosion would scatter you over some forlorn hillside; and then, as rescue teams searched ploddingly for you beneath a mocking sky, the million burnt, exploded, cardiac-arrested bits of you would die once more from exposure. This was normal; this was certain. Certainty ought to cancel out ignorance, but it didn’t; indeed, the aeroplane had reversed the established relation between these two concepts. In a traditional death the doctor at your bedside could tell you what was wrong, but would rarely predict the final outcome: even the most sceptical sawbones had seen a few miracle recoveries. So you were certain of the cause but ignorant of the outcome. Now you were ignorant of the cause but certain of the outcome. This didn’t strike Gregory as progress.

  Next, enclosure. Do we not all fear the claustrophobia of the coffin? The aeroplane recognized and magnified this image. Gregory thought of pilots in the First World War, the wind playing tunes as it whistled through their struts; of pilots in the Second World War, doing a victory roll and embracing as they did both the skies and the earth. Those fliers touched nature as they moved; and when the plywood biplane peeled apart under sudden air pressure, when the Hurricane, excreting the black smoke of its own obituary, wailed down into some damp cornfield there was a chance—just a chance—that these endings were in some degree appropriate: the flier had left the earth, and was now being called back. But in a passenger plane with mean windows? How could you feel the dulcet consolation of nature’s cycle as you sat there with your shoes off, unable to see out, with your frightened eye everywhere assailed by garish seat covers? The surroundings were simply not up to it.

  And the surroundings included the fourth thing, the company. How would we most like to die? It is not an easy question, but to Gregory there seemed various possibilities: surrounded by your family, with or without a priest—this was the traditional posture, death as a kind of supreme Christmas dinner. Or surrounded by gentle, quiet, attentive medical staff, a surrogate family who knew about relieving pain and could be counted on not to make a fuss. Third, perhaps, if your family failed and you had not merited hospital, you might prefer to die at home, in a favourite chair, with an animal for company, or a fire, or a collection of photographs, or a strong drink. But who would choose to die in the company of three hundred and fifty strangers, not all of whom might behave well? A soldier might charge to a certain death—across the mud, across the veld—but he would die with those he knew, three hundred and fifty men whose presence would induce stoicism as he was sliced in half by machine-gun fire. But these strangers? There would be screaming, that much you could rely on. To die listening to your own screams was bad enough; to die listening to the screams of others was part of this new engineers’ hell. Gregory imagined himself in a field with a buzzing dot high above. They could all be screaming inside, all three hundred and fifty of them; yet the normal hysteria of the engines would drown everything.

  Screaming, enclosed, ignorant and certain. And in addition, it was all so domestic. This was the fifth and fin
al element in the triumph of the engineers. You died with a headrest and an antimacassar. You died with a little plastic fold-down table whose surface bore a circular indentation so that your coffee cup would be held safely. You died with overhead luggage racks and little plastic blinds to pull down over the mean windows. You died with supermarket girls waiting on you. You died with soft furnishings designed to make you feel jolly. You died stubbing out your cigarette in the ashtray on your armrest. You died watching a film from which most of the sexual content had been deleted. You died with the razor towel you had stolen still in your sponge bag. You died after being told that you had made good time thanks to following winds and were now ahead of schedule. You were indeed: way ahead of schedule. You died with your neighbour’s drink spilling over you. You died domestically; yet not in your own home, in someone else’s, someone whom you never met before and who had invited a load of strangers round. How, in such circumstances, could you see your own extinction as something tragic, or even important, or even relevant? It would be a death which mocked you.

  Jean visited the Grand Canyon in November. The north rim was closed, and the snow ploughs had been out chivvying the road up from Williams to the south rim. She booked into the lodge at the Canyon’s edge; it was early evening. She did not hurry with her unpacking, and even went to the hotel gift shop before looking at the Canyon itself. Not putting off the pleasure, but the reverse; for Jean expected disappointment. At the last minute, she had even considered rescripting her Seven Wonders and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge instead.