In 1989 — a year especially important for being the beginning of the end of the Cold War — the Chinese military violently attacked pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Though the situations are different, the Iranian government’s current crackdown on election protesters in Tehran reminds Daily Iowan columnist Beau Elliot of the repression 20 years ago, when he had a girlfriend studying in Beijing. Below is a fictionalized account based on his agonizing experience trying to reach his girlfriend following the communist government’s massacre.
China Time
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Two Sunday morning; four in the afternoon in Beijing. Twelve hours now. Dial; wait; click; click; wait; we’re sorry, but your call. Hang up. Dial; wait; click; click; wait; we’re sorry, but your. Hang up. Shoot the phone. Dial; access code, country code, city code, Peking University number; wait; click; calling-card number; wait; click; click; we’re sorry, but. Hang up. Shoot the phone. Dial. Wait.
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Ransom O’Keeble sits in an empty house back in the woods off of Linn, listening to the phone not ring. Safka is in China. In the nine-plus years that he knows her, all through the Eighties, through all the nicknames he knows her by, McDee, McBlonde, she spends almost half her time somewhere else, chasing down another language, another culture. Seven months in Italy, summers in Vermont for language boot camp, a year in France, a year in China, a year in Des Moines as a French translator. It sounds like the lead-in to some joke, being a French translator in Des Moines. Sometimes, Ransom sees his life as a small piece of a tired comic’s monologue, played out in front of restless, shifting troops on a makeshift stage thrown together last night. Sticky afternoons and the smell of foreign dust.
He thinks that they rented that house on Linn after Safka came back from Des Moines, which was a year after they came back from France, which would make it the beginning of 1987 if you’re keeping score. The year in between he doesn’t remember much about. He discovered a good translation of Rilke. Bill Buckner let a routine grounder go through his legs and the Red Sox broke his heart for about the umpteenth time in forever, which should have made him used to the feeling but didn’t. If nothing else, 1986 was a good year for broken hearts. Not much else happened that year in his corner of the cosmos. Oh, yeah, Safka came back, having decided that maybe being a young professional in Des Moines was something more like anesthetic without surgery than the portal to real life. Ransom still doesn’t know where he would classify that event. More and more, it seems that there are a lot of things you can’t classify, they just are. Some more time goes by, just like in the song, things change and now they just are something else. It’s not much of a philosophy, but then, philosophy, like the changing of presidents and the sex lives of film stars, is probably overrated. Or the changing of film stars and the sex lives of presidents.
There was one night I suddenly couldn’t stand him anymore, you know what I mean? Safka says. I guess I’d been working up to it. There was a full moon and we were out on his balcony drinking wine and looking at it, and he started explaining how it all worked, why the moon looked full to us, in these very precise, very scientific terms. And something just went thud inside of me. You know what I mean? I just got up and left.
She moves through the rooms of his cracked house. Light as a glance. Their voices rise and fall, spiraling, two hawks circling or scraps of paper drifting on a wind we already know. Eurydice in the Hall of Mirrors. Orpheus captive in the quicksilver. Sign of the Twins. And a dancer who dies.
This is the year of swirling geography. This is the year that everyone has been waiting for, after those decades of nervousness and hope and boredom, and then it comes and they unwrap it and look at it and don’t know what to do with it. Like so many children in the ancient history of gifts.
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Eleven Sunday morning — 1 a.m. Monday over there. Twenty-one hours now.
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Two p.m. Four Monday morning in Beijing. Four. Quatre in French, vier in German, what in Chinese? Can’t remember. Sleep is another country these days, we always meant to go there, I wonder if we ever will now. I wonder if they have any good cafés there, like we could always find in France, quiet, tucked out of the way between a little church and an unknown square. And the hotels. I wonder if you need reservations this time of year.
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The kid comes down the long wide flat stairs at Orly, head swimming in a blur of Arabic and African dialects and something that might be French, but who can be sure? Eyes looking searching, down and down; all night across the Atlantic they would not close waiting for all this. And the blonde head. The year of letters from France. Do these steps never end? Why do the French have to build the longest staircases in the world? The bottom and a right-hand turn and a football field of a hall and there. Just there. At the front of the crowd a pair of Cézanne-blue eyes. In one motion, she hangs the strap of her purse over the gendarme’s shoulder, next to his machine gun, and leaps over the velvet rope and comes running, slow-motion pumping legs and stretching, swinging arms, a flying grin and wild blonde curls. The gendarme shakes his head and smiles; applause is ringing from somewhere. The kid stops, the Earth stops, not one atom spins, and time stretches motionless. Somewhere Orpheus is chortling but they can’t hear him, they are suddenly far too busy giggling and dancing, laughter is a train carrying them to a country where mere mortals never get to travel.
– Kafka, Sartre, Pirandello, Camus; Kafka, Sartre, Pirandello, Camus, I chant as I dial the phone. Some days even cynics need a mantra. They don’t work of course, but they fill up the dead air between nothing and nothing else.
– I was right there. I can’t believe it. Right there, in her dormitory, someone is shouting at the refrigerator. – Right there. I was in the dorm, and the mofos cut me off. Can you believe it?
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Outside is just another June evening. No tanks, no screams, no yellow smoke; just the cicadas and the sleepy Midwestern air. Hardly any traffic, but then it’s Sunday evening, when even the hip people take a break. I am walking down Linn Street under unfamiliar trees.
Seven-fifteen Sunday night; 9:15 Monday morning in Beijing. Dan Rather is grimness and somberness and many other kinds of nesses, all of them grave-looking. He appears to be saying something extremely serious and important about China, but I can’t hear because two leather-jacket and torn-jeans types have decided that right now is the perfect moment to crank out Z-Z Topp on the jukebox. Bodies flash across the screen and blood and tanks, more bodies and more blood, fires everywhere, smoke and more smoke, and back to Dan. His lips move gracefully. Electric guitars dance the feedback fritz.
The airport security guard is pleasant and nice and all those good Midwestern things, but she seems to be far more firm than anything else.
Dan Rather is talking with a CBS newsman who was arrested and held by the People’s Army; he is missing his glasses and he sports a small eggplant on the side of his face. For a moment I wonder if that’s a typical foreign correspondent accessory like a bush jacket or Wellington boots, but it turns out to be a bruise.
Standing in a hallway, shaking, looking at a phone. Can’t light a cigarette, doctor, there’s too much motion in this ocean. Don’t worry about it, kid, it’s healthier just to look at it and not light it. I don’t give a flying frig about healthier, I just need to make a phone call. Shaking. Stop the earthquake, I want to get off. In the mad bolt from the bar I remembered to bring the bottle of beer. When the going gets tough, the Irish never forget their beer. That’s something, anyway. I’m not sure what, exactly.
The woman at the CBS Foreign Desk tells me the name of the American woman before I can blurt out half my story.
Madness. This is utter madness. Go blow up a bridge somewhere, you’d have better luck. Better karma. Better something.
I’m watching this movie, see? It must be French because it’s very long and nothing keeps happening and there’s no plot and the hero does the same nothing over and over and over and in between he drinks and smokes cigarettes. It must have some deeper, underlying meaning that the hero can’t understand; that’s why he stares off camera so much with this comical expression on his face like somebody just kicked his guts out and then he has another drink and lights another smoke.
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Camels clatter into Tiananmen and the white-robed figures riding them look like neon lights in the orange night. Scimitars flash and slash; the front rank of the People’s Liberation Army is quickly decapitated, bloodlessly. A helicopter comes chuttering in overhead. Searchlights, the blaaaaahpt of machine guns, but Peter O’Toole fires his Enfield and the chopper comes crashing down in the middle of the Square. Not there, the kid shouts, those are friendlies, but the din is overwhelming, it’s like shouting into the tide. O’Toole is as late and erratic as usual, but at least he’s here. It’s a long ride from Aqaba to Beijing, Bogart screams, especially by camel. He is standing right next to the kid, but he sounds like he’s phoning in from Pluto. Automatic weapons whine and squabble and the camels squeal, falling. Camel blood is greenish-yellow, and their humps deflate like punctured beach balls, the kid notes. None of the Bedouins seem to be hit yet, but it’s hard to tell, the noise is so thick. I spotted her on the other side of the Square, Bogart shouts, but smoke is everywhere, it’s like trying to peer through concrete. Then Bogart is hit, blood sluicing down the side of his face and soaking his shirt. He seems to be missing an eye, too. He grins that grin; blood has turned his lips and teeth purple and the flesh is torn off of his right cheekbone; the bone gleams in the fire light like a pearl. I will never forget this bone, the kid says, reaching down to touch it. It is mushy, like oatmeal. Here’s looking at you, kid, this time you get the girl, Bogart says, and grins that grin again. She’s right on the other side of the Square, next to the Lincoln Memorial, you can’t miss her; her Chinese has gotten a lot better, she’s cursing up a hurricane. Then he’s gone, vanished, leaving the kid with purple blood on his hands and forearms and the memory of a grin. The kid starts to run. Bodies are stacked like cordwood, the air is black sand. O’Toole and a Chinese student are on top of a burning tank, throwing Molotov cocktails assembly-line fashion, a whirl of arc and liquid color; they fade in and out of focus in the orange light. Keep your damn arms down, his high-school track coach shouts, down, dammit. The kid runs.
Seven a.m. Monday; 9 p.m. Beijing.
Two in the afternoon, four in the morning in Beijing.
The plane ticket in his hand doesn’t seem real. Hong Kong, it says, connecting to Beijing. He wonders why he can’t feel it, sitting just there in his hands.
They are walking along the coast in Brittany, an alcove by the door to the sea, hand in hand at first and then she paces ahead into the wind impatient to see what’s coming. Craggy, obstinate pillars of crimson granite and black feldspar stretch up all around, marching into the sea in straggling rows, and the waves punch and tear at them, turning them into sand second after second. Look, Irish, she shouts; a windswept whisper from far ahead. The cliff before them towers two hundred feet and the high tide mark is fifty feet up; and everywhere on the face of the glistening rock are thousands of les moules in their oval, glossy ebony shells. Dinner, she says, and begins picking them off the rock. So quiet suddenly he can hear the squish of protoplasm as she pulls. The ocean is a reflecting pond, and all of them and everything and the sky are painted there in rose and purple and ochre. No one was ever so lucky, he says, but she doesn’t hear, lost in the land of les moules. When he looks up, they are standing at the edge of the cliff. She leaps, gliding down into the sky, and he follows, jumping. From the beach he watches, he is falling falling, down to the sky but the sky no longer is.
Some dreamer is playing ballet with a tank; the tank slides left — he moves, pirouette, step, slide left; the tank tries right — pirouette, step, slide right. Left, pirouette; right, pirouette. Step, slide. the tank is surprisingly nimble for steel and rivets but no match for real feet. Behind the first tank are more and more tanks, grumbling, impatient; the line snorts and belches, stretching to the end of the world. The man and the tank dance.
– We’re sorry, but, the phone says.
– How did you get through? she says. – It’s impossible to call China right now. And how in the world did you find me here?
You have to understand, Irish, she says. Softly. Without impatience.
Five-thirty p.m. Seven-thirty Wednesday morning in Beijing.
At ten-thirty the phone rings with the Chinese blaaaaaaant—blaaaaaaant.
Safka across from him in the booth, reaching over, poking him in the shoulder. Poke, poke. Wanna buy a typewriter? she asks, smiling. Safka Elizabeth McDougall. McDee. Walking in Hickory Hill Park toward the cemetery, flipping a mock sultry pose under the Black Angel, laughing. On a trip somewhere, anywhere, riding beside him in a late-night car, the momentary blindness from the approaching headlights, she’s talking and talking to keep him awake. Words spilling out in the green dashboard light, spirals of sentences, miles of America slipping behind them in the darkness. Blink your eyes and she’s gone.
He would sell his sister to the Martians for a cigarette right about now. If he had a sister. If there were any Martians.
– I don’t know why I was so nervous, Safka says again. – I kept thinking you wouldn’t be there. I don’t know why.
He is sitting on his porch, not thinking. It’s three in the morning, maybe. He never wears a watch. The only sound is the window fan up in the bedroom, trying to manufacture a breeze. He sits on his porch and tries not to think.
