I Am China (17 page)

After kisses and a few words with her sister and the children, Iona follows Volodymyr into the kitchen, where she stays. Her brother-in-law is in charge of food for the party and he’s already started getting the ingredients together for pancakes. He’s assembling golden syrup, honey, sugar, lemon juice and a bowl of whipped cream. Iona feels a little queasy.

“Can I help at all, Vlods?” Iona looks with trepidation at the sink, brimming with colourful plastic spoons, twisted soiled bibs, and some gunk that looks like regurgitated porridge.

“I’m fine, thanks, Iona. I’m used to it,” quips the Ukrainian professor. Clearly he likes being a house husband too. “Just making some extra pancakes for us adults. The kids have already eaten. You hungry?”

Iona laughs and shakes her head. Her first laugh for a week, she thinks. Mu and Jian’s story doesn’t exactly inspire much mirth. She likes Volodymyr a lot, perhaps a little too much. He’s busy with his cloud of flour, as he mixes up more batter in a large bowl, and glances back warmly at his wife’s younger sister as she laughs.

“So how’s work at the moment?”

“OK,… got a new translation going now … this one is complicated … I think it might be an important book, but so far I don’t quite understand what’s going on, or how to approach it.”

“Well, anything to do with China is always complicated, as far as I can see! Nell told me you’d called about a Russian novel. What was it you were after?”

“Oh, yes, thanks,
Life and Fate
, by Vasily Grossman. I’ve actually just bought it but I’m only a few pages in.”

“Ah, that’s a great book!”

“Yes, but the size of it! My God!”

“So, since when have you been interested in Russian literature, Iona. Are you switching sides now?” Volodymyr teases her, as he pours a ladle-full of the buttery-milky batter into the heated pan. It splatters and bubbles.

“Er, no, not exactly. I actually want to read Grossman so I can understand what I’m translating.” Iona sighs and looks out of the kitchen window onto another wall, the yellow-and-greyish afternoon light making her restless and anxious.

“Grossman is deadly serious—it’s heavy stuff, you know. Nearly Solzhenitsyn, but not quite Solzhenitsyn yet … to read Grossman is like taking a Soviet history lesson …”

Iona can feel the excitement growing in her brother-in-law’s voice. Nell once told her that Volodymyr had supported a capitalist agenda
in Ukraine, then when he arrived in London his views veered more radically left-wing.

“You know, most books were just banned for publication in the Soviet Union, but
Life and Fate
was the only book which was actually confiscated while Grossman was writing it. KGB men came to his flat, took his manuscript and removed all the carbon paper he had bought and even the ribbon from his typewriter. The poor man died four years later.”

“So how did the book get published then?”

“It didn’t. In fact there were another twenty-five years of silence after Grossman died until in the eighties the first published version appeared in France. A dissident Soviet writer confessed he had secretly smuggled a microfilm copy to Europe—that was how the book survived.”

As Volodymyr speaks, his eyes are focusing on Iona in that way they often do with her. She wonders if he would like to have her, along with his wife, in his own urban harem. There’s always been a spark between them. Cutting off Volodymyr in the middle of a long sentence describing the post-Leninist world of Stalin’s cultural spring comes the desperate plea of Iona’s sister from the front room.

“Vlods! Vlods! What the hell are you doing in there? Come and give me a hand. Otto has cut his finger!”

Volodymyr runs out, leaving his pancake sizzling in the hot pan, handing Iona a wet spatula with an order to “flip it” when it begins to smell good. A few minutes later, she appears in the main room with three burnt pancakes.

6
WISCONSIN, MAY 2012

On the train from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, the band are teaching Bruce how to swear in Chinese. Having grown up in Boston, his Mandarin vocabulary is poor, especially his slang and street talk. He’s a poor fit for this all-cursing Beijing punk gang, but he starts having fun with the new insults he’s learning. “You stupid cunt, don’t be zhuang-ya-de!” Mu uses a small dictaphone to record all the conversation and street sounds around her.

“What is the recording for, Mu?” her Chinese buddies ask.

“Some people take photos, others record sounds. I choose sound,” answers Mu, as she records the train’s clunking rhythm mixing with the loudspeaker’s announcement. “You never know, maybe one day I will transcribe all these sounds and conversations into a book.”

In a bar, Mu records her very first English conversation with a local man. The man, easily over eighty judging by the folds and wrinkles on his skin, has a sunburnt face and muddy eyes. But his eyes begin to shine as the evening wears on and he works his way through beer after beer. When she’s home Mu sits down with her machine and transcribes the recording, making comments on the conversation as she goes along, remembering how she felt only hours ago in the sweaty dim bar.

“Are you local?” I asked him
.

“Well, I’m local enough to be local.” Local enough to be local. I didn’t really understand what he meant. “I came over from England.” He took a big gulp of beer. “A long, very long time ago now.”

“England? You mean, real England? Not New England?” I stuttered in my bad English
.

“Yes, that very England. Queen and country and all that.”

I suddenly thought of Jian. He went to the land where this old man comes from
.

“Which part of England you came from?”

“I’m from Hull, you know. Ever heard of Hull?”

“Hell?”

“Ha! No, not Hell. Hull. Though might as well have been, you know.”

“OK, Hull. So when you were in England what did you do?” I asked, feeling like a journalist from the
China Daily.

“Well, I moved around a bit, had lots of different jobs, anything I could get, wasn’t fussy
. A
bit of fruit-picking, vegetable-selling, street-cleaning, even worked in a slaughterhouse for a while. Then I got into truck-driving. Drove up and down motorways just as they were starting to build them.”

I was only able to understand about half of what he said, and just when I wanted to ask if he knew a town called Dover, he kept on. “So one day I just thought to myself: what the hell am I doing here? It’s bloody gloomy and cold, and I was beginning to hate the truck. I knew other people who’d done it, so I just went out and bought myself a ticket, got on a boat and arrived here. Been here over forty years. And Milwaukee’s all right, it’s one of the most decent places I’ve ever been. And I’ve been to a few. I just thought: bugger England. All because I came from Hull.”

Then he finished his drink and ordered another bottle. He shouted down the bar, “Hey, boy, gimme another forty-ounce Colt 45, will yer?!”

“What is a Colt?” I asked
.

“It’s a revolver.”

“A revolver? You mean, like, a gun? A beer named after a gun—is that allowed by the government?”

“Ha, everything is allowed here as long as you can talk like a lawyer! That Obama was a lawyer, you know. Anyway, in England a colt is a young horse. But here it’s a kind of gun. And this kind of beer is named after that kind of gun. Both can do you some damage! Ha! Watch out, girl!” The old man laughed loudly and the table and chair trembled with the vibrations. I set the empty beer bottle down on the table before me and wondered if I would ever visit his home country
.

The old man snorted into the mouth of his Colt, and gave me a beery, rheumy eyeball, and a cracked-smile look
.

“If you ever visit England, then send my regards to that old hag of a town, London, though I’m sure she’s tarted up well enough now.”

“Tarted up?”

I didn’t understand what he meant, but he ignored my question and went on talking to himself
.

“You won’t know about this. Too young. But places and people, old and dead, get under your skin, when age weighs you down … You get an urge to return, like haunted by a ghost. And you want to see for the last time what you left and lost …”

The old man suddenly stopped speaking. In his silence, I think I understood what he was talking about. Perhaps one day I will get to England
.

7
LONDON, MAY 2013

As Sabotage Sister and the band leave Wisconsin, heading for Minnesota, on the other side of the Atlantic, Jian is writing to his lost lover.

Dearest Mu
,

I received your letter finally—the one about you going to America! America! Old Hell! I don’t know how it made it to me, across seas and continents, but somehow it did. But that was two months ago, so who knows where you are now. I’m going to try this Boston address, but I don’t hold out much hope—on tour means on the road, surely. What a surreal concept; my world is in stasis. I don’t know what it is to explore any longer. I am quarrying inside myself; that’s all there is left
.

I am still in an in-between state. I’m waiting for my asylum application to be granted. That is all. No news, no change—or at least that’s how I feel after days in this grey box. I can’t see what there is beyond this right now, I can’t even see you here with me, or us together in Beijing any more. Even my memories of our flat are hazy and dissolving. I hope you’re having a good time, wherever you are. And I hope you can lead the life you’ve always wanted to live. America must be better than China, whatever I think of it
.

You should start a new life, a brand-new life without me
.

Good luck, Mu
.

Jian

Iona is reading the letter in the fifth-floor cafe of Tate Modern. She repeats the line:
You should start a new life, a brand-new life without me
. As she repeats the phrase in Chinese she rises, then leaves the cafe and briefly visits the current exhibition, a retrospective of the American artist Roy Lichtenstein. Standing in front of a comic strip called
Drowning Girl
, Iona thinks of Mu; somehow the drowning girl becomes Mu’s face. Mu, an individual, struggles for her voice in the sea of multiple American voices. Iona decides to go out for some fresh air.

She is on the Millennium Bridge, swaying in the faintly fetid wind above the grey currents of the Thames. The steel floor vibrates and echoes with hundreds of footsteps. She stops at the central point, sees the city crouching on both sides of the great gash of river whose waves spread wide the legs of the capital. The tide is strong. She imagines people drowning in the stench-coloured water, the opaque liquid ready to consume any living thing. She remembers she heard on the radio the other day that each year there are about forty-five people drowned in the Thames. She can almost see their drowning limbs struggling, grey mud painting out the humanity of their faces before they sink forever. And in the distance the buildings of empire are indifferent to it all. Iona is shaken out of her vision by the feel of a hand touching her left arm. She turns. It’s an old tramp, stump-like limb outstretched, she assumes for money, mouth gurgling something. Automatically, Iona draws out a few coins from her pocket and drops them in the open palm. But she does not linger to confront the eyes upon her.

Proceeding along the bridge she again feels a tug. On the brink of annoyance, Iona turns her head and automatically speaks:

“Yes, what now?”

At first all Iona notices is a traditional full-sized umbrella with a wooden handle hanging in the crook of a man’s arm. Then she notices the familiar big brown coat the man wears. Iona looks up; it is her old professor from the Chinese department at SOAS.

“God, Charles!”

“God indeed.” He laughs. “I thought to myself: who is this slim creature lingering on the bridge, with that devilishly stylish black hair, très Louise Brooks, wandering alone? It could only be Iona Kirkpatrick!”

“Oh, Charles!” Iona almost laughs. “You look exactly the same. I recognised your umbrella first!”

“Oh yes, my gentleman’s umbrella! It ensures my hair is just so in even the worst London downpour.” The professor gestures to his hair—he is completely bald, and has always been, apparently. But his boyish, bright-eyed face is still there, smooth and almost unlined.

“My star pupil. What are you doing nowadays, Iona?”

Professor Handfield’s eyes are full of humorous affection for her. Charles, a well-known sinologist in his mid-sixties, is still bursting with vigorous energy. She knows that she was one of his favourite students, and she got the highest marks on her final dissertation. He had hoped she might continue studying, do a Ph.D. on Chinese history, or work for some important cross-governmental organisation. But she didn’t. Instead she disappeared from the academic scene.