When she’d died, her coterie of followers had taken over, and continued in the same direction.
Staring at her portrait on that wall was like staring at an ill-developed photograph, or a ghost of Britain’s past.
“The problem is your religion,” Yu Lin said. He’d known Emma for exactly two weeks. They’d seen each other every day and today, Lin’s day off, they sat by a lake in what remained of a city park.
It wasn’t a park like what he remembered from Hangchow, of course. For one, Europe had a much higher population density than China, and, besides, centuries of government-abetted pollution, centuries of no one caring what the people felt or wanted, had left every tree sooty grey and the grass stunted, moribund. The water in the lake, itself, was an angry grey and looked vaguely gelatinous.
Emma looked up from her sketch pad. “My religion?”
“Not yours exactly,” Lin said. “The country’s. Europe. The fatalism of Christianity shaped your beliefs, your way of seeing the world. You expect a reward after death, not here. You believe in the poor, the virtues of poverty. No wonder Europe took to communism like a duck to water.”
Emma raised her eyebrows. She had golden eyebrows, very fair and yet dark enough to be seen against her pale skin. They looked like golden arcs over the blue sky of her eyes. “I doubt it,” she said. “Russia is Christian. And it never took to communism. It wavered, perhaps, and tried mixed programs, but it never gave in.”
Lin sighed. He was putting it badly. Or perhaps he was wrong. The more he talked to Emma the more he felt that,
indeed, she was more like him than not like him. So, why this vile submission? Why an history of aristocratic dictatorship, maintained until toppled only by the worse dictatorship of communism? How could a people live like that and never discover the rights of the individual, the value of a human life? “Russia was near China,” he said. “They didn’t dare….”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Emma said. “I think oh, I think something happened, somewhere, something that twisted us. I mean there was Rome, and Greece. They had democratic institutions at one time. By their lights, of course.”
Yes, there had been Greece, and Rome, though little was known about them.
Lin sighed. “Let’s not talk about that,” he said. “Tell me about your dreams. What you think the future will bring.”
Emma grinned. Her blue-sky eyes cleared. She talked of what she envisioned her generation, blessed with faster communications than ever before, would not be kept prisoner to a dying ideal. They would move forward. They would move on. They would acquire right to vote. Listening to her, it was almost easy to believe.
And all the while he kept pondering the question. Should he go back home? He wanted to go back home. And he had the chance now that his first term abroad was up. He could go home to a nice promotion and a whole lot of hardship pay. He could find a girl, get married.
But who would lend Emma the daily paper then?
“I’ve signed up for another year,” Lin told Emma.
He sat on his bed in his hotel room. He’d been telling her all about the youth movements in his own city, the opposition to the war in France.
Sitting on the floor, cross-legged, she listened to him like a child drinking in a fairy tale.
It was raining outside, a dark, sooty rain. It left black stripes on the yellowed glass of the window, and it seemed to reverberate mournfully throughout the building.
“I thought you missed home,” Emma said.
“I do,” he said. “But I couldn’t leave you. Who’d lend you his paper then?”
Emma laughed. Her eyes looked very blue like a slice of sky from a springtime London had never known.
They became lovers, almost incidentally.
Around lovemaking in his hotel room, they talked fervently. Of the rights of man. The hope for the new world that would belong to them. A world where Chinese companies started industries other than cigarette factories in blighted England.
A world where each English peasant had a small cottage.
“I think it was that you never formed colonies,” Lin said. “I mean, China colonized a whole new continent, formed three countries in the Land of the West. And sent enough people to Africa too. But Europe just stayed within its tight confines, getting tighter and tighter in space.”
They walked side by side down a darkened street. Emma had promised to take Lin to a nightclub run by people their age. A very secret nightclub, where you could only enter if your knew someone.
She looked back at him, surprised, almost shocked.
She was wearing a pair of harem pants and a short tunic that Lin had bought mail-order from home. Her clean hair sparkled. “Maybe,” she said. “That and the fear of losing all your descendants. After the great invasion and the plague, when so many died, I think Europeans just got used to the idea that they must have a lot of children.”
He asked how many brothers and sisters she had. She counted them on her fingers. “And there’s Nigel, he works in a foundry in the north. And Arthur who was two years older than I…” she stopped. Her eyes filled with tears. “Arthur was killed in Poland. In the war….”
And there Lin was quiet too, because the war in Poland had been won by China. By the skin of their teeth, but Chinese had won the war. And Lin remembered how close they’d come to wavering.
“No, bloody hell, he’s not like us,” said the blond creep who guarded the door to the nightclub a dark doorway distinguishable only from other dark doorways around by the faint sound of a tinny tape player, and a small crowd of British teens. He looked Emma up and down. “He might give you what you need, sister, but he’s an im-pe-ria-list. Running dog of capitalism.”
He spit on the ground.
Lin tugged on Emma’s sleeve. Emma looked like she’d fight, but he pulled her away.
They walked back, silently, to the hotel.
“I would have fought,” she said, coming out of his hotel bathroom, stark naked, her hair dripping.
“Of course,” he said. “Of course. And what would it have earned us? I wouldn’t want to go somewhere I wasn’t wanted.”
He understood the young tug, even. He, himself, not so long ago, hadn’t been sure the Englishmen were like him at all. And China had been exposed to more racial minorities what with trade with Africa and India and immigrants from both in China than any Briton in the last thousand years.
Emma’s hair sparked under the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It sparked with a red sheen.
Mongol red, it was called. Few people knew that the Mongols had started their pillaging looking much like the people from India, like other Indo-Europeans. But in Central Europe they’d lingered and intermarried, before descending on western Europe, arriving there pale and tall and, more often than not, red haired.
By the time they’d destroyed Iberia and moved on to decimate Britain, they weren’t that much different from the Viking predators. Only they’d stayed. They’d destroyed the economy. They’d imposed their system of hierarchic rule and rigid obedience on all of Europe for a hundred years.
Europe had never got over it.
Lin folded Emma into his arms and kissed the little golden hairs at the back of her neck.
What if the Mongols had taken the other way around?
What if they had gone into China instead, just when Chinese culture was breaking out of its early, rigid mold? What if it had squashed China’s democratic roots before they ever could develop?
“I’m sorry, Lin,” Emma said. “I should have stood up to him better, anyway. I should have fought. But we need them their faction. They’re racists, but they are willing to stand with us. We’re going to have demonstrations and shame our government in the eyes of the world. They’ll have to give us the right to vote then.”