Farewell the Dragon - Up on the Roof

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Up on the Roof

The sun and the vodka had their way with me when I returned to my apartment from the pool and I fell into a coma on the couch. I must have set some kind of alarm in my brain because I opened my eyes suddenly with a fear that I was late for something. It was almost 10:30 PM. I missed dinner.

Did I have a date to eat with the Long Island girls? I couldn't remember. I had been dreaming about the one with the long frizzy hair, Margie, and felt like I had missed an opportunity at the pool early. I stood in the bathroom, rubbed my face with a washcloth, and then rode my bike back to the Youyi. It was just about 11 PM, and the sky was clear with a bright crescent moon.

I walked up the three flights of stairs, poorly lit, all brown stained wood, and came out into the open sky and drunken laughter. It was a full house. The rooftop bar is a big space and when you open the door and come out onto the roof, the noise level suddenly rises. Of course when I stepped into the place it went up even higher.

The scene that unfolded was like a tableau in a passion play. Nearest the door, Zhou and Chen were holding court with Jorge, an Argentine long-haired chain smoker, and Harold, a fat English homosexual, who gave me a quick, but deep look. They were all half-listening to my so-called double Rennie, who was talking to Harold very closely and very seriously. Neither Chen nor Jorge spoke English too well, but both were nodding gravely while Zhou was staring at Rennie as he talked to Harold and she took her eyes off of him, just for a second, gave me a little smile and a tiny half-wave with her fingers, then turned back to Rennie who was going on and on oblivious to whether Harold was listening or not.

How did he get "The Job"? Rennie is Peter O'Toole's stand-in on the big movie they are making about the last Qing Emperor over at the Forbidden City. He's making tons of money he doesn't need, and to top it off he spends his evenings with Zhou. I wanted to ask him about his ex-fiancée, my boss's niece, but I had to be nice because I owed him my job. He had never mentioned the favor he gave me, even obliquely. In fact he had been nice to me. In fact, as far as I could tell, he was nice to everyone. But still, I couldn't stand him, and every time I heard him open his mouth I wanted to strangle him because he was so unaware of his own stupidity. And now that I think of it, he was probably the reason why I didn't like coming over here to the Youyi in the first place.

The General's daughter, Chen, simply stared at me with a catbird grin. I addressed her in Chinese and put my hand on their table as if to bless it and tilted my head, kind of like Ronald Reagan does, as if to say I'm not ignoring you even though I am walking away. I started to look around again when…

"Have some drink!" Boris was standing right in front of me holding out a small glass like you find in cheap motel bathrooms, half filled with something as clear as water and no ice. I drank it in a quick gulp. The men at his table all stood and cheered like I just won the Soviet Clean and Jerk championship. Dagmar rolled her eyes. Boris ushered me to a chair and I couldn't give them the Gipper brush-off because it would look like I was mad at Dagmar, and I'd be damned if I was going to let her know I gave a shit…

"We think you are the best American!" Yevgeny was standing unsteadily. I was toasted as the "Best American" all around. I drank again with good cheer. Dagmar gave me a glassy-eyed look that said, "Please break into the castle and save me." It was strange to be the sober one, but I quickly began to fix that problem.

"You know," said Boris, "we will be friends soon." He stopped and looked around for approval then went on, "The Muslim!" He spat, but it ran down his chin. This got everyone laughing for probably a minute. Boris wiped himself off, took another drink and continued…"You will be sorry you give them rockets in Afghanistan." He looked deep into my eyes and shared a "Slavic Moment of Transcendence" with me, something deep and profound and based completely on vodka. I did my little Gipper head tilt. As I sat down, I saw the two traveling American girls from Long Island, sitting with Ibrahim and a couple of his Arab buddies. I waved.

"Nathan – you don't travel?" Boris was a big guy, handsome in a Russian way, with pretty good English. I had another shot of vodka. The Russians don't let you get to know them. They always traveled in threes. If two of them were together it looked conspiratorial and one Russian walking alone was probably an escaped lunatic. But sitting publicly at a table with three or four Russians, drinking vodka was OK. Even in Stalin's time Americans had done that.

"I'm working for a Canadian company. I had business, so I stayed in town."

"Who assigned you to that?" asked a little guy with a squashed face and a blond flattop.

"No one needs to assign, Demetri – it is free enterprise," said Yevgeny, his Clark Gable mustache and slicked black hair groomed straight back. He smiled at me, sad eyed and ironically as though I were complicit in something that only he and I were aware of. Dagmar sat next to him, drinking quickly and pouring herself another.

"Yes," I said. "Hired. Fired, that's how it works. It's just a job."

"Just a job," repeated Yevgeny and for some reason it was funny to everybody at the table. Dagmar made a face, stood up and excused herself with a forced smile and walked over to sit with Erika, at a table with Sandor and Monique the French girl. Yevgeny's face reddened. He pushed the chair that Dagmar had been sitting in out to the middle of the floor and scooted in next to Demetri the Flattop. Yevgeny was an 105amazing diver, and his body was sculpted like a Greek statue, but now he looked cramped and twisted, as he took a cigarette without asking from Flattop's package and waited for his comrade to fumble and find a lighter. "Look around, Nathan – tell me – who are the spies here?"

"You mean other than you guys?"

Guffawing and nervous mumbling rippled down the table. "Really. You all work for the state, right?"

I had their serious attention now. "Yes," said Boris.

"Aren't you supposed to report what you know?"

"You've lived here how long now?" asked Yevgeny. He started coughing and it turned into a small fit.

"You sound like Myshkin's consumptive friend Ippolit," I said, name dropping characters from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. This got them all to smile. "I've lived here a little more than two years," I said.

"Are all of the Chinese spies?" he asked.

"All of the Russians aren't spies in Moscow. But you are in Beijing. That is different," I said.

"And you…?"

"Yes, but I don't work for the United States. I'm…" I stopped, not sure what I wanted to say. Oddly, no one pushed me to finish, they were looking out at their own thoughts.

"Who else is a spy?" asked Boris after a second.

"Well, Sandor. Probably. Maybe," I said, for some reason. I wish I hadn't.

"Yes. Definitely," said Yevgeny. "Hungarians. And Jewish, yes? The question is – for which side?"

"His father was a very important ally," said Demetri the Slavic Flattop, "he supported the anti-imperialist faction during…"

"Yes of course," said Boris. "But what about from your side?"

"My side?" I asked, feigning surprise. I smiled but Boris kept looking and waiting. "Well, perhaps…?" I said nodding at Rennie, my double. They looked at me with silent puzzlement. They obviously knew he was an idiot too.

"What about the fat English?" said Slavic Flattop.

"Harold? Don't you guys own the British Secret Service? MI6? You should ask Kim Philby."

The laughter at the table drowned out everything else. They toasted me and Philby.

"Nate, my friend!" A pair of lumpy, hairy hands wrapped around my shoulders from behind. The hands' owner spun me around, looked me in the eye, then hugged me.

When I met Ibrahim, it had been strange and auspicious. It was at the Baiyun Hotel in Guangzhou during Spring Festival the year before last. I was with my parents, who had brought Molly to China, which is another story completely. Mom and Molly were in the room and Dad and I were having drinks in the bar. I went to take a piss and this fat bearded Arab in a polo shirt and dress slacks came up and stood next to me. He began staring at me until I looked at him, then he turned away. I finished up and was washing my hands and I noticed he was holding his hands next to the stream of water but not in it. I looked up from his hands and he was staring at me again.

"Is something wrong?"

"No! Nothing…" Then, "Yes, yes! Something is wrong."

He took a deep breath and smiled. "I'm sorry. My girlfriend stole my money." He pulled his wallet out and showed me it was empty. "She is Japanese," he added meaningfully. "We were staying here and this morning I wake up and – it is gone. She is gone." He smiled again. "I thought, no problem, I have a friend in Guangzhou, but, it's just…"

"Just what?" Something put me at ease. His smile, I don't know – but I believed him. Japanese girlfriend? Nobody would make that up. Normally I'm pretty standoffish, but this time something about him made me stay to see what he wanted.

"My friend doesn't answer the phone."

I invited him for a drink – easy to do, my Dad was paying. I always got on better with Dad if we had a third person around and we had a great two hours trading stories. Ibrahim was PLO and had been in Lebanon in 1982. In spite of the horrors of the war, he told funny stories about pretending to be Israeli, using captured papers and speaking bad Hebrew while sneaking his little unit in good order through the Israeli lines that had beaten him to Beirut. My Dad told funny stories about Vietnam and World War II, about stumbling drunk off of a floating bar in the middle of the Mekong River just as it blew up behind him, or shooting at a cousin in the Luftwaffe. I had never been in a war, so I

told what I thought was a funny story about trashing a cop car in front of the ROTC building on my college campus in 1970 right after Kent State.

My Dad gave Ibrahim thirty dollars to buy a train ticket to Chengdu and I left him my address in Louyang. When I got back to Louyang the money was waiting for me (I never did get around to sending back it to Dad), along with a beautiful tiny jade statue of Buddha for Molly, even though Ibrahim hadn't met her and obviously wasn't a Buddhist himself. I wrote him, thank you for the Buddha, etc., but we lost touch after that. Then we both showed up in Beijing last year and here we were.

"We waited for you…" said Judy, pushing between Ibrahim and me.

"Was I supposed to meet you?"

"Yes!" She put her arm through mine to make sure I didn't get away. "We were in the dining room downstairs when Rashid and Nasser and Ibrahim sat at our table…" Judy moved close to my ear so she didn't need to shout. "Well, one thing led to another and…then when we saw you come in, Ibrahim said 'That is my friend!' and we said, 'He's our friend too!' Isn't that funny?"

I agreed it was funny and Judy then leaned even closer and whispered to me – she smelled of perfume and Cuban rum - "Look at Margie." She dragged me arm in arm to their table and Margie was forehead to forehead with a startling-looking young man – that was the first time I had ever met or even seen Rashid. He looked up at me as we got to the table and his eyes looked like sapphires, bluer than any eyes I had ever seen. His hair was golden, not blond, not red, but golden. The more I looked at him the more I realized I was staring. His eyes looked way too blue for his face, way too blue for anyone's face, so blue that they looked completely stoned yet behind those eyes was intentness and clarity that was the opposite of stoned, almost unworldly.

Rashid looked at Ibrahim and asked him something in Arabic.

Margie couldn't take her eyes off of him. "His name is Rashid," she said. "His friend is Nasser…" As if on cue, a very tall, taller than me, very Arab-looking young man with close-cropped hair, wearing an Izod knockoff golf shirt, stood glaring nervously at me.

"Nate, let me introduce you to my friend, this is Nasser." Ibrahim said something in Arabic and Nasser smiled. He suddenly looked like a teenager with an innocent disarming smile. We shook hands and Ibrahim said something else to jewel-eyed Rashid. He looked away from Margie only long enough to smile and nod at me. Rashid spoke no English, but he did speak Margie's high school French, so they got by with whispers and giggles.

"Circassians were favorites of the Turks for their beauty," said Ibrahim to us in English. He struggled not to laugh. "You saw the film Lawrence of Arabia?"

"With Peter O'Toole," said Judy. "I've seen it three times."

"Remember when the Turk Colonel did that to Lawrence." Ibrahim made a face of painful disgust. "Lawrence was pretending to be Circassian – when the Turk did it." More rapid-fire Arabic from Nasser and Rashid leaned over and punched Nasser in the chest so hard it knocked him to the floor. Nasser lay next to the table laughing hysterically and even Ibrahim could not stop. Even Rashid started laughing now. He stood up and shouted above the din on the rooftop –

"P'tar Oh Tooo! - P'tar Oh Tooo!" Everyone turned and Ibrahim and Nasser laughed uncontrollably, contagiously, and soon we were all laughing although I wasn't sure at what.

"I work with Peter O'Toole every day. What is so funny?" My double, Rennie, spoke up loudly, as if he were demanding satisfaction from a gentleman, but was ignored. He walked over to our table with trepidation.

"Peter is a great guy you know. I bet I could get him to come over and drink with us. He stays downtown mostly, but I know he would really like it here."

Ibrahim nodded diplomatically. He shot me a look that said, "What the fuck is wrong with this guy?"

Rashid said something in Arabic. "He wants to know if O'Toole enjoyed being a Circassian." Now everybody was bending over laughing. Rennie still didn't get it, which was now what was so funny.

"Rennie is Peter O'Toole's stand-in. They are making a movie about Puyi, who was the Last Emperor of China," Zhou said quietly in Chinese. She stopped the laughing, even though only about half of us understood what she said.

Ibrahim looked at Rennie and then at me.

"You two should go stand in front of a mirror so you don't get confused as to which is which!" Ibrahim spoke in Chinese with a pure Beijing accent.

"Americans and Europeans all look like eggs in a basket," said Rashid.

"Eggs are eggs," said Ibrahim. "They rot, they are white, brown, big or small and can have any kind of animal inside – an eagle or a snake!" Both Rashid and Ibrahim's Chinese was indistinguishable from that of a native speaker.

"East meets West," said Rennie, suddenly seeming to understand the joke. "It's always an interesting story." He nodded and laughed and put his hand on my shoulder like a good sport. He of course had not understood a word of what was said. I smiled tightly and excused myself. I walked over to the deserted west side of the bar. I looked over the parapet and out into the night. Nothing was out of place. I traced Orion's belt to the Little Dipper. It was all familiar. I am getting older. The same sky, the same stars. Even on the other side of the world.

Then an obviously Japanese woman walked in wearing a short, shiny, tight, plastic blue skirt. She looked like she just got back from a David Bowie concert, with Twiggy-style short hair, blue lipstick, and plastic boots up to her thighs. Dagmar stood up, hugged her and guided her to the Russian table. She stopped and turned and looked at Ibrahim. It was a face-off at the DMZ.

"Mikku!" Ibrahim's voice went up an octave and he looked as if he had just been shot. She looked at him with no change in expression and then turned back to Dagmar and laughed, much too quickly to have been told a joke. Dagmar spoke to her a bit loudly, showing off her drunken Japanese.

"Mikku!" Ibrahim was almost pleading. She turned to him again and looked at him as if she were waiting for something that she could take or leave. Ibrahim went to her.

"Let's join the tables," said Dagmar.

"Yes…" Ibrahim said although he didn't take his eyes off of Mikku. "Yes. This is China. We are all from the same country anyway." He touched her elbow and she pulled away, but went with him anyway.

"Waiguo," I said, getting a big laugh even from Rennie. Two Chinese girlfriends and over a year in Beijing, and Rennie still could not speak much beyond "Ni hao." But even he knew "waiguo" (外国) can mean something foreign or foreign country. How long had it been since we'd been home to the

green hills of Waiguo! In China, we were all compatriots. "Everyone! From now on!" I pulled out a $100 bill – an enormous sum - "We drink until it is gone!"

Dagmar jumped up, ignoring the Russian edginess to my suggestion. "Here! Give it to me." She came over and relieved me of the money. "I'll negotiate. We need food too, right? Erika, come and help." Erika, smoking cigarettes with Sandor, the Argentine longhair, Monique and Harold, had been trying to settle the Falklands War peace treaty, without success, so she joined Dagmar.

I suddenly recognized Mikku. She was the mousy Japanese school "girl" who always wore pigtails, usually with a pleated skirt and white knee socks and who studied by herself in the courtyard at my Institute.

"So," said Boris to Nasser, "You are Arab – from where?"

"I was born in Bethlehem."

"Of course you were!" Now everyone was laughing.

"It's true – just like the Christ. And like him, I am sure the Israelis will kill me eventually."

"No!" shouted Judy authoritatively, leaning over and kissing him. "It was the Romans."

"You see? They won't kill you right away! First they torture you," said Yevgeny. Boris stood on his chair with his arms out, hanging his neck slack. Most of the other Russians looked mortified at Boris's mock crucifixion, but the rest of us were laughing our asses off. Judy climbed on Bethlehem-born Nasser's lap, and straddled his waist. Nasser really did look like he was being tortured and everyone was in hysterics laughing.

"No," he said suddenly picking up Judy as if she were a loaf of bread, and standing up. "First I go to Afghanistan and kill all the Russians for Allah!"

Silence. "No, no," said Ibrahim, "the Russians are our brothers. To Kalashnikov!" He stood up and toasted. The Russians held up their glasses. Mine stayed on the table.

"Let's stop killing," said Judy, grabbing Ibrahim and pulling him back into his seat. "Don't you all understand how rare this is? This could be like a Peace Conference! We could settle it! We all could settle everything here tonight!" Judy looked at Margie, who rolled her eyes and went back to kissing Rashid. "In America this would be big news." Judy turned back at us. "Everybody is here. I've never met a Palestinian before. Why can't we change things?

How do we stop the fighting? All of it?" She turned to Nasser and now straddled his lap again, and kissed him long and full on the lips to the cheers of everybody. "You and me! We'll make Peace!"

"To peace!" I toasted, holding up my glass. Everyone lifted their glasses.

"Is that what it's called in America?" said Yevgeny, with a stage-whisper. "If you really want peace, then stop giving the religious crazies the Stingers," he said. "It will come back to haunt you."

"My mother, God rest her great soul, was a Maronite Christian," said Ibrahim. "She married my father, Mohmet Abdullah. He was Sunni and I was raised in a Shiite village after the Israelis took my grandfather's orchard outside Jaffa. That orchard is my religion."

"What if we became one people? We know what happened wasn't fair," Margie said. "But in 1945…it was desperate for so many…"

"…But maybe," said Judy, "maybe we can…"

The thought hung out there. I thought to myself, maybe you can fuck for peace. I had the feeling that this had all been played out long before, and maybe before that. It didn't work then either.

"The problem is it's a sex thing – a male-female thing. Isn't it just tribes – my tribe and your tribe – keeping women under control?" asked Judy, pulling away from Nasser.

"That's the problem. Sexual envy. Men will die rather than lose that control," said Margie.

Ibrahim said, "It is more than that. Even though Sharon killed thousands of us in Lebanon, I do understand him."

"He's a mass murderer," said Margie.

"No, he's a soldier. He was born on the land and can't go back to America. I know that we will win eventually, and so does Sharon. He is just trying to claim as much as he can. I don't think the sex interests him. He is too fat."

Mikku patted Ibrahim's stomach lovingly.

He looked at Judy and Margie, "You don't need to be afraid of it when we win. During the Crusades, the Arab who finally captured Jerusalem was Saladin."

"He was a Kurd," said Nasser, kissing Judy.

"Yes, yes, Kurd. He killed no one, well, he killed some but not for sport. He destroyed no churches, let the Crusaders who had farms keep the farms. Moses Maimonides, the greatest Jew of his time, was his physician. He preferred to live under the Muslim rather than live in Europe with the Christians. Jews were always safe in the Muslim world until…"

"So you think that sex is the answer to the problem between cultures," asked Chen, interrupting Ibrahim, in Chinese. I translated for Judy and Margie.

"Yes," said Judy.

"We Chinese have always thought so too," said Zhou in English. "We had a policy called 'huanqin'(换亲) which is exchanging daughters for marriage. The Princess was sent to the wild men. How do you say, Xiongnu?"

"The Huns, the barbarians…"

"Yes," added Zhou, "and the Huns would send their Princess to China. In order to keep the peace, the Chinese Princess had to go. It was terrible. She lived in the round tent and wrote many beautiful poems about the difficulty."

Everyone was quiet. "But now it is different. To go live in a foreign land as a bride is not bad." She looked down and reached across the table to put some food on my double's plate.

"Communism succeeded in some places, Vietnam perhaps, Cuba definitely, because of sex," said Harold.

"Why?" asked Dagmar. She looked at Yevgeny impassively.

"Because Americans or French could come in and buy girls cheaply," said Harold. "If I had seen my little sister have to go off with some fat American for a few dollars, I would have joined Castro. Besides, he was actually pretty cute back then."

"What if the American wasn't fat?" asked Chen.

"You would have joined Castro, because his cause was the correct one," said Boris.

"Yes – of course," agreed Rennie, looking at me, nodding seriously, as if he knew that I understood.

"No, my Russian friend," said Sandor. "Communism is dead, or will end very soon. It is almost gone here in China. The 'dictatorship of the Proletariat' will of course continue, but the Capitalists will take over." He stopped to take a

drink and looked a long time at Erika. Boris just stared at Sandor.

"I see it on the movie set," said Rennie. At that moment I understood why I disliked him so much. "Everybody from the West is highly paid, and they live separate, but the girls…" he stopped.

Zhou stared off with a blank look. He looked at her and it was the first time it seemed as if he might have a hint of self-awareness, but it quickly passed. "…Men from the West can be big stars here," he held his hands up as if to demonstrate his point.

Wow, I thought. Of course, he is right.

“But then I am rich," he continued. "My family is anyway. I could have any girl I wanted. But here, I'm not just a rich boy, because Socialism makes us all equal. Here I am myself. And I feel free because of it." Rennie looked around, then at Zhou, who appeared vaguely unsettled. Flattop toasted his drink to him, while laughing. Everyone else tried to avoid looking at each other.

Ibrahim laughed. "Free – yes – free to find a mate! That is as old as life. Male wolves are kicked out of their pack and leave to find female wolves. Chasing a mate is what we all have to do – it is as free as we'll ever be – and then we find them and we lose everything – most of all our freedom! That's the way it is supposed to be – to spread seeds around. Peasants have always known that. Royalty stays in the family and look what happens to them – hemophilia, insanity…"

"Prince Charles," said Harold.

"No," said Dagmar. "Sex outside your class or tribe ends up being exploitative. Women are still property, in fact they are the only valuable property still allowed everywhere. Love is not a bargain, is it? We still are no different than wolves or barbarians. Most of the time, it's just rape." Dagmar looked harshly now at Yevgeny.

Rennie excused himself saying that he had to be on the set early. He came over and offered me seventy dollars to help pay for the food and booze, which I quickly took. He pulled Zhou away for a private talk. I went for a piss and Dagmar followed me down and threw herself around me, clearly drunker than she looked. "So what shall we do?"

"We still haven't finished the vodka," I said.

“Of course – we are Germans – we can never waste anything!"

I noticed I was suddenly a German in her eyes. My immigrant grandfather is smiling, somewhere. Zhou came up behind her and innocently interrupted us with a little two-fingered wave for me to come over to her. I nodded to Dagmar and then walked over to Zhou.

"I need someone to see me home. Rennie is angry at me and I don't want to see him anymore tonight."

"OK." As I left, Dagmar smiled at me with a shrug – no anger and no hurt look. She was pretty drunk.

"Can you get home?" I asked her. "Zhou lives on the other side of the Zoo and it's pretty late."

"Boris is getting a taxi for us all – I was just hoping you could come and pay for it!" She held out the change (about sixty dollars) from the $100 I had given her earlier. I took it.

"Well, send me a bill."

"Oh – you will get a bill!"

My bike, a well-oiled, fat-tired, solid machine, pedaled easily. Zhou rode on the handlebars, fearlessly, expertly. The night was beautiful as we rode away from the hotel.

Recently I had been taking my bike to an old street tinker who oiled and adjusted it. He worked off of a blanket where his well-used tools were laid out clean and straight. He never set up in the same place, and he fit his shelter and tools on his bike with intricately designed baskets and bars. The tune-up cost me fifty mao, half a yuan, about a nickel in dollar value. I paid him twice that, a whole kuai, and refused the change. I remember the old street vendor gave me a smile that promised something extra for the tip.

The night air was cool and the crescent moon was suddenly very close. I leaned back and my well-oiled machine took off for the stars and soared above the earth. My bike handled perfectly, banking from one side to another, seeming to lose all attachment to gravity as we flew into and then out of a cloud bank. I looked down and could see the Great Wall at Badaling to the north and the Forbidden City to the southeast. We dropped down to flying at treetop level and Zhou relaxed and leaned back on my handlebars and I stood and pedaled hard, and we were riding fast, almost cheek to cheek; the thick-framed, fat-tired bike was a magic carpet, sailing us through all time and space with ease.

The night had cooled off after the hot day and I knew she wasn't thinking about Rennie. I made her laugh somehow as we breezed down The Western Gate Road and past the Beijing Zoo.

The moon was still bright, bright in the clear open sky, and a little breeze picked up, making the temperature so comfortable that it seemed like a crime to go inside even for sleep. We turned at a little hutong (胡同) and went down a construction road past a half-finished apartment complex. Just beyond that there was an old wall that looked to be half torn down. The wall was hundreds of years old and would soon be bulldozed. Time stood still and we stood at the edge of her hutong village, next to that crumbling wall. We kissed, just kissed. It was so nice in the summer breeze under the splintered moon. I said good night and rode home.