Avenue of Eternal Peace Page 3

  Stringy, flaxen-haired Clarence had eyes the pale blue of caustic soda. ‘I don’t see why the Chinese have to take it out on the blacks,’ he said. He had studied Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, came to Beijing for finishing off, and stayed on.

  Dulcia had been discussing with him her thwarted project of putting together an aerobics program for Central TV which would make her Jane Fonda to one billion people—the thought made her toes curl. But the project kept coming up against the wall.

  ‘The first thing to learn is not to hope,’ grinned Clarence.

  ‘I hate your cynicism.’

  ‘Cynicism or paranoia. Take your choice,’ he replied. ‘Cynicism is the better way. I’ll survive you all here.’

  ‘You think I’m paranoid?’ A fraction of a squint, at close quarters, made her look vampish. ‘I’ll tell you something—I’m paranoid because I’m fighting. We’re surrounded by enemies here. I want to free these people.’

  ‘Liberate the Chinese? Change China? That’s the oldest con in the book. Merchants, diplomats, missionaries, generals. They’ve all tried, all been gobbled up. Now from their citadels of enlightenment come the kids of Reagan’s America.’

  ‘You talk like a book, Clarence.’

  ‘I get it from my mother.’

  Clarence’s anger caused the table to brood. Then he started to cough. Beijing had given him a permanent cough.

  ‘You should do something about that,’ put in Wally.

  ‘What the doctor ordered, another of the same!’ Dulcia bounced back from the bar with three black cocktails.

  ‘Cheers! Prost! Ganbei! You gotta keep hoping,’ she said too loudly.

  Dulcia believed—in everything; believed in hard work; believed in making it. She knew her homeland had its faults but believed that on odds it was the best place on earth, offering riches and freedom without which there was no possibility of self-fulfilment. Unlike Clarence, she had clear moral convictions. Wilhelm Reich and Tina Turner stood beside Abe Lincoln in her pantheon. She was an agent of liberation waging a personal campaign to help China.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Doc.’ She turned to the sandy-haired, sandy-faced man whose tall frame seemed to be propped against the chair rather than resting on it. ‘How are you finding this place?’

  ‘It’s okay. I didn’t come with high hopes, just to poke around. I’m interested in some of their methods of treatment. But I’d have to admit I’m not finding what I’m looking for.’

  Wally’s explanation was perhaps flimsier than necessary, as if the encounters with Mrs Gu were sapping his sense of purpose. ‘I admire the Chinese. The scale is enormous. To have managed even the first few steps on the road to Utopia is an achievement. They’ve got food. Disease is relatively contained. Things function—more or less.’

  Dulcia spread her hand on the table. ‘Look at my fingernails. Even in this light. The place is filthy! We don’t blow the trumpet about food and hygiene in our countries,’ she said. ‘What’s the difference with China?’

  ‘History,’ said Clarence flatly. ‘The magnitude of what holds them back.’

  ‘For which we are partly to blame,’ added Wally.

  Clarence cocked his eyebrow. ‘Don’t point the finger at me, chum.’

  But words were only obscure terms for unformulated feelings. Wally hung on to the belief that the present cant of the Reforms expressed some deeper wisdom in the Chinese collective consciousness. Progress was biological, a struggle between mutations; and the Reforms, he hoped, were an organic process leading to health.

  ‘We all love Chinese,’ acidly concluded Clarence, who was starved for body contact inside his sheath of winter clothing.

  ‘Let’s play that one over.’ Dulcia was tired of fuzzy talk. Private dancer, a dancer for money, she sang, clapping her hands above her head as she went to dance in the middle of the space with all her happy American heedlessness. ‘Hey guys, let’s party!’

  The barman glanced towards the manager. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, coming forward to whisper in the foreign woman’s ear.

  ‘What? No dancing! Just try to stop me, honey!’

  The manager was next, insisting on the rules … their licence … the Public Security Bureau … certain regulations, as Dulcia mocked.

  A single person was not allowed to dance alone; that constituted performance. Two persons were not allowed to dance together; that was too romantic. No foreigners and Chinese were allowed to dance together; that was ‘spiritual pollution’.

  But according to the regulations, as interpreted by the hand-wringing manager, three foreigners were allowed to dance together. He cordially invited the two men to join Dulcia, who broke up over the regulation—a sly number, three.

  ‘In China it takes three to tango. Come on!’

  And Foreign Trader and Party Greenhorn advanced from the shadows to do a crab-like disco on either side of the woman, encircling her with their pincers.

  The barman watched with a saintly, lit up expression, until the sweating manager impulsively pushed the Eject switch and turned on the light. The dancers blinked, began murmurs and protests, then Dulcia screamed. A large fat rat was scurrying (in not too much of a scurry) along the skirting boards.

  Earlier in the day the same rat had crossed the room while the hygiene inspector was discussing with the manager catering arrangements for her son’s wedding, and a discount was struck.

  ‘Closing time,’ announced the manager, herding the gang towards the door marked Man Closet Woman Closet.

  ‘It’s like those wartime jokes,’ said Dulcia. ‘An American, an Englishman and an Australian in a lousy bar in Peking.’

  ‘A damn Yankee, a whinging Pom and a gullible Ocker,’ said Wally. And thought to himself, a sceptic cursed with the need for values.

  ‘Won’t you tell us the punch line?’ asked Clarence.

  ‘They danced with each other! Nice to see you again, Doc,’ she called as she threw a leg over her bike.

  3

  Clarence walked into the cold. At night, disguised like a homecoming worker in cap, scarf and coat, he became a faceless swimmer in the darkness. He loved the night, when his camera was stowed and he could cease looking for shots. He had come to Beijing to prevent his mother turning him into a character in one of her novels. She had only the notoriety of literary London to confer. Clarence the child, Clarence the teenager, had been utilised more than once in the Honourable Ann Codrington’s heightened fictions. Growing older, he had learned to put himself out of reach, studying a language that could not be quoted on the page, and then moving safely East. His mother’s mighty pen had hung over his head through adolescence, forcing private turmoil back on itself to escape expression. He started playing round with the camera then, and photography irresistibly became his medium: art without a voice. What he loved was the accident of the shutter, and his soul remained the amorphous dark against which images formed—tender and witty and lonely, speaking no language, wearing no dress.

  He walked past the locked-up bird and fish market where by day fanciers traded rare breeds and curios, past the Kismet spires of the Soviet-built Exhibition Centre, and the zoo where the polar bear was bellowing, into the area where itinerants gathered, Mongols and Uigyurs and prostitutes, forming compositions of fur, leather and padding in the steamy glow of the noodle stalls.

  Clarence crossed a scrap of park with solid ice puddles on the paths and trees hacked like iron rakes; and entered the unsewered, draughty lavatory where, shuddering and holding his breath, he relieved himself: a little dragon emitting steam. Opposite, the rooftop of a foreign hotel sent out a lethargic light show of coloured stars. He would go to warm himself on free scotch and gossip from the bar boys; that would do his cold good.

  4

  Three fates in black tangling their yarns: had they been construing China or themselves, Wally wondered. The shapeless, murky depth of the city had somehow to be placed within a framework of understanding, otherwise you were now
here, anywhere, at middle life, far from boundaries and bearings, in the Middle Kingdom. He had drunk too much, heard too much, talked too much, and his body was too big for the damned bed, and the damned bed was too big for his damned body. He scratched frantically, pinched the back of his neck as hard as he could, squeezed the acupuncture point between thumb and forefinger that’s supposed to induce sleep, and, trying to summon Australian sheep milling realistically through a shearing run, managed only cartoon blobs of wool. On the bedside table lay the photocopies of Hsu Chien Lung’s articles. The disappearing man. Wally had flicked through the greyed pages of oldfashioned print and wondered why he admired their elegance so. In one gesture they pointed a mystery and hinted a solution, although the site of that solution had receded. Was his attachment to those old papers purely a road not taken, that he had sentimentally rediscovered as need dictated? He cursed with an insomniac’s impotency—and returned on the ferris wheel to the bottom. Where was he? And why?

  There had been relics, a black leather-bound Mandarin bible, printed Shanghai 1898, a silver pipe that the children fancied smelled of opium, big black placards with gold characters meaning longevity. There were photographs of the white house with black tiles and turned up eaves, a woman with a plait in a white pinafore, swarthy converts in tight round caps assembled in a courtyard. There was the brusque memoir, a gathering of stock anecdotes, that Grandpa Frith had awkwardly typed for posterity. There was the fact that Wally’s father got cross whenever China was mentioned.

  Most beautifully there was The Hut in the hills that family legend whispered had been built by Grandpa in memory of his first wife, Retta. Wally never knew that real grandmother, but he knew The Hut, a cottage of tin and wood and stone where he used to go for holidays as a boy. The soil and climate made exotic things grow there: a Nepali deodar with a cave inside, a spreading lime with leaves of see-through tissue, mountainous rhododendrons, liquidambar, crepe myrtle, peonies, red toadstools with white spots, persistent bamboo.

  Viewed from the bottom road the landscape arranged itself in descending terraces and framed The Hut with lofty trees, some European, some native, some oriental, shaded, half-hidden, with an illusion of great distance; revealing, as Grandpa had planned, the Chinese proportions of a roof that yearned upwards with curving iron eaves. It was Grandpa’s shrine, or apology, where Wally the child had been happiest, in summer, sitting out on the latticed veranda surrounded by the rattling leaves of the great magnolia whose masses of wide open flower moons made the air divine ether.

  Visits to The Hut were special, planned from afar. His parents had settled interstate out of Grandpa’s reach. Then they would drive hundreds of miles to stay with Grandpa and Patsy in The Hut, and everyone always said the time was far too short, until afterwards in the car Wally’s father and mother said they could not have stayed a day longer. Patsy was a divorced woman when Grandpa married her, of Scottish stock, staunch, forthright, likeable. She had a daughter from her first husband and a tribe of relatives, and bore two more Frith children. With his high moral tone and medical man’s common sense, Grandpa fixed up the mess to his perfect satisfaction by making the second, immediate family the one that absorbed his interest and life. Wally’s family was left out.

  Family never meant much to Wally. His father’s childhood had been broken by Retta’s death and ever after his father’s relationship with the old man was strained by unexplored resentments and stubborn independence. Jerry, Wally’s father, was utterly unsentimental where family was concerned; and Wally’s self-sufficient mother was of the same breed.

  Against that background, the ritual pilgrimages to visit Grandpa Frith were steeped for Wally in momentous alienness. In the fabulous leafy old world of The Hut the boy found much. Grandpa teased him with oriental mysteries, the white mane shining, gaunt limbs on the chair arms, bones stuck under clothes, eyes darting as the voice croaked its summons for the boy to enter the presence of an ancestral spirit (who was dying, Wally later knew).

  He was too young to appreciate old Waldemar Frith’s wit, or the sturdy aphorism inscribed in the Mandarin bible that came down to him: The courage we desire and prize is not to die decently but to live manfully (Carlyle). But the spirit image stayed in Wally’s memory. Jerry had gone grey by the time the day came to fly from Wollongong to Adelaide for the funeral. He didn’t say much to the kids afterwards. The clan stopped gathering. That year, when Wally was ten, the year of the last visit to The Hut, summer magnolias stirred riper-than-ever fancies, the Soviets put Sputnik into space and in China Chairman Mao allowed a hundred flowers to bloom before they were quickly scorched. Then came the Great Leap Forward.

  5

  The snow froze. The road was hard and still, long, empty, unbending. The breath of a puny Mongolian pony pulling the cart home along the usual route formed a little cloud of steam. Clop-clop, clop-clop, it moved from city to country with a heavy load of nightsoil. Atop the cart, bundled in greatcoat and fur cap with earflaps down, the old farmer snoozed, and from his nostrils smoked tiny runnels. If he woke he would growl, but the animal knew without commands to go fast when the road was hard and empty and home approached.

  After missing the last bus and taking a roundabout way, Jin Juan came through side streets towards the crossroads. Accursed Beijing she knew like her own nervous system. She came home having argued. Her hair was stuffed inside the hood of her down jacket. Probably to the outside she looked no different, but she no longer felt, or cared to feel, clean and pretty. Her perfume annoyed her. She would have to wash it off before class tomorrow. She felt, in fact, strong and savage as her feet hit the iron-hard ground. She had decided; she knew he had decided; the matter was communicated in their bodies, though for so long they had played ring-around-the-rosy with hopes and promises, just as her country had gone on waiting and waiting for the Red Dawn so long that no one knew now how to break the circle of chains. If only … Jin Juan decided once again that she would win, that her anger and his edginess were but raw materials, and that, rather than exploding, her energy must be used to turn all that recalcitrant matter into well-tempered love. She was tenacious, with a discipline that brought her back from the edge of violent destructiveness to a new deep vein of persistence.

  She was conscious first of an intrusion on her thoughts. The animal knocked into her, was trampling over her, and she was down among its hundred-seeming legs. Her body was rolling under the cart. Trotting along the familiar road, the horse could not be expected to take account of a young woman crossing in the dark, and scarcely registered the disturbance, scarcely stopped. The old man snorted and made a lame attempt to pull on the reins. He was not about to apologise. Jin Juan rolled like an acrobat and was on her feet again. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said, ‘no harm done.’ The farmer would only swear at her if she let him. Perhaps her cheeks were grazed by the ice. There was no light to see what state she was in. She shrugged, laughed, turned and made her decisive way before the sleepy farmer abused his puzzled horse into motion once more. She walked away. What guts she had. She sniffed. She did not look vengefully back at the honey cart. Was the stuff all over her? She smelled the perfume, like a film of pollution. She smelled her body, his, their, bodies. She smelled shit. Golden grace spiking ice down the road’s black centre, Jin Juan walked decisively.

  THREE

  The Way

  1

  The driver went through the regular litany of questions as the taxi crawled across the city. What country are you from? Wally answered faithfully, except sometimes he said Iceland. What are you doing in China? How old are you? Are you married? Yes, he fudged. Children, yes. (Contrary, baffling Jerome, his son.) Home? Car? How much do you earn? By any standards he was comfortable, though his colleagues grumbled, too comfortable. Chinese people too many, Chinese history too long, China too poor. If I go to your country, how much money can I make? What do you make of Chinese people? Wally pronounced the word he had learned to describe them: lihai, meaning fierce, a force to be reckoned with
, like the hottest Sichuan food.

  No one was skittled on the way, though human shapes drifted out in front of the taxi that sailed through the streets like an air-conditioned barge.

  Eagle was waiting for him at the Daoist temple, standing at attention against a sunny patch of wall. He wore navy running pants with a white stripe, white running shoes and a bulky sweater knitted with the Armani eagle. Full of energy, he led the Doctor across the swept flagstones to the first courtyard where monks with topknots were pottering about. He tolerated the foreigner’s interest in such quaint things, though he had seen too much fakery to regard these Daoists as close to any source. Yesterday’s stinking superstition was today’s colourful tradition under the Party’s magic wand; and the monks, with baggy robes and inturned eyes, performed well.

  ‘If they can’t get a better job, it’s not a bad living for these guys to be transferred here,’ he commented.

  Wally was thinking philosophically of Lao Tzu. Yet Eagle was the truer Daoist, always taking the path of least resistance. Even the movement of his frame suggested the flow of fish in a stream. Cheeky sarcasm communicated itself in his facial gestures as much as his broken language. He was open and virtuous, while entirely pragmatic, serenely following the accident that had first thrown him together with the foreigner. If the Cultural Revolution had deprived him of education, he had become an alert autodidact, and although he had only a badly paid and boring job in a state office, he seldom proclaimed his grievances. There was more to life than the refrigerator, the video recorder and the foreign passport that his contemporaries worshipped. Wally liked him. He preferred being with Eagle to being with the people from the Medical College who were eager, for their own motives, to act as his guide. With Eagle he felt unconfined and could question frankly. It was necessary to trust someone. When Eagle said he had been a basketball champion in the city, Wally believed him. His height distinguished him, and he had an affable grace that athletic prowess might have conferred. Wally committed himself to the relationship, and would not let Eagle down when the time came. Meanwhile he pestered him with questions, as if Eagle were the representative Chinese who could answer all inquiries about his people.