Avenue of Eternal Peace Read online

  They stepped through bright red and green paintwork into dark lustrous chambers hung with banners and out again into white winter sunlight, accompanied by the monks’ babbling wooden music. ‘Actually, why did you come to China?’ asked Eagle in return.

  ‘You’re like the taxi drivers. You ask direct questions and expect direct answers. Why can’t you be inscrutable like you’re supposed to be?’

  ‘What you say?’

  With some exasperation Wally explained that he wanted to learn from China.

  ‘Can you learn from China?’ Eagle seriously wondered.

  ‘Like the man said about Everest, it’s there.’

  ‘You are going to climb Heaven Mountain?’

  ‘Heaven Mountain you call it? I can’t climb Heaven Mountain because China has got in the way.’

  Eagle hung his head in helpless resignation. To be presented with such metaphysical reasons for behaviour, to have placed before him the world of Wally, where great actions were undertaken for whimsical motives, where practical considerations were irrelevant or beneath mention, was perplexing.

  ‘Do you believe in religion?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Wally, fluffing it.

  ‘I don’t believe,’ Eagle stated flatly.

  2

  Wally’s grandfather had believed. That, indirectly, provided a reason. But the oblique causation was not easy to explain. New China had begun in 1949, and was already the burdensome past to New Age China of the 1980s. In thinking of his grandfather Wally was harking back to the late Ching dynasty, that perfumed twilight merged already with legend. His grandfather had been a doctor and a Christian in the South at the turn of the century, a craggy old chap whose perdurable Saxon Christian name Wally had inherited. Jerry, Wally’s father, had been born in China. On winter weekends in Wollongong, when rain beat down over the ranges, while ma and pa snoozed after lunch, Wally loved to sift through his father’s desk. It wasn’t snooping; Jerry had nothing to hide, as long as the boy left things as neat as he found them. The father’s desk was a model to the boy, of bookkeeping, scrupulosity, and how to get rid of useless clutter. Wally wished for more clutter, though he was scientifically minded and liked to have names on things. He liked best the folder of documents kept in the locked drawer, and his favourite thing there was his father’s birth certificate. Jeremiah Columba Frith, in browned copperplate, 8th August 1905, Hangchow. The names and occupations of his grandparents written out in full. Waldemar Thomas Frith, medical officer. Retta Frith née Glee, nursing sister. Address: The Mission Hospital, Taichow. In the bottom corner of the yellowed certificate was a vertical row of tiny printed characters, to designate, perhaps, a Chinese manufacturer. The certificate threatened to fall apart along its crease lines from a lifetime’s folding and unfolding.

  Wally often raised these matters with his father, but Jerry—having long ago ditched the thundering moniker Jeremiah—showed little interest. He had no recollection of China. When the family was shipped from Shanghai to South Australia, Jerry was four. Nor, in later life, was he in touch with his elder brother Lionel, a scapegrace who might have remembered more. Wally’s curiosity was kindled but never fanned, not after Grandpa died. The link with China was a stray thread in a life otherwise well ordered, hardworking and determined. Jerry was a professional soldier, a communications engineer. During the war years, of middling rank and no longer young, he met a woman similarly placed, and when peace came they married. In his forties he entered upon domestic life and a General Post Office job at Wollongong that lasted till retirement. From both his parents Wally got no-nonsense attitudes: do what’s best for you; make a good job of things; make the most of what you’ve got. He was also brainy. In the spirit of his country and the times, the early 1960s, he was encouraged to go for broad horizons and high endeavour. He came top of the class in his final year at Wollongong High; he worked for it. He was offered his first choice, a place in Medicine at Sydney University.

  Wally was a straightforward young man, though neither he nor his mates, who read philosophy and literature and talked politics, self-consciously, and involved themselves in campus activities, were typical medical students. Wally was secretary of the Student Socialists, an unfrivolous lot regularly assailed by the more numerous Libertarians, a flamboyant anarchic set who were not politicised until Australian boys died in Vietnam. Wally did not need a stinking post-colonial war to establish his convictions. He was a socialist on scientific principles. He believed in the common good being served by common cooperation. Knowledge as much as wealth was power and neither should be the privilege of a few. His views set him at odds with his brothers in the medical school, who had sharp eyes for money under the blazon of the Hippocratic Oath. Wally’s altruism was bullshit, they said, and Wally was a bore. Their attitudes turned him towards a career in medical research rather than lucrative practice. He was superior, even if he didn’t come from the North Shore; and he stuck by his thinking mates and kept himself clean.

  In the summer holidays he worked on the Wollongong docks, loading ships that took Australian wool and minerals to Japan, and later at the steel smelter, and eventually in the workers’ compo office at BHP. To put in the twelve weeks each summer he turned down more diverting proposals, again out of pride and a desire to have the stuffing knocked out of him. To the blokes on the job, who wished he was more talkative, he was known as Doc. He sat around with his nose in a book. When he did open up, he was all opinions and hot air.

  On weekends, Wally walked in the bush and on the mountains that ran along the south coast. He roamed the Budawangs in drowsy fragrant heat, through stands of eucalypts whose curling boughs created crackling grey-green canopies, through tufty buzzing clearings, into cool gorges dense with wattle, to creeks and pools overhung with willows and wild apples and spiky melaleuca, and up, at high altitude, to outcrops of rock split by ice and heat. To walk the ridge of an elevation was Wally’s pleasure, to find the natural trail or swear by the compass and reach a crest where under the purest indigo sky the softened furry mountains, sheer cliffs and spread plateaus rippled into terrain that, however ancient, answered to human contours and desires. To him it was a more seductive sight than the flat shimmering sea stretched to disappearing in the other direction. Once he climbed Pigeonhouse, a mountain topped with a rock that from out to sea had reminded Captain Cook of a dovecote: or perhaps that was Cook’s discretion, since the mountain was a huge breast with nipple aroused which, from afar, or if he was standing atop like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, fed Wally’s fantasies. On the horizon of the sea, where Cook’s ship had sailed, passed the dark shapes of cargo ships heavy with ore, wheat, wool, the vessels of trade going to and from Wollongong, Sydney, Newcastle. On their stained sides, the young man had seen at close quarters, some had Chinese characters. Now Wally’s people were creating a blockade of incineration and carnage in Vietnam to stop the Yellow Peril. His mother said she didn’t want to break her back in a rice paddy and eat stones for bread. His father said that if the Chinese stood in a line holding hands they would ring the globe.

  Exhilarated on the summit of Pigeonhouse, he wiped the sweat and grime from his brow. The breeze tugged at his sandy curls. His face was burnt pink with blotches of orange freckles. From his peak in Darien, he considered, the world lay all before him. He was twenty-two, a few days into the New Year 1967. His resolution was to be an explorer of whatever terrain the modern world laid open. A letter had come to inform him of his final results. He had won a scholarship to study overseas. He did not know he would still be out of the country when his father died, and then his mother.

  3

  In the courtyard, incense smoke arose from a bronze urn over which dragons played. Wally and Eagle followed an elderly monk into a pavilion where the rite was in progress. Amidst hangings of scarlet and yellow silk embroidered with cranes of longevity and pink clouds and flowers and many-splendoured butterflies, the monks lined up to chant. They wore black caps over their buns, and over their white stocki
ngs and blue smocks they wore scarlet cloaks bordered with black. They were mostly young. ‘Unemployed youth,’ whispered Eagle. The chamber was lit like a theatre, to make the most of the dusky images and the shiny purple Ching dynasty vessels. The music began, syncopated and percussive, as gongs, bells, copper strips and hollow lumps of wood were struck. The indecipherable grumbling chant commenced, with a moderate amount of ducking and rising, to bring the living and the spirits of the dead together. The spectators watched blankly, too humble to be sceptical, until a plain man in a blue cotton dustcoat came forward, lit a handful of incense, kowtowed, and led forward a frail, shuffling woman, also in a cotton dustcoat, evidently his wife, and placed her on the kneeler. She was blinded by glaucoma, Wally diagnosed. Afterwards, neither husband nor wife having met the eyes of an onlooker, she was led away, lifting her feet high over the raised threshold of an entrance she couldn’t see.

  In the attached museum Wally studied a Daoist chart of the human body which made the names and relationships of the body’s organs and passages into a narrative about spirits and demons.

  At the kiosk, buying postcards from a young monk who came of Marxist-Leninist parents in the barren North-East, and who had chosen Daoism because his parents could not feed him, Wally asked what was the aim of the faith.

  ‘Long life,’ said the monk succinctly, and implied that no other religion laid itself on the line so frankly.

  ‘How is long life achieved?’ asked Wally.

  With suitable circularity the monk replied, ‘By training.’

  4

  Wally Frith was an educational product of Sydney University and the two Cambridges, in a process that took sixteen years of his life and sailed him into intellectual and social waters unimaginably far from his boyhood mountaintop.

  In Cambridge, England, he was a graduate member of Christ’s College, a chap with a tawny beard, blue jeans and a shapeless tweed jacket, whose family was the lab where he worked with unflagging discipline as ideas sparked. In the same buildings a few years earlier, the DNA helix had been isolated by Watson and Crick. As a phalanx of researchers marched abreast to realise the implications of its discovery, embryology enjoyed a revolution. Wally went to the wildly hypothetical forefront—gene pathology and its links with cell mutation. The time was the high 1960s, when briefly the prospect of a massive social transformation offered. Wally’s former socialist principles were strengthened by his encounter with the nobs and yobs of Old Albion; but unlike others he had no time for full-scale revolutionary theory, not at the expense of embryology. It was with difficulty that he held his own in political debate over a pint. His work demanded, and absorbed and satisfied, as only a vocation can. In May of 1968, when the rallying cry issued from Paris and spring burst in red flags over the Cambridge meadows, Wally was in the lab eighteen hours a day, refining his data on the oncogene: what a colleague nicknamed the human face of the Brave New World.

  Next stop was transatlantic, in one of those lateral moves that give a career its curious pattern, whether destiny or drift. He entered further into the white and lonely corridors of a freemasonry whose techniques were, they claimed, humanity’s highest mastery. By taking up a post-doc position in the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute of Harvard Medical School, Wally was able to apply theoretical research to clinical medicine. Some genomes were viral. Absorbed into the gene was a virus making the gene ‘infected’, so to speak. From those same genes, after triggering, came the production of cancer cells. Yet between the viral genome and the final cancer was a gulf, an unexplored terrain of indeterminate causation. A gulf too wide and unruly to be charted, many scientists said. To find a way across would be to show, with classical simplicity, that a cancer could be caused by infection; explicable, non-numinous—to show that a cancer was a mundane, therefore curable, disease.

  When the plane landed at Boston, Wally had left his beard behind. From the sun of his childhood his eyes were already frayed with lines, though from England his skin was pale. He brought with him a wife and child, and from the first meeting with his immensely distinguished seniors handled things professionally. Pretty soon he was part of the team, and befittingly earnest. Not only his work mattered, but his opinions. ‘As I see it,’ he would begin, to give more rather than less definitiveness to his remarks. Still, as an Australian, he had the common touch, luckily, thrust upon him.

  He produced a string of major papers, but the gaps remained. Ninety-five per cent remained inexplicable. When the new information, seized upon, was tried out clinically, nothing tangible came of it. If a treatment could be even partially effective, if a disease process could at any stage be retarded or reversed, there might be some pointers to a working explanation. As in the case of Edward Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccine, even those who seemed accidentally immune could show the way to the relevant nature of the immunity. But there was a woeful lack of clinical data, and too many different conditions had been lumped together under the name of cancer. No one had thought to record case studies of successful and unsuccessful treatments in sufficient detail. In pre-war medicine a cancer was thought of as an invader of the body, to be removed by surgery; a recurrence was a secondary assault, to be removed again, and so on until there was nothing left of the alien body to be removed, often nothing left of the body itself. The radiation treatment that came into vogue after the war used more advanced weaponry for the same approach. The move to chemotherapy was a partial recognition that the tumour or malignancy existed not in opposition to the body but symbiotically in a shared environment. The more radical treatments that followed—hormones and meditation, for instance—moved closer to a recognition that the cancer was created by the body itself, in response to poisons or triggers or signals of some kind. Wally’s basic postulate, that the malformation originated from viruses absorbed into the gene itself, shared such an approach at the most fundamental biochemical level. The cases where a cancer ebbed and flowed, where it metastasised and subsequently went into remission, were of consuming interest to him. Where the body’s processes adjusted in such a way as to turn from infirmity back to health, where a route to life was re-achieved, Wally was particularly concerned with what stimulated the turnaround—but there had been no organised collection of the data.

  He often discussed the problem with his boss, Harvey Heilmann, who had been in the field for decades and didn’t believe in breakthroughs, despite his being a Nobel laureate for some allegedly revolutionary research. Harvey believed, instead, in steady progress, in the nature of geological change, and he had faith that some day all their work, their conferences, societies, learned journals, scrabbling for funds, feudings, backstabbing, false hopes, follies, errors, despair, would all be justified by humankind’s clumsy arrival at Understanding. So he was a great boss, even if his crawling time scale and drowsy voice sometimes looked like lack of fire to his younger colleagues.

  With a shrunken gangling body and an elongated face in which the teeth were too prominent, Harvey Heilmann was a soft, slender-necked, leaf-munching dinosaur. It was over a bowl of lettuce after an afternoon’s swimming in the neighbourhood pool one summer in the green outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Wally once again started to complain about the paucity of case studies that might suggest an overview, a framework of ideas and explanation into which his laboratory experiments could be placed. His heart needed a sense that his work in the clean-air lab was connected with the ignorant, irrepressible life and destruction outside. He needed to feel that his isolated test tube cells were part of people’s stories—not for sentimental reasons, but to grasp at the Whole Thing.

  Old Harvey got up and swayed into his study.

  ‘You might take a look at these,’ he indicated laconically.

  Laid out on his desk were three faded copies of the New England Journal of Medicine, with the old blue paper covers, dating from the 1930s.

  ‘There was a chap on a fellowship here when I was starting out. A youngish professor, came over to us from China. As pe
rnickety a gentleman as they come. We tried to get him to join in the work we were doing, which in those days, as you know, was largely directed toward surgical techniques. The Chinese swam against the tide—oh, as politely as you could imagine. He worked on metabolic processes—on what we would now think of as hormone synthesis and deficiency in relation to the failure of the immune system. What we’re just moving toward ourselves, thirty years later. He’d trained in Western hospitals in China, but his family was from a rural area in the South, an old official family, I believe. He was with us for nearly ten years—I never got close. He wasn’t a Red, but when the Reds won, he went back, for love of the motherland. I never found out what became of him after that. Read these papers. The assemblage is elegant, the data are there and the conceptual pointers are remarkable.’

  Wally flicked to the table of contents. ‘Efficacious Treatment of Liver and Other Cancers in Chekiang Province, China: A Bystander’s Records’ by Hsu Chien Lung.

  5

  The blood-red lacquered pillars of the temple challenge the grey flagstones, the frozen pine trees, and a grey sky that disguises in haze an industrial chimney oozing filthy smoke over the neighbourhood. All around the temple are narrow lanes running between factory compounds, tarred walls hiding furnaces, assembly lines, packing houses and tubs for chemical conversions; and the chilly, unadorned housing blocks for workers whose lives, even in deep winter, burst on to the balcony where things in daily use are piled up for want of other space: bicycles and empty bottles crammed beside dormant pot plants and pigeon cages. Wally walks with Eagle through the narrow alleys to the main road. At the corner is a mountain of white Chinese cabbage, brown from frost on the outside, giving off a rotten smell. On a tiny stool sits a woman beside a glass box where she proudly displays her skewers of candied crab apples, her round face the same caramelised red. Eat tanghulu, she calls. A toddler in a cape and hood of emerald satin is led along by a limping grandpa whose furry earflaps stick straight out from his hat. A cyclist rings his bell; no one pays attention. On the main road expensive oranges and apples blaze with colour as they are lifted from the hawker’s scales to the housewife’s plastic briefcase. A kid vends roast sweet potatoes from a rusty drum; no one buys. They crowd round the newspaper seller in the gutter whose Sports News flies into the air like plucked feathers as soon as she unwraps a bundle.