Avenue of Eternal Peace Read online

  There are no taxis. They take a bus. Wally’s back is nearly broken by the press of people manoeuvring for position, all muffled in winter clothing, more skilful and less perceptible in their movements than worms. The buses are like caterpillars too, two buses joined at the middle by a concertina and pulled by one motor. Every society has its own survival of the fittest. Wally, whose body does not bend around bars and boxes and impassive human forms, goes under here. Eagle grins.

  6

  The farmhouses among the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, what was the Garden of Perfect Brightness before the British and French fired it, had fallen into dereliction and were occupied temporarily by urban fringe-dwellers. Down a lane, across a sluggish, iced-up stream, a cluster of brick shanties edged a field; a narrow path led through a doorway in the carved stone arch to a tiny courtyard with a light in one side. Dulcia had cycled from the city. She knocked on the window; a voice called out a greeting; bundled inside, she sat by the stove and hot tea was put into her frozen hands.

  ‘This late!’ He could smell drink on her breath.

  ‘I got lost on the way,’ she lied. She had been to his house once before, and her sense of direction was unerring. ‘Well?’

  ‘So-so.’ He tossed his long hair out of his eyes. ‘I’ve been painting.’

  The room was cluttered and cramped; a rumpled bed, a coal stove, books, boxes, huge paintings hung or pinned across every available space.

  Jumbo was not tall, even for a Chinese. When he unscrolled a painting, holding his arms above his head and standing on tiptoe, the bottom of the scroll bumped on the ground. Brooding, malformed shapes in black ink escaped from the paper like genies from the bottle, straining away from the painter’s body, probing at the walls.

  His head popped impishly around the side of the broad scroll. Dulcia sat and admired. She liked the cool acerbity of his work; emotion held in restraint, knowing the chains. Too much of what passed for art was sickly-sweet and infantile; Jumbo’s use of black, his refusal to specify form, made his different. The haunting of tradition was there: rock, water, mountains, leaves of bamboo; but, as she looked, their definition vanished into a bad dream, black inchoate masses expressive of emptiness and terror at the centre, where the individual ceases to exist.

  ‘Drink some tea.’ He stooped to pour more hot water into their glasses, traditionally solicitous of the guest and surrounded, in his artworks, by the hallucinations of his race and time. His small body was tough as steel wire; his features refined; his hands and face lined prematurely into a mask of carved smiles. The physical definition Dulcia achieved through aerobics had been inflicted on Jumbo by the People’s Liberation Army where for six years he had trained by treading water for five hours a day in the river in full uniform and greatcoat, holding a rifle over his head. His body became a weapon that could endure everything, even his thoughts. He had killed men. After the Cultural Revolution he got a place at university with other older students from intellectual backgrounds, and was assigned to work at Central TV, where he met the foreign woman who nicknamed him Jumbo because he was ‘small’, she joked, ‘and mighty’. The name he had been given by his long-suffering patriarch father meant ‘rousing spirit of a great wave’. His painting had been criticised for going beyond realism. Few understood, though some admired. The improvised exhibition had not been a success despite Dulcia’s talking it up all round Beijing. On the third day the authorities had closed it down, and Dulcia had become a crusader on Jumbo’s behalf, calling all her journalist friends.

  ‘The artistic environment here is wretched. For a thousand years now there’s been this pull backwards down a great drain as we try to get back to our old cultural roots. I don’t want the old yellow earth, you understand; I want the mind, myself, my individuality. Here to seek individuality is blasphemy, swimming against the stream of the great state river. Here individuality is the waste product, to be washed away by the mighty current of tradition, the Party, the people. But I don’t know if what I’m doing is really new. I need to go outside and see for myself.’

  He talked of leaving the country as if it were stepping outside the family’s front door.

  ‘Can you help me? Give me the names of a few art schools in New York. That’s all.’

  She nodded. She wanted to nurture him. But she made no further move.

  She thought of Cray, her husband. Theirs had been a college romance, a language lab affair at Berkeley when he was a skinny four-eyes studying Russian (before the contact lenses) and she was the fat girl before the aerobics. They had been flattered to be treated like bionic Californian gods when they arrived in China as teachers. Dulcia competed in the college sports meet and defeated the school’s best men and women athletes, including her own husband. The Chinese made a joke of their humiliation, but no foreigner was ever asked to compete again, and the change in Dulcia and Cray’s marriage dated from that day. Chinese men could not resist pitting themselves against her physical supremacy. At the end-of-term party she arm-wrestled the chunkiest graduate student, Wildman, and won. Cray decided to move on to Moscow. Behind their tears of farewell at the airport were a skinny boy’s snivelling and a fat girl’s tremulous exultation. Hooray! She had got outside the body America told her was a problem, and now she could be everything America told her it was her right to be. For the tin men, the straw men, the cowardly lions of China, she had hearts, brains and nerves on offer.

  Yet her forthrightness was inhibited by the rites Jumbo imposed. She yawned, and Jumbo asked if she was cold or tired. Was she in love with this fastidious, fine-boned Chinaman, his long oily hair and long fingers draped over crossed legs? Would he fit in her baggage? She speculated as to her motives, and his, and Jumbo sat tight on his stool, breathing smoke and brooding.

  Perhaps he scrupled at taking advantage of the woman he called on for assistance. Perhaps modesty held him back, or, more likely, the paralysing passivity that prefers to manoeuvre the adversary out on the limb first so that, when both are on the limb and it breaks, its breaking can be blamed on the one who first claimed it was safe.

  Outside, on an eroded hilltop, stone columns lay as they had fallen a century ago, great white shapes nuzzling each other under a velvety snow-bearing sky.

  7

  ‘Perhaps I did not understand,’ said Mrs Gu. ‘I thought you wanted to see Professor Hsu, but there is no need for that.’

  In front of her was a copy of one of Hsu’s papers that Wally had produced. She had changed key remarkably.

  ‘I thought you were insisting that Professor Hsu was at our College, when he is not, because he has retired.’

  There was not even a pause for dramatic effect when the professor who did not exist was now declared to be in retirement. But Wally saw nothing to gain from pointing out this miraculous logic.

  ‘I did not understand that it was our work on clinical therapy for liver and other cancers that interested you. You have only to ask, Professor Doctor Frith, to tell me exactly what you want. Now I know what you want, I can help you. That area is the responsibility of Director Kang. Indeed, Director Kang has pioneered that field. He would be honoured to have the opportunity to talk with you. But I’m not sure of his program. When would suit you?’

  ‘I’m causing you so much trouble, Mrs Gu,’ replied Wally, taking up his mug of cold, floral-tasting tea.

  FOUR

  April Fool’s Day

  1

  For fifty cents, at the public bathhouse, Eagle could stand under a hot shower for as long as he liked, scrub his body all over, lather his scalp and scrape his beard (a weekly occurrence). Home, one room and tiny attached kitchen in a maze of lanes near the station, had no such washing facilities, nor a lavatory. Winter and summer alike Eagle squatted at the public convenience down the street, freezing his bum or offending his nose according to the season, in the name of the revolution.

  Today he cut his shower short. If he was not at the front of the queue the beancurd noodles would be sold out. Flushed from
the shower, in his freshly laundered clothes, he stood with his pannikin by the vendor’s trolley for forty-five minutes as the cold drew in. He was determined not to hear the old lady croak: ‘All gone!’ The Doctor was coming.

  His mother had quizzed him. What did the foreigner want? What kind of person? What was her son’s aim? She would not have taken the risk. But because her son wanted it, she devoted herself to the visit.

  Mother Lin was old Peking—a squat woman with a dropped shoulder and doubting, jeering eyes. Once, before Liberation, her family had owned a courtyard house. She married out before the house was sequestered and when she walked down the street ten years later she found the neighbourhood replaced by a boiler factory. Her father, a very petty bourgeois with no money, had sung Peking opera. She remembered him slipping out the gate at afternoon and returning late, pleased with himself. For all she knew, he might have been a considerable artist. Only in later life had she grown affectionate towards the old opera. As a girl she had been a romantic rebel, sharp as a pin, and harangued her young man, a Communist officer from Canton, about the corrupt ways. She laughed in his face before she married him. Two years later came the Red Dawn. Her husband studied, and on graduating was reclaimed by the army. She went to work in a glass factory and kept the one-room home in the city to which he returned once a year. The 1950s were prosperous and optimistic; then only optimistic. Eventually her husband was resettled, and two baby sons crowded the house. But her man had grown cautious, punctilious, maintaining ideological correctness and discouraging contact with outsiders. During those empty, flavourless years of the 1960s and 1970s, whatever strength or joy they managed was kept close within the family circle of four. Since Old Lin was wary of milking connections, living conditions did not advance and few favours came their way, until existence was as scant and furtive as a mouse’s in a borrowed hole. Out of what surprised his wife as terror, Old Lin permitted not one grumble, even within their walls or under the covers at night. His nature warped; the scholar’s ideals became nasty puritanism, disguised as the uprightness of a self-denying Party member and family man. When even the smallest good fortune fell his way, Old Lin distrusted, and when the new season came he was unable to adjust.

  Eagle was seventeen then. He stood in Tiananmen Square with the crowd and cried without knowing why. Beginning from that day the boy found words for trees in leaf, for the tastes of the year between his teeth, for the glint and nudge that go with foul-mouthed jokes. He was quick and fast, and tried out for a place in the district basketball team. After a couple of months of impressive play, he was selected to try out for All-Beijing. He had never been a dreamer, he was almost without self-consciousness or aspiration, not even aware of his own naiveté: a lifetime’s Mao Thought had done that to him. His elder brother called him a straw dumpling. But his passivity, the stupefying creation of Mao Thought, allowed him to be pliable, to live for the day. On the eve of the basketball trial, as he sat cross-legged on the bed pondering, it seemed that his day might have come. Sport was the route to self-advancement; a successful athlete was the people’s hero—and no privilege was out of bounds.

  He slept deeply that night, and next day won his place in the squad. But his father was suspicious of the ease with which success had come. Good luck was dangerous. His mother worried that when he moved out to the Sports Institute, he would not be fed properly, her motherly pride unwarmed with joy, as if success was a kind of shame.

  Old Lin continued to dote on his elder son, Sunshine, who had found an alternative future hawking foreign cigarettes. Old Lin saw both his sons in jeans and wristwatches: in Sunshine’s case he commended enterprise without inquiring too closely; in Eagle’s case he became gloomy and disapproving. Against his father’s advice, Sunshine made contact with relatives in the south to whom he was determined to prove his business acumen. Eagle brought money home from the Sports Institute; Sunshine took the money out again.

  Then Eagle broke his ankle. He was a good basketballer, but not the best. The teammates were closer to him than brothers, like lovers in their preoccupation with each other. But the determination to win for the sake of China, to drive himself and his teammates on to certain victory in gratitude to the Party, was lacking in Eagle. He had not joined the Communist Youth League. Neither did his family have rank or connections with the coach. There was something detached about the boy. It was decided that the young comrade should be reminded that the talent of the masses could produce ten thousand other basketballers as good. His weak ankle would always make him vulnerable. The Sports Institute could not afford to keep him on.

  Eagle came home. His mother hugged him. His father’s mistrust was confirmed, and he also blamed the boy for failing. Sunshine, meanwhile, had made himself plausible and a woman had taken him on. As happened when the wife’s side brought the greater portion to a match, the man moved in with the woman’s family and became subordinate to their operations; so Sunshine moved into a spacious flat provided by his wife in the west of the city and devoted himself to her business interests. And Eagle, the son left at home, was fixed up with a dogsbody job in a state office when his ankle was better. The family’s fortunes had not been glorious. Life in Beijing opened like a paper flower with changes in the economic policy, but still Mother Lin queued for rationed noodles, Old Lin had to beg for his medicines, when Sunshine called it was to scrounge spending money, and Eagle felt buried alive.

  2

  April Fool’s Day was a day like any other in the city, but Wally had mentioned the holiday for playing tricks, so Eagle invited him on that day. Where Eagle waited, the setting sun was a ferocious gold lion among the smoggy black clouds over Beijing Station.

  When the Doctor arrived on his bicycle, Eagle held up his hands.

  ‘No food,’ he said apologetically, ‘there’s no food!’

  Wally was embarrassed. ‘Here, let me—’

  ‘Not even you foreigners can buy food. Haven’t you heard? The city’s run out of food!’

  Wally frowned, worried, until Eagle squeezed his waist: ‘You’re really hungry, aren’t you? April Fool!’

  There was enough: tea and sweets, garlic shoots, spinach, meatballs, cabbage, chilli noodles, plate after plate of food. Mother Lin made the two males sit while she prepared more. She would observe what the Doctor ate, then pile up his bowl with more of the same while pronouncing on the fact that he ate this or that.

  ‘Eat! Eat!’ she kept saying.

  ‘You eat!’ retorted Wally.

  Eagle picked gracefully while Wally ate. ‘There’s no beer,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find any.’

  ‘Is that another joke? The pub with no beer?’

  ‘Impossible to buy. I went everywhere.’ So the Beijing good life was precarious after all. Chinese historians describe a time when the population was decimated by war and plague as ‘people few, goods many’.

  ‘Will you drink spirits?’ asked Eagle.

  Wally waved his hands in protest.

  ‘Can he drink?’ asked Mother Lin.

  ‘Can he drink!’

  But Wally was content with company. Mother Lin sat back to smoke, her old woman’s prerogative. Voices and the sound of television came from very near, behind the walls.

  Eagle removed the dishes and stacked the table and stools away.

  Wally patted his heart and told Mother Lin what a good character her son had.

  ‘He shows his good side,’ she said wryly. ‘Isn’t your character good too?’

  ‘Average.’

  She made a great joke of it. ‘The Doctor’s character is average,’ she called to her son—then to him, ‘Have you really eaten enough? You need to eat more than we do.’

  ‘I’ve eaten too much. It’s all been too delicious.’

  ‘Are you used to Beijing food?’

  ‘I love it, especially the noodles, the ravioli, the dumplings.’

  ‘Dumplings! Dumplings!’ She seized on the word. ‘He eats dumplings. Why didn’t I know? He should eat my dumpl
ings, and not the dumplings outside. Tell him to be careful.’

  ‘Be careful of dumplings? Why?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’ Eagle stood in the doorway. ‘In the west of the city the dumplings have human meat in them. They arrested some people last weekend. A man and a woman and the woman’s little brother. They’d been luring hawkers from the country up to their flat and killing them and turning them into dumplings. I know someone who lives over there. She said they couldn’t catch any more peasants so they were going to eat the brother. He ran for the police. The neighbours found a thighbone in the alley. They thought it belonged to a pig. The local doctor knew better.’

  ‘Horrible. Why isn’t all Beijing talking about it?’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘It’s not in the press.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Those people must have been quite desperate,’ said Wally with automatic compassion.

  ‘The man was asked why. He said he’d tasted many things in his life but never human flesh. The woman said that the price of pork was ridiculous these days. The dumplings tasted like good pork dumplings.’

  They snickered and fell silent.

  Mother Lin added that a famous restaurant during the Song dynasty had served up babies to the Emperor.