Avenue of Eternal Peace Read online

  How had Waldemar and Retta stuck it? Wally imagined deep reliance on each other, trust, loving kindness, a universe unto each other to sustain them even against all China. He imagined pressures on the two of them turning to strength, a remarkable achievement about which details were far from clear. Before leaving for Beijing he wrote to his cousin Hilary, a mango grower near Cairns and his closest link with that mad old boy, Uncle Lionel. For his early life, into his fifties, Lionel had held down clerical jobs (in between madcap schemes) and supported his family; but once the girls, Wally’s cousins, the Dionysian Hilary and the Unspeakable Penelope, had celebrated their majorities, one in a beach romp, the other in evening dress under a marquee, then Uncle Lionel was off, unfettered, free to squander all his curious, enterprising energies. Operating a lugger in the waters between Cape York and New Guinea, he had some luck with salvage; but it was short-lived. At sixty he fell in love with an Aboriginal woman, half-caste, and set up house with her in an upturned corrugated iron water tank up north. The Unspeakable Penelope and Lionel’s good-humoured wife forgot him, while the Dionysian Hilary, by now slowing down, made occasional pilgrimages on the fuzzy assumption that she was the living link. The Aboriginal woman died or left; Lionel resisted the authorities’ attempts to institutionalise him. When the mood or need took him, he visited Hilary’s mango farm; but neither father nor daughter desired permanent cohabitation. He ended up in a shack above a northern beach. Wally spoke to Hilary, and Hilary promised Wally she would get the China stuff out of her old man if she could. No one knew what was there exactly, and Wally assumed that old Uncle Lionel had lost his memory long ago. But perhaps there would be an illumination, a fragment of story.

  7

  Staff and students gathered round a long table for Wally’s first seminar, which turned into an impromptu lecture moving uncomfortably between first-year biochemistry, technical minutiae and remote speculation. The questions asked in public were at a level of remoter speculation. Was the gene pool becoming poisoned, someone asked, and, if so, what measures could be taken?

  In private different questions cropped up. Orange soda, beer, spiced beef and cupcakes were produced at the conclusion and talk broke into whispering conclaves. The Suzhou beauty (MD Stanford) cornered Wally. With darkish skin, startled eyes and waving thick hair, Dr Song beautifully belied her thirty-seven years.

  ‘I and my husband want to invite you to our home. Are you free on Saturday?’

  Surprised, charmed, he accepted.

  Dr Song then returned to the question of her experiment. She was trying to implant alien gene material into pig embryos in order to cause tumorous growth instead of normal foetal development. There were difficulties; to get the embryos she had to operate on sows that had newly conceived, and the numbers in each litter were frustratingly unreliable.

  ‘Chinese pigs!’ She laughed. It was a variant on the common cry that Chinese pigs were too fatty. Dr Song went on to explain the difficulties of an experiment with so many variables carried out on a small scale.

  ‘Like cottage industry. We don’t have the equipment to carry out this kind of experiment on a large enough scale to produce compelling results.’

  ‘That disadvantages you when it comes to convincing the rest of the world of your findings. But I get the idea anyway that you Chinese are resistant to the elaborate testing procedures we go through.’

  The remark, addressed to a woman of Dr Song’s intelligence and experience, risked causing offence, of accusing the Chinese of scepticism about the processes of inference and deduction and the very existence of ascertainable laws of nature; it may have been taken as an accusation of mere lip service to the fundamental assumptions of Western science. If you could get results, what need theory, what need tests? Dr Song smiled as she replied: ‘We must continue to experiment. But we must not overlook the differences between animals and humans. We are doctors. Our aim is simple and practical—to heal people. To cause a cancer in a pig is not simple and not practical.’

  ‘But you can do it!’ Wally added with a swagger.

  ‘I cannot predict it,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you will come on Saturday.’

  8

  The gathering took place in a small concrete-floored apartment on the fifth floor (there was no lift). Dr Song greeted Wally with apologies for the apron under which her tightly cut red dress swelled. She had a rounded face, rounded perm, rolling shoulders and roly-poly middle. She introduced her husband, boyish, bespectacled Dr Rong.

  ‘I can’t call you Dr Song and Dr Rong,’ laughed Wally.

  ‘I have an English name,’ said the man. ‘David.’

  ‘Fine. And can I just call you Song?’ he asked the woman.

  ‘My full name is Song Weihong,’ she replied. ‘You just call me Song.’

  David set a cup of tea before Wally and started unfolding the table where they would eat. ‘Are you accustomed to the life in Beijing?’

  ‘Is Beijing life accustomed to me? I feel like the proverbial bull most of the time.’

  ‘A bull in China?’

  ‘It’s an exciting time to be in China, with the Reforms. Do you approve?’

  ‘Life is better now. No one wants to go back.’

  ‘That’s one question the China watchers are obsessed with. Will the door close again?’

  ‘There are problems. Resentments. Some intellectuals are unhappy about their position, their low pay. But we cannot go back. Of course the open policy is not yet entirely realised. China must work towards being open, without becoming too humble or too proud.’

  ‘In the West we tend to think of freeing things up as going with human nature—individualism, entrepreneurship, market forces—all instinct. Here it’s a conscious ideological move, you’re saying.’

  ‘Those things are natural here too, but the Party must also learn to allow them.’

  ‘To let go control?’

  ‘To find new controls. Chinese people are afraid of chaos. That is where you people are so sophisticated.’

  ‘With chaos?’

  ‘With narrowly avoiding it.’

  The man’s smile suggested layers of experience of what was so abstractly discussed.

  ‘Excuse me,’ David said. ‘I must prepare food.’

  There was a knock at the door and both David and Song went to answer it. The woman who entered, of medium height and build, held herself modestly, and stood with hands loosely clasped. She wore a plain dress of rich pine green, and had a fat braid of hair on one shoulder. Her face was long, delicate, suggestive of vulnerability yet also strength and a fierce quickness. She was introduced as Song’s school friend, Jin Juan. When she sat down, in brighter light, Wally saw that her skin was not as petal soft as it looked from the door. There were minute lines, rough patches, and beneath the powdered surface the skin was taut, weathered.

  ‘I have heard you are very distinguished,’ she said to Wally with incisive, elegantly modulated English.

  ‘Heaven forbid!’ He waved his arms in protest. ‘Are you in medicine too?’

  ‘I am a middle-school teacher,’ she answered with blank eyes.

  ‘Then we talk no more shop. You’re from Suzhou too?’

  ‘No, I’m from Zhejiang. Or do you say Chekiang in English. From Hangzhou.’

  ‘Above is heaven, below are Suzhou and Hangzhou,’ intoned Wally.

  ‘It has that reputation,’ she added with evident irony.

  David came worrying in to move the table to the centre of the room. ‘Please!’ He hurried back with dishes, bottles and glasses.

  ‘A model husband,’ noted Jin Juan.

  Meanwhile Song brought from the bedroom their four-year-old daughter, a chubby child who squirmed like a bear cub on her mother’s shoulder. They called her Claudia. The guests ooh’d and ah’d.

  ‘Abu Dhabi, Accra, Amman,’ began the child, and squawked as she was heaved off to bed.

  ‘That kid has a speciality,’ said Jin Juan. ‘She can recite the capital cities of the wor
ld in alphabetical order. You should try her some time. Not now! Eat!’

  Song asked Wally if he had caught up with the Professor—Hsu Chien Lung, was it?—whom he had expressed interest in meeting.

  ‘I’m working on it. They tell me he’s retired to a seaside resort town somewhere. I’m planning a visit. The place is called Beidaihe.’

  ‘Why do you want to see Hsu Chien Lung?’ asked Song. ‘He must be old now.’

  ‘He’s one of the reasons I came to China. Before the war he published some papers in the States that contained some insights into the work I’m doing now. I want to see what further information he has, what conclusions if any, at the end of a lifetime’s work.’

  The others smiled. They seemed to show concern for the foreigner’s opinion, and the weird, miraculous fact that, of all things, an old man in a rest home at Beidaihe should be the key link.

  ‘When are you going to Beidaihe?’ asked Song. ‘We are going there with our little girl for a few days. You will accompany us.’

  ‘Really? No, no, no—’ For a moment Wally panicked. Was their company another means of thwarting him? He wanted these to be the honest, simpatico people they seemed.

  ‘We will go together then,’ confirmed David. ‘Jin Juan, you will come?’

  She hesitated; a play of self-interrogation crossed her face.

  ‘Can I take a raincheck?’

  The idiom was for Wally.

  FIVE

  All Souls

  1

  Near the College was a sealed road edged with rubble, potholes and pale hard strips of mud. One day a work team came to the street with a water truck, buckets, baskets, hoes. They were mop-headed kids in baggy trousers, jackets, pink singlets, with thin hard arms, or family men in blue cotton caps with faces like pickled dates, who shouted, whistled and sang as they broke up the ground in work that was like making mud pies. At the end a mule-drawn cart came with a load of long thick sticks wrapped in sacking. The workers planted these broom handles and packed the earth around each one. When they piled on to the water truck and the mule cart, they left behind a row of tall sticks standing in the bare mud.

  By the first of April there were buds at the tops of the sticks and one or two had produced tiny leaves. On the hard mud was a brush of emerald fur. The days became bright, though the nights were chilly, and after a wind, when the coal dust was blown away, the Western Hills were revealed in craggy purple-jade splendour, yet never near enough to seem part of the flat grey city, rather like memories of China’s sighing imperial greatness, a stage-shy presence always nervously in the wings.

  2

  For Song, David and the child to visit Beidaihe for a weekend was a complicated matter. The College authorities had to clear their absence, buy train tickets and reserve beds in a residence. Obstruction lurked at each of these stages. For Jin Juan to accompany them was more difficult. She knew from experience that her work unit, the humble middle school, owed her no favours. For two days either side of a Sunday she could take sick leave if a medical certificate was provided. Some units were more suspicious than others about sick leave, but malaise was an art form in New Age China, especially among teachers. If David would sign a medical certificate, she could go.

  The College, battening on to all available privilege, had booked Wally ‘soft’, while the Chinese got ‘hard’ seat tickets. But Wally was able to swap with a kid who would enjoy the ludicrous perk. ‘Hard’ was a floor show. A girl conductor in cocked hat and epaulettes announced in singsong her pleasure to be serving the travellers, as she came around with the kettle for tea. Intermittent broadcasts urged people to be civilised and polite and extolled, as it flashed by, the glories of reconstructed Tangshan, the city flattened in 1976 by an earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people and presaged the death of Mao. A decade later Tangshan offered a vista of untidy industry and thrown-up housing blocks in a treeless moonscape. When the train reached the more picturesque hills of the peninsula a television program started up from sets above the carriage doors, and attention was drawn to a Soviet contortionist in pink gossamer sheath, filmed through vaseline, who twisted and gyrated to the ‘Song of Joy’ and did impossible things to the rope between her thighs that suspended her above a roaring crowd. The businessmen looked up from their discussion of prices. The schoolteacher stopped knitting her cardigan. The honeymoon bride awoke from her daydream. The guys in operetta uniforms neglected their poker game. The clip was followed by a multi-racial American jazz ballet from Broadway, and then came China with a series of demure matrons in evening attire who sang of snowflakes, seagulls and willows south of the Yangtze. Attention drifted. The child started to list capitals, ‘Cairo. Cabinda. Canberra. Caracas. Cayenne.’ Once again Wally was asked where he came from and how much he earned.

  The mild coastal spring was well advanced in the chirpy seaside town. At the Diplomatic Guesthouse, where Wally was obliged to stay while the others went to the cheaper College-approved dormitory, there were lots of petunias in painted pots. There were layers of human hair in the bathroom, and wicker chairs on the pleasant balcony. Alone, Wally slept soundly, lulled by the sea’s presence and the sweet clean air after the travails of Beijing.

  He woke early and found his way to the beach for a dip, just as he would have done on a holiday morning back home. The flat sea of the swimming enclosure between two rocky promontories was ringed with a net. Some old people in blue and grey pyjama suits were out exercising, swinging their arms intently and bending vigorously at the knee as prescribed: Beidaihe was a playground for ailing Party leaders whose life had become perpetual vacation. A couple of girls were collecting shellfish and grit in plastic briefcases. There were boats out, sailing towards the radiant misty east. The sea had carried invaders from Korea and Japan; not far from here the Great Wall itself came down to the ocean’s edge in an attempt to stop them. The Greatest Gate Under Heaven was there, the Gate That Controls Inside and Outside. Much further away, thought Wally, the waters of this Pacific Ocean could have carried Chinese voyagers to San Francisco, Tierra del Fuego or Capricornia. It was icy. No sooner had he dived than he wished to be back on shore. The swim shook his senses and after breakfast and a shower, ready for the appointment, he felt alert and frisky; excited, too, about meeting the Professor at last.

  Only Jin Juan was at the gate to meet him. David and Song’s child had come up with a fever overnight, so they were staying put. Jin Juan would be the Doctor’s guide. She was dressed for the beach in big sunglasses and a candy-pink dress with a V-neck and big buttons down the front. But her manner was strained. Wally asked if she had slept well.

  ‘No! Tossed and turned.’

  They took a bus from the main street to the Qigong Rest and Recreation Institute, a glassy construction amid tall pines on an eastern rise. When stopped at the gate they asked for Professor Hsu Chien Lung.

  ‘What unit?’ snapped the woman.

  ‘Peking Union Medical College. Retired,’ answered Jin Juan in kind.

  ‘And you?

  ‘Same unit.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Expert at the unit.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  A higher official arrived, and they told the story again.

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  The process was repeated three times as they inched along the chain of command from the gatehouse to the reception desk to a second building out the back, and a third that lacked the modern facade of the block facing the street: it was antiquated, colourless, medicinal, with light searching its long corridors on this bright morning. There was a sharp scream followed by a drawn-out moan behind one of the doors. It had a familiar unpleasant institutional feel; the condition to which, in China, many buildings aspired.

  ‘Hsu Chien Lung? Hsu? Hsu? Hsu Chien Lung! Professor! Professor? Hsu! Hsu! Shoo-shoo-shoo.’ The name was shouted, whispered, passed from voice to voice.

  ‘Wait!’ commanded a chap in a dustcoat whose spectacles crowned a bald pate. This time �
�Wait’ was meant seriously; more than half an hour slipped by. Wally and Jin Juan sat staring at the blue sky outside until they were summoned to an office and a desk behind which sat an imposing woman, also in a white dustcoat, with permed black curls and a concerned, almost ardent manner. Wally submitted to the ritual quiz and she quickened at the discovery that he had worked at Harvard. She had visited Tufts University in nearby Boston once, and was ‘well acquainted’ with Harvard professors. Having established ramifications of significance belied by the unplanned appearance of this athletic-looking foreign holidaymaker who turned out to be a high-level expert, with a smart Chinese woman in tow, the Department Head (called Cao) obliged. She jotted down notes and quizzed further, this time about the foreigner’s connections with Professor Hsu Chien Lung.

  Wally said merely that he wished to pass on the warm regards of a common American friend. Scribbling, the Department Head nodded. Her face grew a little tighter.

  ‘His condition is not good. What a pity!’ She sniffed.

  ‘You mean we can’t see him?’

  ‘Of course you can see him, but I’m afraid he will not appreciate your message. Let’s go,’ she said, coming out from behind the desk.

  As they walked the sunlit dismal corridors, Wally’s skin tingled. To have tracked Professor Hsu through many obstacles brought a sense of adventure and imminent achievement. The path that had taken Hsu to Harvard in the first place, where he left an impression on young Harvey Heilmann, and the path that had taken Wally to Cambridge, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now to China, were about to intersect. He was an agent of the larger meeting. The somewhat arbitrary determination to rediscover Hsu had brought about the kind of connection that might happen or might not, and that makes the world take one shape and not another, and Wally was aware of a single man’s direct participation in the unboundedly complex fate of the planet, as he followed Department Head Cao through the curiously inactive institution.