Avenue of Eternal Peace Page 8

  During his time in China he had encountered time and again the disorganisation of the place. So much seemed to be a formless, fluid mess; a sluggish, surging river of mud and sand and fertile slime and debris pouring itself into the sea of a present that was endlessly disappearing into the past, always threatening to burst its banks, sometimes doing so, recording its progress by the silt deposited. In response the people were salty, sarcastic, quick-humoured, laughing at disaster rather than preventing it, in supreme anti-perfectionism. Yet that was not all. Somewhere in this stir-fry was genius, Wally was convinced. Somewhere was a spirit of knowledge and understanding, hidden certainly, dormant or suffocated perhaps, un-self-advertising, imperceptible to the foreigner’s gaze; yet it existed, and for Wally, with his particular expertise, the genius had come to reside in Professor Hsu Chien Lung.

  They passed through locked double doors into a corridor of doors also locked. Through one, left ajar, was a glimpse of a ward of four beds, clothes, ornaments, furniture, luggage, that suggested long-stay patients. In the window was a big red paper cutout of the character for long life. They came to a little sitting room with the usual armchairs, the usual loose brown covers, the usual mugs for tea. Wally, Jin Juan and Department Head Cao sat while an orderly went to fetch the Professor. After a time, the frail old figure appeared in the doorway. He was short, quite fat, with sloping shoulders, rounded stomach and splayed feet as he shuffled forward. His head was near bald save for silver spikes above the ears and on the left was a big pink birthmark. His very pink lips hung loosely. Striped pyjamas showed beneath his loose grey serge trousers. On his feet, scraping across the terrazzo floor, were black corduroy slippers and sheer nylon socks worked with butterflies. What Wally noticed especially was his wristwatch that hung loose on a band of metal links and told the wrong time.

  In a loud voice Department Head Cao made formal introductions, and the old man grinned enthusiastically. Jin Juan came forward and placed her slender hand in the Professor’s pudgy hand. Her cool, bitter expression ignited into shock at the squeeze he gave her. After giggles all round they sat, and Wally began to speak in slow clear English.

  ‘I’m very happy to meet you …’ His speech had advanced three sentences and the jolly, vacant grin on the old man’s face was unchanged. ‘You remember Harvey Heilmann? At Harvard?’ Wally repeated, with exaggerated inflexion. The old man appeared not to register. ‘Perhaps his English is rusty,’ Wally said to Jin Juan.

  Department Head Cao spoke up. ‘He can’t speak English. He can’t speak Chinese either. He can’t speak anything now.’

  ‘He’s lost his marbles,’ said Jin Juan. Once remarked on, the fact was obvious.

  The old man had started to dribble. As the spittle fell in a long thread from his lip to his jacket, the Department Head watched unperturbed. ‘He does not know who we are or where he is or who he is himself. But he’s quiet. Our qigong therapy has helped but he has not been able to regain the power of comprehension or speech. We continue the treatment.’

  ‘What results have you had?’

  ‘He has a good appetite, and regular bowel movement,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘He is strong and should live for a long time.’

  The man’s fleshy features and bulging pink eyes struck Wally as the very expression of absence; there was scarcely a human individual there, not a spark of intelligence, but a dough dumpling in official drag. He pitied the poor old man, and lamented the absence of what he had hoped to encounter.

  The Department Head nodded. ‘Okay.’ The visit was over. Once again there were grins, nods, hand shakings, goodbyes. From the international world of medical research Wally brought greetings and honour to the slobbering, jolly dumpling.

  ‘What a sad end,’ said Wally as they retraced their steps through corridors and locked doors.

  Jin Juan still walked behind, her hands clasped in front as if she were spectator at a pageant. Was that a sardonic smile on her pressed lips?

  ‘It hurts to see a man who could once produce such fine work reduced to that state,’ continued Wally. ‘Do you know his papers on traditional treatments for cancer in the Zhejiang region? I believe his hometown is near Hangzhou i. He has collected remarkable data from the villages in that region. That’s what he worked on at Harvard back in the 1930s. I guess I was half hoping to collaborate with him even now at the College. So it’s all very distressing.’ Wally chattered garrulously.

  Department Head Cao absorbed his words and waited for Jin Juan’s clarification. To the woman she said that perhaps Wally had misremembered. She said that Professor Hsu Chien Lung was not from the South, from Hangzhou: he was from the extreme North-East, from Harbin. He had studied in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, he had never studied in the United States. She thought perhaps he had made the acquaintance of some American professors at conferences. He was not a cancer specialist, he was a brain surgeon—or had been.

  ‘Really? Really? Oh I see!’ Jin Juan responded matter-of-factly, and passed the information on to Wally, who was flabbergasted and furious.

  ‘You mean that old guy’s not Hsu Chien Lung.’

  ‘He is called Hsu Chien Lung,’ the Department Head said categorically. ‘How do you write it?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘He is Hsu Chien Lung originally from Peking Union Medical College.’

  ‘There must be some mistake.’

  ‘Maybe there are two professors with that name.’

  Again the Department Head suggested to Jin Juan that the foreigner had misremembered.

  Wally swore. ‘Mrs Gu—I’ll kill her.’

  Jin Juan was quite calm. ‘It’s a mistake. The wrong Hsu. If the Hsu fits, wear it. It doesn’t, so don’t get upset. We’ve been taken for a ride. But if he was the right Hsu, it would not have helped you much. Hey? It’s better we beat a retreat.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Wally turned to the Department Head and bowed. ‘Forgive me. My mistake. I’m a stupid foreigner.’

  Department Head Cao was dignified as they took farewells. She evidently agreed with the distinguished foreign guest’s self-assessment.

  Wally and Jin Juan walked down the hill from the Qigong Rest and Recreation Institute and cut through to the waterfront. Everywhere trees were in bud, acacias, plane trees and poplars, everywhere new residences were under construction, as if the retired hacks herded to holiday in the place would never cease coming. On street corners cherry-cheeked women sold ice blocks and drowsy youths sold porcupines made of cockleshells. Occasionally a Cantonese construction worker would fly past on a Suzuki motorbike. And everywhere the elderly officials waddled with their unique blend of smugness, vacancy, busybodyness and undeviating rectitude, sea lions washed up on the beach.

  A road ran along between wind-bent tamarisks festooned with blazing convolvulus and crossed at intervals the rank marshy streams or sewer drains that flowed into the foam where people frolicked. Wally and Jin Juan came out onto the sand and took their shoes off, enjoying the sun on wintry skin.

  ‘What can it mean?’ he pondered. ‘What are they up to? Can that man be Hsu Chien Lung?’

  ‘You think they don’t want you to meet the real McCoy?’

  ‘Or don’t they know what I’m after? Is it a question of crossed wires?’

  ‘Not likely,’ said the woman with hot confidence that verged on anger. ‘Better wait and see. I guess that Hsu is a decoy.’

  ‘I just want to talk to the old guy. I don’t bite!’

  ‘You’re a foreigner. You’re all spies. You want the truth, but maybe your truth goes against the glory of China.’

  ‘Come off it.’

  ‘You want this thing badly. There must be a reason. They cannot see your reason. The safest response is to stop you. Don’t lose your temper with them. Wait.’

  ‘Maybe I’m the crazy one with this fantasy that I must meet up with old Hsu.’

  ‘Perhaps you should wait for Hsu to find you. I guess he knows you’re coming.’

  ‘Ho
w can you be so sure he’s alive?’ He looked at her inquisitively. ‘The guy’s probably kicked the bucket, or an old fraud like all the others. But it’s my way through this country.’

  ‘The old man is fond of dragons,’ she said. ‘It’s one of our sayings. This old guy was a dragon fanatic. He studied them, painted them, filled his house with toy dragons. One day a real dragon popped its head in the window. The old guy died of fright. It means you like the idea of a thing, but you can’t cope with the reality.’

  ‘I’m like that?’

  ‘Many foreigners are like that about China. We Chinese are like that about foreign things too. We want them—want you—on our terms. We’re timid.’

  ‘Your English is really incredible. It must be wasted in the middle school.’

  ‘I was assigned there.’

  The angle of her pointed chin had the capacity to suggest negative emotions without any ostensible change. A few faint lines round her eyes tautened, her eyes perhaps narrowed a fraction, her lips, sitting together, clenched, as if she had sucked on vinegar. Resistance, bitterness, anger were communicated in a mute form that had been internalised and almost, but not quite, dispensed with. Useless ineffectual negative emotion passed through her in a shudder and was gone again to leave her serene and ironically sparkling.

  ‘How old are you?’ He took a Chinese liberty.

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘Married? Not married?’

  ‘Not married yet.’ The shudder once again.

  ‘Strange, someone like you.’ It didn’t fit. A job with low status, and no career prospects to speak of. A dazzling sophistication and command of the foreign language, such as only the best Chinese background and education can achieve in the most gifted and diligent students. Style, attractions—sharp-temperedness. No husband, no kid. Most Chinese women by Jin Juan’s age had taken care of those things or were panicking. Something was wrong. He hesitated to pry, but pursued the line of his questions.

  ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’

  ‘I have,’ she said, holding up a finger with a ring. She lowered her eyelids and looked at him humorously. ‘Can’t get married till we find an apartment. That’s no simple matter in Beijing.’

  He had judged her wrongly then.

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘My parents died some years ago.’

  ‘Oh. So there’s only you.’

  ‘My grandfather is still alive. He’s in the South. You know?’ At that her face became fully expressionless and she turned to look at the waves. Some girls in what looked like cocktail dresses, in stockings and high-heeled leather shoes, with chains round their waists and shells round their necks, were prancing in the sea up to their thighs, shrieking from cold, clutching each other and laughing as spume broke over their bodies and their drenched clothes, trying to steady themselves and pose for the photograph that a man on the beach was lining up. The romantic bedraggled look, a mermaid flung ashore in a party hostess’s rags: that was the image they were after.

  ‘Shall we swim?’ cried Jin Juan.

  ‘Too cold!’

  ‘You can keep your clothes on.’ She bubbled with laughter.

  ‘You people are bananas.’

  3

  At dusk Wally sat on the balcony of the Diplomatic Guesthouse watching tea-coloured waves break. At the tip of the western promontory of the bay was famous Tiger Rock, an object of holidaymakers’ pilgrimage which, for those with active imaginations, had the shape of a tiger. As the crowd swarmed over it in monochrome clothes and the tide rose, Wally was reminded of those nuns who sang ‘O God Our Help In Ages Past’ while the ship sank.

  For the first time since he had been in China his loneliness took a new form. It was no longer the steady, standard condition which he was confident of enduring, but the more puzzling and sweeter absence of a companion who had made him happily forgetful of himself and his situation.

  Jin Juan had asked about his wife and in straightforward terms he had told her the truth about Bets. His present feelings of tender emptiness came from having unburdened himself. But it was impossible to render the images that were growing stronger and stronger in his memory.

  Bets had bowled up to him in the dark cramped stairwell of a Cambridge party nearly twenty years ago, a big-boned young woman in a peasant jumper, with a clippety-clopping New Zealand accent.

  ‘A little Antipodean girlie just lobbed in at the station,’ said the waspish, equally Antipodean culture critic who had her suitcase to stow.

  She greeted Wally with the enthusiasm of an old friend, automatically, though they’d never met, and at once lapsed into embarrassed silence.

  ‘What brings you to Cambridge on such a night!’

  ‘I had his address’—gesturing at the culture critic, Charles—‘and wanted to hear the choir. You’re living here!’ She had a chipped front tooth and a wild mass of wavy blonde hair.

  ‘Nice!’ she exclaimed when he laid out his situation. ‘So you can hear the choir whenever you want.’

  ‘Actually, to be honest, I’ve never got round to it. It’s more a thing for tourists.’

  He had not meant to sound condescending, to imply that the girl was as shallow as sparkling seawater; but his own Cambridge had so narrowed down that the famous choir was scarcely part of the place.

  He had narrowed himself, crawled into the inner recesses of his work. His PhD routine permitted mild inebriation once a week, no more; and usually in the form of these Cambridge parties, where in cold dim rooms in workingmen’s cottages furiously intelligent students pursued pungent arguments about revolution, antimatter, sexual distress, while Chairman Mao’s picture was pinned to a wall of the crumbling loo down the back.

  It was a change from black things to hear the girl’s confident account of her English pleasures: towpaths, Devonshire teas, domestic interiors, voices, curtain calls, old stones. She had been in the country for two months.

  Late into the night they danced to Jumping Jack Flash, worked up a sweat then collapsed. Next afternoon they went together to King’s to hear the choir. She would be called nothing but Bets, and gave a low wheezy laugh.

  They sat on hard seats in white light from high windows. Wally could not get inside the music no matter how hard he concentrated. He shuffled and frowned; his thoughts roamed; images and dreams came to him seemingly unconnected with the music; yet afterwards, clapping and beaming, he knew he had experienced something. Bets sat expressionlessly throughout, as if it meant nothing to her, and as soon as it was over said she was starving. They walked, found a tearoom, walked again, found a pub, and talked easily, humorously, till closing time. Wally forgot about work that seemed, all of a sudden, shamefully self-absorbing, or found a new enthusiasm in explaining it simply. Towards the end Bets made some matter-of-fact comments about the concert, which showed specialised and discerning judgement.

  She confessed, ‘I studied for a year at the Con. Didn’t have the voice—and now I’m travelling.’

  Wally felt tricked by her uncomplicated directness; he had earlier made some pompous remarks about the music. Seeing how she undersold herself, he would not be such a fool as to take her at face value again.

  Nor had he enjoyed a day so much in ages, and when they were back at his college rooms he hugged her, in sheer delight at her solid enlivening presence rather than intending seduction; though seduction followed, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. Neither for young Wally nor Bets was it casual or common. But Bets showed not a trace of embarrassment, even when Charles popped his head round the door next morning to escort her back to London.

  The next weekend Wally travelled down to see her and she took him to a Lieder recital. Some of it—the Schumann—she had once studied, but she refused to sing for him. He loved being with her, especially in the mornings, lazing through passages of time filled with one another. She was bouncy, exuberant, wonderfully crude at times, and she had fallen in love with him. At the end of the year he moved into the top stor
ey of a subdivided Victorian family mansion, and Bets came too: provisionally, on her own terms, keeping her own plans.

  When the summer arrived, Wally agreed to wind up his experiment and they went wandering, from Cambridge to Land’s End in a borrowed car, staying in bed-and-breakfasts when it rained, or camping by embowered streams when the weather was fine, sitting shirtless till late. They never needed to apologise for what they were, a shy serious socialist boy from Australia whose clothes hung on his man’s frame and whose conceptions were at the forefront of science; a pilgrim girl from New Zealand whose lack of awe was salt in the stew. When they visited William Morris’s cottage, approving his union of artisanship, organicism and creativity—which tied in with Wally’s theory of the body’s organicist intervention in its own processes—seeing the charcoal of Beatrice on the wall, Wally knew he had his own, a muscular candid woman with the gold of the sun in her eyes.

  On the night of the summer solstice they camped at Tintagel and saw a student performance of The Tempest in the ruins of what might have been Camelot. Radiant moonlight attended on the players, scrawny or puppy fat in tights, and their fuzzy voices echoing among the gaping, moon-shadowed battlements turned to powerful legend the Bard’s conviction that all strife, even in love, can be reconciled. Thought is free! Thought is free! They chanted in hippie dance.

  Afterwards Bets and Wally climbed down the cliff to the beach with a great group of actors and spectators and stagehands, and a mighty bonfire was built. Callow Ferdinand, Caliban, Miranda, stripped off their clothes and pranced into the frothing, icy western sea, and others followed—Wally, Bets—trilling, shrieking, their bodies coated in silver scales of moonshine.