Avenue of Eternal Peace (11 page)

As Wally flicked through the badly typed pages of his grandfather's memoir, ‘Postscript to Turn-of-the-Century China', his eye caught a sentence he remembered having liked. ‘Not for the last time was I accused of being a heathen.'

In a village in the South near where Waldemar, at twenty-five, was a lay medic-missionary, a travelling Baptist woman from Georgia had ‘gone mental'. She smashed up the plaster guardians of the local Daoist temple and, muttering prayers and obscenities, had decapitated the gargoyles along the eaves, put a match to the paper lanterns and fanned the flames with revered embroidered banners. The monks had lifted their robes in the easiest way to extinguish the fire while old mongoloid women restrained the American and the abbot of dubious virtue hurried to the
yamen
. Subsequently, in a charade of a trial prolonged by nasal high-toned officialese, and despite a plea of insanity, the visitor was sentenced to death. She had no consciousness of her crime. Her travelling companion, a foreign devil from Alabama in a pinstriped suit, was at a loss. Executions could be summarily carried out—not to mention the rumours of exquisite tortures when death was not summary. The gent begged for the nearest Sinophone foreigner to be summoned, and next day young Waldemar was borne in by litter. The circumstances were recited several times over while he spied out an avenue for compromise. At last it was agreed that the Baptists should pay for a new and better temple to be built, assisting personally in the painting of the spirit heads; and a banquet would be given where the abbot and his monks, the Magistrate and his family, would be invited to dine like gods, and in the glow of repletion enmity would lose its edge. Waldemar hoped that fermented grain liquor, like the waters of Jordan, would wash away sin. He was learning, however, that there were no lasting solutions. What passed for forgiveness was often stored away to be remembered another time.

Imprinted in Wally's memory was also the reference to his grandmother's diary. ‘Once Retta wrote in her diary that she had counted over a hundred corpses in the river. Possibly exaggerated, but suggestively true.' The image of his grandmother counting corpses had caught Wally's imagination as a young boy. Retta must have been twenty-three or four at the time. Her diary had not been preserved, so it was thought, until reckless Uncle Lionel committed to the mail a swatch of lined yellow pages torn from a notebook and covered in a Victorian handwriting that crept over the paper like a tiny translucent crab.

W. says I must turn the other cheek. I suppose I must. I have seen a trader in the marketplace maintain his dignity while in the presence of angry creditors and afterwards slap his own face very hard, once on each cheek. Is it worse to inflict punishment on oneself or to offer oneself to another's malice? I do not know. The Chinaman's way is an advance payment against whatever suffering must come. No satisfaction is afforded the enemy, although a Christian knows anyway that an enemy's satisfaction must be hollow. My thoughts are rebellious, but I write them. W. left this morning in the chair with Lionel all excited. They are to visit the site for a new hospital on the plateau. If rains come, they will be gone for many days. So far sunshine. May is at her lessons and wee Jeremiah playing in his basket in the sunny comer of the courtyard. I raised my voice when Wang refused to go shopping. He asked me to pray for the pains in his legs. I shall pray for his idleness. They make such a fuss of the children in the marketplace, yet I dare not leave them behind. May takes the basket, she can carry our purchases, Jeremiah must be carried in my arms. The ruts are too rough for his cart. I hope the oranges are in. We need strength. I should not sit here writing. Yet I feel safe at my table by the upper window. Over the wall today the mountains are sharp, like a broken frilly cockleshell. The rice terraces are aglow, the water asparkle. My eyes dazzle if I try to pick out the black things afloat in that shining mirror.

SEVEN
Greasing Up

1

Eagle knew his faults. When he was unsure of himself he exuded too much optimism. He already regretted his swaggering entrance to the office of the Party Secretary of the Sports Institute. But the coach had encouraged him. The same man who had sacked him from the team greeted him like a prodigal son and praised his physical condition, repeating over and over how he hoped Eagle would return to fill a vacancy in the squad. No problem, no problem, insisted the coach, rubbing Eagle's bad ankle. The carton of duty-free cigarettes that Eagle had got from the foreigner was zipped inside the coach's carry bag. But it was not the coach's decision. Eagle would need to speak to the Party Secretary. She was a slim middle-aged woman who wore red chiffon scarves with her Japanese running shoes. Eagle adopted a clownish certainty of success and made the fatal mistake of trying to charm her. He had no cigarettes left.

The Party Secretary gave a cold and precise recitation of Eagle's relations with the Sports Institute. He had asked for holidays at inconvenient times. He played the fool with his teammates, putting fun above disciplined team spirit. He blamed luck when the team was defeated, rather than criticising his own performance, and he lost heart when the opposition was impossibly superior. His injury had been caused by his own carelessness, at great cost to the Institute. He was not a Party member.

‘Your attitude has not been good,' said the Party Secretary.

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Is there any change?'

‘My attitude has changed. I have learned from my mistakes.'

‘Fine,' said the woman. ‘Okay. You can rejoin the team.'

It was her tactic to leaven kindness with a bitter moral. ‘As long as you have your unit's approval, you can start training tomorrow.'

‘Oh,' said Eagle as his rising heart sank again, ‘don't you look after that?'

‘The responsibility for releasing you lies with your work unit. We have nothing to do with that. Haven't you spoken with them?'

Feeling the hopelessness of his situation, Eagle smiled his broadest fake smile like a goody-goody child. ‘Thank you, Party Secretary.'

As if from the Emperor's throne, he backed from the room. The coach was scurrying out of sight, but Eagle chased him. If the unit would not release him, maybe the coach could help.

The coach knew a friend who knew a friend; it was not impossible. His words trailed off as Eagle sloped down the corridor in the strange good mood that came over him when his heart hit bottom. As his mother said, he was too happy. He couldn't take life seriously.

In the street, despite himself, his step quickened—quite in contrast to the compliant position he had been forced to adopt in the Party Secretary's office. The question of whether he could rejoin the team was out of his mind, proof itself of bad attitude. He squeezed aboard a bus and sprang off at one of the most crowded places of the city, where he could rub shoulders, move like a fish, look and be seen. He streamed into a department store, peered at ugly shoes, streamed out again into the sunshine. He bumped into a girl on a bicycle who abused him. ‘You stupid idiot, strolling along in a dream …' He abused her back, both of them laughing. ‘You can't even ride straight!' The old-fashioned grey brick shopfronts had bright vertical panels of characters announcing that they sold medicine or hardware or fish. Some old shops had tacked aluminium frames, sheet glass and neon to the front, and sold computers and photocopiers. Eagle deviated from the main street, passed a theatre and racks of potted daffodils and hyacinths outside a florist, and followed deeper into sun-slashed alleys. Everywhere people were basking, busying and budding like flowers at the onset of spring. The emerald sprouts on the pruned trees along the way were turning to catkins and the sky was joyfully blue. He knew as he knew himself the grey uneasy heart of the city that contracted to frozen wounding rock, then thawed in uncomfortable negotiations, sluggish, adaptive, and at last awakened with an irrepressible smile. He pranced into the little dumpling shop as he turned a last corner. The queue of empty stomachs growled and wisecracked and behind the counter his classmate Lotus sat taking the money. She saw him and looked down, showing no expression. He stood in the queue, impatiently shifting his weight in a kind of jig, as if he were one of those kids listening to foreign music on a Walkman. Lotus waited till he reached the head of the queue before she looked up and rolled her Rs at him as only a Beijing girl can.

‘Eat half a
jin
of dumplings,' was his taciturn reply.

His ticket passed through the window to the back of the shop where they kneaded and rolled the dough, stirred the filling, stuffed the dumplings and placed them in huge steamers over boiling water: hot, hard, never-ending work. There were no empty stools round the tables in the little shop. No matter how quickly one ate and left, another was always waiting for the place. The city was insatiable. Eagle poured some vinegar into his bowl and leaned against the wall. They made good dumplings.

He liked Lotus too, who gave a slight smile from under her white hygiene cap as juice dribbled down his chin. They came from the same neighbourhood. Although not directly affected by the Cultural Revolution, most ordinary kids had grown up in an atmosphere of violent mistrustfulness, ignorant and unskilled. Eagle and Lotus had played kids' games through it all. He would sneak out to meet her on the ruined bit of city wall behind the station where they could scramble and hide as long as daylight lasted. By the time they were teenagers, in the terrible months before Premier Zhou Enlai died, they could no longer be innocent of the world around them. The streets were full of vagrants, delinquents and untended children. Eagle and Lotus stuck together. Their relationship, though uncondoned, was protective and loving at the base of that crumbling bit of wall. They saved themselves from the destructive despair that overwhelmed many others, and had a great time.

But Mother Lin thought the girl was scarcely better than a peasant. She could not know the moments of beauty that Eagle and Lotus discovered amidst social chaos in the stormy years of their adolescence. Then as things settled, they drifted apart. Lotus was married to a factory worker and moved to the western suburbs. Her husband worked hard and made little. She produced a son and went to work in the dumpling shop. Some days she chopped, some days she rolled, some days she served, some days she took the money. Though she got fat and lost her prettiness, she had no complaints.

The door of the shop was wide open to the air, and across the way carnations and geraniums bloomed. After hibernation the beginning of spring brought restlessness and the desire to test new powers of body and spirit. No more than two or three times a year Eagle came to see Lotus, when he needed comfort or pleasure. When the feeling came, his feet, like a homing device, took him to her. At first it brought shame to both, but eventually it became an understanding. For her he was an opening of the window, a night out, a treat. She came from behind the counter to walk him to the corner. In that snatched private moment he said, ‘Tonight at the canal.'

No more words, no contact. The dough-rollers in the shop were all eyes and ears, and the old lady selling iceblocks from her trolley was an informant. Eagle vanished, and Lotus returned to her workaday self.

He figured that at night it was warm enough if they wore their coats, and there were enough leaves on the trees for them not to be seen if they leant against a tree in the scrubby area at the far end of the wasteland beside the canal. After going to his unit, he would call at his friend's to pick up some condoms. Lotus would leave a message at her husband's factory to say that she was staying at her mother's overnight. To go home and change would take too long, but she could go to the bathhouse and perhaps buy a scarf on the way. Anyhow she must ask Eagle to get a pair of shoes for her husband through his friend at the leather factory.

As he walked away, Eagle's thoughts switched to the basketball team. As a child he had studied martial arts. He enjoyed rolling on the old mattresses in the yard, shaping and toning his young body with the other boys, until martial arts were discouraged as a stinking vestige of feudal superstition and he switched to other sports. After his ankle injury, he had taken it up again, determined the office job would not make him soft. The friend with whom he trained was a martial arts champion, and by the time he came to reapply for the basketball team, Eagle was in good shape. But could he get a release from his job? If he didn't, it was goodbye to his chances of winning the ex-model Pearl and a new flat. His step leadened as he reached his work unit.

It was Chief Hou who had got Eagle the job in the state office as a favour to Old Lin that turned out to be an exercise in not showing undue favouritism. Knowing that the young man had come into the office through the back door, everyone was satisfied to see him bored, humiliated and wasted. And once inside, the door shut behind you.

Chief Hou explained that a government office could not be seen to release an employee on the employee's own request, especially on a youthful whim to play sport. That was a bad precedent that might lead to chaos. Eagle protested that basketball was part of the Four Modernisations, raising China's sport to a high level of international prestige.

Chief Hou prickled at the boy's rationalisations. A great rationaliser himself, he was not swayed. It was a question of ‘work need'. Eagle was essential to the office, said Hou, preparing to embroider the palpable lie. In China, service personnel, especially the military and their dependents, relied on the promise of early retirement and a cushy unthinking afterlife, which it was the duty of Chief Hou's office to take care of. From the age of twenty-five the needs of service personnel, retired out due to injury, were catered for from the Ministry's ‘iron rice bowl'. Eagle's task, once a week, was to take the senior citizens to the park where they could quaver pieces of Peking opera to each other. Someone young and fit was needed to herd the elderly to and from the park. Eagle was indispensable.

There was no arguing. The only recourse to a leader's God-like decision was prostration, a series of return visits until God's mood changed or His price was found. Eagle bowed his head, not angrily, and left.

On the way to the bus stop he executed a whirling martial arts movement, a foolproof device for bringing your opponent to the ground in agonising submission. Then he shrugged and shook his shoulders like a bird ruffling its feathers, and scrambled aboard the bus. Lotus was waiting by the canal.

2

It was not clear who was treating whom. Mother Lin wanted to introduce the Doctor to Peking opera, the Doctor wanted to give Mother Lin a night out. Eagle scoffed, but came along for the ride. There was much fretting about tickets. Wally insisted that he could get them. Mother Lin put on her best jacket and slacks, and mother and son caught the bus to the theatre where the Doctor was waiting as planned. Eagle considered it a major sacrifice to sit through an evening of Peking opera. It was an unpopular art. He was glad when interval came and he could join the scrum for icecream. Mother Lin was content with faint praise for the performance, not as good as it used to be. Wally's head was ringing. He had understood nothing but cacophonous, kinaesthetic sensation. Eagle had mistranslated the opera's title as ‘The King of Bah Says Goodbye to His Cucumber', and Wally improvised accordingly. At interval he was still trying to sort out the pieces.

Then suddenly Jin Juan came bumping through the crowded foyer, exclaiming with surprise to see him there. The man at her side, standing confidently in a smart beige trenchcoat, gave Wally's hand a firm Western shake.

‘What's your opinion?' asked Jin Juan.

Wally said he was there with his friends and looked round for Eagle and Mother Lin, who had vanished. He was on a mission to achieve a little understanding of even the most impossible things Chinese, such as shrieking Peking opera. Jin Juan relished its stylised energy. Her cousin was one of the performers, so she often came. Tonight, she explained, after interval, her cousin would perform an extract from the ancient tragedy
Snow in Summer
in which a young woman is falsely accused of trying to murder her mother-in-law. As Jin Juan talked with animation, her companion, Zhang, took no part, grinning at the woman's foreign-language fluency with incomprehension and a degree of hostility.

As they were drifting back to their seats, Eagle returned. He didn't notice Zhang at first, and was delighted to see the Doctor escorting the elegant woman down the aisle. But Zhang came from behind and placed his hand possessively in the small of Jin Juan's back, provoking her, it seemed, to suggest that they should all sit together so she could explain the plot to Wally. Zhang acquiesced, self-importantly proper, and further disconcerted to find an old woman, Mother Lin, included in the party. He scarcely humoured Jin Juan's taste for Peking opera. He had been happier as a firebrand adolescent chanting ‘Down with the Stinking Olds', of which opera was one of the rankest. Now he was into Democracy with Chinese Characteristics at the prestigious Centre for Research into Economic Structures.

How could she have any feeling for him left, thought Jin Juan. He had been late, as usual. They had planned to eat together, but he had changed the arrangement, as usual. She had waited outside the theatre in Goldfish Alley, and Zhang had been sublimely unflustered when eventually he arrived. She had stiffened to his touch before releasing inevitably into its warmth. He could be romantic, turning his serious eyes to her. He was self-preoccupied, but zealous and bright; not indolent like some of his ilk, nor knotted and strained with political resentment and ill will. He existed happily on the egotistical enthusiasm of an unsoured princeling.

On stage a prison scene takes place, the deep-voiced gaol matron as impervious to the bride's pleas for help as a tree stump in winter; the tyrannous mother-in-law demanding judgement, not for herself but in recognition of the law; the innocent bride, removing her jewels and brocade, sorrowing as she flutters nearer to her death, like a moth to the flame.