Avenue of Eternal Peace (23 page)

Wally's guess made him confident enough to ask questions. But the old man had reached a confusing stage of overexcitement. Tiny bubbles of spittle dribbled from his mouth and his watery eyes seemed painfully, pathetically empty as he struggled to grasp the visitor's questions. It was too hard.

In a desk where there might have been records was nothing but tatty committee pronouncements and the old man's few photographs of a family dispersed. He wanted so much to help.

To make it easier Jin Juan was reduced to putting the bluntest questions, and to all of them the preacher nodded enthusiastically, an obliging host. Yes, there were foreigners. Yes, there was a hospital. Yes, there was a man called Frith. Yes, there was a missus. Children and grandchildren. Oh yes, so long ago. His mother always remembered. Yes, there were so many foreign friends. Never forgotten.

They settled for a group photograph in the courtyard and lined up, the senile white-haired preacher, the two black-haired mentally disturbed ones, Jin Juan in her scarlet gauze scarf, Wally in his running shoes. Who was to take the shot? Then someone young was found.

As they made their farewells, a great big tear rolled down the old man's face. Such visitors had come in a dream. He seemed to remember a likeness, a ghost, so long ago in childhood. The contours of his pastoral work were obscure, concluded Wally; the heart was pure. Water again, not the grit of fact.

He thought of the creature who had lost his faculties in the sanatorium at Beidaihe, the wrong professor. How far he had come, questing. Had he found his trace?

Walking back they stopped on the bridge over the wide silty river, and Wally tenderly put his arm round Jin Juan's waist.

‘Do you understand what I have been looking for today? Does it seem a waste of time to you?'

‘Barking up the wrong tree? No, filial piety is our custom. I only hope the old-fashioned ritual does not leave you feeling empty.'

But he was full of her.

‘My grandparents probably walked here,' he said. ‘Singly, perhaps not together. They were devoted, but not in love, and more cut off than they wanted to be.'

A crowd was gathering at one end of the bridge to point with disapproval at the visitors, the foreign man and the Chinese woman who were carrying on like lovers.

‘Do you think your grandmother might have walked here too?' asked Wally.

‘Silly superstition! I don't care about that.' She broke away.

That evening the host of the inn feasted them in his own quarters. He had a magnificent red and gold dragon-and-phoenix carved double bed, an ancient heirloom. When he sat on its edge to take food from the little table, he grew full with well-being. Across the courtyard his young daughter worked the bellows to make the furnaces roar and the wok so hot that the crabs, fish, clams and soybeans cooked as soon as they were plunged in. The table was constantly replenished, and they got drunk on toasts of yellow wine and fervid white spirits.

Wally went out the back and perched, somewhat precariously, his head reeling from drink, on the edge of the great earthenware vat. He hung there in the fetid darkness communing tipsily with the sky above his head. His fuzzy thoughts seemed an expression of satisfaction not so different from the snuffling of the two big pigs in the adjacent pen. He smelled them and they smelled him, and a few wide-awake chooks came pecking at the trousers around his ankles. From a mound in the centre of the yard grew a magnolia tree, higher than the inn, past flower, in full leaf. Through the fingers of the leaves were the stars. He contemplated the movement of the planet, and the prankish, unpredictable, unguessable laws—beyond race, creed, nation—that had brought him there and held him perched there, the poor, bare-arsed, forked, drunk, and, for that moment, unwarrantably happy creature.

The bus left early the next morning. Jin Juan and Wally splashed their faces awake. The host's wife was squatting in the courtyard plucking bean pods from the picked branches and the host was bleary eyed. They shook hands in farewell.

At the last goodbye with Hsu Chien Lung in Shaoxing the old man wryly apologised for not answering the Doctor's questions. It was an offence to a guest who had travelled so far. Hsu brought out a stack of papers, some English, some Chinese, offprints, notes, unpublished articles. ‘If you and your colleagues work through these and find anything of value, you have my thanks. I suspect it's as long and stinking as the proverbial old lady's foot bandages.' He chuckled, and it was time for the train.

In the sleeper back to Beijing Wally considered how little he had discovered on the trip, how few of his questions had been answered, how few even of the old questions remained intact. Yet his brain was sparking with new questions and devising new experiments to follow up when he got back. He repudiated Professor Hsu's fatalism and felt a new determination take hold. He had ascertained one thing. He knew who the woman was who had visited his residence in the Medical College. There was only one woman, Jin Juan, who had no substitute. As the train rocked north he mulled over the predicament his various feelings placed him in, knowing that the action he had decided on could be accounted for in more ways than one. He was in love with her and loved being with her. It was not only desire but delight in her presence, in her sharpness and strength. Yet the pleasure of her was also an addiction that he couldn't see beyond. He couldn't tell how much she might reciprocate his feelings, or for what purpose. He assumed that she, of all people, would want to leave China. She had suffered, and her talents continued to be wasted. She had the English, and other qualities that would allow her to succeed abroad, to find and fulfil herself. If the result of his visit proved nothing more than to have placed him in her path, then he should do the right thing and help her, squarely setting the end against the means. Should he offer to marry her on that basis, as the most useful thing he could do for her? And if they should come actually to live together as lovers, why not? If the condition of helping her out of the country was to marry, he could afford to risk their feelings for such a cause. Or was he seeking means to justify a blind holiday romance, an infatuation with Chinese skin and eyes and fatalism? The thought discredited Jin Juan who was cautious, balanced. She could live in one of his empty rooms back in Sydney. She would be there, solid. Would that work? What else did he have? He would marry her, if she would have him.

ELEVEN
Encountering Trouble

1

The band was on stage. Behind the curtains the poets plotted and planned in factions. Out front their friends and hangers-on crammed the front rows while the rest of the auditorium filled up with students who had managed to procure tickets. It was a fine late-autumn evening, and permission had been given for the reading to be held in the mock-Oxbridge hall of Peking University.

A lighting and sound system had been installed to render the presentations more dramatic. Shafted with a red spot, a broad-shouldered poet in black recited his ‘Old Summer Palace Drunk' like a pop singer, his shadow doing a tango against the scrim. The obese editor of
China Youth News
sat on the boards with his back to the audience mumbling his words into a mike. By the time it was Build-the-Country's turn to recite, the band was in place. A twang of guitar chords accompanied each emotive phrase.

The theme of their poetry was I: isolated, having no past, no future, not believing in the present, a wraith haunting a great ruined culture, consolable neither in body nor spirit. The poems were blackly sentimental, and to the packed audience of contemporaries, the audacious inflection of their language was like a drug. The poets were heroes. The monkey-faced one read an epic of the rough sensuality he had saved from the regime's attempts to iron him flat. The editor of the pro-democracy magazine quashed five years earlier read a tribute to his comrade-in-arms who had turned schizoid in prison. The lean and hungry proclaimed their slogan: I-DO-NOT-BELIEVE.

It was poetry of walls and extinction in search of a cadence with which to hymn a cruel society. They wore drainpipe jeans, boots and bodgie sweaters. When the music pounded, they moved on stage like stiff robots, stamping with their heels and hammering with their heads. There was no room for dancing so the audience stood on the spot in the narrow rows of seats and stamped and swayed with grimacing faces, hands beating their sides like pistons, releasing a fraction of the hot, rank energy a hard power had pressed down into them.

Backstage a university official was talking to a representative of the poets. It was the official who gave the orders. He had turned a blind eye when the unauthorised band appeared on stage, but he was perturbed by the mass dancing, which was strictly forbidden. There was danger of a riot, however, if hundreds of students were too quickly checked in their defiance. The poets were conciliatory. The music slowed, quietened, and the students gradually resumed their seats until the music stopped altogether, leaving the rumbling of discontent and disappointment as a thousand cigarettes were lit up.

Among the lesser writers saved for the end was Philosopher Horse. Although his name had begun to be whispered around, he was unfamiliar to the Beijing crowd.

He looked like any kid from the South with pimply skin, thick glasses and cropped hair, but for his expression of obsessional conviction. He wore unfashionable grey worker's clothes and his delivery began flatly as he read a piece of reportage. Really he was explaining himself. A boy from a rough, weird province in the South (they laughed at his accent), he had been a student in a provincial college until expelled for skipping classes and exams. Then he walked away from an ill-paid, boring factory job, and remained unemployed. It was an ordinary case history in which all could recognise themselves. Only from Philosopher Horse's aimlessness had grown his extraordinary intensity.

He used to spend his days at his elder sister's house, with his sister and her kid. His brother-in-law worked at a unit three hours' journey outside the town and only returned at weekends. His sister worked on the far side of town, an hour's journey away. Their child was left to get to school, to buy a midday meal, to play in the afternoon, by himself. Philosopher Horse spent many hours hanging round with the kid as there were no other family members. Their parents were still in the country village from which first his sister and then the boy himself had moved away. His sister had an old friend, also from their village, who was thirty-five and unmarried. He was known as Lao Men, which meant Old Gate. He would often call in to play with the kid, or chat with Philosopher Horse, or share in the meal when sister came home. Old Gate was tough and dismissive of unnecessary refinements, yet exceptionally courteous, even chivalrous. He appreciated what he got of family life in the household. Fortune had not shone on him. He worked in a chemical factory and lived in a dormitory. One of his legs was twisted from polio, but he was stronger than any other man in the factory. He was happiest when sister's husband, his special mate, was home at the weekend. The two men shared rough and ready opinions, a taste for strong wine, a love of chess, and a code of honour that included torturing hard work. By contrast, Philosopher Horse had views a little too abstract, but on nights when his mate was away Old Gate could also enjoy a debate with the younger boy, whom he had known since childhood.

Philosopher Horse told the ordinary story in direct, unmannered language. The audience listened. Its very plainness was unusual. At the time of the crackdown on crime a girl was raped in the town. Old Gate was rounded up. There was no evidence for or against. As usual on the night in question he had been drinking at sister's house, and slowly meandered home. No one had seen for sure what time he returned to his dormitory. He was, anyway, too old to be unmarried; a man with insufficient ties, not a true member of society. On the street everyone spoke well of him. But he was from a peasant village, not from the town. The appearance in court was, in any case, a closed affair. Within three days of his arrest he was sentenced. He was paraded through the town with a truck full of other alleged criminals, their misdoings proclaimed on yokes round their necks. At one point Old Gate yelled out his innocence, to no one in particular. In the stadium along with the others he was shot in the back of the head. A large quota of executions was required that month.

‘After that,' Philosopher Horse concluded, ‘I understood.'

He had finished.

He held a fist in the air and cried out, ‘Defend the People!'

He cried out that phrase once only, bowed quickly and left the stage.

Some mouthed the words in silence. Defend the People! No one dared to shout them aloud. Transfixed by recognition, the audience burst into roaring applause.

2

The concert petered out and Clarence marched to his motorbike. He got a nice shot of the kid with his fist raised. ‘Something is happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr—' he howled to himself as he rode south through the night. The New Age Bar would still be open via the back door and he would tank up.

‘Black Chinaman?' quipped Young Bi, who looked consumptive. Bad types had taken over the bar. The glamorous people, except for Clarence, had stopped coming, and without them Bi's dreams took a battering. The hours of work were long, conditions were poor, and his practised servility was wasted on ruffians. Bi was solicitous, without knowing the wound in the Englishman's heart.

One night Clarence had brought the Han dynasty pot that Autumn dug up. He showed it to Foreign Trader. Foreign Trader asked to take the piece away for expert examination and, to prove his honourable intentions, offered to take Clarence along too. But Clarence accepted the man's honesty. Foreign Trader was rich enough from his fake Tang horses not to be a blatant thief. Clarence was not in the smuggling business himself but hoped that Foreign Trader could dispose of the pot through his Hong Kong network and return the proceeds to Autumn.

Foreign Trader was in the bar with his friend Party Greenhorn. They were laughing over Irish coffees, and Clarence thought it best to wait. In the end Foreign Trader came over, offered a cigarette, and announced his price for the pot. It was not low enough for the piece to be a fake, and therefore was too low. Foreign Trader asked Clarence how much he would accept. ‘Much more,' said Clarence, upping the amount ten times. Foreign Trader laughed. Clarence said he was reluctant to sell. ‘Okay,' said Foreign Trader, compromising, ‘don't sell.' The pot was worth the price Clarence had named, more, but there were difficulties. Foreign Trader sauntered to his seat and returned with the pot carefully wrapped in old towels, as Clarence had presented it. The failed transaction was somewhat graceless. To gain face Foreign Trader asked Clarence if he was interested in conveying some substances to Hong Kong … Clarence gave a blunt refusal, and Foreign Trader lumbered back to his cold Irish coffee where his friend Party Greenhorn quizzed him.

Clarence ordered another drink. He had not sold the pot for the available offer because Autumn was not around to profit. For some weeks he had not seen or heard from him; he was worried and had no one in whom to confide. A bilious hacking cough was his body's response to the Chinese vodka in the cocktail. He shouldn't drink it; he'd be wrecked again in the morning, but what matter? His health was wretched. He had ignored the Doctor's advice. He could not bring himself to go to Hong Kong.

He roved over every grim possibility for Autumn—sickness, detention, worse—and kicked himself for every time he and Autumn had let down their guard of discretion. The boy had vanished without trace.

Clarence had gone looking at the No. 3 Vehicle Plant. He had gone during daylight hours and inquired of the management, which drew suspicion, and he went again at night to ask the workmen dossing down in the dorms if they knew anything. Then he remembered Autumn's sister, who lived south of the city. He knew that Autumn had occasionally visited his sister's house where, if not exactly welcome, he was at least taken in. Clarence remembered the name of the bus stop and the sister's work unit. He knew the visit would implicate more people, but he had no other lead.

It took him the better part of a day's questioning in workshop after workshop to find people from the Shandong countryside where Autumn's family originated. Clarence felt sure there would be some kind of local network. People were curious enough; they crossed the road to hear him put his questions, and they paid him back in questions tenfold. But no information came out. He grew angry and suspected concealment. Yet they told the truth. For all their love of gossip, their scope was narrow. They had learned that the people in the next lane, the family across the street, those girls from out of town, that foreigner with his fluent mangling of the language—those things were safest ignored. ‘I seldom go out the door,' was the common reply. They meant it. Clarence could only repeat his questions until the odds brought him up against someone who might know.

Word had got round and suddenly a woman came running up to him. Suspecting that the foreigner might be connected with her, she came alone. She was Autumn's sister, and she ushered Clarence furtively to her house.

She poured tea and was hospitable. Neither side was patient, yet neither asked outright. The sister tried unsubtly to investigate the nature of Clarence's relationship with her brother, and Clarence, not knowing what the sister had been told, was wary. Foreigners brought unlimited possibilities for boon and bane and, since the sister had never been so close to one before, she was confused, as Clarence explained that he wished to find her brother.

She volunteered the information that Autumn was not there. She did not know when he would be back. He had not been there yesterday either. Or the day before. At last the woman admitted that she had not seen her brother for nearly two months. She had not worried, thinking him to be at work. They had no fixed arrangement, he was under no obligation to visit, yet—she had thought it a little strange and started to worry. Autumn had mentioned once that he had a foreign friend. She imagined, perhaps, that Autumn had left the country with the foreign friend. Or perhaps the foreign friend had brought trouble upon his head.

Clarence grew pale at the sister's news. He said quietly that he had not seen Autumn himself for two months. She sat down and bowed her head. Her round, weathered face turned red and she started to cry, imperceptibly at first, then in heaves. Clarence didn't know what to do. She called out piteously that perhaps he had gone home to the mountains. When Clarence laid a hand on hers to comfort her, she pulled away convulsively. His own tears had dried up.

Then she stood and paced the room violently. ‘Maybe it's you who's brought him trouble. Certainly it's you foreigner who's brought him trouble.'

‘Possibly,' said Clarence, chastened by what he recognised as a real possibility, insensitive to the woman's emotional fit.

She screamed. ‘Where is my brother? What have you done to my brother? How could it happen? What am I going to do, my mother, my father?' She was rooted to the spot, cursing and shrieking. ‘You—go! Go! Never come back.'

Clarence pushed out through the door, the neighbours, threw his pale head in the air and strode across the puddles in the muddy alley. He was afraid not of the woman but of the scenarios—her fears were hysterical and unfounded, yet she knew her society, she recognised the disruption of the normal: Clarence's fears were specific. If there had been some kind of suspicion? If Autumn had been called in? A final twist of the knife was the likelihood that he would never know anything. Vanish! Non-being! Puff! The gritty wind in his eyes as he rode the motorbike gave him an excuse to scream and bleed.

3

At boiling point Jumbo approached Dulcia's apartment in the Friendship Hotel. He had not been stopped at the gate, but the fat little spy at the bottom of her stairway called to him, ‘Where are you from?' (Meaning: what is your official status?)

As he had passed the man almost nightly for the last six months, Jumbo merely grunted in reply.

‘Hey,' the spy yelled, ‘which unit do you belong to? Where are you going? What's your relationship with that person?'

Jumbo shouted in a blather, ‘I belong nowhere. I come from nowhere. I am going nowhere. I am no one.' Then he turned and skipped up the stairs.