by Gail Jones
After the first time together they were hyper-sensitively aware. For him the brush of her skirt, the threads of hair at her nape, the way she turned away when she found his gaze too compelling, were almost unendurable. He was distracted, always waiting, for a thrilling handful of breast, for the next time she guided him into her, her hand gentle around his penis.
They sat beside each other in the class. He watched her reading and writing; he noticed that she chewed her fingernails, and hid her hands so as not to reveal it. He saw how she yawned and sneezed and kept pushing her hair behind her ears. Everyone was still treating them the same, like kids, but between them was this hidden maturity, this adult awareness. There were twenty-eight students in their classroom, twenty-eight bodies and twenty-eight inner worlds, but James could imagine only Ellie as alike, or as unlike in ways he almost understood.
At Central Station a loudspeaker somewhere was booming. The message was unintelligible. James saw signs: Eddy Avenue Exit, Elizabeth Street Exit, and felt disorientated. Discreetly he shifted his genitals in his pants, and tried to put Ellie from his mind. After all these years she still returned to him in this private way. Just as he held his father in a phantom dip and rise, escaping the gravity of the present, so Ellie also persisted in an earlier body and unrelinquished longings.
James stood before the ticket machine, fed it coins and pressed the buttons. When he located his platform it was bathed in full sunshine. He could not have denied there was a cheerful spirit afloat in the weather, but he still felt out of sorts and enormously thirsty. The side effects of Temazepam, taken for too long. Dehydration, memory loss, depressive withdrawal. All those benzodiazepines zapping the gamma-aminobutyric acid in his brain. He bought a bottle of water from the little stall on the platform, suddenly wondering how he might appear to Ellie. He didn’t want rings under his eyes or a hung-over daze.
The doors parted before him. When he boarded the train James found he was silently chanting fragments of anatomy revision: right coronary artery, left coronary artery, anteriorventricular artery, aortic valve, mitral valve … it must have been one of the early lessons. He used to chant the terms as he walked the paths by the university around the river, timing his steps rhythmically, watching light from the sunrise glance in streaks on the calm water. It was a kind of happiness. Repetition, sky, light on water. Once he had seen a pod of dolphins in the river, lazily arching, turning their sleek bodies, and all momentarily was right with the world. God-in-his-heaven. Etcetera, etcetera.
The man in front of James was wearing a black T-shirt stamped with a logo that read teen spirit. As James found his seat he recalled the Nirvana video-clip, ‘Heart-Shaped-Box’: cut-price Surrealism. There was Kurt Cobain looking crazed, shouting at the camera. There was a crucifixion, ravens, babies hanging from a tree, there was a sad little girl in white robes and a white conical cap. There was a large woman in some kind of suit that showed her inner organs on the outside.
Although James was what? – nineteen – when this video version had appeared, it left a terrifying impression. He cannot now remember when first he saw it on television, but the images gave him a nightmare. And here now, on a train in Sydney, it was still invading and upsetting him, acting like airy turbulence when he wanted to cruise.
James stared out of the window and watched inner-city Sydney slide by. He took another gulp of water, finishing the bottle. So much was playing in his head, ringing in this paltry, mortal cupola of the skull. He wanted to see Ellie. He wanted peace and quiet. He wanted not this thirst, this wider hunger, this sense of failure and shame, but whatever he had felt when twenty years ago he first fell into her body. Wholeheartedly. As a kid. Finding a true home.
It was freakish good luck, to be welcomed to the chamber she offered him. Women didn’t realise this: that the noise a man made when he came was of gratitude, simply to have been admitted.
Central Station. She was almost there. The train slid to a creaking halt and a line of passengers disembarked, then came a tide of others to replace it, in a lovely long stream. It was reassuring to see so many people in the world. So many legs moving, stepping upwards, to the modern command of sliding doors.
Central Station. Pei Xing thought wryly that she would never be at the centre of anything, that her life would always be this circling around an irrepressible past. As the train accelerated away, so did her recollection. The world in a train-ride was conducive to her own speedy summonings.
Pei Xing was thinking of her family, long ago, making them reanimate. With her mother and brother Lao, four years older, they had gone together to the First Department Store on Nanjing Road to buy her a new winter coat. She was seven years old. It was 1958, the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. Every morning at school the students praised Mao, the Great Helmsman, and sang ‘The East is Red’ in a hearty, energetic spirit of agreement. They stood stiffly to attention, and even then, so young, Pei Xing knew of Grand Economic Plans and carried nationalist phrases on her tongue. Her teacher was pleased to remind his class that Mao Tse Tung once worked as a primary-school headmaster in Hunan – anyone could be a Communist leader! – and each week they learnt about a new hero of the Great March of 1935, some modest fellow who had sacrificed all, melodramatically, for the People’s Republic, or who had starved, or martyred himself, or believed in Mao beyond all others. In storybooks these figures always appeared in the same poses, three-quarter view, one arm raised, peering towards the future, and the illustrations of valiant deaths made Pei Xing cry. She knew she belonged to an incomparable nation with an inviolate leader, a leader, fortuitously, who shared her birth-date.
Mao’s balloon face would become better known to her than her own father’s, that mole on the chin, that spaced-out stare, the way the single button in head-and-shoulder portraits always looked so exact and rhymed so perfectly, so centrally placed, with his mid-chin mole. His head would float like a dirigible throughout her life, beyond gravity, weightless, in the corner of her vision, always sweeping into history with the bright awful glamour of a God.
The weather was already cold, though it was only early autumn, and the visit to the First Department Store was an outing she remembered because her mother had made a fuss. Her daughter needed a new woollen coat because, she predicted, it would snow in the coming winter. Pei Xing could not remember having ever seen snow before, but believed – in a kind of magical thinking – that the purchase of the coat would be answered by a wide white heaven. Lao also wanted a coat, and mother said she would see how much money was left. He was carrying a kite. It was a time in her brother’s life in which he always carried his kite, as other boys carried books, pocket-knives and fighting crickets. The kite was homemade with a painted phoenix outstretched on the brown-paper diamond. It crackled as he held it, a fragile precious thing.
The women behind the counters chanted a greeting: Huanying guanglin! Huanying guanglin!: Welcome, brightness draws near!
Pei Xing looked into their broad friendly faces and felt that all was right with the world; it was an auspicious day, and she would choose scarlet.
She had never known before how various and how many were the products of the world. She had been to markets, of course, and to smaller local shops, those near Hua Shan Lu and further up Nanjing Xi Lu, near the Jiang’an Temple, but her first visit to a department store was a revelation. When they selected a coat from a rack of hundreds it was exactly as she had wished – of scarlet wool, with four buttons, two by two, and a neat symmetrical collar of two black triangles. There were side pockets for warming her hands and a black trim around the sleeves. Pei Xing remembers her mother standing behind her as they looked together into the long tilted mirror. She was smoothing the coat across her back and tugging at the sleeves to check that it was not too small.
There was not enough money that day for Lao to have a coat too. But he was placated by a trip across the road to the People’s Park, where mother bought them onion-salted pancakes wrapped in rice paper. Lao flew his kite with
other boys on a large oval of grass while Pei Xing sat with her mother on a bench beneath the shedding trees. An old man nearby was playing an erhu and singing in a thin reedy voice. He plucked at the two strings intently, as if every emotion was caught there and must be released.
‘From the provinces,’ mother whispered, with a hint of approval.
Pei Xing was wearing the new coat, taking care not to stain it with her snack. When she finished eating her mother leant over and wiped her fingers with a cloth. It was a moment Pei Xing would return to again and again, first when she was in prison, and later at the Cadre Camp. For some reason there was a purity in this simple touch. Pei Xing held her hands out obediently, finger by finger, as though it were a game. It reminded her of how her mother stretched and pulled her fingers before she played the piano, seeing the gift of her own hands, preparing to skim them across the keys.
She wondered if the recollection was so complete because she had been so happy. Sadness blurs and erases; it cannot bear too many details. But the sight of Lao’s kite aloft, the way he turned to them and called out, wanting to show his skill, the fluttering phoenix visible as a golden mark swooping and rising in the sky, all this was preserved for Pei Xing in a kind of shining delineation.
When they rode the tram home, along Nanjing Road, it was full to bursting with Saturday shoppers and all three had to stand, packed in the crammed aisle. The vehicle rocked and shuddered. Pei Xing was wedged between the bodies of larger people, hemmed in by adult legs and arms. Lao held his kite above his head, afraid it would be torn. Mother steadied Pei Xing as they rode. One hand rested gently behind her daughter’s head, the other clasped at a leather strap, so that she held the motion for both of them. All around was chatter and communality and the smell of someone’s fried meat. Pei Xing loved this sense of other bodies containing and encompassing her, the muffled, animal warmth of the moving tram. She loved her new coat. She loved her family. She leant against the cushion of her mother’s belly and felt like singing.
At home Pei Xing’s first thought was to show the new coat to her father. She rushed into the house and found him where he should be, at his desk, translating. His face was fixed in concentration. He was somewhere between languages, in a studious and placid world. Pei Xing stood in the doorway until at last he noticed he had company. Father peered at her over his rimless glasses, slowly put down his pen, then smiled and opened his arms so that Pei Xing stepped forward into his embrace.
‘Ah, a new overcoat! Pretty! Let me tell you about Gogol!’
And as if the day had not enough intimate moments to fill it, he pulled Pei Xing onto his lap and told her the story of The Overcoat.
In St Petersburg there was once, long ago, an unhappy young clerk, called Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who wanted nothing more than to own a new overcoat. He scrimped and saved – he was very poor – and at last the day arrived when he could afford a new coat, a fine-tailored garment with a collar made of cat fur. When he wore this coat he was suddenly popular and successful. But one night, after a party, two thieves set upon him, beat him up and stole the coat, leaving him alone and barely conscious in the falling snow. Poor Akaky Akakievich died, bereft. He took revenge on the people of St Petersburg as a scary ghost, roaming the snow-white city at night, spooking and attacking the people for their winter coats.
Pei Xing must have looked alarmed.
But in the end, her father said gently, he attacked one important man who had been tormenting him and then no more: justice was done. Other ghosts roamed around, playing havoc and disturbing citizens. But not Akaky Akakievich. He was not a bad man, Akaky Akakievich, and not a bad ghost, but he cared too much about his coat, and too little about the words he wrote in the office. Words, not coats, are where meaning lies.
Pei Xing told her father of her mother’s prediction, that the coat would bring snow. He responded that she was a wise woman, her mother, and if she claimed it was so, she was no doubt correct. It would certainly snow.
At first Pei Xing thought that her father had ruined everything, moralising like that, wanting her to think about ghosts. He had a Russian story handy for every occasion, a literary homily for all events. But his tale added beautifully to the memory of the day. It was there, years later, like breath on a pane of glass, a human trace to see through. It added to the subtle, persisting ways in which she would remember her father, long after he disappeared.
Russia was in those days the ‘Big Brother’ of China, and Russian was the number one foreign language. Young sailors and soldiers were taught to sing Russian songs. Russian folk tales were taught in schoolrooms and universities. For Pei Xing, her father’s knowledge confirmed his importance; he knew both English and Russian; he was internationally skilled. But with the Cultural Revolution everything changed; Khrushchev was a revisionist and capitalist roader; Russian was traitorous, English decadent. Pei Xing, loyal to Mao, was deeply confused. They had been mistaken, it seemed, in seeking other tongues. Languages were not a special capacity, as she had once imagined, but incautious assent to the wrong kinds of meanings.
A few weeks after the shopping excursion the three returned to the First Department Store to buy Lao’s coat. By then the air was chill and sharp and everyday Pei Xing looked out the window, like a character in a book, waiting for the advent of snow.
The second visit to the Store was largely unmemorable, except that she wore her scarlet coat, clasped her mother’s gloved hand, and felt proud that their family was so well dressed. Her coat by then held a scent of the camphor trunk in which it was stored; she walked in a little circle of fragrance, a small charmed embrace.
And when snow at last came, fitful at first, in the faintest disappointing sprinkle and then – oh yes – in a dense overnight fall, she believed that in some way she was personally responsible. She had woken and there it was, layering the roofs and the trees, lining the handlebars of bicycles and piling the edges of the laneways, caught on stall awnings and in the yard of the Elementary School. Whiter than rice powder, with a bluish-mauve lustre. Softer than leaf-fall and more wind-dispersed. You could taste it. You could drink it. You could swallow the sky. Flakes settled in her mouth and on her open dazzled eyes.
Pei Xing gazed with moist delight at the world anew. Her big brother grabbed snow and moulded shapes and flung it around him, or tipped the branches of trees so that he created his own snowfall. But Pei Xing wanted the snow to remain forever as it first was, a damp hush and a pale shadow, just fallen, undisturbed.
Within hours it became slippery mush, dismally dissolving. But the early morning vision was enough to confirm the bright promise of the scarlet coat.
At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Pei Xing’s teacher who so loved the tales of the Great March was one of the first to be attacked and then disappear. By chance she had seen him in the winter of 1967, assembled with other schoolteachers on a basketball court. He had been badly beaten, and one of his eyes had been crushed. Eye matter and blood ran down his face. He wore a dunce’s hat, a high white cone, and a board around his neck that announced his crime as being a ‘running dog imperialist’. By then Pei Xing was no longer surprised. Her parents had been taken, the schools had been closed, everyone for whom she had felt affection was experiencing persecution. But this teacher – Comrade Lu – who had conducted their singing with such enthusiasm, who had been moved to tears telling of the 170,000 souls who died on the Great March, seemed somehow more unlikely as a generalised target.
Comrade Teacher Lu was made to kneel with the others, his eyes downcast, and a crowd of Red Guards surrounded them and shouted slogans of hate. Pei Xing had retreated. She did not want to witness another denunciation of ‘black counter-revolutionaries’. Nor did she want some quiver of complicity to arise between her and Comrade Lu. Sympathy was dangerous in those dark and volatile times. Afterwards she was haunted by what her fellow students had done – so many had participated in beatings and murders. And afterwards it was not only what she had witnessed but
what she had heard, that she could not forget. Her literature teacher was found dead, covered with bruises, her mouth was stuffed with torn pages from an English language book. Her arms were tied backwards in the excruciating ‘flying a plane’ position. With scant details, this was still unbearable knowledge.
Afraid to attract attention, Pei Xing walked quickly past the large character posters flapping in the wind, and when she was out of sight of the Red Guards broke into a panicked run. She felt she was running into shadows and from all she held dear, but she was only one of many, very many, who were told to repudiate past histories. The campaign of the Four Olds – destroying Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas – was already well under way; the slogans of the Four Olds were daubed all over the city.
On the door of her home had appeared the sign: ‘Breaking down the Four Olds; setting up the Four News!’ after which the Red Guards had entered, tearing photographs, smashing vinyl records, crushing underfoot her parents’ small collection of porcelain figurines. She heard a man call out the slogan on their door, as if reciting Tang Dynasty poetry or a line of sutras from a holy book.