by Gail Jones
James averted his gaze. And now I’m free, he thought.
In the amber sunlight of before-home-time, when the class was allowed to read in silence whatever they wished, he looked out over their bent heads and felt at peace. He imagined for the first time in his life that he might like to be a father. It must be like this, he thought, casting a canopy of concern over the heads of small children, and a sense of promise, of the time that is yet to come. He read his own book, something Russian, an anti-Australia. This too gratified him. He was at one with the children, all that might be possible within words, and all these individual minds, receiving whatever provocation or emancipation might arrive innermost, easy as music, on a long melody of story.
At night James would sit on the verandah of his weatherboard Education Department house, listening to the sounds of the lives around him, feeling the cool breeze after a stifling hot day. In the apron of yellow light that spilled from his kitchen, in the shifting evening air, in the calm of his solitude, he heard the bang of wire-screens and a fridge door slammed shut, he heard remote voices travel across the broad country dark, he heard a dog bark, then another, and a sad mopoke calling, he swatted mosquitoes and drank beer and looked up at the starry sky. He played and replayed his CDs of Bob Dylan and the Triffids. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’. ‘Calenture’. When he slept he slept well, and when he woke he was refreshed.
Towards the end of the year, James took his class on an excursion to visit the seaside. There were students who had never before seen the sea, those for whom this would be a gift of amazement he alone would have given them. They would always remember him, offering the ocean. It was an adventure for all of them. The local cop arranged a bus driver’s licence for the occasion, and he set off with fifteen children to drive to the west coast.
What James did not tell Ellie: the drowned child. Amy Brown her name was. Nine years old. What he could not disclose: his own dissolution.
He could barely remember the happy part now, because of all that followed. There must have been a happy part; there must have been exhilaration. There must have been children whooping for joy and splashing in the shallows, exclaiming at their experience of the Indian Ocean. He knows for sure that the first night, when they sat in a circle around the campfire he had made, they were all flushed pink with firelight and high rejoicing, singing at the tops of their voices, acting up, going silly. For some of them it would have seemed a remarkable holiday, all their mates and no parents, and this single teacher who was cool. After their dinner James brewed drinking chocolate with hot milk, warmed over the fire, and the kids poked at the embers and stayed close, avoiding the black wilderness behind them. He remembers their faces ashine, and the high tones of their voices. The small hands clutching at mugs of chocolate milk and breaking their biscuits.
And when at last they bedded down James realised he had never been so happy. In his tent he listened to the voices of his students whispering after lights-out, gradually settling, becoming quiet, then entering their own dreams. The sound of waves pulsed beyond the sand-dunes, and he stepped into the moonlight just to look at them, to see the world before humans, elemental and apart. The sky was awash with constellations and the sea was lit up with moonshine. A milky mist seemed to hover just above the horizon. Oceanic repetition and extension: it was like being hypnotised. It was like having the stars to yourself, James thought.
In the morning they had begun their breakfast before they realised Amy was missing. A few kids called her name, there was a casual search, and then it came upon James all at once; his chest contracted and was fearfully tight. James bounded over the sand dunes and in panic ran to the water’s edge. At first all he saw was the sea churning under a now-grey sky, but then, yes, the child’s body, dragging and tipping in the shallows. She was wearing her bathers – she must have decided on an early swim – and her limbs hung loose from the neat little sheath of green lycra, decorated with a comic-book image of dolphins. James rushed headlong into the water to claim her. Her limp body was tiny in his giant arms. He tried, and tried, and then tried again, but even through his tears and his snot and his wet dripping clothes, even through his wild desperation to unmake the catastrophe, he knew enough to realise that she was already long gone.
All at once a semi-circle of children was standing on the sand before him. James shouted at them all to go away. Told them to fuck off – fuck off! – with a ferocity that frightened them. Then he took his shirt from his back and wrapped it around Amy’s head, gently, as if she were a baby, or could still feel his touch. So that they might not see her face, and have to remember it forever.
At the inquest in the city James wore a suit and tie. Everyone was looking at him. He saw the parents weeping quietly, but at the end of the proceedings the father shook his hand and said that he understood the drowning was an accident. The mother turned away, unable to speak. Later a simple message, scrawled in an uncannily childish script, confirmed she believed that it was just one of those things. The imprecision was heartbreaking. The handwriting was heartbreaking. The forgiveness was heartbreaking. But in his jangled head James was hearing Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’. It was a tormenting and crudely compelling association. He did not want The Authorities To Blame Him. For Something That He Never Done. The song repeated its screeching message and its frenzied violins. James tried to suppress it, to break its thrall, but the lyrics penetrated with taunting efficiency, so he took valium, then sleeping tablets, then uppers to stay awake in the morning.
Within days of the drowning the Education Department released James on leave, and arranged visiting counsellors for the children of his class. As soon as he could, James fled. He drove too fast and manically along the wide road back to the city, pressing his rusty old Cortina to the limit of its speed. Acres of wheat flashed past. A flock of black cockatoos, like Van Gogh’s crows, rose in the distance like a dark presentiment. He could not still his thoughts. He could not control his instability. He hated the Dylan-noise that was playing in his head. He hated the note from the mother and the stricken stares of the other children. Then there was pneuma, there was Magritte: his past was recurring. Everything in his wretched life was forming a pattern, preordained and imprisoning. He didn’t believe in Fate. He didn’t believe in these patterns, like wallpaper, shapes to cover a split surface. The very idea of a pattern was an offence to his politics and his reason. And as James passed under the blazing sky, piss-coloured behind his sunglasses, too huge to look at, he experienced once again his own physical symptom, a sense that his lungs were being crushed by an internal fist. He pulled his car to a skidding stop and threw himself from it, bent double, afraid, gasping for air. There was the ring of an empty world, a landscape so void and depopulated it hummed. When he came to his senses he was crying, like a kid just beaten.
James breathed deeply and slowly as he had once been instructed. Inspiration, expiration. Feel the diaphragm, place your hands there.
The world did not acknowledge private misfortune. Not this world, with its cafés beside the Harbour and the expansive delight of a sunny day. It had been four months since Amy Brown drowned in the Indian Ocean and he still thought of her, remembered her, every post-mortem day. Four months of sick leave. Four months in which his life entered a kind of free fall, like one of those universal, cross-cultural dreams of falling, caught in a sensation of unreality and unbounded panic.
James moved closer to the edge of the pier and gazed into the water. A pattern resembling his mother’s crochet, crafted in light, lay wobbling and shifting in light ferry-wake. Oily slicks drifted from boats and left an iridescent trail. Then he lifted his gaze and saw again the form of the Opera House, and was seized suddenly by a desire to see it from the inside. What must it be like to shelter there, within those high white shells? To look from the other direction, out across the water? To hear an orchestra, perhaps, belting out Wagner as if the Götterdämmerung was upon us, as if it was thrash metal rock, full of multi-track fury? The US army was playing death
metal to al-Qaeda in Baghdad. Nirvana’s ‘Tourette’ was an instrument of torture at Gitmo. Where had he heard that? Could it be true?
What he had not told Ellie: it swelled inside him. He had expected to explain himself so that he might be unburdened. She was the only person in the world he could imagine hearing his words. It was not too much to hope for, surely, to cast off the sense of defilement that had accreted around him, to want a reciprocating tone, a haven to rest within, to say in a safe place what needed to be said.
After she fed Hua rice porridge Pei Xing brushed her hair. It was a kind of ritual they shared. Hua had kept her white hair long and Pei Xing sometimes plaited it. This reminded her of her childhood, of her own dark plaits hanging down her back, of her mother’s deft braidwork and the neat addition of a bow. It reminded her of dressing for school, and how proud she had been of her uniform, how in middle school she was awarded the title of a ‘Three Good’ student, good morally, academically and physically. San Hao: Three Good. A shining enamel badge.
Perhaps because Hua was silent and from the same city, Pei Xing found her presence a source of remembering; it was as if she must remember for both of them, and keep spoken out loud what was locked up in paralysis. In their mysterious friendship, remembrance laced them together; indeed, Pei Xing imagined at times – since Hua could not confirm it – that they shared a few recollections that were exactly the same, that there was a fatedness to their meeting and a correspondence of selves.
‘Do you remember,’ she asked her friend, ‘Double Happiness ping pong bats? How we all owned one, what a joy it was?’
Hua would blink, and it was an encouragement.
‘And Golden Deer bicycles? A boy in our lane had a Golden Deer bicycle. We bribed him to give us turns. Once my brother, Lao, took off down the lane and the owner called out thief! thief! and chased after him like a madman. Lao came back of course, but the boy with the bicycle never gave him another ride.’
With such details Pei Xing fell back into the swoon of her childhood, thought of the chestnut-coloured curtains in the front room of their small house that gave it a constantly shady aspect, of the milk popsicle sweets that were ten fen a piece, of the picture above her bed, a fat rosy-cheeked baby riding an orange carp, of the sound of bicycle wheels in a murmurous procession, the Flying Pigeons, the Phoenixes and the desirable Golden Deers. There was something charming in all those legs moving together in concert, the circles of so many pedals, ring upon ring. When as an adult Pei Xing saw Western futurist art, her vision made sense: the curves in repetition, the blur of speed, the pastel tones of a movement apprehended nostalgically. If she had not been a teacher she might have been a painter. She might have attempted a painting of the river of bicycles, gliding though Shanghai in a series of abstracted circles.
Pei Xing said: ‘Do you remember that awful proverb from the provinces? Women should only marry men who can provide three things that go round: a wrist watch, a bicycle and a sewing machine.’
She did not speak of Mao. She did not mention their large-scale history, the three-year famine, or the anti-rightist campaigns; just as she did not tell the most private of her family memories, the red coat day, her mother’s music, the times she had spent learning English and Russian from her father. And so it went by, the cosy lassitude of a hospital afternoon, washed in reminiscence and a snowy story from Russia.
When Pei Xing boarded the ferry to return to Circular Quay, that which she wished to forget revisited her. Every now and then she forgot to forget.
What returned to her there on the deck, exposing her face to the wind, watching the steep shore recede and the water break open in a frothy wake, was that she had worn her red scarf. In her first encounter with Hua, whom she knew then as Comrade Peng, she had worn her red scarf.
After the Revolutionary Guards took away her parents, Pei Xing lived alone in their house for six weeks before she was seized. Her brother, she had heard, had somehow escaped to Hong Kong. She felt desolate, and afraid. Three families were moved in to occupy their rooms, and at this time some minor official must have remembered her existence, and that she too was a criminal. She recalled her teacher, Comrade Lu, beaten at a ‘struggle session’, the pitiful sight of his destroyed eye, the splashed blood on his shirt, his forehead bent to the ground and his gentle self humiliated. There were also demons in the pay of foreigners, former Nationalist Party members, rightists, undesirables, bull devils, capitalist roaders, reactionaries, revisionists, running dogs, blacks, all guilty of obscurely serious crimes committed against the Party. Pei Xing discovered she was a ‘counter-revolutionary-educated-youth’, and that she had somehow aided her father in spying for the Americans. Her brother, she was told, had sold state documents to the British Imperialists. She was arrested and taken by jeep to the Number One Detention House for political prisoners. There she was strip-searched, photographed, and hauled into a solitary confinement cell.
To show her party allegiance Pei Xing had worn her Youth League badge and the red scarf of her Young Pioneer uniform. She had worn it first as a nine-year-old; she joined the Young Pioneers on 1st July, International Children’s Day, in 1960. How proud she had been. With the other children she chanted: Ten thousand years to Chairman Mao! In those days she had believed, as she was told, that her scarf was dyed red with the blood of the revolutionary martyrs.
When she was arrested at her home in Autumn Happiness Lane, later to be renamed People’s Struggle Lane, she was allowed to bring her standard issue cotton quilted jacket and pants, and a few personal items, a hairbrush and some underwear. The scarf was her protection. She had once been so fond of it. In this time of profligate symbols and ideas reduced to codes, when so much depended on the mesmerising loyalty to red, here was her conciliating sign of assent. But once arrived at the prison her effort was derided. A female guard wearing a khaki cap with the red star emblem had yanked at the scarf on her neck and slapped her face.
‘Radish,’ the woman said with spitting contempt.
Pei Xing felt her stinging cheek and the welt where the scarf had been torn, and held back her tears. This was so small an injury, compared with what was to come. She saw a large banner – Serve the People! – as she was hit again.
Pei Xing no longer dwelt on the two years she spent in prison. Nor on the injuries Comrade Peng and others inflicted. The days were distinguished only when she was submitted to meaningless interrogation, or beaten in a particularly memorable way. Her compulsory reading material was The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao, which she learnt diligently both from boredom and in an attempt to please her jailers.
When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns still remain.
She was an enemy without a gun, yes, she needed Communist re-education, yes. She had studied English, yes. But she did not help her father spy for the Americans, no; he had never spied, no, she had never spied. No.
Pei Xing believed that if she signed the ‘confession’ saying that her father, a ‘member of the stinking ninth category, the intellectual class’, had committed a crime, she would be condemning him to death. It made no sense to her, this story that they told. She did not recognise her family in the crude, mendacious version they offered. Only later she discovered her parents had been killed a week after they were taken; her confession was to provide a retrospective justification. For the paperwork, someone said. To show that the Party was infallible.
At first there was only retching despair and a nightmare of foreboding. Pei Xing waited to die. She was cold and cramped and could not imagine a future. She was filled with a grief of monstrous inexactitude. Day and night she heard sobbing, and random brutal shouts. But as the months wore on she found resources of solace and distraction. In her small dim cell, Pei Xing began silently to recite lines her father had once taught her:
Transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry.
Amazing to consider these were adjectives used to describe snow. Could it be a bad English translation, o
r remarkable poetry?
Yet it was also the world re-created, the world linguistically new. Pei Xing was not permitted to write, but nothing could prevent her privately remembering. Over the weeks she slowly told herself the story of Doctor Zhivago, and when she had finished she began again, embellishing what she had earlier recalled, adding a few Chinese details of her own. Doctor Zhivago was her secret life, whispered not into the air, but into the cardinal recesses of her heart, held close as she had been held by her mother and her father. She saw her body becoming straw-thin, felt her painful chest filling with fluid, she forced down the repulsive prison food to keep herself alive, but she also invented a counter-life of familiar characters, a story that became over time more and more incredible.
Pei Xing’s Doctor Zhivago included her father and her mother, it included her brother riding in the countryside on a Golden Deer bicycle, it included lines of Tang Dynasty poetry, often about nature, or love. In her version Lara and Zhivago played chess and ping-pong, visited Pudong and Puxi, and were educated much as she had been. They knew the great Chinese classics, especially The Dream of the Red Chamber, her mother’s favourite book. They knew the plots of Chinese opera and even some quotations from Chairman Mao. And of course they also knew Russia in revolutionary times, and understood the great and improbable outcomes of any fraught nation. In this way, and by small degrees, Pei Xing saved herself. In this way she kept alive in spirit what was dangerously impermissible and communed with her family, who were hungry ghosts before their time.