Avenue of Eternal Peace

by Nicholas Jose

  Gently does it, says Eagle, convinced that training, rest, diet and Chinese medicine will strengthen his weak ankle. Each afternoon he works out at martial arts to achieve not only a peak of physical fitness but also a depth of spiritual determination. Given the chance to try, he would now perform so well that he could never be excluded from the team again.

  2

  To test the water, Eagle visited Pearl’s house and presented her mother with the bags of bananas and dried bamboo shoots that his brother Sunshine had brought up from the South. He chatted and smoked with Pearl’s young uncle while her mother poured hot water and Pearl sat button-lipped. She wore the mauve mohair cardigan from Paris and a slinky foreign frock that had been washed too many times. Her hair was in a chignon too complicated for someone staying at home and her face was professionally made up. She was displayed as one of the assets of a prosperous family. There were few occasions on which Pearl could dress up, now that modelling jobs came less frequently. If she displayed her foreign beauty techniques in public around Peking, people would get the wrong idea. Nor, being unmarried, would she go to the city’s nightspots. Practical not ethical considerations forced her to sit home by the television. The maintenance of virtue was an investment in her future.

  When Eagle arrived, rather than showing her pleasure, she looked pinched. Her mother’s welcome was enough for two. Pearl merely sat by, wondering if she had cast him aside too lightly. It had been many months. During his brief stint in the model troupe, Eagle and Pearl had been leading boy and girl. She was hard and cold and needed a good-looking man. But modelling accorded ill with ‘socialist spiritual civilisation’, and when the troupe was disbanded, only Pearl got to stay on as a professional, apparently because Pierre Cardin personally had insisted on using her. She was placed in the Department of Product Popularisation at the Ministry and went to Paris several times. She detested foreign men. She always returned to Beijing and once upon a time it had been to Eagle, who as a prospective basketball hero suited her. When she found out about his ankle injury and his sacking from the Sports Institute, she joined the others in blaming his bad attitude. She said that only if he worked to join the Party would the team take him back, and only if the team took him back would she do likewise. It was her ultimatum. She didn’t want her man out of a job. She didn’t want a man with an injury that would cripple his chances for life. After all, there were other fish in the sea. The marriage their talk had been tending towards faded, and with it the large new flat with water and gas and heating and a lift that came as Pearl’s dowry. Diplomatically they stopped seeing each other. But Pearl had not found a replacement. Her modelling work was thinning out, and she was wearing the same clothes she had been given in Paris two years before.

  Yarning, laughing, feeding one piece of information after another to Pearl’s uncle, Eagle made the deal clear. He was in top physical condition. The team was sure to take him back. What about it?

  This was business. There was no immediate answer, but the provisos were in place.

  Draping the mauve cardigan over her shoulders, Pearl stood in the doorway to see him off.

  ‘Come back when you’ve got time,’ she said.

  ‘The man came again today from the neighbourhood committee,’ said Mother Lin, knitting when Eagle got home. Sweet summer air filled the room from the open door. ‘About the demolition of our street.’

  3

  The Doctor and Song turned to small talk as they completed the experiment. He was fishing for news. Song said that Jin Juan was unwell and had gone out of town. As they changed out of their lab coats, Wally told Song about his initiation into Peking opera. ‘Jin Juan and her cousin seem very similar,’ he observed.

  ‘Two brothers married two sisters,’ explained Song. ‘They are double cousins.’

  ‘Jin Juan should have been a singer too,’ he joked, sensing that Song was in the mood for gossip.

  ‘Jin Juan could do many things.’

  ‘She seems wasted in the middle school, with such marvellous English.’

  ‘She is too unlucky—’ Once they were through the door to outside, where there was no chance of being overheard, talk loosened. ‘At graduation from the Foreign Languages Institute Jin Juan was the top student. She should have become a research student and gone abroad. But there was no chance.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘She was asked to work here at the hospital translating medical journals and training doctors in English. But the decision was reversed.’

  ‘Why?’

  Song shrugged. ‘On high.’

  ‘Was someone out to get her? Someone from the College? What was her crime?’

  ‘You don’t need a crime.’

  ‘You’ve known Jin Juan a long time, haven’t you? How can her situation be so different from yours?’

  ‘Her background is different.’

  And a different personality, Wally noted, imagining in Jin Juan a stubborn, principled streak, whereas Song was a flexible practitioner and probably the cleverer of the two. Something about Jin Juan invited trouble … He remembered her at the theatre, sharp towards the arrogant fellow on her arm.

  ‘She’s not married?’ asked Wally, adding quickly, ‘She had a chap at the opera—I wasn’t sure who he was.’

  ‘Her fiancé,’ said Song, ‘of long standing.’

  Wally took the inference. ‘Long engagements are the custom in China.’

  ‘Not so long as this one,’ Song commented sourly. She despised Zhang. Her own parents were peasants. The turbulence of the Cultural Revolution had opened up opportunities which she had utilised with hard work and brains. Now she saw her country being destroyed by smooth privileged parasites like Zhang. She put it bluntly: ‘They should have married years ago. He’s taken advantage of her. Now she’s too old and too inconvenient and because his family’s gone up in the world he can do better. His family has made difficulties. I blame Zhang.’ The story made sense, though Song would not be more specific. Instead she invited him home, for ‘a very simple dinner’.

  Once again her husband David did the cooking while the colleagues talked, Wally’s offers of help being thoroughly overpowered. The daughter bounced on the sofa chanting, ‘Mogadishu, Moscow, Monte Carlo.’

  ‘The crèche does a fine job,’ said Song, raising her eyebrows.

  Also present was David’s younger brother, a law student at Peking University. As the mood progressed, and food and beer were consumed, Wally asked whether the boy studied Chinese law or Western law.

  ‘There is no Chinese law,’ he answered smartly.

  ‘What do you study then? Are we not developing the legal system!’ David laughed.

  This light-hearted approach was as a red rag to the bull. ‘We are developing rules,’ said the boy. ‘We are strangling ourselves with rules, but there is no law to protect the people, to safeguard justice and confer rights. Power is the only law.’

  ‘That is so in the West too,’ offered Wally.

  ‘I don’t know about the West. I’m not allowed to go there. I know there is no law in China.’

  David, shiny-faced from the cooking, began to admonish his brother in heated Chinese for spouting heretical opinions in front of the guest. The boy called David a coward. An argument developed in crossfire over Wally’s head as the brothers grew passionate. From the key words, Party, economics, modernisation, democracy, freedom, Wally could guess at its general drift.

  The boy argued that China’s failure to develop an effective legal system arose from a deep antagonism to the divesting of authoritarian power that law implied. Similar failures in scientific and technological development, in the economy and in culture, stemmed from the same refusal of the political system to budge. The Reforms were welcome, of course, but were too slow, too cautious, often sabotaged, and fundamentally half-hearted. In the West, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, development had occurred rapidly because people were free from the repressions of socialist central planning. If freedom of speech could be pr
otected in law, then a true new people’s China could be created. What the Party most feared, however, was the uncontrolled release of the potential for continuing change on which it had ridden to power itself.

  David did not particularly dispute his brother’s opinions. Yet he urged him not to voice them. Caution and gradualism were to be recommended. Intellectuals could see a long way into the future, David said, too far sometimes, to a future that would never exist. They should also make the effort to look back. He understood that for his brother there was no past. What beckoned was a fresh start for a generation that had been spared disillusionment and which, encountering obstacles for the first time, swore to abolish them. David had spent the years from fifteen to twenty-five in the countryside, never quite achieving the desired state of perfect re-education. On his return to the capital he had wept tears of hope at a Democracy Wall that was rapidly cemented over. Now he recognised the dream of reform as a calenture. He contented himself with the rhetoric of democracy as an infinitely-to-be-postponed goal. The greater danger lay in too much complaining, too much demanding, too much belittling the past of the martyrs. If the old men on high were piqued by the ingratitude of their offspring and underlings, then the thunderbolts would fly. History could only be reversed in a patient manner that would save the face of the people. Within the shell of his idealism, David had found a place for what experience had taught him, that the world cannot be improved and that life must be endured. Or perhaps that was the contempt of middle age.

  The kid took David’s views as a provocation, appalled to see his brother only ten years older already manoeuvring himself into the robes of a Confucian elder. Why did all Chinese feel the need to preach rectitude to those ‘under’ them? How could his brother bear to promote the older generation’s world-weary apathy in the name of order and acquiescence and don’t-rock-the-lousy-leaking-boat? The kid scowled.

  ‘The truth is we would be better off today if the Kuomintang had beaten the Communists shitless. We could have used our energy to go forward instead of constructing this palace of terrors!’

  ‘Now don’t get too crazy.’ David wagged a finger. ‘Don’t forget that before Liberation our country was also backward and feeble. Anyway, I’m fed up with politics. Put more money in my pocket and I’ll be content. Just like the masses—and a bit of cash would shut you students up too,’ he said sulkily.

  ‘That’s where your thinking is deficient. There ain’t no more money, and there ain’t going to be no more until we change the system. It’s politics first.’ The boy was flushed. Changing tactics, he appealed to the visitor.

  Wally wished he had not been asked. But it would be pusillanimous not to make a stab.

  ‘Well, I’m a doctor first of all. I believe in health, which is really another name for the opportunity to continue growing. We’ll never know what the perfect conditions for growth are, and that’s lucky because we could never achieve them anyway, but we do know what’s harmful in an environment and we can recognise which conditions are good enough. I guess I believe a good society ensures those opportunities for healthy growth—food, shelter, security, education enough, equality enough, love enough—but what it really boils down to is room to move. Freedom to think about things and act on your thoughts. Space to create, to continue. I believe in space. I’m an Australian. We have lots of space and we haven’t had to think very hard about what happens when space is constantly encroached on, about the kind of organisation and adjudication necessary. The harness of community is not a big thing with us.’

  Was it gibberish? He scratched his head. The kid seemed to warm into a fuzzy drunken happiness, thick hair flopping round his eyes and ears. He wore faded jeans and a bulky black sweater. From his wrist hung a silver bracelet, and a paisley rayon scarf was stuffed around his neck. He looked for all the world like types Wally had hung out with in Cambridge; rosy red cheeks after a couple of pints, wispy sideburns and moustache, a sullen underlip and the same tense body language. In the Cambridge of 1968 Wally had been unswervingly convinced of what he believed. Had he uttered such woolly benign thoughts back then he would have been hooted from the pub. The trouble was, his present formulations lacked all ardour, because he knew no way to guarantee the growth and continuance of creativity that he valued. The fact of life was sickness, not health. Unable to get round that fact, doctors became in the end the most indifferent or the most despairing of people—which was why he had reverted to research. Was he giving up the fight? He had always resisted the tribal assumption that firebrand youth led on inevitably to crusty conservative old age, had always kept in mind those elders who defied the rule by luxuriating in their old age like tropical blooms. But was he now, like David, preparing to change his clothes and his colours—shuffling off?

  The kid stood up and bowed to Wally. He had to catch the last bus back to the students’ dormitory. He said that on May Day he and his friends were having a picnic at the Old Summer Palace. His brother and sister-in-law were invited, and he hoped the Doctor would come too, with other foreign friends. Wally was courteous in reply, shook the kid’s hand heartily, and asked him to repeat his name. He was called Build-the-Country.

  David apologised afterwards for the loose talk that had flown. ‘It’s all fun,’ he said. ‘The kids like to shoot off, but in reality there’s no commitment to their ideas. Life has been too easy for them. They’re innocent of society.’

  ‘That’s what us oldies always say.’

  Song, playing with her daughter, had been happy to keep out of the argument. After ten hours in the lab, she longed to close her ears and eyes completely. ‘Lab again tomorrow,’ she said coming from the bedroom. ‘At least our pigs can’t give us their opinions. I prefer pigs to humans sometimes. Tomorrow Director Kang reports too. I wonder what news.’

  Wally stretched himself from the cramped corner where he had been sitting all evening. He had not raised the question of Kang’s work with Song yet.

  ‘Vila, Vienna, Vientiane,’ came a singsong voice.

  ‘Oh that naughty child!’ sighed Song.

  ‘Look, I’ll be going. Thanks, David,’ he called to the kitchen, and to Song on the landing he gabbled, ‘I hope to catch up with Jin Juan. Will you tell her? Do you think I could contact her through the cousin? Do you know where the cousin lives?’ But Song was not much help.

  When the foreigner was gone Song warned her husband that he would have to do something about his kid brother before they all got into trouble.

  4

  The concourse outside Beijing Station was quilted with bodies of peasants, long-exiled residents and those waiting for trains, forgotten kids drifting back from the countryside, criminals, innocents and weary bones bedding down together on the pavement. The boy was bleary-eyed after his cramped night in the smoky train. His hair was like a dried pat of buffalo dung, his eyes rubbed red. He ran his tongue over his furry upper lip and spat. He had travelled by horse-cart to the next village and by broken-down bus to the market town, through mountains of flinty stone and spurs of caked yellow dust where no trees grew, to the plain where water ran in channels, producing emerald rice crops and fat white ducks. He had a mute sensation of regret at leaving home. At New Year he had written to his sister in the city telling her that one day he would come. She didn’t reply. She had married out of the village many years ago. Then he had gone to the father of the other boy from the village who had gone to Beijing. He had the address in his head, money in his pocket, and news to pass on.

  He was eighteen, youngest of six brothers, a sturdy round-faced boy of medium height who had brown farmer’s hands with stained yellow fingers and limbs that swung so freely that he seemed loose in the joints. He wore his best cotton jacket with a tear at the pocket and a cigarette burn on the sleeve. He carried only a bag of flat pancakes. His schooling had stopped when he was twelve. Their land was poor and the work unremitting. But as the youngest of the boys he was the least indispensable, and the expectation had grown up that he might perhaps take
another road. He was often sent down to the market town to send produce or buy fertilisers and salt. He liked to stay and watch television in the street there, even if it meant he had to walk all night up the mountain track to get home. On television he saw one colourful event after another jump into a mysterious narrative chain, and weird-looking heroes and villains, green, orange and crystalline blue who waged glorious battle and danced some cosmic dance that re-created for the boy in magical form the legends that had surrounded his village and his people, in sky and earth and water, for generations. None of these visions had been uppermost, however, when he lay down to sleep the previous evening, uncertain whether he would go or not. But when the rooster crowed and he opened his eyes, the dawn air laden with the damp smell of mud walls nipped him into action. He clambered quickly from his place between his sleeping brothers. He sat on the great clay urn out the back beside the pigs. He splashed his face with icy water from the bucket. Through razor mountain peaks a tender light was pushing towards the little human settlement, offering a protective bond between his home and the faraway world so pink and promising. His belly stirred hungrily, but there was no time to eat. He laced up his canvas shoes, buttoned his jacket to the neck, called into the dark that he was going. His father echoed the words gruffly. Only the dog, whining and leaping in the street, shared the adventure.

  Arriving in Beijing, he stared at the many cars and people; he had never seen traffic lights or tall buildings or cranes, and he felt tall himself as he walked. He kept expecting to turn a corner and have the city end. But the streets went on, until he stopped noticing single things. He was going to the No. 3 Vehicle Plant on the West Third Ring Road and assumed that he would arrive at his destination automatically. In the countryside he never had to ask or be told where things were. He walked for several hours before it dawned on him that he had not got anywhere. A bristling peasant instinct made him steer away from asking directions, and when he did speak, his heavily accented language was more demand than question. At last, disconsolate, he found a dumpling shop and spent the remains of his money filling up on dumplings that were of thinner dough and more expensive than at home. The girl who took the money had a patient attitude. The West Third Ring Road she knew: go west, turn north. She came to the shop door to point him on the way, explaining about buses. But when he reached the bus stop, he just kept on walking, and when the bus route finished, he sat down on a step feeling that the city was stuck to his body like tar and feathers. He had one coin left. He crossed to the old woman on the corner who pulled an iceblock from her canvas box and said as always, ‘Go straight ahead.’ Where it was she had no notion, and as the country bumpkin headed west, she toddled back inside the limits of her world.