Avenue of Eternal Peace

by Nicholas Jose

  ‘Many are growing poor,’ said Jin Juan.

  She offered him tea, but refused his invitation to dinner. She did not wish to appear wholly accepting of his turnaround. He found it irksome that she was not more grateful. After all, it was he who had shown magnanimity by returning to her in her condition. He did not consider further because if a woman was able to fulfil her primary function of mothering a son, then the rest could be overlooked. What he owed his parents was not the correct choice of a wife, but posterity. And he would not find another beauty like Jin Juan among the silly grasping girls he met in trade offices and foreign hotels. She was superior among Chinese, he admitted; she was a true Chinese.

  ‘I think you understand me,’ he bowed his head as he took her hand, pinching her skin a little, ‘I believe that we understand each other.’

  She told him that she was going away for a while, making a trip to her hometown in the South. It was her duty, and natural enough. Yet he distrusted her family connections.

  ‘Is it safe for you to travel?’

  ‘I need to see my grandfather. I’ll be gone only two or three weeks.’

  Zhang nodded. ‘There’s not much time.’ He wanted to trap her now, to make certain. ‘Well, hurry back.’

  Her long neck curved in ironic deference to his will.

  8

  Clarence and Autumn always met secretly, in public places—bars, eating-houses, parks and the half-rural reaches of Beijing’s suburbs, and at each meeting made sotto voce arrangements for the next meeting, so as to avoid surveillance—so Clarence was alarmed to get a note demanding that they meet at once.

  He waited on the assigned street corner while the traffic rushed past. The boy was late. Then Clarence saw him—and, shocked, noted a yellow plastic wind jacket, synthetic pillar-box red running tights with a GT stripe down the leg, white ‘Italian’ running shoes made in Taiwan, hair freshly permed, and a turquoise neckerchief ruffled at the throat. Autumn came grinning like an idiot, a bird of paradise among the drab workers. He always bubbled happily at seeing his friend, and today he had spent all of Clarence’s money on new clothes.

  Clarence shrank inside. Himself he wore Chinese cotton shoes, jeans and a grey jacket, to be as inconspicuous as possible—though nothing was as obtrusive as his long nose. He always urged discretion on Autumn. Yet he knew he shrank less from Autumn’s imprudence than his sheer bad taste.

  ‘New clothes,’ commented Clarence bluntly, planning a safe place for them to go. ‘Nice colour.’ He tweaked the jacket.

  ‘Yes, very fashionable,’ Autumn purred.

  In a corner of the zoo, near the browbeaten hyenas that no one wanted to see, Autumn revealed his discovery. He was too excited to keep it to himself. At last he had found a way of doing a favour for his beloved Big Brother.

  Excavations were being carried out at the No. 3 Vehicle Plant. While he was digging a trench, Autumn’s spade had scraped against a pot buried deep in the clay. He quickly covered it up and later, after dark, returned to dig it out. It was a large unbroken earthenware pot that his instincts told him was ancient and valuable. He unbuckled his khaki satchel and let Clarence peek.

  Autumn giggled, pushing the satchel into Clarence’s lap as a gift. The satchel nearly tumbled to the ground. Autumn kept giggling, while Clarence’s face became strange with thoughtfulness. Probably he could not carry it out of the country himself. Perhaps, however, he could arrange for it to be sold. He would make inquiries. Valuable it certainly was. Han dynasty, perhaps. And the money must go to Autumn.

  ‘No, no, no,’ protested the boy. Clarence thought of leather-jacketed Foreign Trader at the New Age Bar.

  Autumn looked so healthy, happy and trusting. When Clarence looked at his rough, boyish face, and the smile, and the ridiculous new clothes, he felt like a defiler. And he was being given a treasure in exchange.

  9

  A gaudy profusion of scarlet and yellow flowers marked summer along Changan Avenue. Perpetual crowds streamed into the Forbidden City where the tiles seemed to crackle and the blood-coloured walls to smoulder in the heat. In a secluded courtyard at the side Clarence and Wally began with gossip and generalisations, the warp and weft of Beijing talk. The personal existed uncomfortably at the intersection. Clarence was chain-smoking and coughing. His slight build and London face, alert with intelligence, his hair like a chewed toothbrush, and the shirt of Nile green silk, made him seem like an eccentric court attendant of yore as they sauntered among dry pines to the Flowing Music Belvedere.

  ‘That’s nasty,’ remarked the Doctor of Clarence’s cough.

  ‘I can’t seem to shake it off.’

  ‘Smoking doesn’t help.’

  Clarence nervously chucked the cigarette to the ground.

  ‘My health’s bad in China. A constant succession of colds and flu, headaches, bone aches, and nonstop Delhi belly. Mouth ulcers, weight loss, bleeding from the bowel. I seem to get everything that’s going.’

  Wally adopted his avuncular consulting manner. ‘China’s a pretty stressful place. The stress strikes at the points of vulnerability in your system. Reactivates things that would otherwise lie dormant. Maybe you need a break.’

  ‘I think I should have a good check-up. Who knows what could be lurking?’

  ‘You may have picked up a tropical disease. It could be attributable to any one of a number of causes. Are you sexually active here?’ continued the Doctor.

  Clarence grinned stiffly.

  ‘I see,’ said Wally, not probing further. ‘We’re not in a position to do all the tests here, but I can put you on to a doctor in Hong Kong next time you’re down. That can be arranged.’ He turned to the sky. Those who had dwelt in the Forbidden City had seen only the sky. They had no proof that the outside world existed. Nor could the millions of subjects of the empire, for thousands of miles, ever guess what lay within those walls. Yet both had gazed at the same sky.

  ‘I want to make sure I haven’t got anything I could pass on.’ Like a corporal facing his CO after he has lost his head and disgraced the regiment, Clarence turned his eyes on the Doctor. Guilt wrapped round him like a stocking. He imagined Autumn’s defenceless body rotting from a punitive Western plague, ditched into a furnace by the Chinese authorities.

  ‘Well, be sensible,’ said Wally. ‘No good waiting till the horse bolts.’

  They passed from the courtyard to a shaded marble corridor that led to a little garden. A few students were squatting on the rocks under a pavilion watching the water run in ornamental channels under their feet as they smoked and chatted. One, who looked up, had tufty hair and heavy glasses, his open shirt baring his belly and tight shorts. He seemed to squat precariously in his high sandals, and seized on the two foreigners with such intense recognition that he almost toppled over. It was Philosopher Horse, who was holding court with his comrades.

  They stood and shook hands politely, Philosopher Horse acting the keen go-between. He explained that they had come to inspect the imperial court, and had been discussing the overthrow of empires in Chinese history. Each time the pattern repeated. The words of the wise went unheeded, and those honest men who criticised were cast out, only to return in the form of implacable opposition, the nemesis. The doors and windows of the palace were always blocked. Empire was a blindness that the Chinese people reverenced. They surrendered their eyes. They were made to feel so gloriously small that no blame would ever light on them, and so grand because of the great shadow under which they lived. It was the dragon’s disorder.

  Philosopher Horse expounded to the Doctor as if to one of his disciples who, Wally noticed, all had similar X-shaped scabs on their forearms.

  ‘Our blood brotherhood,’ declared Philosopher Horse while the others stared with grim loyalty. ‘We are training in qigong together, the breathing power. We’ve got people coming up from the South, not ordinary people but powerful people. Our qigong master from Guizhou will come. We are in touch with powerful forces. You foreigners don’t know anything
about it.’

  ‘Are you organised?’ asked Wally.

  But Philosopher Horse would not answer questions. He was whispering now. ‘We have connections. We are in communication. Something will happen, you will see, Doctor. It can change.’

  He made a silent gesture of pressure with his hands, pressing down until the pressure was too great, when his hands opened into an opposing gesture of explosion, like a blessing, or like fireworks going off, his lips mouthing the bang.

  TEN

  Travellers Among Mountains and Streams

  1

  The Doctor’s summer was passing in days of sleeping and swimming and he lacked all stamina. China’s fine net had ensnared him. His goals came no nearer and he could pursue no direction other than his aimless laps of the International Club swimming pool. Then everything changed with explosive suddenness. Emeritus Professor Wu at the Academy revealed to Ralph, who passed it on at once, that Professor Hsu was connected with the Hangzhou Chinese Medicine Factory—another wild-goose chase, perhaps, but a clue that must be followed. Then a flyer came in the mail with a scribbled message from Azalea about a Peking opera festival to be held—in Hangzhou. All roads led south. After a brief consultation with Song, who was still being vague about Jin Juan’s whereabouts, Wally confronted Mrs Gu about tickets and hotel bookings. She bustled benignly to arrange the Doctor’s holiday, worried only that he was travelling alone. Wally explained that he preferred to travel alone. He planned to rest his body and spirit beside the serene waters of China’s most famous beauty spot, a proposal that met with Mrs Gu’s favour.

  Rocking him to sleep as it sped southwards, the train made him think of the woman. Which woman? When he put himself to the test he could not specify whether his thoughts turned to Jin Juan or Azalea. They were physically similar, but their personalities and the nature of his encounters with each were quite different; mute intimacy with Azalea, wiry idiomatic exchanges with Jin Juan. As his eyelids grew heavy in the stuffy compartment, and his face turned an embarrassing red, he analysed the phenomenon whereby Jin Juan and Azalea merged in his desire. Even as he tried to recollect the body he had held, his imagination became abstract: softness, slenderness, silkiness, neckness, a child’s breasts with a woman’s hard nipples, a face that yielded no inner life, a being whose lack of human particulars allowed the enactment of a yin-yang fantasy, female passivity and male activeness, mysterious Eastern surrender to determined Western penetration. Such was the distasteful Deep Structure—Ralph the Rhino’s phrase—of his sensual confounding of Jin Juan and Azalea. In all sex there was perhaps an element of attraction to otherness. But Wally’s analysis found in his attitudes a residue of his native Australian racism. As long as he was confined to speechlessness with Azalea, he would feel uncomfortable about the ardour that had him clackety-clacking southwards. If only the two cousins could be combined. For the moment, Azalea would have to suffice. He admired the silent, lucid way she had sent her instructions. If there was potentially an element of distortion, of exploitation, in the excitement his big loose-skinned middle-aged body found in embracing the supple girl-form, the way to deal with it, he justified himself, was by ploughing on. He was yang. Was it the same yang character as the animal in which Australia abounded? The sheep? Or the goat? No!

  2

  Wally set out, with no great determination, to explore one of the places on China’s list of tourist clichés where enchantment was still possible. He strolled past dragon boats, touting photographers, ice-cream vendors, resort hotels painted up like sideshow alley, through a street of red-latticed houses to a park of magnolias and sweet osmanthus that gave again onto a shore where ‘both wavelets and willows listen to birdsong’. The scene had the same romantic prettiness as the Italian Lakes through which he had driven, how long ago, with Bets, en route to Tuscany. The memory, struck like a tuning fork, set tender reverberations rippling. The West Lake receded into the misty embrace of mountains in a series of landscaped spurs and inlets. The horizon was a dyke devised by a constructive poet-governor-sage and engineer of ancient times. A string of six bridges and walkways undulated across wide water that reflected like photographic paper. To that distant causeway the lakeside path led indirectly, past picture-book villas and sanatoria poking out of russet woods. By the time dusk was blurring the gardens, he had reached the first of those bridges that curved less than a bird’s wing. As a pink twilight invested the scene, Wally was captivated by a moment that seemed to be his own precious fortune as it had to thousands of others; as if, on buying a Willow Pattern plate, one believed it to be the original.

  When he returned to the Hangzhou Hotel, that stood as splendidly functional above the lake as in a revolutionary painting a hydro-electric power station stands among the mountains and streams of tradition, Wally found that he had missed a caller. Two tickets had been left at the desk for a performance of Peking opera on the following evening. Song had informed: his whereabouts were known.

  Wally wondered what to do with the spare ticket. In the event, he went alone. The program consisted of three pieces. The first was acrobatic; a ruthless general goes crazy with remorse and kills himself. The second was a comic second-time-around love story in which a widow and widower who have renounced marriage fall head over heels in love when a matchmaking nun brings them together. The third was the spectacularly tragic finale from Snow in Summer that Wally had seen in Peking. Once again the self-betraying heroine was acted by Jin Juan’s cousin, with the sinewy body that Wally knew, and the fine, leached voice.

  At the curtain the smiling performers duly clapped the audience. Wally tripped over the crutches of an old man beside him and hurried backstage. Azalea was alone in the stark, draughty dressing room when he knocked. The lustrous costume had been replaced by a cotton robe, the braided coiffure was still in position, and the thick make-up was the shocking pink of peonies. Azalea was fiddling with pins around the hairline, and clenched a couple between her teeth. She had not turned when he knocked. Wally came close and laid his hands on her shoulders with a tender squeeze. Azalea carefully lifted the hairpiece into the air, without turning to him, set it on a dummy, and revealed a scalp of short flattened black. Wally ran his fingers forward intimately. From among the hairpins between clenched teeth came a murmured, ‘What are you doing?’ in a lower, flatter register than the singsong accent he remembered from the night Azalea had visited. Something was different. The body did not respond in the same way. He stared at the thick face paint, the wisps of hair pinned back behind the ears, the bumpy white throat. Tenderly but testingly he reached his hands forward, then pulled back. He stood to one side uncomfortably to appraise Azalea, whose sexiness in the half done-up, half undone state gave him goose pimples. Azalea was not a woman. In a man’s voice the figure before the mirror turned with a budding smile to ask if he had problems.

  ‘You are not—’ was as far as Wally’s Chinese got. He didn’t know what was happening. To his mortification he acknowledged that he must have mistaken one dolled-up Chinese for another, as if they all looked the same after all. But this one did have an ambivalent appearance, did look like and seemed to have been expecting him.

  Then Jin Juan herself walked through the door, in jeans and a t-shirt, plain and fresh, and without missing a beat said, ‘Hi,’ as natural as anything, ‘so you did make it after all. Welcome to Hangzhou.’ She shook his hand.

  ‘You!’ he gaped. She laughed a little bit. Azalea was grinning at Wally’s expense, and in response to old friends reuniting. Wally was strangely happy, though entirely baffled.

  ‘You know my cousin,’ Jin Juan went on.

  ‘Your cousin?’

  ‘He does Snow in Summer brilliantly, don’t you think?’

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘I was hoping to join you. I got held up. I thought I might find you backstage. I gather you wanted to meet him.’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘Unfortunately his English is no good. I’ll have to interpret.’

  ‘Ok
ay okay okay,’ said Wally. ‘I’m happy to see you. Where have you been hiding all this time?’

  ‘I’ve been with my family.’

  ‘Song told you I was here, right?’

  ‘It was convenient that I could be here too. Show you around.’

  ‘Quite a coincidence,’ said Wally sceptically. Azalea was now wearing jeans and a light jacket. The mask was smeared off with cold cream, leaving his face greasy. He brushed his hair up to give it fashionable height. Without the trappings he was an ordinary-looking young man—but seeing him beside Jin Juan, the resemblance was nonetheless striking. What was beauty in her was oddness in him, a peculiar animation and plasticity of feature that could be transformed on stage.

  ‘You’re not brother and sister?’ Wally asked.

  ‘Cousins,’ corrected Jin Juan. ‘Double cousins. Our parents— two brothers married two sisters—a Chinese arrangement.’

  ‘They live here?’

  ‘Dead—also a Chinese arrangement.’

  The young man nodded, bobbing several times as he ushered the Doctor out the door; and Wally, scrutinising his shiny face and cocked fingers, was all at sea.

  3

  The track through the tea terraces led to Dragon Well, source of the choicest green tea tips. When the women from the temple teahouse stirred their hands in the waters of the well, a twist of light, known as the Dragon, appeared. Wally and Jin Juan shook their hands dry and moved to the pavilion, to sip their steaming tea in the sun and split melon seeds with their teeth. Around the pavilion were great tiered camellia bushes and the light seemed to bubble and steam from their glossy leaves. The tea was topaz green.

  Wally thought it best to admit his quandary. Maybe, maybe, he could elicit an explanation.

  Jin Juan smiled a little, her long eyes full of intelligence.

  ‘Cousin,’ she began. ‘Normally in English you distinguish between genders, such as “actor” and “actress”, whereas in Chinese we don’t. Family members are one exception. Your word “cousin” can mean male or female whereas our words differentiate. You got confused in translation.’