Avenue of Eternal Peace

by Nicholas Jose

  7

  The white churned-up dust on the narrow mountain road clouded the bus and reduced visibility to zero. To the valley from which they had climbed was a sheer drop, but still the loutish driver in his mirror sunglasses continued to pass the timber and cement trucks, and the timber and cement trucks groaned after the bus in billowing dust clouds. The scrubby conifers had curious nibbled bundles of hay halfway up their trunks, and the laden orange trees were snow white with dust. Jin Juan, who had a seat, and Wally, who sat in the aisle, screwed up their eyes as much against their possible fate as against the dust. With each jolting stretch of the ride from Shaoxing, each breakdown and cranking, their bodies became more cramped and knotted. At the top of the mountain was Heaven’s Terrace, Tiantai, a ramshackle dust-fertilised town with Red Star 1950s buildings that looked as ornate as those remaining from the Ching dynasty and the one formerly Christian hospital.

  After Heaven’s Terrace the road flattened for the coastal run through orange groves that shone like enamel and well-watered rice paddies overseen at intervals by cosy villages of grand two-storey houses with stepped roof decoration and eaves curling upwards like stretched toes. There was little to distinguish the oldest houses from those under construction. Sometimes a woman in scarlet satin smock, belly swelling, would stand on the balcony to watch the others march home across the fields. The peasant’s dream was well on the way towards realisation here: a house, a mate, a kid, a grandson. In their sleepy, deceptive prosperity, protected by high breaks of flowering black bamboo as they were protected by the mountains on one flank and the river that wound to the sea on the other, the villagers of the county were at once the most conservative and the most radical of Chinese, with regard only for their own laborious livelihood.

  After dark the bus reached the river town. It was the event of the day to judge by the hawkers and scouts who assailed the passengers. Jin Juan shooed them off, until one middle-aged woman came quietly forward to say that she ran a private inn.

  They were received, through a door off a narrow alley, at an agreed price with no formalities. It was a farmhouse really, but the man of the house, who had twenty years earlier served as an indentured labourer on a Chinese construction project in Africa, had shown enterprise by setting up a hand-turned printing press in an annexe of the house, and began putting up his assistants in the loft. Where his wife was silent, if not demure, the man was coarse and sociable and shook Wally’s hands with great enthusiasm—the Australian was the first white man he had seen in their town.

  Asking no questions, he led them up a ladder to a room where they might sleep: in it were three wooden beds covered with tatami mats and bedding and draped with mosquito nets. There was a basin and a chamber pot, and a flask of water and mugs for tea. The floor was laid with smooth black boards, and air flowed from a window that looked to a modest mountain against the starry sky.

  They were assured of no noise or disturbance, but the host first insisted on bundling them across the market square to a place where they might eat, by one bare bulb, the local river crabs and frogs fried with garlic. Then it was time to retire.

  The courtyard of the inn had a profuse bougainvillea and racks of flowering pots. The air, under the sparkling night sky, was fragrant and bracing. Wally stripped to the waist before an urn that was big enough to stew two men and ladled washing water into his basin. From a kettle simmering on the coal stove he added some hot, and rubbed the dust and grime from his skin, arching his neck to the heavens as the water trickled down his throat to his belly button and inside his belt. The pleasure of making do was combined with the special virtue of cleanliness and the sense of having gone farther from his moorings than he had ever imagined. But because he was with Jin Juan, as a friend and as his true companion, he did not feel estranged. She brought him a human focus, and plenitude. He passed her by the ladder with her towel and toothbrush. She looked happy.

  The host pointed to a round basket by the foot of the ladder. ‘Kee-kee kee-kee!’ he imitated the rooster that would wake them before dawn. But they were warm and content in bed and slept through the rooster’s crowing, and the market was in sunny mid-morning bustle when they first looked out.

  Half-heartedly Wally returned to his quest. Was it not already an achievement to have come so far? Quest was simply a sluggish flow of the current. He had reached the town where his grandparents had built the mission hospital, where his father had been conceived and learned to toddle; the place that had been reconstituted in family lore and a young boy’s myth of China. As a scientist, Wally had felt obliged to check for traces since the town was only a day’s journey, however arduous, over the mountains from Shaoxing, and Jin Juan had been willing to accompany him. On the other hand he expected, in fact, to find nothing. Traces, like radiation, were more often than not a leftover poison.

  In her high-heeled sandals Jin Juan stepped like a Sui princess through the streets of the undistinguished town to which the century had bequeathed its haphazard layers. The old at each stage remained, with the new grafted clumsily on in a wonderful palimpsest. Abutting a storehouse of functional Socialist Reconstruction ugliness (poverty’s Bauhaus) was a minor Daoist shrine, like a rotten pulled tooth, standing askew but still standing, because no one got around to heeding the order of demolition.

  Softened by plane trees, the grid of central planning was upset by asymmetries of nature near the surging coffee-coloured river. At each point they inquired: ‘Was there an old hospital hereabouts? Was there a place where foreigners had lived long ago? Was there a Christian church?’

  Every tongue, eye and hand pointed a different direction and they wandered in pleasant confusion from one perimeter to another and along the squelching riverbank where a sow and piglets wallowed in the sun and ducks skittered across the mud to bob on the water in the shadows of low-bottomed boats. Across the river the bright fields stepped rapidly to high ragged mountains that were washed in sunlight to the colour and texture of stone-scrubbed denim.

  Coming on a weedy survival of the old city wall, and the site of a stone ford, Wally’s memories were stirred, and after interrogating a string of old pipe smokers who were helpful as far as their dialect permitted, they came to a walled compound and a locked gate. Through a crack in the gate they saw an old crone dandling a baby’s naked bum in the sunshine. They called and called. She was preoccupied or deaf. In the end Wally shinned up the wall.

  Amidst a commotion that combined utter astonishment with utter acceptance, as if the Second Coming had occurred, Jin Juan was admitted and the two visitors were ushered to an upper room. At one end were wide open windows flooded with white light. The walls and low ceiling were white. Varnished wooden chairs were arranged in rows. A ceiling fan was motionless below the height of Wally’s head. At the front was a large chest covered in a flower-embroidered cloth, on which stood two glass jars of plastic flowers. Beside this altar was a lectern at which a white-haired man was speaking inaudibly. As they moved closer, he did not register their presence, until they were right in front of his nose. There were two people listening to him, and for them too the words must have been almost inaudible. They stared from swarthy faces under mop hair, frightened.

  The preacher hurried down to greet Wally and Jin Juan. The film over his eyes indicated his immense age. The man spoke no English or standard Chinese, although the word ‘theology’ seemed to emerge from his babble. With the greatest difficulty, at the top of her voice, Jin Juan tried to explain who they were and why they had come. With hand gestures the man communicated that he was ninety-five years old. But they could get no further sense from him. His hair was neatly combed, his clothing stained but correctly buttoned (unlike the tatters worn by his audience of two), in his face was a lambent, baby-like emptiness. Wally guessed that he was far gone into senility. This hypothesis was disturbed when the man began excitedly pointing at the other two, who were much younger, though not young, indicating his brain and their brains. If Jin Juan understood correctly he was ex
plaining that they were crazy in the head and came to him for help. They were two black sheep and he was their ancient shepherd.

  The preacher led them downstairs to a reception room, and here Wally noticed that the fittings of the building, the style and materials, were different from the upper storey. The room was darker for a start. There were exposed beams and dark panelled doors that were tall and wide, not built to Chinese proportions, with broad, elaborately grooved lintels. It was the work of an amateur Victorian carpenter, Wally surmised. Outsiders must have assisted in the construction of the sturdy lower storey which had survived assault and refurbishment to this day.

  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.