Avenue of Eternal Peace

by Nicholas Jose

  Backstage a university official was talking to a representative of the poets. It was the official who gave the orders. He had turned a blind eye when the unauthorised band appeared on stage, but he was perturbed by the mass dancing, which was strictly forbidden. There was danger of a riot, however, if hundreds of students were too quickly checked in their defiance. The poets were conciliatory. The music slowed, quietened, and the students gradually resumed their seats until the music stopped altogether, leaving the rumbling of discontent and disappointment as a thousand cigarettes were lit up.

  Among the lesser writers saved for the end was Philosopher Horse. Although his name had begun to be whispered around, he was unfamiliar to the Beijing crowd.

  He looked like any kid from the South with pimply skin, thick glasses and cropped hair, but for his expression of obsessional conviction. He wore unfashionable grey worker’s clothes and his delivery began flatly as he read a piece of reportage. Really he was explaining himself. A boy from a rough, weird province in the South (they laughed at his accent), he had been a student in a provincial college until expelled for skipping classes and exams. Then he walked away from an ill-paid, boring factory job, and remained unemployed. It was an ordinary case history in which all could recognise themselves. Only from Philosopher Horse’s aimlessness had grown his extraordinary intensity.

  He used to spend his days at his elder sister’s house, with his sister and her kid. His brother-in-law worked at a unit three hours’ journey outside the town and only returned at weekends. His sister worked on the far side of town, an hour’s journey away. Their child was left to get to school, to buy a midday meal, to play in the afternoon, by himself. Philosopher Horse spent many hours hanging round with the kid as there were no other family members. Their parents were still in the country village from which first his sister and then the boy himself had moved away. His sister had an old friend, also from their village, who was thirty-five and unmarried. He was known as Lao Men, which meant Old Gate. He would often call in to play with the kid, or chat with Philosopher Horse, or share in the meal when sister came home. Old Gate was tough and dismissive of unnecessary refinements, yet exceptionally courteous, even chivalrous. He appreciated what he got of family life in the household. Fortune had not shone on him. He worked in a chemical factory and lived in a dormitory. One of his legs was twisted from polio, but he was stronger than any other man in the factory. He was happiest when sister’s husband, his special mate, was home at the weekend. The two men shared rough and ready opinions, a taste for strong wine, a love of chess, and a code of honour that included torturing hard work. By contrast, Philosopher Horse had views a little too abstract, but on nights when his mate was away Old Gate could also enjoy a debate with the younger boy, whom he had known since childhood.

  Philosopher Horse told the ordinary story in direct, unmannered language. The audience listened. Its very plainness was unusual. At the time of the crackdown on crime a girl was raped in the town. Old Gate was rounded up. There was no evidence for or against. As usual on the night in question he had been drinking at sister’s house, and slowly meandered home. No one had seen for sure what time he returned to his dormitory. He was, anyway, too old to be unmarried; a man with insufficient ties, not a true member of society. On the street everyone spoke well of him. But he was from a peasant village, not from the town. The appearance in court was, in any case, a closed affair. Within three days of his arrest he was sentenced. He was paraded through the town with a truck full of other alleged criminals, their misdoings proclaimed on yokes round their necks. At one point Old Gate yelled out his innocence, to no one in particular. In the stadium along with the others he was shot in the back of the head. A large quota of executions was required that month.

  ‘After that,’ Philosopher Horse concluded, ‘I understood.’

  He had finished.

  He held a fist in the air and cried out, ‘Defend the People!’

  He cried out that phrase once only, bowed quickly and left the stage.

  Some mouthed the words in silence. Defend the People! No one dared to shout them aloud. Transfixed by recognition, the audience burst into roaring applause.

  2

  The concert petered out and Clarence marched to his motorbike. He got a nice shot of the kid with his fist raised. ‘Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr—’ he howled to himself as he rode south through the night. The New Age Bar would still be open via the back door and he would tank up.

  ‘Black Chinaman?’ quipped Young Bi, who looked consumptive. Bad types had taken over the bar. The glamorous people, except for Clarence, had stopped coming, and without them Bi’s dreams took a battering. The hours of work were long, conditions were poor, and his practised servility was wasted on ruffians. Bi was solicitous, without knowing the wound in the Englishman’s heart.

  One night Clarence had brought the Han dynasty pot that Autumn dug up. He showed it to Foreign Trader. Foreign Trader asked to take the piece away for expert examination and, to prove his honourable intentions, offered to take Clarence along too. But Clarence accepted the man’s honesty. Foreign Trader was rich enough from his fake Tang horses not to be a blatant thief. Clarence was not in the smuggling business himself but hoped that Foreign Trader could dispose of the pot through his Hong Kong network and return the proceeds to Autumn.

  Foreign Trader was in the bar with his friend Party Greenhorn. They were laughing over Irish coffees, and Clarence thought it best to wait. In the end Foreign Trader came over, offered a cigarette, and announced his price for the pot. It was not low enough for the piece to be a fake, and therefore was too low. Foreign Trader asked Clarence how much he would accept. ‘Much more,’ said Clarence, upping the amount ten times. Foreign Trader laughed. Clarence said he was reluctant to sell. ‘Okay,’ said Foreign Trader, compromising, ‘don’t sell.’ The pot was worth the price Clarence had named, more, but there were difficulties. Foreign Trader sauntered to his seat and returned with the pot carefully wrapped in old towels, as Clarence had presented it. The failed transaction was somewhat graceless. To gain face Foreign Trader asked Clarence if he was interested in conveying some substances to Hong Kong … Clarence gave a blunt refusal, and Foreign Trader lumbered back to his cold Irish coffee where his friend Party Greenhorn quizzed him.

  Clarence ordered another drink. He had not sold the pot for the available offer because Autumn was not around to profit. For some weeks he had not seen or heard from him; he was worried and had no one in whom to confide. A bilious hacking cough was his body’s response to the Chinese vodka in the cocktail. He shouldn’t drink it; he’d be wrecked again in the morning, but what matter? His health was wretched. He had ignored the Doctor’s advice. He could not bring himself to go to Hong Kong.

  He roved over every grim possibility for Autumn—sickness, detention, worse—and kicked himself for every time he and Autumn had let down their guard of discretion. The boy had vanished without trace.

  Clarence had gone looking at the No. 3 Vehicle Plant. He had gone during daylight hours and inquired of the management, which drew suspicion, and he went again at night to ask the workmen dossing down in the dorms if they knew anything. Then he remembered Autumn’s sister, who lived south of the city. He knew that Autumn had occasionally visited his sister’s house where, if not exactly welcome, he was at least taken in. Clarence remembered the name of the bus stop and the sister’s work unit. He knew the visit would implicate more people, but he had no other lead.

  It took him the better part of a day’s questioning in workshop after workshop to find people from the Shandong countryside where Autumn’s family originated. Clarence felt sure there would be some kind of local network. People were curious enough; they crossed the road to hear him put his questions, and they paid him back in questions tenfold. But no information came out. He grew angry and suspected concealment. Yet they told the truth. For all their love of gossip, their scope was narrow. They had learned that the people i
n the next lane, the family across the street, those girls from out of town, that foreigner with his fluent mangling of the language—those things were safest ignored. ‘I seldom go out the door,’ was the common reply. They meant it. Clarence could only repeat his questions until the odds brought him up against someone who might know.

  Word had got round and suddenly a woman came running up to him. Suspecting that the foreigner might be connected with her, she came alone. She was Autumn’s sister, and she ushered Clarence furtively to her house.

  She poured tea and was hospitable. Neither side was patient, yet neither asked outright. The sister tried unsubtly to investigate the nature of Clarence’s relationship with her brother, and Clarence, not knowing what the sister had been told, was wary. Foreigners brought unlimited possibilities for boon and bane and, since the sister had never been so close to one before, she was confused, as Clarence explained that he wished to find her brother.

  She volunteered the information that Autumn was not there. She did not know when he would be back. He had not been there yesterday either. Or the day before. At last the woman admitted that she had not seen her brother for nearly two months. She had not worried, thinking him to be at work. They had no fixed arrangement, he was under no obligation to visit, yet—she had thought it a little strange and started to worry. Autumn had mentioned once that he had a foreign friend. She imagined, perhaps, that Autumn had left the country with the foreign friend. Or perhaps the foreign friend had brought trouble upon his head.

  Clarence grew pale at the sister’s news. He said quietly that he had not seen Autumn himself for two months. She sat down and bowed her head. Her round, weathered face turned red and she started to cry, imperceptibly at first, then in heaves. Clarence didn’t know what to do. She called out piteously that perhaps he had gone home to the mountains. When Clarence laid a hand on hers to comfort her, she pulled away convulsively. His own tears had dried up.

  Then she stood and paced the room violently. ‘Maybe it’s you who’s brought him trouble. Certainly it’s you foreigner who’s brought him trouble.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Clarence, chastened by what he recognised as a real possibility, insensitive to the woman’s emotional fit.

  She screamed. ‘Where is my brother? What have you done to my brother? How could it happen? What am I going to do, my mother, my father?’ She was rooted to the spot, cursing and shrieking. ‘You—go! Go! Never come back.’

  Clarence pushed out through the door, the neighbours, threw his pale head in the air and strode across the puddles in the muddy alley. He was afraid not of the woman but of the scenarios—her fears were hysterical and unfounded, yet she knew her society, she recognised the disruption of the normal: Clarence’s fears were specific. If there had been some kind of suspicion? If Autumn had been called in? A final twist of the knife was the likelihood that he would never know anything. Vanish! Non-being! Puff! The gritty wind in his eyes as he rode the motorbike gave him an excuse to scream and bleed.

  3

  At boiling point Jumbo approached Dulcia’s apartment in the Friendship Hotel. He had not been stopped at the gate, but the fat little spy at the bottom of her stairway called to him, ‘Where are you from?’ (Meaning: what is your official status?)

  As he had passed the man almost nightly for the last six months, Jumbo merely grunted in reply.

  ‘Hey,’ the spy yelled, ‘which unit do you belong to? Where are you going? What’s your relationship with that person?’

  Jumbo shouted in a blather, ‘I belong nowhere. I come from nowhere. I am going nowhere. I am no one.’ Then he turned and skipped up the stairs.

  The spy decided to leave it for the present, and made notes in his file.

  Dulcia was in a flap. Her cat was off colour. She couldn’t get her aerobics routine to work. She’d poured herself a drink and, when Jumbo came in, she glided into his arms and led him a dance.

  But he was a heavy weight.

  ‘What’s up?’

  He had come from the Public Security Bureau, Passport Section. On previous visits he had been fobbed off. He’d been told to wait. This time he went early in the morning and waited all day. Each time he demanded to see a higher official. At last he reached the wall, an official who told him point blank that his application for a passport to America had been refused and the decision was final. Jumbo stayed his ground. He knew that if he did not demand an explanation for the decision he could never again apply for a passport. It was essential to find out the reason. He was told to wait, for hours, and at last he was brought to the office of the highest official of those who manned the barricades to protect the entirely inaccessible, real decision-makers. The rosy-cheeked young man, a football fan who accepted a foreign cigarette from Jumbo, put it clearly. Jumbo had been placed in the Fifth Category, consisting of those people who might bring the motherland into disrepute if they were allowed out. It was a category reserved for counter-revolutionaries, doubters—and especially young artists whose work was insufficiently ‘patriotic’. The ruling could not be overturned. Never. There was no point reapplying. He would never be given a passport. Smoking Jumbo’s cigarette in the most appreciative fashion, the young Public Security officer said in a spirit of friendly advice that Jumbo should have thought more carefully beforehand.

  When Dulcia heard the news, she started to shout. She ranted. She hurled cushions at the sick cat and laughed weirdly. She could not register the fact; she had no training for a reality that failed to square with her wishes. From Jumbo’s contained anger, his determination to maintain good-humoured decent behaviour in the face of evil fate, she recognised that for him this was the bedrock. They were utterly powerless. Nothing could be done.

  They did not make love as they had most other days. The whole contour of Jumbo’s relationship with Dulcia was changed by this fact. Not that he had been using her, but he had been swimming with her in a current that flowed towards a future; and even their complicated lovemaking was a training in that direction. For Dulcia their relationship was a thing of romance and salvation; in some future world it might dive into tragedy, but that would be their own doing, an expression of the logic of two individual personalities. It would never be imposed by the State.

  ‘Why? Why? Why?’ she shouted. ‘Just because they don’t understand your paintings? Just because you have a foreign lover?’

  ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘I never told you. I couldn’t. Now what does it matter? They came to me, months ago, after we first started seeing each other.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘They. They knew about you. Your friends—the journalists— the diplomats. They wanted information. What you did. What you thought. Who you knew.’

  ‘What were they trying to find out?’

  ‘They just want to understand.’

  ‘There’s nothing to understand.’

  ‘That makes them suspicious. I told them I had no information to give. They were unhappy. Then they contacted my mother in Xian. She’s an old woman, a simple woman who cares about my father and my sister and doesn’t think outside the family. Once she was different, but her experiences taught her to be simple, unthinking. They came to her and told her that her son must help them, help China, for the good of the family. How could she refuse? She begged me. I could not say no. So I went to them. I gave some information. Very little. I reported some conversations. About art and culture. Nothing important. Nothing they would even understand. They were unhappy with me. They could make no sense of my information. They accused me of lying and concealing. Of course I did conceal, but they could not have understood anyway. They were unhappy with me. They finished with me. That was when Central TV decided they could not sponsor my study in the States. If I went, I would have to pay for myself. That was their doing. And now this is their final revenge. The Fifth Category. There is no way out.’

  Dulcia beat him on the chest. ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ She felt betrayed.

  ‘I wanted less trouble. I th
ought I could handle it.’

  ‘No one can do that.’ She moaned, ‘Oh Jumbo. The bastards! The blackmailing rats! Your poor mother! All because of me, because I was nobody and they’d blown their cover for the sake of nothing. What can we do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That’s impossible. Are you safe?’

  ‘While you’re still here.’

  ‘I’ll stay, I’ll stay,’ she declared. But she knew she had not enough love for Jumbo in her heart to stay in China with him for the rest of her life. Not enough love, not enough constancy. Right now, however, she had passion. She looked at him and said: ‘I’m not gonna take this lying down. You’ve heard of pulling strings? Well, I’m gonna yank the fucking ropes!’

  ‘There’s no way,’ said Jumbo with quiet firmness, and he picked up the wine glass and bowed his nose to it like a child.

  4

  Celery and shallots spilled out on the table. Wally chopped while Jin Juan kneaded the dough, laughing at his clumsiness. She had come to him as soon as she returned to Beijing. She knew the place, she reminded him, from her visit as Azalea.

  ‘Now why did you do that?’ he asked.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Certainly.’

  ‘It was no more than a practical joke. I suppose I was testing you, and protecting myself.’

  ‘It could have backfired.’

  ‘It almost did.’ She laughed again, not revealing her true motive, that had to do with Zhang. Coming to the foreigner had been a trial by ordeal. How could he understand her coldly irrational behaviour? She had been abandoned and had forced herself to act the whore. She had also come for revenge.