Avenue of Eternal Peace

by Nicholas Jose

  Your friend, Autumn

  The press corps clubbed together on the Bund, in the Peace Hotel, but Clarence deserted for a back alley place where a chuckling old lady was glad to pour scotch into him. He saw Autumn’s skull shaved of its permed curls, a brown belt encircling his slender waist several times, khaki billowing, his pocked complexion growing pasty on mess food. Television paraded the legless and blind veterans, of twenty and twenty-one, who came back from the nasty border war with Vietnam. What of the others? All China’s borders were in conflict. There was a saying that military boots required iron nails. But the boy was right. Clarence’s fantasy of taking him to London in his suitcase, lugging it from the cab, opening it on the porch of his mother’s Nash terrace, would never have eventuated. The Englishman’s stomach twisted. Fuck! The boy was gone. Nothing ever lasted. It was better to feel nothing. But he would be taunted by the memory. The boy at least—the letter said nothing to the contrary—was alive, and well out of his lover’s way. Clarence stumbled from the bar, took a wrong turn in the alley, spat and blindly wended forward. The air was opaque with a putrid mist, not exactly rain, that descended slowly from the heavy sky. Shanghai was sodden with water that seeped up from the spongy ground and subterranean net of canals into which the city was said to be sinking, like Venice. Clarence wandered towards Suzhou Creek for the hell of it, the moored barges reminding him of patients in a stinking ward. As he crossed the humped bridge he sang in a throaty theatrical imitation of Marlene Dietrich, Johnny’s gone for a soldier, Johnny’s gone for a soldier. He could only remember one line. A bundle in the gutter reared its head.

  He made a wrong turning, revolved, retreated, and found flagstones under his feet, with obscure yet familiar inscriptions that demanded attention. Tombstones. Humphrey Stenhouse Waterman, d. 1919. Juliet Jane Keswick, d. 1922. Marcel Hubert Villeneuve, aetat. 27. Felix Kleyff, Berlin 1874—Shanghai 1924. The road was paved with slabs removed from the foreigners’ cemetery. Clarence’s feet passed over their memory as if he were a ghost with them. Then he sang his despairing line again. Then he emptied his guts good and proper, and found his way back. With sham dignity he disturbed the night porter of his hotel, and took the lift seven flights to his room. Watercolour was rising from the river, juices excreted according to the body rhythms of the monster city of solvents: liquid and money.

  The morning began with crowds of demonstrators invading the Mayor’s office. They were young, curious and passionate. In the afternoon a car was manhandled, overturned and set ablaze. It was a sign that things were getting out of hand. Mao said it takes only a spark to light a prairie fire. Clarence took the shot that was used worldwide by the Western press.

  At midnight, returning to his hotel with his camera, he was prevented from crossing Nanjing Road by a mass of people moving towards the Bund. Like a mighty water dragon, the crowd followed the riverfront and pressed up against the blockaded portals of the Municipal Building, the headquarters of the city authorities. They carried bread rolls in their hands, hundreds of bread rolls that were hurled at the iron grille.

  8

  It froze early that year. Againsta classic winterscape of broomstick trees, russet pavilions on exposed hills muted by draperies of mist, and the veiny rumpled ice leading to treacherous patches where water was visible beneath a glass membrane, Wally and Jin Juan ventured out onto the ice at the Summer Palace. Wally, who had not skated since New England, trod cautiously as an old fox. His feet shuddered painfully on the high blades. Wistfully he watched Jin Juan describing loops around him, swift as a vixen. He attempted a figure of eight and, hearing the ice crack behind him, just managed to reach the safe, thick part. Then Jin Juan came up behind and pushed him down, and stood there laughing at his long struggle to right himself.

  As the year was turning towards Christmas it seemed, for Wally, to be closing in. His thoughts turned homewards—to his querulous son Jerome who had written only one letter. The first snows had come in Beijing, and the diplomats were flying to sunnier climes. A hybrid Old Kitchen God-cum-Santa Claus had been set up in the courtyard of the Medical College. Wally could no longer postpone booking his flight home if he was to be on deck in Sydney at the end of the Australian summer.

  ‘Dad’, Jerome had clipped, in a cockatoo monotone, when Wally put the call through. Dad or dead? ‘Geez, we’ve deleted your file. You’re coming back? Good stuff. How is it? Going along. Country’s joined the Third World. No change. Jasmine’s crook at me. Things are pretty stagnant. Great news! Send us your details and we’ll see you in the VIP lounge.’

  Wally had said nothing about Jin Juan. How could he? After skating they walked arm in arm around the frozen lake. A decision had to be made. He wanted the woman to know that his offer stood. He was willing to escort her, on his passport, to the so-called free world.

  ‘I am in debt to you,’ she said. ‘Love you. Most women would grab at what you offer, and I have obligation, gratitude, on top of that. But—for me, it’s not right. I can’t go. What you propose can’t be. I have my grandfather. I have—thanks to you—my job. I have, shall we say, unfinished business here. Forgive me, please. I’m not free to follow you.’

  Wally did not expect her answer. He frowned, his eyes prickled in the cold.

  ‘I’m not imposing anything on you,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t make it easier. It’s a completely free choice such as I’m not used to making. If you imposed the authority of our love—’

  ‘I want you.’

  ‘It’s not necessary.’

  Her response to his rational, magnanimous gesture made him realise suddenly how much he feared going back, to emptiness empty-handed. He was grasping at Jin Juan, on her shoulders erecting the scaffolding he had devised, and now the dream was disappearing into mist.

  ‘If you didn’t want to go through with this, why did you come that first night?’

  ‘I was never looking for a passport. I was acting like a ghost, perhaps, on a caprice. But you desired me, didn’t you, and I came to you, fascinated by the path you were on. You welcomed me, and we travelled together, with our own private story. But that doesn’t amount to anything, does it? My life is here. Look, sorry, they’re closing the gates.’

  Despite her resolve, Jin Juan continued to visit him, and together they visited Eagle who was set up in a salubrious ward with his elephantine leg swinging from a contraption above his bed. He scowled, cracked gags, was patient. He was putting on weight. All the hospital staff knew he was the foreigner’s friend. Sometimes, when Wally was working, Jin Juan sat with Eagle and bantered in Beijing slang. Because Wally had taken responsibility for his relationship with Eagle, elder brother to younger brother, Jin Juan could take him seriously as she could never have done otherwise, since their backgrounds were different. They came to know and respect each other, sharing their complex stories. Each day Eagle offered Jin Juan one of the delicious treats his mother had made him.

  TWELVE

  Thorough Democracy

  1

  Big feathers of snow fell all night and continued in the muffled daylight, piling on black branches and rooftops and reducing traffic to a crawl. Wally started early, arguing and haggling for a taxi. The drivers were either staying home or out to make a killing. At last he commandeered a minibus that snailed to the journalists’ compound where Clarence was waiting and on to Beijing Station where hordes of quarrelsome travellers were fearing havoc from the snow. Under falling snow all rugged-up bodies looked the same, until Clarence’s photographer’s eye caught a woman swigging wildly from a bottle. It was Dulcia. With hoots and hugs Wally and Clarence joined her huddle, passing the cognac as they shuffled in the snow in greatcoats and walking boots. When Wally had last seen Dulcia, some weeks earlier, she was a jumpy, chain-smoking, slush-grey figure who’d had no sleep for days. She had exhausted her power, done everything at her command, pitted all her faith in individualism, and in herself, against the system, and everyone said the cause was hopeless. Through friends fro
m the aerobics session she led at the United States Embassy she had pushed through to a meeting with the person in charge of scientific and educational exchanges. At Happy Hour she had collared the World Bank representative who monitored educational aid funds. She had even wangled five sympathetic minutes with the Ambassador. Then she locked her case into place with an imminent visit by the President of UCLA at Berkeley, to whom she had a line as former campus charity queen. She used what she had down to the last dime. The President was the key figure in the exchange program. He was the man who could lay his hands on the funds and who understood the technology that the Chinese Academy of Science wanted so badly. The agreements were all but signed, and the President was flying to Beijing to be ushered by the Ambassador into high presences in order finally to set his seal on this expensive, strategic act of friendly cooperation. And the Ambassador, being in a mood to make suggestions on the morning of the signing, was prompted to raise a certain matter during his off-the-record banter with the Chinese Minister. The President of Berkeley would be particularly gratified if a young Chinese artist could visit his school, and he placed the name as if it were an arrowhead. The game was chancy: fifty-fifty. Too much American interest in one suspect painter could have him sent to a labour camp. But two mornings later a valid passport arrived special delivery for Jumbo at Central TV. ‘That guy has all the luck,’ said Dulcia, playing down her own part. She was still laughing as they stepped in the snow in a celebratory hopi dance around the cognac bottle and the stuffed suitcases.

  Body to body the masses squeezed through the turnstiles, shoved through the doors, stumbled up the alarming, unfamiliar moving stairways. Burdens of luggage caught, pressed, bashed; sewn sacks, leatherette cases on wheels that came adrift, motors slung from poles, bags, bundles, bedrolls, apples, pears and cartons of cola; old people, businessmen, babies, and others in a range of military and civilian uniforms banged, kicked, spilled forwards into great waiting rooms where giant unruly queues formed against the final barrier. The system that kept Chinese trains more or less on time was cast-iron in its regulation of the never-ending torrent of people. All of China was pressing forward, as if driven by a metaphor, a siren call: progress; the Long March; the Red Guards rampaging during the Cultural Revolution; troops and dissidents on one-way journeys to the border regions, and now the pressure on every crack in the door to the outside world. All of China, and the drive and insistence of Chinese history, moved through Beijing Station.

  Dulcia and Jumbo were settled in a soft compartment. The heavy suitcases of books and scrolls—the Chinese culture he carried outside his skin—were stowed, and Dulcia’s backpack. Their friends waited on the platform as they leaned out of the window arm in arm, two heads, differently grinning: Dulcia in triumphant relief, Jumbo with a clown’s black grin as he prepared, disbelieving, for the last shunting out. They were taking the train to Guangzhou. They would walk across the border at the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. They would see Hong Kong, multi-faceted glass jewel; then they would fly direct to San Francisco. ‘My Golden Gate,’ Jumbo repeatedly quipped. Dulcia hoped to share the miraculous experience with her lover. But Jumbo’s dreams, and judgements, would be as silent as a child’s, as subtle and mean. Clarence’s camera kept clicking. Face after face: which would bear the true expression of flight, emigration, exile? Beyond the platform snow was blizzarding, the obscurity into which the train would burrow. Hot white steam was rising, swirling with cold white snow. The train began to glide, slowly, as smooth as ice. Kisses, hugs, tears, clicks. It was history.

  As Clarence and Wally walked down the platform with Jumbo’s Chinese mates, who were suddenly glum, wondering what their odds were, Wally said, ‘He made it by the skin of his teeth. To get off the blacklist and get out. A hundred thousand to one?’

  ‘A million to one,’ bet Clarence. ‘Anyway, getting out is no solution to the problem.’

  ‘Save yourself,’ grinned one of the fellow artists in contradiction.

  2

  Snow fell, and when the sky cleared for a spell the city became magnificent, its blood reds and mortar purples glowing like velvet against the intense white. Yet as the skies cleared, the temperature dropped and the ground froze even harder.

  Outside in the snow, as Wally crossed from the administration building to the residential block, the room attendants were pelting each other with snowballs, leaping and landing like ruffled crows. A snowball hit Wally in the back and he whirled like a dervish, grabbed a mitt full of snow, and roared after the boy he knew best, who looked after his room. Usually the room attendant sat sullenly at his post. He was teaching himself English without making much progress. In the blank space left in the textbook for constructing sentences, Wally once saw, he had neatly demonstrated his command of Subject-Verb-Object structure with I am nobody. I am nothing.

  A few days late for Christmas, Ralph the Rhino paid a call to drink the Doctor’s health. His red, peaked beanie made him the closest thing to Santa Claus. Like old comrades, they talked through Wally’s time in China, the revelations that had turned into nothing, the nothings that had become revelations. They toasted their minor victory over Director Kang.

  Ralph was working through the Chinese part of Hsu’s papers that Wally had brought back from Shaoxing. It was a huge job. Wally had read the English sections and hoped that he and Ralph would collaborate back home in putting together a festschrift. Wally was still chewing over the implications of Hsu’s research. He didn’t plan to let up. There were materials, ideas and hypotheses to be investigated, and he was the only person in a position to do so. His intellectual energies had been recharged, not by the prospect of answers but by new nagging questions. There was a path to be taken that no one but he could take.

  ‘There’s gold there,’ declared Ralph. ‘The quest continues.’ He yawned heartily. ‘Santa brings you a titbit of news for Christmas.’ He had marched through the snow all night, fifteen kilometres from the Old Summer Palace to Tiananmen Square, from midnight to dawn, with thousands of jubilant students who sang and chanted ‘Freedom! Democracy!’ as their cloth-shod feet defied the cold. The mood had been good, the police restrained. But at Tiananmen Square the police had provided buses to ferry the students back to their residences and warned them not to be silly. A second rally was planned.

  ‘We’ll meet again,’ declared Ralph as he pulled on his boots in readiness for the snow. ‘Under a spreading avocado tree down under, eh? Ho ho ho!’ That was his parting shot. ‘Be on standby, Doc. New Year’s Day. Ho ho ho!’

  3

  The authorities acted swiftly. Ten regulations were brought in to prevent unofficial demonstrations. Certain places were expressly forbidden, and of them all Tiananmen Square, the vast space thrown open to the people when the heroic Communists demolished the clutter of the old walled city, the most strictly.

  At the turning of the old year, according to the solar calendar, in the small hours of night, the square was flooded with water in the name of hosing away the snow. The water set hard. The square became an ice rink, hard and smooth as stone. No matter how the crowds surged they would never make headway across that stony, glassy ice. Besides, a railing was erected around the perimeter of the square, and along the railing were stationed uniformed members of the Public Security Bureau in numbers almost as great as their plainclothes counterparts who idled on the strip of road and pavement that surrounded the square. From early morning, however, people began to gather, in straggling groups along the edges and congregating a little at the corners of the square.

  The snow was light, drifting in the wind. The day was bitterly cold, and the figures were so wrapped in clothing as not to be easily recognisable. Students could hardly be distinguished from onlookers and tourists, though perhaps the distinction was unimportant because they shared a common, concealed motive. Only the students might be a little more overt than workers who were vulnerable to greater penalties. At the top of the square the great red wall of the Forbidden City was almost luminous.
Above the Gate of Heavenly Peace Mao Tse Tung’s rejuvenated, rouged portrait beamed down from beneath a crest of snow. Behind the wall the snow-laden, green-gold tiled pavilions of the Palace lay like moored battleships.

  In the square people stood alone. Wally watched, his balaclava pulled down over his brow and his scarf up round his mouth and nose. In his standard-issue greatcoat he could have been anyone. He moved among the crowd, avoiding people. Two joined in conversation would halt as a third came near. The crowd continued to mill slowly around the four sides of the square, round and round, back and forth, as the energy of frustration and expectation grew. The numbers were not large, some thousands excluding the police. Most had sensibly been frightened off by arrests, detentions and ceaseless denunciations from the media, from professors and parents, from friends. The diehards remained, their grievances overflowing, but forbidden to assemble, to speak, to shout, to sing, to hold banners, to step on their square. They paced restlessly. Here and there would be a scuffle. A few kids would link arms and flow forward against the cordon of security, then ebb back as if rebounding from elastic. A knot of voices would grow loud. A lunge, a dash, and a fellow was drawn into concentric circles of police, always just out of eyeshot, and quickly dragged to a van—shouting, mouthing, cheered by the crowd. Doors closed before others could run to see. The arrested ones, officially described as workers, were students. There were foreign press in the crowd. The secret police were thick with video cameras from which there was no point ducking. Two, three hours passed edgily, and no one succeeded in trespassing on the ice.

  Wally was an observer, but as he moved among them he was drawn closer into their midst. The crowd was tightening, and their suppressed passion became palpable. Their bravery stirred him, all helpless, naive and hopeless, but at the core fearless and full of hope. He was on their side but, recalling his own neglected revolutionary ardour, feared that power and history were not. Was he ashamed of his sceptical apostasy? His eyes prickled under the woollen overhang of his balaclava. If they were powerless to change things, nothing would ever be changed if the powerless did not try.