Avenue of Eternal Peace (10 page)

‘I'm warming up,' Wally excused himself.

‘Hey, what's your idea of fun?' Dulcia accused Jumbo. ‘Shakin' up the fizzy drink cans and throwin' cream cakes at your friends? We call that a kids' party.'

Jumbo raised his eyebrows. A glacial young woman in red velvet opera cap skewered with silver prongs glided by, her mouth downcast—as if to prove his point.

‘The foreigner takes a lot of warming up,' said Wally. ‘Three vodkas to be precise. Cheers all.' He drained his glass.

‘Okay, let's dance,' cried Dulcia—and they did so, until they were hot and breathless, and Wally's shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and the dancing space became so packed with bumpers and grinders that someone compared it to the Beijing bus at rush hour.

‘I say, Professor!' cried a mock toffy voice when Wally staggered against the drinks table. Wally dropped his arms with a sigh of pleasure to see the leering presence of Ralph the Rhino.

‘Howsa doing, old cock?' With exaggeration Ralph shook Wally's hand.

‘I'm surprised they let you in.'

‘Had a bit of fun with the lift sheila—a real goer.' Ralph's face dropped into a caricature of the sullen lift attendant and made Wally laugh again.

‘Have you got a drink?'

They scrounged for a glass, then the two men wandered out to the cooler, quieter balcony to talk. Below, the Embassy grid of grandiose 1950s piles and stately trees lay lightless and the city stretched.

‘Fuckin' beautiful,' said Ralph. ‘Makes Sydney Harbour look like a sewer, eh?'

Wally laughed again.

‘No seriously, Ralph, I want your opinion.'

Despite his style there was no one more knowledgeable about China than Ralph the Rhino. A raving Aussie ocker who got himself tangled up with her in the early days and had blazed his technicolour trail through many a drab revolutionary meet. His style was
sui generis
, and effective. In the 1970s when the ideological clamps were on, his larrikinism gave him sufficient anti-bourgeois, anti-imperialist credentials for him to be welcomed as a Friend of China. With the recent changes his frankness and ingenuity and sheer sticking power endeared him to his contacts. A compulsively inquisitive intellectual anarchist, Ralph wasn't trying to get anything out of China, nor concerned with making a ‘success' of it. His first and last love was herbal medicine. Originally, back in Sydney, he had trained as a doctor, but he never did things properly. A side track took him to Chinese medicine, the Chinese pharmacopoeia, the ancient script, and ever more
recherché
explorations of ancient science and philosophy, all pursued with an amateur's passion. At one stage he detoured into Australian Aboriginal culture, testing the theory that Peking Man was kin to the gracile-skulled skeletons of 40,000 years ago unearthed near Lake Mungo in western New South Wales. He financed these explorations and travels by any means to hand, living like a nomad on the smell of an oily rag. In Australia he beat around in an old van with few possessions, and always retreated to the avocado plantation he had established. He lived in a big army disposal tent there that kept things simple. A chest suspended on ropes from a pole stored his dictionaries and encyclopaedias. He feared mildew. When the rains came, he sat under the tent flaps hacking a path through Chinese
materia medica
, until a return to the Middle Kingdom became essential, for six months or a year, in order to follow up inquiries. A citified bush Australian with the shyness of a snake, sceptical to his big toenail, an oblique bullshit artist to the last drop in the bottle, and open-heartedly surging with a benign and munificent life-current, crazy Ralph was respected.

From the barrage of recommendations and counter-recommendations that Wally gathered before leaving for China, Ralph's was the voice that loomed loudest and wisest. They clicked on first meeting over a cappuccino in Sydney's Chinatown. In high summer Ralph wore a flame-coloured Hawaiian shirt over his khaki shorts and Wally was in a safari suit, coming from a university committee. Their talk turned on the power of certain organically derived substances to change the red-white blood cell ratio for purposes of sickness or slow death, and was so mutually illuminating that it generated a second meeting in a pub, then a third and a fourth. Wally was knocked out by Ralph's acuity, and Ralph was impressed by Wally's clinical experience and access to official medical knowledge. Towards the establishment Ralph was perpetually irreverent, but he valued what its funding could underwrite. Wally, disillusioned by the medical powers-that-be, loved Ralph's guerrilla raids on Real Truth.

From wind and sun and travels between the two hemispheres, Ralph's huge frame and big egg-shaped head, from which protruded eyes like agates and the great horn nose, were bronzed all year round. He wore an outback hat around Beijing with the PLA greatcoat and a cocky's moleskins and boots. No better combination of clobber could be found.

‘In China anything is possible,' was his motto. Tonight for the journalists he had the story about Radio Beijing broadcasting the archaeological discovery of a stone disc with inscribed grooves that when hooked up with an iron needle and a hollowed out buffalo's horn and spun at high speed produced the voice of Confucius dictating the
Analects
. Forget Thomas Edison. The Chinese had invented the gramophone three thousand years ago. When a foreigner declared the story to be a hoax, the patriotic broadcaster shrugged, ‘In China anything is possible.'

Ralph the Rhino's greatest feat was his lone motorcycle ride from Beijing to an unvisited Tibetan lamasery two thousand kilometres west. He dyed his hair black and cropped it like a Chinese, and became dirty and determined enough to convince the locals he was one of them. At any point he could have been arrested, attacked or stranded, but the people on the way were delightful and the trip was serendipitous. When he climbed the last stretch of winding road, through stunted conifers and scattered boulders and drowsy Tibetan shepherds tending hairy po-faced flocks, to temple structures that were weirdly amphibian, scarcely distinct from the rocky peak yet afloat in the sky, and the solitary monk on the hillside took out a horn as long as himself to blare a timeless, toneless welcome to the growling Yamaha; when Ralph got off his machine and was received through painted carved gates and offered a bed for the evening, honoured pilgrim from the fabled oppressive capital, and later over cigars and tea savoured the perfection of the place's geomantic setting, its
fengshui
, and the completion of his goal, Ralph felt just like a man who has taken one step, and the right one, off a plank into depths from which there is no return.

Word of his exploit spread like wildfire through the foreign community, and journalists and photographers vowed to repeat it. But no one except Ralph would ever do it again. So discreet had he been that when the story reached the Public Security Bureau and he was called in, he managed to convince his questioner that he had never left Beijing. All he brought back from the lamasery was an ordinary piece of quartz. But no one doubted the story because Ralph was Ralph.

‘Good one. So you were sent on a wild goose chase to Beidaihe? And the old prof turned out to be a veggie? Good one.'

‘Does it make sense to you?'

Ralph scratched his chin. ‘Have you confronted your minder with the fact that it's the wrong Hsu?'

‘Oh, a waste of time absolutely with Mrs Gu.'

‘Wonder what they're up to. They're up to something, that's for sure. Let's think. They're trying to throw you off the trail of the real Prof Hsu, right?'

‘Right.'

‘Which means they've got something to hide. Either something shameful to cover up or something valuable they don't want to share.'

‘Right.'

‘I'd opt for the latter. The Chinese are great ones at hoarding their goodies. You say the original Hsu had important things to say in his youth. Who knows what brilliance he may have produced later? They'd be frightened you'd steal it.'

Ralph put the matter clearly. Wally's problem lay in bamboozling himself with the most complex of explanations. Too often he did not see the wood for the spreading trees of his own verbiage.

‘What could be so important that I would steal it?'

‘You don't know Chinese pride, mate. Chinese tenacity. The other day I read a survey done in the streets of Moscow. The main gripe of the man in the street over there against China is that the Chinese have a secret cure for cancer which they are gradually leaking to the United States but withholding from the Soviet Union. That's true. That's what the Soviets believe. There could be something in it. The ultimate arms race.'

‘Fantastic!'

‘The point is that Chinese medicine is a great source of national pride, as much a unifier of the culture as the written script. It has survived into the twentieth century because it works, first of all, but also because the Chinese are great mystifiers and because when it comes to sickness human beings will accept any amount of mystification and mumbo-jumbo in their desperation to get better. Medicine is the great secret weapon of China. Once again the great men of the West are coming to pay homage to the Mighty Empire in hope of learning her secrets. Where you are, since it's a Western medicine centre, you probably don't see this. But where I am, at the Academy, the religious certitude and secrecy with which they enshrine their knowledge has to be seen to be believed.'

Ralph concluded, ‘They might just have something important at your place. Ninety-nine per cent unlikely, but you never know. They're making fools of themselves to protect it, that's obvious. You better find out what they have, lad.'

Ralph made it sound easy.

‘How?'

‘Avoid confrontation. Ingratiate yourself with the boss. Ingratiate yourself with the disaffected.'

‘Grease up to Director Kang.'

‘That's the spirit.'

‘Can the Chinese really be so peculiar?' asked Wally. ‘Why do we always end up talking of them as “the Chinese”, “they”, “them”, as if they're a different species. As individuals they're as different from each other as chalk and cheese. But it's the larger organism that fascinates us, the group thing, the nation, the race. What laws does it operate by with its revolutions and counter-revolutions, the fanaticism and the inertia that drives you up the wall? How do you know what they want? They don't seem to want anything for its own sake, but only as a way to somewhere else, as a way of keeping in the swim. They slide past us, round us, through us, but afterwards you feel there's been no contact at all.'

Wally was thinking of Jin Juan.

‘Hey man,' said Ralph. ‘You gotta stop thinking about China. Them, us. Forget it. Restore peace to your mind. Settle your heart. Day by day. Step by step. Specifics only. Come and visit me some time at the Trad. Med. Academy. We gotta go in now.'

But the party was fading. The Canadian Trade Commissioner was dancing with a Chinese poet whose creased face gave him the name of Monkey. The Australian Cultural Attaché was singing Peking opera in falsetto. Dulcia and Jumbo were necking on the couch. Clarence and the two Caravaggesque naifs were twirling each other in a high jive to cheers and whistles from the room. The time had come when Clarence was wild, his hair awry and sweat running down his bared chest, and he could horse with his Chinese friends as if they were all boys together in the same public school dorm.

Sabina's face was white as flour against her black hair and clothes.

‘Shit, I gotta go home and write a story,' she said. ‘This time not the Chinese but the Germans. All governments are shit! One of the Baader-Meinhof group has been working here as a foreign expert for seven years with no passport. The Germans offered him a pardon to go back home, then sprung him at Frankfurt Airport,' she gabbled to Wally. ‘We must hold our mistrust. Mistrust always!' She looked at her watch. ‘At least the German prisons have hot water. My apartment has no hot water after midnight. I go. You come?'

‘Out of the frying pan into the hot water. No, no.' As a middle-aged man he was flattered by Sabina's interest, and regretted for a moment. But he too would turn into a pumpkin if he stayed and drank more.

2

As he cycled home, he enjoyed his release. He passed a man keeping guard over a pile of cabbages. China this, China that. Ralph the Rhino was right. Settle his heart. Put his mind at rest. He could no more understand China than he could understand himself. Journalists, diplomats, photographers, China was too big for their lenses. The Five Foreigns met the Three Chineses and had the Four Conversations. Was the political line really Right but pretending Left, or really Left and pretending Right? Was China booming like the new Japan or struggling to hang on? What was the latest absurdity of the currency apartheid that obliged foreigners to use expensive funny money? And there was always so-and-so's claim to have discovered the Real China, where ‘they had never seen a foreigner before', as if to see a foreigner rocketed people into a new kind of space-time. All under the same moon, he thought, noticing the sky.

The night porter stirred as he came through the College gate and the boy sleeping on duty on his stairwell grunted. Entering his empty flat, Wally fell into the armchair and stared upwards with a feeling of tension and strangeness. He felt detached and free-floating, cut loose. He stared for a while at the air, then snapped himself into a different posture, adjusted the lamp, and took out the thick envelope from Uncle Lionel.

‘My dear boy—'

3

From his treetop in tropical North Queensland Lionel sent an apology. He was too busy in his hedonistic dotage to concern himself with stray family doings. Like Wally's father, Lionel had gone early into the world, after Retta's death and Waldemar's second marriage. By the time the papers came down to him, there was little family relationship left, and his own silver-whiskered gallivanting was in full career as he found second, third and fourth winds. Posterity could decide whether the records should be maintained or returned to earth—altogether too dry a matter for Lionel as he applied oil to his shrunken withers before bobbing down the track for his morning dip in the blood-warm brine. He packaged up the relics and dumped them on the post office counter.