Avenue of Eternal Peace (12 page)

As Jin Juan explained the characters, the story of
Snow in Summer
emerged in archetypal outline for Wally, the distortions of voice and rising anxiety of percussive sound became expressive and the nuances of the three performances shaped a bride's tragedy that was as moving as it was tautly artificial. His eyes were on the girl, the cousin, who had Jin Juan's long Sui-dynasty face and swanlike neck. She wore a sky-blue dress and silver lollipops quivered in her hair. Her face was a puce and white mask of purity and her voice shrilled like a reed. Her body seemed to shudder with outraged virtue as if it were a set of vibrating fibres, and with self-sacrifice that grew more erotic as more defiant. When she was led off to wrongful execution at the last, it was as if stretched elastic had snapped—and the opera was over.

The clapping was perfunctory. The performers stood in full light on the bare stage before rows of rapidly emptying chairs. Jin Juan tugged Wally up on stage to meet the three principals. Their eyes were like glimmering pools of oil in hard masks and they stayed in character as they greeted and nodded. Jin Juan's cousin whispered only a few words in her ear as they left the stage. Wally was intrigued by the power of their characters, offstage in their bulky costumes as well as onstage, and especially he was taken by the slim sorrowing bride into whose eyes he was permitted to stare deeply as she made her exit.

Zhang smoothed down his trenchcoat as Wally and Jin Juan said their goodbyes on the street corner. They were speaking in English, but Wally dropped his voice nevertheless when he asked her how they could make contact in future.

‘I have no way of reaching you,' he said, ‘so I'm relying on you to get in touch with me. You know you can find me through your friends at the Medical College.'

‘That's right,' responded Jin Juan with a discreet little nod.

Whether or not Zhang understood the communication, Eagle noticed and took his farewell in high spirits. Zhang wore his rank imposingly, and Jin Juan was a dish, and Wally laughed when Eagle told him frankly, as they walked with Mother Lin to the bus stop, that he approved of the woman.

3

Ralph the Rhino was waiting for Wally in the New Age Bar. Sitting alone, he'd been pestered. Foreign Trader had joined him for a drink and offered Han bronzes, Song porcelain, girls, boys; dope, heroin and excellent exchange rates. But Ralph kept his hands clean—unlike Party Greenhorn, who was developing a paunch and sat in the dark with a white hand appearing from behind to rub his trouser front. He must have been sitting on the girl.

‘Extracting the honey,' snickered Bi the bartender as he fixed Ralph's favourite drink. ‘Is it all right?' asked Young Bi respectfully.

‘Better and better, mate.'

Wally rescued Ralph not a moment too soon. The Doctor was tingling with electric sensations from the evening at the opera and Ralph greeted his enthusiasm like a satisfied parent. Then, laughing all the way, Ralph quickly got down to business. ‘You got the stuff?' His big balding pate shone.

Wally pulled from inside his jacket a swatch of blurred grey photocopies.

‘The usual high-quality reproduction,' commented Ralph, bringing the sheets closer to his eyes. ‘You don't want an instant translation, I hope. This is technical stuff. I'll need reference books for medical terms—musk, mugwort, toad's venom—you know the sort of thing. Can you give me some time? This one looks good.
Cervical Cancer Removed by Witchdoctor: a Scientific Investigation
.'

Wally pricked up his ears. ‘What are the other titles?'

‘Let's see.
Remission of Tumours through Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture
. Interesting.
Malignancy-bearing Genomes and the Impact of Certain Tree Fungi of Southern China
.
Radiation, the New Moxybustion?
A whole host of goodies. All the work of your Director Kang? Impressive. And you say Kang's the bogus Yankee? This looks like traditional Chinese medicine to me. I'm surprised to see it emanating from the Peking Union Medical College. It's usually a case of never the twain shall meet. What's the rest of Kang's stuff like, the stuff in English?'

‘Impressive in places. The data is exceptional. Sometimes there's an inspired hypothesis, other times he makes ludicrous, totally implausible links between the Chinese data and modern Western practice. It's full of contradictions. At places he doesn't have a clue what he's dealing with.'

‘The stuff's published abroad?'

‘A fraction, and that's the more modest part, though plausible for that reason. The pieces published in the English-language journals in China do a lot of trumpet-blowing, with great insistence on the need for the latest Western technology, scanners, chemotherapy, radiology, all that.'

‘A bid for funding?'

‘Presumably.'

Ralph shuffled the pages together and slipped them inside his coat. The translations would be hard work, but he had no greater love than to ferret his way through the esoterica of Chinese wisdom or fantasy.

‘By the way,' he said, ‘Hsu Chien Lung was the name of your old boy, right? I asked one of my trusty colleagues at the Trad. Med. Academy, dear sweet Emeritus Professor Wu, a real honey of an eighty-year-old. She wouldn't come up to the height of the bar here, bent double by the weight of her knowledge, looks like a Maori tiki, a totem face cut with a chisel. Anyway, she's a love, even if she does go in for ellipsis. She said of your Hsu Chien Lung, and I quote, “He could not be surpassed.” High praise. She said they had carbon copies of his original papers in the archives. Never-published things. If I'm very nice to her, she might just arrange for me to see them.'

‘Does she know what happened to him?'

‘I asked. She just shook her head with that special Chinese mixture of horror, wonder and resolute fatalism.'

‘Hmm. Well, drink up. Another Black Chinaman?'

4

Wally was drinking too much in China. Tea and booze. Booze and tea. Booze brought him closer to the people, as if his wild drunken fire of impulses, wishes, hallucinations and flights reflected the rainbow-coloured dream-world flaring in everyone's head; as if, despite drab exteriors, everyone were secretly the Monkey King in a drama that could be entered upon through drink. His work failed to exhaust his energies, and his determination to research China had expanded in an unruly fashion to include what Ralph called The Deep Structure. His behaviour was becoming more and more peculiar. What was the committee man, the concerned doctor, the administrator of yore doing ambling along an empty midnight street waving at any car that passed? He had no objections, suddenly, to wasting his life. But he had misjudged Director Kang, letting surface impressions get the better of reasoned assessment, and he must make the appropriate amends. He thought of the tiki totem's comment on Professor Hsu Chien Lung. ‘He could not be surpassed.' Playing with words produced another reading. ‘He was in the way.' He had surprised Jin Juan tonight with her callow chap. As he thought of Jin Juan, her face metamorphosed into the exquisite sorrowing mask of the opera princess, Emperor's Cucumber in a salad of snow.

5

‘Who's he?' snapped Zhang as he and Jin Juan walked away from the lighted foodstall where a long-whiskered man in a night cap was turning kebabs over a brazier. ‘How did you meet him?'

‘Song introduced us.'

‘What's her aim?'

‘He's helping with her work.'

‘You should keep away from foreigners.'

‘You're a typical suspicious Chinese. Aren't we supposed to be learning from them?'

Once in the darkness he put his arm tightly around her waist. The shadowy east gate of the Imperial Palace loomed, where they turned to follow the moat. In the air was the sharp fragrance of mimosa beginning to bud.

‘Have you thought about us?' she asked.

‘I always think about you. I love you.' Perhaps five hundred times before in the ten years of their never-ending courtship he had said those words to her. When was it he had promised to marry her?

Zhang's father was a high cadre in the Ministry of Aeronautics and Astronautics, one of the ultra-leftists of fifteen years ago who had turned himself inside out and kept on top. His mother was a Vice-Mayor of Tianjin. The family went back to the Manchu rulers, which accounted for Zhang's cruel cheekbones. He had been protected from everything, Jin Juan judged, and was a glossy, moody, self-concerned young ram. She had not forgiven him for being late and unapologetic, and contrasted his behaviour with the foreigner's straightforward friendliness.

They turned the corner of the moat and climbed the crumbling steps by the boathouse to reach an alcove that was exposed only to tranquil water, their trysting place. He pushed her against the wall.

‘Easy!' she protested.

‘I love you. Really. Truly. I love you. Say you love me. Say it.'

She could never resist their passion, although she hated it now. Ten years ago when she came back young and confused from the countryside, she had admired his brash undentable student's optimism. At the time she was starving for some friendship, some opening out, after the cut-off years in the work camp. They had joked together on those days when they met by the lake and ice glittered. She had pretended to be a student at the Foreign Languages Institute and he was amazed by her English, which he wanted to study. They became committed intellectual partners and prudent, demanding lovers. With Zhang's help she got into the Foreign Languages Institute after all; he was the more impressed by her lie.

Her fingers behind his back counted ten years of sweet, necessary, efficient lovemaking as he held her against the boathouse wall. Afterwards, walking back along the moat, she raised once more the question of the flat, which was the question of their marriage.

‘It's fallen through,' he said. ‘Mum doesn't agree.'

‘I'll talk to her then.'

‘She's in Tianjin.'

‘I'll go to Tianjin.'

‘No.'

It was the custom that Jin Juan did not contact Zhang's family, whose high position put them strictly out of bounds.

‘You mean you haven't spoken to her.'

‘They oppose.' Zhang had staved her off for years, by sharing the hope that in time all obstacles to their marriage would be overcome. He used her as his mistress, sympathising with her problems, sharing with her the difficulties he faced with his family. But Zhang was growing older. He wanted to marry and have a son. The relationship had grown stagnant despite the sexual satisfaction. He could find another, a younger girl who suited his prospects; he could start again. He knew that he had no will to fight his parents, and each year Jin Juan sensed the hardening impasse.

On this ordinary evening, as they walked back along the moat as on a hundred other evenings, for no apparent reason, except that there had been nothing else between them but sex, and Zhang had been bored by the opera, and irked by the foreigner and Jin Juan's animated English, and that she had been a little more removed, for whatever reason, Zhang said words that could not be retracted.

‘We'll never be able to get married. Let's forget it.'

She did not reply at once. The reply was not worth the effort. At last she said feebly, ‘I'll talk to your mother.'

‘Forget it. No use. Let's call it quits.'

‘No!' Stopping, she addressed to his face loud savage words. ‘No, that's not possible. You promised. You'll carry it through.'

As she threatened him, he felt piteous and hostile. ‘I won't be ruled by you or anyone.'

‘Does your mother rule you?' she spat.

‘It's the end.'

‘It's certainly not the end. You're a seducer.'

‘Don't say that.'

‘I say it. It's the truth, that's why!'

She stamped the ground with her sharp heels as she walked quickly away from him. He did not follow. So it was as easy as that. He stopped again, lingering at the kebab stall. Jin Juan sat head erect and dry-eyed all the way home on the bus. In Chinese law to sleep with a woman on the promise of marriage and to break the promise was rape. The thought that for ten years she had been raped by young Zhang gave her a certain despicable satisfaction. Her fingers felt around her eyes for wrinkles. She was no longer young. Because of the years in the countryside she had aged fast. There would be no other man for her if Zhang got away. Whether he liked it or not she was his for life. On her beautiful face the strain showed not a flicker. Her tumultuous emotions were calmed by some lines from the earliest Chinese book of songs. Three thousand years ago, women had lamented:

I had hoped to grow old with you,

Now the thought of old age grieves my heart.

The Qi has its shores,

The Shi its banks;

How happy we were, our hair in tufts,

How fondly we talked and laughed,

How solemnly swore to be true!

I must think no more of the past;

The past is done with—

Better let it end like this!

6

Flattery did not come easily to Wally. He considered that to remark on another's virtue implied astonishment that such virtue could exist. Director Kang had no such scruples, however, and launched into fulsome praise of Wally's work in the College. Wally countered that he had not been giving his full attention to supervision in the lab because he had been working through the pile of the Director's papers given him by Mrs Gu.

‘Fascinating, remarkable stuff,' Wally declared. ‘You've been hiding your light under a bushel, Director.'

‘Oh no, that is not my recent work. Those were my salad days. A few speculations on the conjunction of Chinese and Western medicine. You see, Professor Doctor, I do not believe we can command Chinese medicine unless it is thoroughly integrated into the discipline of Western critical science. Our aim here—I speak broadly—is to root out superstition, to destroy false science, and to establish watertight findings compatible with the latest Western technology.'