Avenue of Eternal Peace (14 page)

The kid stood up and bowed to Wally. He had to catch the last bus back to the students' dormitory. He said that on May Day he and his friends were having a picnic at the Old Summer Palace. His brother and sister-in-law were invited, and he hoped the Doctor would come too, with other foreign friends. Wally was courteous in reply, shook the kid's hand heartily, and asked him to repeat his name. He was called Build-the-Country.

David apologised afterwards for the loose talk that had flown. ‘It's all fun,' he said. ‘The kids like to shoot off, but in reality there's no commitment to their ideas. Life has been too easy for them. They're innocent of society.'

‘That's what us oldies always say.'

Song, playing with her daughter, had been happy to keep out of the argument. After ten hours in the lab, she longed to close her ears and eyes completely. ‘Lab again tomorrow,' she said coming from the bedroom. ‘At least our pigs can't give us their opinions. I prefer pigs to humans sometimes. Tomorrow Director Kang reports too. I wonder what news.'

Wally stretched himself from the cramped corner where he had been sitting all evening. He had not raised the question of Kang's work with Song yet.

‘Vila, Vienna, Vientiane,' came a singsong voice.

‘Oh that naughty child!' sighed Song.

‘Look, I'll be going. Thanks, David,' he called to the kitchen, and to Song on the landing he gabbled, ‘I hope to catch up with Jin Juan. Will you tell her? Do you think I could contact her through the cousin? Do you know where the cousin lives?' But Song was not much help.

When the foreigner was gone Song warned her husband that he would have to do something about his kid brother before they all got into trouble.

4

The concourse outside Beijing Station was quilted with bodies of peasants, long-exiled residents and those waiting for trains, forgotten kids drifting back from the countryside, criminals, innocents and weary bones bedding down together on the pavement. The boy was bleary-eyed after his cramped night in the smoky train. His hair was like a dried pat of buffalo dung, his eyes rubbed red. He ran his tongue over his furry upper lip and spat. He had travelled by horse-cart to the next village and by broken-down bus to the market town, through mountains of flinty stone and spurs of caked yellow dust where no trees grew, to the plain where water ran in channels, producing emerald rice crops and fat white ducks. He had a mute sensation of regret at leaving home. At New Year he had written to his sister in the city telling her that one day he would come. She didn't reply. She had married out of the village many years ago. Then he had gone to the father of the other boy from the village who had gone to Beijing. He had the address in his head, money in his pocket, and news to pass on.

He was eighteen, youngest of six brothers, a sturdy round-faced boy of medium height who had brown farmer's hands with stained yellow fingers and limbs that swung so freely that he seemed loose in the joints. He wore his best cotton jacket with a tear at the pocket and a cigarette burn on the sleeve. He carried only a bag of flat pancakes. His schooling had stopped when he was twelve. Their land was poor and the work unremitting. But as the youngest of the boys he was the least indispensable, and the expectation had grown up that he might perhaps take another road. He was often sent down to the market town to send produce or buy fertilisers and salt. He liked to stay and watch television in the street there, even if it meant he had to walk all night up the mountain track to get home. On television he saw one colourful event after another jump into a mysterious narrative chain, and weird-looking heroes and villains, green, orange and crystalline blue who waged glorious battle and danced some cosmic dance that re-created for the boy in magical form the legends that had surrounded his village and his people, in sky and earth and water, for generations. None of these visions had been uppermost, however, when he lay down to sleep the previous evening, uncertain whether he would go or not. But when the rooster crowed and he opened his eyes, the dawn air laden with the damp smell of mud walls nipped him into action. He clambered quickly from his place between his sleeping brothers. He sat on the great clay urn out the back beside the pigs. He splashed his face with icy water from the bucket. Through razor mountain peaks a tender light was pushing towards the little human settlement, offering a protective bond between his home and the faraway world so pink and promising. His belly stirred hungrily, but there was no time to eat. He laced up his canvas shoes, buttoned his jacket to the neck, called into the dark that he was going. His father echoed the words gruffly. Only the dog, whining and leaping in the street, shared the adventure.

Arriving in Beijing, he stared at the many cars and people; he had never seen traffic lights or tall buildings or cranes, and he felt tall himself as he walked. He kept expecting to turn a corner and have the city end. But the streets went on, until he stopped noticing single things. He was going to the No. 3 Vehicle Plant on the West Third Ring Road and assumed that he would arrive at his destination automatically. In the countryside he never had to ask or be told where things were. He walked for several hours before it dawned on him that he had not got anywhere. A bristling peasant instinct made him steer away from asking directions, and when he did speak, his heavily accented language was more demand than question. At last, disconsolate, he found a dumpling shop and spent the remains of his money filling up on dumplings that were of thinner dough and more expensive than at home. The girl who took the money had a patient attitude. The West Third Ring Road she knew: go west, turn north. She came to the shop door to point him on the way, explaining about buses. But when he reached the bus stop, he just kept on walking, and when the bus route finished, he sat down on a step feeling that the city was stuck to his body like tar and feathers. He had one coin left. He crossed to the old woman on the corner who pulled an iceblock from her canvas box and said as always, ‘Go straight ahead.' Where it was she had no notion, and as the country bumpkin headed west, she toddled back inside the limits of her world.

Night fell, and the wind picked up, rasping the city with sand off the Gobi desert. At evening rush hour the streets milled with people whose heads were bagged and masked against the wind. Then the streets emptied again. His stomach growling, his head aching, he screwed up his gritty eyes and placed one foot before the other with no thought of where. Faces were closed as firmly as shopfronts and courtyard walls to shut out the sandpaper wind. He had no knack of eliciting sympathy and walked doggedly forward, slower and more aimless, with an empty grin on his mouth, until he found a bare patch of trees and earth with an edifice in the corner, an open door to a large unlit bog. He squatted inside out of the wind, ignoring the stench, and wondered if there was a clean dry spot where he could curl up to sleep.

His eyelids were drooping when a man came in. The man humped his shoulders away from the draught to light up his smoke, coughed painfully, a tall figure in greatcoat and cap astride one of the trenches. The smell of smoke suggested pleasure. From his squatting position the boy asked whether the man knew the West Third Ring Road.

The man peered down into the dark. ‘What?'

‘The West Third Ring Road.'

‘I know it. Go west.'

He swept the coat around him and was already striding towards the door when the boy came up behind him and asked for a cigarette. Without a word one was offered. The boy grabbed it in the darkness. The match flared up and he concentrated on lighting the cigarette. Only when he leaned back with a grateful smile as the match burned out did he meet the foreigner's face.

In other circumstances there might have been panic. But here a relationship had been initiated and they were brothers before they were Chinaman and Devil. The boy followed the man outside in order to see clearly the pale funny-shaped face, like a kind of horse. Clarence was equally struck by the face of the boy. He had expected another scrounging late-night Beijing prowler. The ruddy face in the match flame was a dirty cherub's. But he had learned to be suspicious. He repeated the directions and turned to go. The boy came after him.

‘No, no,' said Clarence. ‘That way is west.'

But the boy continued to walk beside him. Clarence coughed convulsively. The wind burned his throat. He could tell from the accent that the boy was from out of town, but there was something else. He did not bombard Clarence with the usual questions he encountered on his camera-less nocturnal rambles, and saved Clarence telling lies.

‘Are you cold?'

‘No, no!' The boy was shuddering. Clarence suddenly pulled off his greatcoat and draped it over the boy's shoulders, and a spirited tussle broke out, the boy refusing, flailing about, pushing Clarence away, throwing off the unwanted garment, and Clarence insisting, smiling, wrapping the coat round the boy's body and holding him squirming—until polite refusal was enough and the boy slipped his arms into the engulfing coat. Clarence was cold, but didn't care.

The boy's story emerged through the Shandong burr. He had no possessions and no money and had spent his first day in Beijing looking for the place where his friend lived. The only information he had to save himself was the name of the No. 3 Vehicle Plant on the West Third Ring Road. Clarence took the boy inside a late-night noodle shop where he emptied two bowls of noodles in ravenous slurps. The old proprietor was bemused at the partnership and reduced the size of the portion. The only other customers, two slick youths, made exaggerated compliments on Clarence's Chinese, to which he replied: ‘Don't pull my leg.' And the boy jumped up, angrily, offering his fists.

There was a cheap inn behind the noodle shop, where the night porter made difficulties.

‘The rules, the rules,' he muttered as he shut the smooth-talking foreigner and the moron yokel out into the night. He had lost the place in his
kungfu
novel.

The wind sliced into Clarence's chest. The boy squeezed his hand, kissing it sometimes like a puppy. When a lone taxi appeared, Clarence ran into the middle of the road and waved his arms. Seeing the pale face, the taxi stopped, and for a price agreed to take them to where the No. 3 Vehicle Plant was supposed to be.

They were dumped in an area like a ghostly airfield with the odd red flower of a light drooping above; low brick hovels, stretches of rubble, ditches, abandoned construction projects, iron fences, concrete walls, high iron gates labelled with names—and not a soul. A soft bundle turned out to be a sleeping guard who curtly said go west—a hundred metres.

The boy padded off.

‘Hey,' said Clarence, ‘that's east.'

‘West,' said the boy.

‘East!' said Clarence.

They stopped in the dead centre of the broad road, and the wind drove through their bodies as if they were shreds of rag caught on a wire.

Clarence spoke firmly. ‘That is north.'

The boy echoed agreement.

‘That is south.'

Nods.

‘Then that is east, and this is west.'

The boy granted north and south. He would not grant east and west.

Clarence imposed his will and they marched west by the compass to an obscure opening in the barrier behind which was a yard of puddles, mounds, shards surrounded on three sides by barracks. The boy shouted the name of his friend from the village. A bony figure in long johns came to the door and pissed voluminously on the step. The boy called and called. They tried another door. In a room of a few square metres a dim bulb revealed perhaps twenty-five tousle-haired grey-faced snoring snuffling bodies side by side, head to toe, toe to head, pressed against each other in their greatcoats on a wide platform where there was no room to lie flat. On shelves round the walls, on every hook, in every cranny, were their meagre towels and bags. The boy peered at each sleeping face in search of his friend. An eye opened to meet their investigations. They were all Shandong peasants come to work at the plant—but the friend was not there.

Clarence and the boy conferred outside. The boy was confident he would find his friend in the morning, and that his friend would get him a job shovelling coal at the plant for one yuan a day, which was why he had come to the city.

‘I don't know your name,' said Clarence. ‘What's your name?'

‘Autumn,' said the boy. ‘I was born in the autumn.'

Then Clarence broke with his usual practice and wrote down a telephone number. He told the boy to hang up if anyone else answered, but to keep trying, if he needed help. Clarence left the boy with his greatcoat and some money in the pocket, and started his own long coughing journey home. The boy yawned. He lay down on a ledge of the platform of bodies, squeezing against the outside man. Gradually the pressure of one more body was taken up by the others. Each adjusted his position a fraction, and by morning the boy was sleeping just like the others, a sardine, but one whose heart glowed with his adventure, and the telephone number on a scrap of paper in his innermost pocket.

5

It started when the winder in Wally's camera jammed; in trying to fix it he wiped out thirty-six memorable moments. He couldn't remember them anyway. A few days later he lost his address book. Deliberately? Ties were severed. Letters remained unwritten. He stopped bothering to listen to the World Service or read
Newsweek
. The world was slipping away. Whose fault? Was all-mothering China drawing him into its soma? Grey on grey. Or was withdrawal his own expression of the state his existence had reached? His work ceased to be in earnest. The days went by and nothing was asked of him. Whether he exercised among the blooming magnolias in the park or stayed sedentary, whether he drank scotch or sipped tea, made no difference. He slept for eight or ten hours at a stretch, his sleep weighted with accidie. His bones ached from too much sleep. Friends, acquaintances, the mystery of China—what nonsense!—all were forgotten in his submersion in the strangling web of sleep. And his dreams were drab, as if the power had been cut.