Avenue of Eternal Peace (16 page)

The visitor did not respond when Wally addressed her in English as Jin Juan. Quickly he grasped that she was Jin Juan's cousin, who must have come straight from a performance at the opera theatre: the imperial cucumber. To appear at his door so late in the evening was an act of temerity and high courage. Perhaps Jin Juan had encouraged her. She was a striking creature, maintaining her stage stylisation as she moved about his rooms, and responded to his remarks in a high-pitched voice, sparing with the information she revealed. Her long-term motives would emerge with time; now, she said, it was just a visit between friends. Wally re-tied the cord of his satin dressing gown low around his hips. Over tea they chatted in the same stilted, uncommunicative manner. Azalea she was called. Her long neck drooped, and lights seemed to be struck from her paint-framed eyes. He could smell her as she sat side-saddle on the couch beside him. His bare hairy legs were staked apart on the floor, and a knee contrived to touch hers. Azalea was as graceful, as refined, as could be, and her purpose was apparent. Had she by some mistake made her entrance into the wrong scene of the wrong opera? Certainly, he began convincing himself, he had been bewitched by her from the start. Nature abhors a vacuum, so Wally's emptiness had called and Azalea answered. What price would she exact? He wondered who might be watching. When he put his arm on her, she kept him at bay with the most extravagant gestures and wicked, delightful flashes of her eyes. Why not, thought Wally frankly, it's been a long time? And he hugged her to him, held her slender body against his in the empty space of the bed, grew rapturous at the feel of her skin, kissed the paint from her eyes. So much he had forgotten.

She went as secretively as she had come. In the morning the other side of the bed was empty.

NINE
Things Fall Apart

1

‘When life has no interest, dreams matter,' shouted the young man who was ten metres above the ground. He had shinned his way to the top of one of the ruined stone columns in the Old Summer Palace. His friends were picnicking below. Looking down, he feigned dizziness and swayed a little, as if he really might fall.

‘He's okay,' laughed Build-the-Country, tilting his chin towards the column.

‘How did he do it? One minute he was sitting here brooding over his beer, next minute he's up on that thing.'

Against the blazing blue sky, the young man's figure was distorted like a modernistic statue. His skinny arms flailed at peculiar angles in homage to the sun. Baggy cotton trousers, rolled to the knee, billowed in the breeze. Only his feet seemed firmly planted.

‘Put on your own heart!' he declaimed, and the groundlings cheered, recognising the line. The monkey-faced poet who had penned it threw a bread roll, and a volley of cans, apple cores and orange peel followed.

But climbing to heaven was one thing, getting back to stable earth quite another. There were no footholds on the worn fluted column. His friends were calling from below. He was drunk, they yelled, he should be careful.

A couple of the guys dragged out the large quilt on which they were sitting and held it up as a safety net. On top of the column the young man pushed back his glasses and scratched his head. Others joined in holding the edges of the coloured square taut.

‘I'm coming,' he shouted, took a breath—and jumped.

‘Ouch!' He bumped his arse and sprawled like a baby on the quilt, and laughed and laughed.

How easy it was!

What was his name?

The Philosopher Horse.

Huh? ‘Ma Zhe,' it was explained to Wally. ‘Meaning Horse Philosophical. He's an unemployed kid from the South. A thinker, a writer. Not bad, eh? He's got guts.'

Watching the animated rosy face of Philosopher Horse, with the bumfluff on his upper lip as he sipped another beer and straightened his wild black hair and frayed yellow t-shirt, Wally thought: a holy child.

The party grew more disorderly. The weather was warm, as evening came on. The grounds of the Old Summer Palace, chiefly given over to farming, were rich green, with figures in bright blue coats bobbing in the green as they pulled weeds or cut vetch. On paths crisscrossing the hillocks and mounds loitered lovers and solitaries. The willows' jade nipples were bursting and crepe myrtle was headily in flower. You could see clear across to the Western Hills, as lucent as candy sculpture.

The friends poked fun at one another as they lay about on the ground, picking over the last of the fruit and meat.

‘The Doctor likes Peking opera!' they pronounced in disbelief when attention turned to Wally.

They were students, unemployed, writers and artists. He was Build-the-Country's guest. Song and David had stayed home with their child, perhaps fearing the unruly company. Wally had heard that Jin Juan might be there, but she was not, and without her he lost his zest for the party. She had not been in touch with him, nor had her cousin since the curious visit. He had been to the opera on several occasions, and had even gone snooping around backstage during the daylight. But the company was not resident at the theatre in Goldfish Alley, and by the time he tracked them down to other theatres they had each time moved on. He was embarrassed to keep asking Song to deliver messages, but since it was on his mind, he had asked Build-the-Country how he might locate a Peking opera singer. He was behaving, perhaps, like a naughty old man. But that was not his real purpose. Somehow, for reasons he could not define, he was beginning to be aware of, to be compelled by, a set of parallels, or even connections, between his—desire, was that the word?—for the beautiful singer, for Jin Juan, and his quest for Hsu.

The curling baroque stones looked like the playthings of a giant child abandoned in the grass. On Jesuit advice, the pleasure palace of the Chien Lung Emperor had been filled with scaled-down replicas of the European architecture of the day. Removed from native soil, the eloquence of Rome was translated into swirling plastic pomposities of fantastic silliness. Yet, despoiled and desecrated, becoming ruins proper, the remaining fragments regained their dignity as the sorry traces of Europe's dream of the City of God on Earth, and China's dream of Europe as her illustrious vassal. The place had become the locus of a cult, where young Beijingers held meetings, or basked like lizards on the stones.

And Philosopher Horse guided them, scruffy southern kid that he was.

Jumbo was there with the artists, and Dulcia, who had brought Clarence along. Jumbo was in a sulk and went off with his friends to rowboats on the lake.

‘The shit's hit the fan,' Dulcia confessed to the Doctor. She was red around the eyes.

‘He's in a huff?'

‘Well, his passport still hasn't come through and they won't tell him anything. The Public Security Bureau is investigating him and the spies at the Friendship Hotel have been reporting. Every time he visits me they take down his details and ask what our relations are. I tell 'em I'm his English teacher. But they're playing it by the book and we're waiting for the knock on the door. It's really having a negative effect on my functions. They've been to Central TV. You know, Central TV was going to pay for him to study art design in the States. Now they turn around and say he can pay it himself. They don't trust him any more. Where's he gonna get that kind of money? He'll have to sell a lot of pictures.'

Wally commiserated. He knew the obstacles she was up against.

‘What pisses me is that I'm sure somewhere in his head he blames me for all this trouble, when I'm only trying to help. He's pretty arrogant. He believes he could do all this by himself—contacting schools in the States, getting references, preparing resumés; he believes he is doing it himself. Or he resents me if I take short cuts through the Embassy, as if I'm trying to trap'm. He thinks I'm a spy too. I've said to'm really honestly that I'm helping'm because we're friends and I don't
expect
anything in return. I'm not working the Chinese way. He says that he wants to go to America as a free man. He doesn't want to marry me for the sake of the passport. He says we can decide what we do when we get there, when we're equals. But they won't ever give him the passport unless we do get married. And there's the problem. I can't marry'm anyway till my divorce comes through. Jeezus! But the basic problem is that he doesn't trust me.'

‘Maybe you're expecting too much of him,' said Wally.

‘I'll be frank with you. The first few times Jumbo and I made out it wasn't a good experience. He really had no idea what was happening. He would just lie there being very gentle, but no good for a woman like me. I know Chinese men. You gotta get tough with 'em, tell 'em, show 'em, and they learn real quick. I gave Jumbo a copy of
The Joy of Sex
that I brought from the States. Things got really interesting after that. There are things the human body can do that don't exist in the Chinese language.

‘That was our honeymoon period. Then one day at my apartment at the Friendship he found the box under the bed. You see, I imported a whole shipment of
The Joy of Sex
and I give one to every Chinese guy who needs it. Jumbo counted how many were left from the original five dozen. And he turned on me! It's crazy. Well, we made up. Wow! But he doesn't trust me.'

‘Do you trust him?'

‘How can you? I like him. I don't ask about trust, whether he likes me for myself or for what I can get'm, you mean? If you want Chinese friends, you gotta understand that helping people is like the very heart of friendship. And that kind of friendship gives me power, which I kinda like.'

Wally smiled. Dulcia was a tribute to Sino-American relations. As she rolled on to her front, she concluded, ‘Right now I hope we both get out of this country before something ugly happens.'

The others returned through the trees, exhilarated from their larrikin rowing. They were lugging fresh supplies of beer to drink in the summer dusk. Jumbo's moodiness was gone. He pranced ahead of the troupe, his hair flying about like ruffled feathers, and flopped down in the woman's lap. A girl pulled out her guitar and sang a Chinese version of Simon and Garfunkel, and when it came to the chorus they sang and shouted and clapped and stamped under the trees. ‘
Lai-lai lai!
Come, Come, Come!
'

It was a rare opportunity for unabashed enjoyment, out of reach of surveillance. There was no need to talk politics. Their longings were shared with unspoken intensity and they drew strength from suffering together as far-seeing exiles in their own land.

When the singing and dancing died down, one of the poets, the youngest of them all, a boy with thick curled locks like a Persian lamb, with a black silk jacket over his black trousers, a Beardsley bohemian reincarnate in Beijing who drank like his hero Dylan Thomas, sprang up on a pediment and shouted out the language of his heart to a crescent moon that seemed to hang over his shoulder:

I am he who from this darling earth

chokes out poems

as if retching on bitter flowers,

the drunkard of springtime!

His admirers hooted and roared.

Towards midnight a girl said she felt like swimming. They found a deserted edge of the lake, pulled off their clothes and ran scrabbling and shoving into the chilly water, swimming towards the centre of the lake like so many glossy water rats. They cheered Wally for his hundred metres' Australian crawl. Then they scrambled back on shore and covered wet bodies with clothes that were still warm. It was Philosopher Horse who said that the time had come to scatter like clouds blown by the wind—but they must remember! They must remember the spirit of their gathering. They must remember their common cause, help and protect each other. He gazed around at his friends imploringly. He stared at the American, the Englishman and the Australian, who looked solemn and embarrassed. He pulled each of them by the hand into a firm huddle of fellowship. ‘Freedom!' he roared.

On bicycles, on foot, they fanned out from their picnic place. Jumbo and Dulcia picked a path through the fields to Jumbo's house. Build-the-Country and Philosopher Horse stumbled in their wake. Clarence was on his motorbike. He coughed, and winced from a pain in his gut. As he revved, he discreetly asked the Doctor if he could arrange to see him professionally.

‘Not now,' grinned Wally, who had miles to pedal before he slept.

2

Eagle had reached an agreement with Pearl. With the help of two more cartons of cigarettes, he had also reached an agreement with the coach. He started training with the squad and easily proved himself good enough to be in line for the national team. The coach then cleared the matter with the Party Secretary of the Sports Institute, and with Eagle's work unit, and only Eagle's ability stood between himself and his goal. Marriage was talked of again, and the furnished flat that Eagle and Pearl would move into, and with the flat squarely in view, Mother Lin could set her heart at ease fortunately, since her heart gave trouble.

Eagle trained energetically. He erred on the side of incaution and caused errors by taking too many risks, by not allowing his teammates time to prepare. Blunted by over familiarity, the other players welcomed the extra competitiveness Eagle brought, but were quick to criticise. When Pearl came to watch their practice matches, Eagle couldn't resist showing off and his teammates passed white-eyed glances. Eagle was one of the stars.

The formalities for his transfer from the state office to the Sports Institute had not been finalised, however, before he put in his most extraordinary performance in a match between two city districts. He seemed to harness all his power, working with his teammates, passing, connecting, in perfect synchronisation. By the start of the second half, the game looked sewn up, when the balance changed. The opposition turned bullish at the prospect of defeat and their play became angry. And in a subtle, unconscious manoeuvre Eagle's own teammates bonded together to block their own best player. Eagle was too busy, too tired and too high to notice. As things started going wrong, he tried hard to counter the adverse pressure. The opposition lured him into an outlandish sideways lunge. He leapt into the air after the ball. When he landed on one foot his balance was not quite right. It was his weak ankle. The weight of several of his teammates crashed down on him. Under the impact of his own motion and the momentum of his fellow-players, his knee gave way. He tumbled in ungainly motions of pain across the ground. When they tried to straighten him out, he screamed. The kneecap was smashed and the leg fractured below the knee.

Eagle was suspended from the squad with no compensation; and according to their agreement, Pearl had no choice but to call off the engagement. The new flat was lost.

Mother Lin was silent as she nursed her beloved son. The doctors applied their routine treatment to reunite the bone and patch up the knee. But she feared her son would pine away with shame. He would be laid up for many months. The sky had fallen and crushed him.

3

An overgrown Boy Scout was waiting for Wally when he arrived outside the Old Peking Observatory at the appointed time. With his crew cut, his flat cotton shoes, his loose nylon shirt and baggy Baden Powell trunks, Ralph stood in a sliver of shadow against the high grey wall. Black glasses concealed his expression, and a black plastic document holder was slipped under his arm.

‘G'day cobber. Fighting fit, eh? You're looking great, sport. Don't tell me this place agrees with you!'

The Observatory was flanked by a shaded courtyard garden where peonies bloomed. Ralph told how the Empress Wu, one of China's terrible ladies, had ordered all the flowers to bloom in winter as a tribute to her power. The helpless plum blossom, the fawning rose, the shameless dahlia, the resilient chrysanthemum complied. Only the peony refused, having a majesty above the Empress's, and was exiled to the faraway city of Luoyang. Admiring the large layered blooms, vermilion with gold coronets, Wally could see why the peony was made sovereign of Chinese flowers.