Avenue of Eternal Peace (17 page)

They sat on a stone bench in a drooping arbour and Ralph began his report.

On perusing Director Kang's writings in English and Chinese, and reading through Professor Hsu's early papers from the
New England Journal of Medicine
and the manuscript pages from the archives of the Traditional Medicine Academy, he had been struck by similarities. A more systematic study, with attention paid to the probable dates of composition and publication, led to the inescapable conclusion that the larger part of Director Kang's work was lifted from Professor Hsu's.

‘All the good bits in Kang come straight from Hsu. It's a blatant act of plagiarism committed not just once but carried on methodically over many years. In those cases where Hsu's original also exists it's crystal clear that what is not Hsu is rubbish, either Kang's own padding or lifted from another ill-chosen source. Where there's no Hsu original one can only guess that the good stuff comes from papers of Hsu's which are missing. To my mind, there's not a shred of doubt that Kang is a fraud and a crook. The only thing that can be said in his favour is that he recognised the value of what he was lifting. Even that may not be to his credit, since he might merely have been reacting to other people's acclaim of Hsu's work—probably other professors from abroad many many years ago.'

The surmises Ralph presented made sense of the cool reception that Wally's quest for Professor Hsu had received from Director Kang and Mrs Gu. But Wally displayed a scholarly reluctance to jump to conclusions. He said that acts of plagiarism were often hard to distinguish from similarities in work emerging from different people within the same lab or institution. And he understood that originality and plagiarism may not have the same meaning in China as outside.

Ralph countered that the lifting in some cases was total—character by character—and carried out too pervasively over too many documents to be a case of influence, reciprocal or otherwise. It was possible, however, that Hsu, by reason of some political taint, might not have been allowed to publish his research findings and that Kang in a nice piece of sidestepping was putting out the work under his own name for the greater glory of the Medical College and the motherland. But this in itself made something of a mockery of the College's pretences to be engaging in experimental science and seeking verifiable or falsifiable conclusions according to international procedures and standards. Worse, the fact remained that Kang was swanning round the world receiving accolades under false pretences, when the political problem, if there had been one, had surely ceased to apply—and meanwhile Professor Hsu had disappeared without trace. The more likely explanation was that Director Kang had engineered Professor Hsu's removal once he had his hands on enough material to ensure his own rise.

‘The bastard.'

Then Ralph presented another bit of news. Dear old Emeritus Professor Wu at the Traditional Medicine Academy had let slip that, as far as she had been able to find out, Professor Hsu was alive and well and living in retirement in the South. He had gone back to his old home.

The two men strolled together through the courtyard of peonies and up the stairs to the roof of the cube-shaped building where astronomical instruments were on display. The instruments provided an elegant frame for photographs of the new Academy of Social Sciences across the way, on the site where once the imperial examinations had been held. The beautiful, enigmatic objects had been presented to the Ching Emperor by scientifically minded Jesuits who hoped to exchange their knowledge for religious conversion. In the end the Chinese had taken neither form of enslavement, but later devised their own, also in the name of deliverance, and now were once again seeking knowledge as the way out of economic disablement. The instruments had been looted and sent back to Europe during the Boxer Rebellion, then returned to China under the Treaty of Versailles. Under a brilliant blue sky they stood as a rusted cat's cradle of irony.

‘We've stumbled on to something big,' said Wally. ‘It's a major academic crime.'

‘It's news to us, but not in the inner circles of the Chinese medical world, I bet.'

‘You mean they condone it?'

‘I mean they conveniently don't know about it and wouldn't thank you if you rubbed their noses in it. They'd have difficulty feigning surprise for a start.'

‘Kang should be hounded for this. Hsu deserves justice.' For Wally, as a medical scientist, the very possibility of knowledge rested on the most scrupulous adherence to the principles of intellectual honesty.

‘Whoah boy, before you start breathing fire you need to think carefully. First put all ideas of sweet revenge right out of your mind. Revenge is pretty well impossible for us in China, because the Chinese simply don't allow us to feel the emotional satisfactions we need to make revenge work. That's why in the past a lot of Westerners have just gone crazy and beaten the shit out of them. Kang is morally untouchable. You can't shame him. If he can be brought to feel shame, which is unlikely, it will only be by that inner grouping of his own people to which he feels accountable. You're nothing to him. Your only satisfaction can be in discovering what this information, assuming it's true, is worth to you—how you can play it to maximum advantage. Its value can massively increase if it's held back for the right opportunity, like a card placed nicely in a game. That's China I'm afraid. The joy of revenge has to give way to the cooler pleasure of a deal well made. Are you with me?'

‘You're saying we should sit on this information?'

‘Only till we know where we are.'

‘I'd still like to get Professor Hsu back from the beyond. More than ever now.'

4

Jin Juan was still in Beijing, finishing up her teaching for the summer. She stayed in her dormitory. It was prudent, for the sake of her grandfather, to continue to give the honourably inquisitive foreigner a wide berth. She could observe him satisfactorily from a distance through her friend Song's reports. She had, in any case, a more immediate matter to deal with.

She wrote to Zhang that there was something she needed to discuss, concerning him, and stipulated a time and a meeting place. He didn't show up. A few days later his letter came explaining that he had been called away on business but that he would be available if she so desired. She wrote again making the place the edge of the lake north of the Forbidden City where they had met as young lovers, the time a summer afternoon when the pleasure boats jostled. She saw no reason to spare him.

Zhang looked officious. ‘How have you been?'

‘Not very well,' she said. ‘Busy with examinations.'

He was contemptuous, not of her diligence but of her arrogant expectation of something better.

‘What's up?'

‘I've been unwell, for a woman's reason that perhaps you understand.'

‘Hmh.' It took him a moment to realise she was talking matter-of-factly, not sentimentally.

‘Do you understand? It's already two months.'

He sat rigidly.

She continued with sudden self-pity, ‘We've been separated two months and now this.'

‘It's very convenient,' he commented sarcastically. ‘It never happened before.'

Not that she would have told him about, she thought savagely to herself, then said, ‘I must have had foresight. It's a coincidence.'

‘I suppose you want my help,' he replied, staring away. Half the boats seemed to hold fathers with their babies. ‘I can arrange for it to be taken care of for you. No problem.'

He turned to face her, using the act of taking her hand as a pretext to press her belly. He felt full himself, a sensation of distinct pride. ‘After all these years,' he said, grinning at her.

Her narrow eyes bore an expression of dependence stiffened by dignity. He could not fault her. She would not ask directly for the thing she wanted, and now he could not break away from her into indifference.

He laughed bitterly, out loud. ‘We'll need to consider the situation,' he announced, as at a committee meeting. ‘Examine.' He squeezed her hand desirously. ‘First you must have an ultrasound test. If it's a boy—'

The shouts and laughter of kids in the pleasure boats joined the slapping wavelets, the cicadas and the whispering leaves.

‘Sooner rather than later,' she said at parting. ‘I can't wait too long.'

5

Along the canal fishing rods stuck up from the bank. The road ran due north through a sun-slashed avenue of trees. On the back of the bike Autumn hugged Clarence's waist as they flashed between farmland and factories. On small peaks were lookout towers and tiled pavilions that shone like honey. At a certain point Clarence ducked his head and they passed the military sign that said in Chinese, Russian and English:
Foreigners Forbidden to Enter
.

The road led through orchards towards the hills, and the plain, as they left it behind, became a chequerboard of water mirrors and green rectangles, with an earth station protruding like a mushroom. Clarence turned his imagination to the romance of foothills and mountains. For centuries temples had been built, one rivalling another, to oblige wanderers on those magical, not-so-rugged slopes. Most were dilapidated, ambiguously protected by their irrelevance to the present; the Forestry Institute's negligence had allowed one wing of the most ancient Buddhist temple to burn down.

‘Shoo! Shoo!' said the guard. A person-in-charge waddled over. ‘Go back!' He did not say where.

A track wound down from the monastery across a rivulet to a set of lower courtyards where a mighty eunuch had once presided. It was now part of a rivet factory. The entrance to the main hall was colourfully decorated with characters, urns, tiles and little ceramic gargoyles. Bells on the topknot of a stupa tinkled in the wind, weeds sprouted through the damp flagstones, and to recline there in the shade was delicious. Behind an embankment ran the railway line to Beijing. Where the geomantic setting was most auspicious, along the hills' line of jewels, progress had dictated the fire chariot.

Halfway up a hill of dwarfed, pruned trees, across the railway track, beside a revolutionary coal yard manned by two indifferent guards, they found the flight of stone steps that led steeply up to the Tomb of Prince Chun. They climbed until they reached a landing with a small temple, crossed a stone bridge and climbed again to the terrace where stood a mortar and brick plinth that looked like a filled-in water tank. When he was regent uncle to the last boy Emperor, Prince Chun had lavishly ordained his own funerary mound—but not a century had passed and the tomb was derelict and disregarded even by scholars. Only the conifers and gingkos tattled over the pile of rubble.

A woman in a blue cotton smock herded white goats through the golden grass. Into a niche of the terrace wall leaned a courting couple. Graffiti were scratched in the clear spaces, and a pink Maoist slogan had not yet faded from the tomb itself. Bits of green-glazed dragon tiles were scattered on the ground where Clarence and Autumn spread their greatcoats. Clarence uncorked the wine and Autumn spread out food from the panniers. They lay beside each other in a sunny patch. Over their heads birds circled like gliders in the mountain breezes. A little drunk, a little sleepy, Autumn smoked a cigarette. He had come to enjoy his Saturday outings with his English friend. His drooping eyelids showed the line of soot he had not quite cleaned off. Most of the day he shovelled coal into the boiler at the No. 3 Vehicle Plant. No matter how thoroughly he washed in the bathhouse, the ingrained coal dust never came away. He rolled his jeans up to the knee, his t-shirt to his nipples. Black curls spread out from his head, like snakes running into the grass, as he sprawled on his back. One of his first city novelties had been to get his hair waved.

Clarence never slept after lunch. He sipped his wine, coughing occasionally the cough he could never get rid of, and took out the pre-Liberation tome that was his chosen guidebook. Alone with the remains of Prince Chun, his sleeping friend and the susurrating pines, he read aloud the mannered periods:

It is pleasant to look at the brocade of autumn tints from the pretty pavilions on the hillside, to linger near the pond where tame goldfish rise to the surface to be fed at the sound of a wooden rattle, to gossip with lonely old men who have cut themselves off from family life by the nature of their calling, but who served Empresses and princesses and remember many things … The old regime may have had its sins both of omission and commission, but it certainly cultivated refined tastes. Alas, these Manchu grandees so typical of the faults and virtues of the past—have nothing to offer the new world except a wonderful but unwanted elegance of living which still permits them to accept with calm dignity the fate of failures.

As the afternoon wore on, the sun exposed golds and greens on the slope above the tomb. On a rocky hill face a spring issued from a clump of boulders, and around its waters were gathered stone tablets invoking the virtues of dastardly Prince Chun. On one stone Clarence picked out the Buddhist injunction to cleanse one's heart.

They clambered higher, among thorny flowering gorse, stunted pines that clawed for position in the soil, and slender oaks with great clappers of leaves. Birds and insects, a rare sight, leapt among the branches, not just sparrows but tuxedoed Chinese magpies and butterflies and hornets. There was no one about, which was even rarer. They climbed above the tree line to a burrow in the earth where a fort was overgrown. Power and communications lines sagged and spun overhead. The different layers of agriculture were evident up the slope, from cabbages at the foot through fruit trees to hardy pines for timber, before the mountain became a forbidding rocky challenge that the peasants shunned. Clarence and Autumn continued to climb, on animal tracks, up the windswept spur.

The peak was elusive. Higher and higher they climbed, until the wood around the tomb of Prince Chun looked like a tame courtyard garden. They met no other person. The path gave out and they were forced to crawl up rock ladders on hand and foot. At last they reached the highest point. Beyond was a slight dip, then another rise, and beyond that the same again. In corners of rock, snow sat white and hard. They found remnants of what looked like hideouts or guard posts, where sensitive souls had escaped the grind of reform-through-labour during the Cultural Revolution, or landlords fled the Communists, or republicans the Manchu Emperor. Or earlier, much earlier, had boy soldiers been sent to keep perpetual vigilance against the hordes from the North, Manchus, Mongols, or anything from outside? Men who spent a lifetime watching, or turned their backs on duty to light a cigarette and huddle to the warmth of fire and companionship inside a rude hut, unprepared when the wolf at last came down?