Avenue of Eternal Peace (20 page)

The house of Hsu Chien Lung derived its distinction from the watery aspect. Through a gate in a crow-coloured wall was an austere entrance chamber that gave onto a stony courtyard where the greenery was strictly in tubs. The living quarters followed, a few spacious rooms with pearly light and black wood supports that failed to raise the roof high enough to overcome the dim, dank, suppressed sheen of an old Chinese interior. At the windows were creepers, and beyond the living quarters a garden, not large, but suggestively wild, of purple bamboos, potted prickly exotics, and a carpet of mosses and water grass, like some giant sponge, through which stepping stones picked a way. Wally was wary of treading too heavily on the stones. There was a black rectangular pond which was below ground level and marked by a stone-viewing parapet. Colours of olive, ruby, chocolate were suggested in the water, against basic black. Only three sides of the rectangular pond were visible. The water ran under the house, concealing a fourth edge, as if the house did not rest on solid ground but formed a kind of bridge, or cover, for the black water, making the rooms seem to float as in a houseboat. The water, without boundary or bottom or colour, became a mysterious image of nothingness.

Beside one corner of the pond grew a thick trunk that was greened with slime and lichen. The roots reached into black ooze, the branches separated above the sun line and ran across a trellis to become recognisable as tips of wisteria. Fronds had been trained around the exposed roof beams and twirled prettily about the window frames. The wisteria's arms prevented the house from floating away altogether. A leaf wafted pettishly from the eaves, a tiny golden feather to tickle the black skin below.

The honorific speech gestating in Wally's head had aborted in the bustle when Professor Hsu met them at the station. They rode in a three-wheel ‘rickshaw', Hsu joking that the visitor was sure to enjoy a reminder of old China. Wally wondered whether to speechify, wanting to be adequately respectful, but they travelled through the autumn evening in appreciative silence until they were jolted out of their seats beside a modest gate. With shrieks and cries two women came hurrying from the house to help with bags, shaking Jin Juan's hands and scolding the old professor for any oversight. Wally wondered if the histrionics were for his benefit. Hsu was grinning like a kid. He led the Doctor inside and made him sit but couldn't sit still himself for more than an instant before bobbing up on business. Jin Juan was making a bid to take over the arrangements from the two women. Wally stood up to stretch his legs and was immediately ushered by a hitherto-unseen fellow to a privy off a further courtyard. Such was the household.

Refreshments appeared when he returned: subtly American-style, pickles, peanuts, and, as an aperitif, Hsu explained, a small glass of the best Shaoxing yellow wine, which was ‘really rather like sherry. Cheers!' Wally remembered the sherry substitute from instructions in his
Chinese Cooking Simplified
book back home. He tilted his glass and at last began his speech. Once again Hsu overrode him with affable insistence: the visitor must make himself ‘feel right at home'.

The house and the living seemed shabby-genteel. The room where they were sitting suggested layer upon layer of experience, and lateral displacement. A cabinet was stuffed with books, including old medical classics that Wally recognised. He pointed to them as an opportunity to introduce professional matters into the conversation.

Hsu, as if mind-reading, forestalled. ‘How's the Red Sox doing?'

Wally imagined the lonely dedicated foreign PhD student Hsu had once been, whose strongest passion was reserved for the democratic game of baseball. Where Jin Juan's English was idiomatically perfect with a synthetic accent, her grandfather's was fractured, with a period flavour; his genial bass was an immigrant's voice laced with 1930s Boston demotic alongside the Harvard drawl, a voice used for speaking with one and all. Hsu's mannerliness extended to not making a display of the language. Jin Juan was more flashy. But the roll of the old man's voice was enough to summon up a warm, wise and wily parlour in Cambridge, Mass., where Hsu had once felt at home. It seemed to surround Wally now—so that he was as Hsu himself had once been, a foreign newcomer visiting the distinguished professor in his domestic setting. There was a subtle realigning of roles that suggested less the culmination of a quest than the beginnings of what both sides must hope would be a solid working relationship: master and student. There was all the time in the world, it seemed, or at least enough for important matters to be deferred.

So the first evening passed with pleasantry and potent yellow wine. Hsu got tipsy and relived each moment of a famous baseball game. He was a man in his eighties, agile, stooped, hair thin and downy, skin smooth and shiny. Only when he stretched the smooth pouch of flesh around his eyes were the myriad tiny wrinkles revealed. He wore modern, clear-plastic rimmed spectacles, and had good protruding teeth that were alternately bared in smiles or hidden behind pursed pensive lips. He was quietly jolly with no sense of urgency. Even when his deafness caused him to lose a remark, he glided on. At the end of the meal he leaped to his feet, seizing his walking stick, to adopt a baseball hero's batting stance. Like other sages before him, he inhabited a zone where accumulated knowledge yields delightfully (and with great relief) to childishness.

Yet against the merry chortling of the stream, there was a back current. What did Wally register? Was the old man's batting posture shaped by old rheumaticky pains? A shadowy cold element was just out of sight.

In the dewy morning, when Wally woke, the old man was outside doing his slow eloquent exercises in the black pyjamas of a prisoner or a monk. But when he passed the bed where Wally lay dozing, he seemed to be singing: ‘
Zippity-doo-dah
…' Over breakfast the old man's face was as delicate, as refreshed, as the skin of a plum.

The time would come, thought Wally—but the old man was reluctant. Was it a power play, an insistence on the rites? Very gentle, if so. In response to resistance, Wally's interest turned to Jin Juan, where there was more give.

Hsu took great pleasure, however, in recalling his Harvard days. Such was the face he readily turned outwards, the greater part of his life—in China—silently turned to the wall. He loved to tell over his old haunts, historical edifices and hamburger joints alike, and twinkled as Wally updated the memories with glimpses of the later Cambridge, Mass., that he had known.

Thus it was, at last, that Wally introduced into their nostalgic talk the subject of the papers Hsu had contributed to the
New England Journal of Medicine
. The two men were out walking. Hsu registered the mention and reverted to baseball. But on returning to the house Wally was able to riffle from his bag his copies of the articles. Exhibit One of good faith. He expected the sight of the old document to open a door.

Instead Hsu nodded with polite disinterest, and even a touch of annoyance. He cherished the memories he chose to preserve and did not wish to be reminded of his responsibility for the greater part of a past that he, not time, had wilfully sent to oblivion.

Wally pushed on with his explanation, since the articles were important to him, if not to Hsu. He told how he had wanted to invite the professor to Australia as visiting fellow in his department, how his letters were never satisfactorily answered, how that had brought him to China in person, how his own research interests had taken a direction which made him, years after, remember back to the day during his post-doc at Harvard that his boss Harvey Heilmann slapped down Hsu's papers.

The old man scarcely bothered with the details of Wally's narrative. He nodded nervously, in anticipation, as the story unfurled, until he pressed his head against the hard-backed chair, straightened his spine uncomfortably, closed his eyes and said: ‘He passed away, I believe.'

Wally didn't follow—then made the leap.

‘Yes, that's right. A great guy, Harvey.'

The old man opened his watery eyes and directed them unwaveringly at Wally. He began to speak, as if to inside, with no trace of levity, as if a skin had been peeled away.

‘We lost a lot after Liberation. They took my home. Later, more than once, I needed to retreat. I had no choice but to stick it out at the College in Beijing. I had my granddaughter with me until the Cultural Revolution, when we were separated, degraded. I was unable to work. My aim was only to survive, in order to retreat, to retire. I confessed my crimes. What's in a word? At last, at the end of the years of chaos, I was able to put Beijing behind me and return here to my old home. The house had been put to other uses, naturally, but I was able to insert myself in a corner. After the Gang of Four they began to restore property. I filed my claim with the authorities. I knew I must wait. One day the legal process was brought to an end. The old home was mine again. Later I found out it was Harvey Heilmann. He wrote letters. He asked they treat me fair. He was a big man. He wrote to the right person. I am lucky. Perhaps one in ten thousand had my luck. I am unworthy,' he shrugged. ‘No God to thank. I thank Harvey Heilmann. Thank you his long memory.'

‘That must have been just before he died.'

The old man nodded. He did not speak again. Wally had expected to bring surprise; he had not expected to be surprised himself.

The old man's life was a nimble and graceful kind of dance. He had a goldfinch in a cage that was his joy and around the clock he would exercise the bird, removing the cloth cover and swinging the cage as he pottered about the garden and walked out the gate and down the lane to a sunny corner where he could sit on a stone slab with the other old boys and compare the songs of the birds. How proud he was of his finch's lusty note. Or he would pay attention to his cactuses, and since it was autumn, tease out insects from the whorled buds of his potted chrysanthemums. He was a cheerful, active man whose various concerns ran like diverse currents in one stream. He easily rode from one to another. So while exercising his bird he might notice a shoot on the wisteria that needed snipping and, never forgetting, would return in due course with the knife. He knew even the habits of the carp in the black pond beneath the house: invisible except in the rarest light conditions, when their murky forms could be admired. He made no other contribution to their rearing. To admire was enough.

The book cabinet was never unlocked.

Jin Juan no more than Wally could sustain conversation with the old man, although their mutual accommodation and assistance in the household, and their ribbing small talk, suggested years of symbiotic closeness. But Jin Juan became a hard-edged modern Beijinger in this environment, rather than melting like an old-style Southerner. She folded her arms tight, turning a sharp nose towards the quaint old man in the mossy garden. The amahs shook their heads.

‘What's up, doc?' the old man would say whenever he passed Wally in the room.

One afternoon Wally went walking with Jin Juan, just the two of them, two of a kind, on the same wavelength of the world. Such was the transformation Hsu had wrought. All difference seemed to have vanished.

They walked by the white-banked canal under a canopy of plane trees. Each house along the way was open to reveal a table between two high-backed chairs beneath a gaudy poster of the Old Man Kitchen God, an improvised domestic shrine. From a passing boat men were fishing bamboo husks and other debris from the canal. On the lower steps women were pounding laundry.

They visited the town's centrepiece, the museum to commemorate Lu Hsun, China's great twentieth-century writer. Moving through the cavernous chambers, which were arranged according to the most orthodox Marxist-Maoist storyline, Wally was struck again by the despair in China's history, an evolution so slow and chancy as scarcely to deserve the name of progress, mutation rather, each wave of reform, enlightened, idealistic, suicidal, feeding straight back into the self-devouring maw of the organism. The museum showed touching photographs of the early advocates of democracy, a century ago, and later the martyred writers of
La Jeunesse
who had felt a new ardour heat their country; and in the last equivocating chambers the attempt made to establish an affinity that never existed between Lu Hsun and Mao Tse Tung's policy of art in harness to the revolution of the proletariat. It was a museum of sorry lies that made any real hope go soggy, Wally thought; yet had not Lu Hsun written ‘Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path—yet, as people are walking all the time in the same spot, a way appears'?

Afterwards they looked at the room where Lu Hsun slept, the room where Lu Hsun ate porridge, the vat where Lu Hsun pissed and, out the back, the acre of profuse weeds where he escaped from the discipline of school.

Revisiting the past placed Jin Juan and Wally more squarely together in the present.

‘You let me go running all over the country making a fool of myself,' he said. ‘Why didn't you trust me?'

‘I didn't know your motives. A foreigner arrives, a stranger; he is hell-bent on tracking down my grandfather. Just think. It was sheer chance that my friend Song was able to inform me of your intentions.'

‘Why has it taken you so long to tell? You didn't trust me, or you still don't?'

He no longer knew what his aims were or how things stood around him. Was there a further message behind Jin Juan's message?

‘Do you find my grandfather eccentric?'

‘He's unpredictable.'

‘He's had his ups and downs, but he's in pretty good shape all things considered. He's had a good innings, would you say?'

Wally laughed, throwing back his head and shoulders, his arms flying out with an Australian abandon, indifferent to Chinese niceties of space. His fingers brushed Jin Juan's skin and they found themselves sauntering down the canal hand in hand.