Avenue of Eternal Peace (21 page)

5

That night he sat up late with Hsu. Jin Juan had gone to sleep early, but the old man was alert and quietly talkative. Hours passed, over the steady sipping of diminutive glasses of yellow wine, and their laconic exchanges settled into serious conversation. The Doctor was cast in the role of disciple, and at first did not press or question, except when a tentative spur was required to nudge the conversation along. Hsu sat remarkably straight-backed, not stiff, throughout, his hands moving minimally between table and armrest, his pale face screwed up so his eyes disappeared into wrinkled flesh. His glasses had been removed; Wally suspected he saw nothing, heard only his foreign interlocutor's voice. The room, in any case, was virtually dark.

Wally too was sleepy from the wine and from the exertions of the day; well-being smoothed away the nervous necessity to communicate and made things easier. Hsu talked at length of Chinese herbal medicine, and the high rare skill involved in its successful application—a dying art that had become commonly nine parts quackery and guesswork. It was often said, he smiled, that herbal medicine worked, although no one knew why. In reality, the practice was no less obscure than the theory. Most who claimed extraordinary success in its application were liars. ‘I do not accuse. They are not deceivers, merely self-deceived.' But there were recorded cases where the prolonged application of herbal medicine by a master coincided with remarkable cures—cures brought about by faith or accident perhaps, though in Hsu's analysis (the investigation of such cases in relation to cancers had been the foundation of his work) the connection was causal.

He spoke of a certain wizard who had operated from the mountains beyond Shaoxing before Liberation. The man was feared and revered, and carried forward the traditional techniques wrought to a high pitch. He was a kind of male witch, a witchdoctor or shaman whose medicine was inseparable from meditation, manipulation, breathing techniques and the wilder, anarchic fringes of popular Daoism. As a young man Hsu had witnessed some of the famous cures. There was no doubting the shaman's effectiveness, and from Hsu's materialist viewpoint he became convinced that the application of rare, complicated medicines was the key. That had led him into further case studies and analyses. He was puzzled that the chemical synthesising of organic Chinese medicines failed to produce substances of comparable effectiveness. He was no Luddite or naturopath; maybe the technique was deficient; but it was clear that artificial materials failed to behave; hence failed to provide the results needed for further research.

The tragedy, he said, was that, after Liberation, Chinese medicine and Western medicine were severed from each other. What passed for Chinese medicine, though allegedly the great pride of the people, became an ignorant travesty; and what passed for Western medicine was often crude and behind the times, an application of technique without understanding. That had led to the present-day ‘reconciliation', where, for instance—he gave a bucktoothed grin—the common cold would be blindly treated with a huge shot of penicillin in the bum and a sack of dirty dandelion roots to be consumed as gallons of bitter tea!

His complaints were not against medicine in China. In many areas skill and progress were great; it was the larger failure, of the creative vision required to understand the wisdom that already was there in the culture and the people, that grieved Hsu. For however terrible China's history, however riddled with folly, one thing remained certain: the common people had powerful resources.

Wally asked at what level of abstraction or practice the Eastern and Western traditions might meet. He explained that Hsu's work in the States, which had seemed to keep its distance from the conventional research of the day, had curiously anticipated the directions that Western oncology had latterly taken.

Hsu became philosophical. East and West meet where they merge, he said, where they can no longer be separated. They meet on the common ground, he said, where all doctors meet, in the impossibility of their task. He yawned, rubbing his invisible eyes.

‘You have been reading Director Kang's papers?'

Wally laughed. ‘They contain some excellent passages.'

Hsu returned the laugh. ‘Indeed they do.'

‘Then you have known?'

‘We know about Kang. But it was clever of you to discover.' Wally's pride in his and Ralph the Rhino's cleverness for a moment made him forget the crime, to which he now adverted with a vengeance. ‘You must be very angry.'

‘Oh? I have not anger for everything. The Director's publications list is, after all, quite a civilised form of contempt. You might say it shows respect. In any case I am grateful that my work has had an outlet. That might not have been so otherwise.'

‘You don't consider intellectual dishonesty a crime—as brazen as Kang's?'

‘Before, no. But now you have given it a new name, now that you have discovered, then it becomes something. A minor international incident, perhaps. That brings no pleasure to me, however, unless of course the information can be used to help someone very dear to me—?'

‘Jin Juan?'

The old man nodded.

After due pause, Wally returned to the question of whether Hsu felt cheated, whether at the end of his life he did not have a desire for his finest achievements to go down to posterity.

From the darkness came the old man's lucid voice. He had closed his books, locked up his cabinet of active ideas, research, exploration, invention. Those manifestations of the intellectual life had been discarded like an old skin. Maybe he had indeed been re-educated by swilling the latrines. Or maybe he had become that bane of old China, the empty Daoist boat floating on a sea of non-being. But he was joking. It was simply that, as he had been saying, the body had come to his rescue. Frail, brittle old man's body in need of warmth, empty of passion, it was nonetheless his friend, making him forget the intellectual struggles of his life. Happily, the old thing stopped him from achieving. That reconciled him to a doctor's failure; it was common; and now he cared not one way or the other whose name was attached to writings that pitifully scraped away at the laws of death.

His advice was simple: ‘Forget it.'

‘Do you not care that your work may be of value to others?'

‘If the work is true, others will discover it for themselves.'

‘Do you not allow for a quantum leap of understanding?'

‘I tell you something, son. You say that I, not Kang, was the creator of that work. I tell you. I am not the creator. I too am a thief, a plagiarist, as you say. I was told about the shaman of Heaven's Terrace by a young woman with whom I worked in Ningbo Hospital as a student long ago. She had grown up in an area where the shaman operated. A young woman with Western education, she was sceptical but impressed. It was she who had the idea of recording the cases. It was she who wrote the first papers. When, later, I had the opportunity to go abroad to study, and she, being a woman, had not this opportunity, she told me I must take her work and develop it. Of course under her inspiration I too became interested, and for several years together we collected material for our case studies. I was in love with her, you see, and before I left for the States she became my wife. You are surprised? Those famous papers you mention are the result of my wife's work, based on her drafts, which I was able to re-express in the light of new attitudes I was learning at Harvard. It was for her sake that I returned to China. She had become very idealistic. She believed I should return and work for my country. It was she who brought up our two little daughters, while I was in the States. She was a reformer, a moderniser, with her feet on the ground. But in our two daughters something of the old refinement came back, the hankering for the old culture. My wife had great faith, in me and in our country's future, but that could not protect her finally. My work took me to the capital when I returned to China. She stayed in the provincial hospital. Later she was made to answer for many crimes, most bitterly when she was accused of being unpatriotic for carrying out birth-control programs in the region. I was unable to help her. Who was to predict those years? We were blind perhaps. We had not the imagination to foresee that my granddaughter would be all that was left me of my family. I have no imagination now either. At last the lack of imagination is a blessing.'

His voice cracked and he shuffled to his feet. He turned the dim lamp to an angle that illuminated a woman's photograph on the wall; large, black-and-white, grainy, indistinct. He chortled. ‘Who is the source? Chicago gives Kang a medal for ideas he lifts from me. My ideas cannot exist without my wife. But she records the doings of a shaman. So perhaps he is the source. But he is just a mountain man, one of the masses.'

The face in the photograph was like a mask, yet those woman's eyes with their patiently unveiling insights were what Wally would see in future when he read the dog-eared pages from the
New England Journal
.

‘Pei, my wife,' said the old man, who belched, ready for sleep.

‘Wait a minute,' said Wally. ‘Can't we talk a little more?'

‘I'm tired,' said Hsu.

‘You said your wife came from Heaven's Terrace, near Taizhou.'

‘You know it? It's not far from here.'

‘When was that? Were there foreigners there?'

‘Oh, it's certain that there were foreigners, all through the province.'

‘Did you know my own father was born in Hangzhou?'

The old man raised his eyebrows. The visitor did not seem to have Chinese blood.

‘Sit down, let me tell you the story.' And the old man quietly sat again, the perfect host, to listen to another variant of the story he had heard so often, in the States and in China, of a family connection, all but random, that exerted its indirect tyrannical power to bring the younger generation back. It seemed less a question of individuals than a gravitational force, and Hsu failed to share Wally's boyish excitement in the story. He commented only ‘It's possible, it's possible,' when Wally drew the lines of coincidence in tight.

‘Don't go to bed,' pleaded Wally. ‘I want to ask you about the targeting of the treatments. Take the liver, for example. Do you treat the tumour there, or other malfunctions?'

‘Please—' the old man bent to Wally laying a hand on his shoulder, ‘—let me sleep. It's not important. It can wait, can't it?'

It could wait, thought the old man, for other people in another time and place.

6

Wally tossed and turned in broken sleep, and before first light he was up. He pulled out the diary from his luggage and sat outside rereading the last pages in search of clues.

It's the season of the river frogs. Peg insisted on an excursion. Lionel and Jerry were suitably decked out in galoshes and I carried nets. What a lark! We followed the river to a shallow lagoon and there in the rushes the frogs hopped into our hands. The boys were very merry, and very mucky. Waldemar would have feared for our sanity more than our health. What a treat we gave the peasants, most especially when Lionel, a budding linguist, cried out ‘Such fun!' in their own dialect. My boys looked like frogs and as I could not help fearing that the peasant men might have thought them fit to eat, so I can understand the terrible imaginings they have of our intentions towards their babies. One fancies witches and wizards all round. Peg led the expedition home, Jerry on her shoulders and a bucket of frogs heavy in her proud hand. She showed me how to cook them, in brown sauce; W. thought they were pieces of fowl. I smirked at his grace: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.'

W. is perturbed. Peg also is perturbed and relays the news that the whole town is agitated. Seemingly the rains have not only brought the frogs but also a faith healer who has come down from the mountain and inspires great respect in the people. For some days Peg has been distracted, then she confesses that she has been chided by a matron of Patriarch Lu's clan acting under the instructions of this witchdoctor. She has not sufficiently reverenced her mother. The healer demands to know why he was not called to save the woman. Peg, who has been sceptical herself, urges me not to scoff. The man has knowledge, she says, mixed with power. Peg is edgy. W. is edgy, noting a falling off in the usual line of patients and petitioners. I long to see the fellow, alas the chance is denied me.

We hear that a tug-of-war has taken place between the Magistrate and the Patriarch, with victory to the latter. The healer has moved into the clan house. Lu has declared himself afflicted with one of those Chinese illnesses that have no symptoms and in no way impair the faculties but nevertheless demand cure. Peg says it's a problem of balances. He's certainly obese. It's an old man's malady, she explains patiently, to do with
yang
, the masculine force, and requires the gruesomely appropriate application of snakes, bear's paws and the unmentionable part of a bull. More important, says Peg, are the healer's investigations of the surroundings through the methods of geomancy. He has sworn success. Peg does not distinguish between the Patriarch's physical condition and the state of his war with the Magistrate. Both she describes as manifestations of ‘force'. I cannot wean her from these notions. How she snuggles to me as we talk our nonsense.

I wake to a world washed of colour and feeling. Waldemar administered laudanum. I was overwrought with fatigue, having wept and not slept, and having shouted I know not what terrible accusations at Waldemar, who is blameless. The matron came from the Patriarch and announced that Peg was wanted. She allowed no time for preparation. Peg's things were bundled up by a servant. Again it happened like a charade, and I disbelieving, except for Peg's air, that told me she had expected it. The clan was reclaiming her. The servant had not yet opened the gate when she dived into my body and clung there, shuddering with fervid spasms, and I gripped her, her hair falling down from its plait, and we clung with limbs like pincers, and fingers that left claw marks through our flesh. To inflict pain was the only recourse. I slapped the matron's face as she prised Peg away. Wrong, I know. I begged Waldemar until he made a visit to the Patriarch. He had a far frostier reception than in former cooperative times. There was no hope of my girl returning. She was betrothed in marriage to a clansman. The healer had declared it auspicious, necessary. W. did not see Peg. But he described the bony form of the fellow, his blackened bullet of a skull, his deep empty sockets of eyes, his dirty black tunic and trousers and voluminous brown coat, his blind man's walking stick and wriggling nose. Bracelets of gold. W. tells me he should properly be designated a shaman, a practitioner of the most ancient mischief and devil worship. I am frightened, and have not the conviction to pray.