Avenue of Eternal Peace (4 page)

Next stop was transatlantic, in one of those lateral moves that give a career its curious pattern, whether destiny or drift. He entered further into the white and lonely corridors of a freemasonry whose techniques were, they claimed, humanity's highest mastery. By taking up a post-doc position in the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute of Harvard Medical School, Wally was able to apply theoretical research to clinical medicine. Some genomes were viral. Absorbed into the gene was a virus making the gene ‘infected', so to speak. From those same genes, after triggering, came the production of cancer cells. Yet between the viral genome and the final cancer was a gulf, an unexplored terrain of indeterminate causation. A gulf too wide and unruly to be charted, many scientists said. To find a way across would be to show, with classical simplicity, that a cancer could be caused by infection; explicable, non-numinous—to show that a cancer was a mundane, therefore curable, disease.

When the plane landed at Boston, Wally had left his beard behind. From the sun of his childhood his eyes were already frayed with lines, though from England his skin was pale. He brought with him a wife and child, and from the first meeting with his immensely distinguished seniors handled things professionally. Pretty soon he was part of the team, and befittingly earnest. Not only his work mattered, but his opinions. ‘As I see it,' he would begin, to give more rather than less definitiveness to his remarks. Still, as an Australian, he had the common touch, luckily, thrust upon him.

He produced a string of major papers, but the gaps remained. Ninety-five per cent remained inexplicable. When the new information, seized upon, was tried out clinically, nothing tangible came of it. If a treatment could be even partially effective, if a disease process could at any stage be retarded or reversed, there might be some pointers to a working explanation. As in the case of Edward Jenner's discovery of the smallpox vaccine, even those who seemed accidentally immune could show the way to the relevant nature of the immunity. But there was a woeful lack of clinical data, and too many different conditions had been lumped together under the name of cancer. No one had thought to record case studies of successful and unsuccessful treatments in sufficient detail. In pre-war medicine a cancer was thought of as an invader of the body, to be removed by surgery; a recurrence was a secondary assault, to be removed again, and so on until there was nothing left of the alien body to be removed, often nothing left of the body itself. The radiation treatment that came into vogue after the war used more advanced weaponry for the same approach. The move to chemotherapy was a partial recognition that the tumour or malignancy existed not in opposition to the body but symbiotically in a shared environment. The more radical treatments that followed—hormones and meditation, for instance—moved closer to a recognition that the cancer was created by the body itself, in response to poisons or triggers or signals of some kind. Wally's basic postulate, that the malformation originated from viruses absorbed into the gene itself, shared such an approach at the most fundamental biochemical level. The cases where a cancer ebbed and flowed, where it metastasised and subsequently went into remission, were of consuming interest to him. Where the body's processes adjusted in such a way as to turn from infirmity back to health, where a route to life was re-achieved, Wally was particularly concerned with what stimulated the turnaround—but there had been no organised collection of the data.

He often discussed the problem with his boss, Harvey Heilmann, who had been in the field for decades and didn't believe in breakthroughs, despite his being a Nobel laureate for some allegedly revolutionary research. Harvey believed, instead, in steady progress, in the nature of geological change, and he had faith that some day all their work, their conferences, societies, learned journals, scrabbling for funds, feudings, backstabbing, false hopes, follies, errors, despair, would all be justified by humankind's clumsy arrival at Understanding. So he was a great boss, even if his crawling time scale and drowsy voice sometimes looked like lack of fire to his younger colleagues.

With a shrunken gangling body and an elongated face in which the teeth were too prominent, Harvey Heilmann was a soft, slender-necked, leaf-munching dinosaur. It was over a bowl of lettuce after an afternoon's swimming in the neighbourhood pool one summer in the green outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Wally once again started to complain about the paucity of case studies that might suggest an overview, a framework of ideas and explanation into which his laboratory experiments could be placed. His heart needed a sense that his work in the clean-air lab was connected with the ignorant, irrepressible life and destruction outside. He needed to feel that his isolated test tube cells were part of people's stories—not for sentimental reasons, but to grasp at the Whole Thing.

Old Harvey got up and swayed into his study.

‘You might take a look at these,' he indicated laconically.

Laid out on his desk were three faded copies of the
New England Journal of Medicine
, with the old blue paper covers, dating from the 1930s.

‘There was a chap on a fellowship here when I was starting out. A youngish professor, came over to us from China. As pernickety a gentleman as they come. We tried to get him to join in the work we were doing, which in those days, as you know, was largely directed toward surgical techniques. The Chinese swam against the tide—oh, as politely as you could imagine. He worked on metabolic processes—on what we would now think of as hormone synthesis and deficiency in relation to the failure of the immune system. What we're just moving toward ourselves, thirty years later. He'd trained in Western hospitals in China, but his family was from a rural area in the South, an old official family, I believe. He was with us for nearly ten years—I never got close. He wasn't a Red, but when the Reds won, he went back, for love of the motherland. I never found out what became of him after that. Read these papers. The assemblage is elegant, the data are there and the conceptual pointers are remarkable.'

Wally flicked to the table of contents. ‘Efficacious Treatment of Liver and Other Cancers in Chekiang Province, China: A Bystander's Records' by Hsu Chien Lung.

5

The blood-red lacquered pillars of the temple challenge the grey flagstones, the frozen pine trees, and a grey sky that disguises in haze an industrial chimney oozing filthy smoke over the neighbourhood. All around the temple are narrow lanes running between factory compounds, tarred walls hiding furnaces, assembly lines, packing houses and tubs for chemical conversions; and the chilly, unadorned housing blocks for workers whose lives, even in deep winter, burst on to the balcony where things in daily use are piled up for want of other space: bicycles and empty bottles crammed beside dormant pot plants and pigeon cages. Wally walks with Eagle through the narrow alleys to the main road. At the corner is a mountain of white Chinese cabbage, brown from frost on the outside, giving off a rotten smell. On a tiny stool sits a woman beside a glass box where she proudly displays her skewers of candied crab apples, her round face the same caramelised red. Eat
tanghulu
, she calls. A toddler in a cape and hood of emerald satin is led along by a limping grandpa whose furry earflaps stick straight out from his hat. A cyclist rings his bell; no one pays attention. On the main road expensive oranges and apples blaze with colour as they are lifted from the hawker's scales to the housewife's plastic briefcase. A kid vends roast sweet potatoes from a rusty drum; no one buys. They crowd round the newspaper seller in the gutter whose
Sports News
flies into the air like plucked feathers as soon as she unwraps a bundle.

There are no taxis. They take a bus. Wally's back is nearly broken by the press of people manoeuvring for position, all muffled in winter clothing, more skilful and less perceptible in their movements than worms. The buses are like caterpillars too, two buses joined at the middle by a concertina and pulled by one motor. Every society has its own survival of the fittest. Wally, whose body does not bend around bars and boxes and impassive human forms, goes under here. Eagle grins.

6

The farmhouses among the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, what was the Garden of Perfect Brightness before the British and French fired it, had fallen into dereliction and were occupied temporarily by urban fringe-dwellers. Down a lane, across a sluggish, iced-up stream, a cluster of brick shanties edged a field; a narrow path led through a doorway in the carved stone arch to a tiny courtyard with a light in one side. Dulcia had cycled from the city. She knocked on the window; a voice called out a greeting; bundled inside, she sat by the stove and hot tea was put into her frozen hands.

‘This late!' He could smell drink on her breath.

‘I got lost on the way,' she lied. She had been to his house once before, and her sense of direction was unerring. ‘Well?'

‘So-so.' He tossed his long hair out of his eyes. ‘I've been painting.'

The room was cluttered and cramped; a rumpled bed, a coal stove, books, boxes, huge paintings hung or pinned across every available space.

Jumbo was not tall, even for a Chinese. When he unscrolled a painting, holding his arms above his head and standing on tiptoe, the bottom of the scroll bumped on the ground. Brooding, malformed shapes in black ink escaped from the paper like genies from the bottle, straining away from the painter's body, probing at the walls.

His head popped impishly around the side of the broad scroll. Dulcia sat and admired. She liked the cool acerbity of his work; emotion held in restraint, knowing the chains. Too much of what passed for art was sickly-sweet and infantile; Jumbo's use of black, his refusal to specify form, made his different. The haunting of tradition was there: rock, water, mountains, leaves of bamboo; but, as she looked, their definition vanished into a bad dream, black inchoate masses expressive of emptiness and terror at the centre, where the individual ceases to exist.

‘Drink some tea.' He stooped to pour more hot water into their glasses, traditionally solicitous of the guest and surrounded, in his artworks, by the hallucinations of his race and time. His small body was tough as steel wire; his features refined; his hands and face lined prematurely into a mask of carved smiles. The physical definition Dulcia achieved through aerobics had been inflicted on Jumbo by the People's Liberation Army where for six years he had trained by treading water for five hours a day in the river in full uniform and greatcoat, holding a rifle over his head. His body became a weapon that could endure everything, even his thoughts. He had killed men. After the Cultural Revolution he got a place at university with other older students from intellectual backgrounds, and was assigned to work at Central TV, where he met the foreign woman who nicknamed him Jumbo because he was ‘small', she joked, ‘and mighty'. The name he had been given by his long-suffering patriarch father meant ‘rousing spirit of a great wave'. His painting had been criticised for going beyond realism. Few understood, though some admired. The improvised exhibition had not been a success despite Dulcia's talking it up all round Beijing. On the third day the authorities had closed it down, and Dulcia had become a crusader on Jumbo's behalf, calling all her journalist friends.

‘The artistic environment here is wretched. For a thousand years now there's been this pull backwards down a great drain as we try to get back to our old cultural roots. I don't want the old yellow earth, you understand; I want the mind, myself, my individuality. Here to seek individuality is blasphemy, swimming against the stream of the great state river. Here individuality is the waste product, to be washed away by the mighty current of tradition, the Party, the people. But I don't know if what I'm doing is really new. I need to go outside and see for myself.'

He talked of leaving the country as if it were stepping outside the family's front door.

‘Can you help me? Give me the names of a few art schools in New York. That's all.'

She nodded. She wanted to nurture him. But she made no further move.

She thought of Cray, her husband. Theirs had been a college romance, a language lab affair at Berkeley when he was a skinny four-eyes studying Russian (before the contact lenses) and she was the fat girl before the aerobics. They had been flattered to be treated like bionic Californian gods when they arrived in China as teachers. Dulcia competed in the college sports meet and defeated the school's best men and women athletes, including her own husband. The Chinese made a joke of their humiliation, but no foreigner was ever asked to compete again, and the change in Dulcia and Cray's marriage dated from that day. Chinese men could not resist pitting themselves against her physical supremacy. At the end-of-term party she arm-wrestled the chunkiest graduate student, Wildman, and won. Cray decided to move on to Moscow. Behind their tears of farewell at the airport were a skinny boy's snivelling and a fat girl's tremulous exultation. Hooray! She had got outside the body America told her was a problem, and now she could be everything America told her it was her right to be. For the tin men, the straw men, the cowardly lions of China, she had hearts, brains and nerves on offer.

Yet her forthrightness was inhibited by the rites Jumbo imposed. She yawned, and Jumbo asked if she was cold or tired. Was she in love with this fastidious, fine-boned Chinaman, his long oily hair and long fingers draped over crossed legs? Would he fit in her baggage? She speculated as to her motives, and his, and Jumbo sat tight on his stool, breathing smoke and brooding.

Perhaps he scrupled at taking advantage of the woman he called on for assistance. Perhaps modesty held him back, or, more likely, the paralysing passivity that prefers to manoeuvre the adversary out on the limb first so that, when both are on the limb and it breaks, its breaking can be blamed on the one who first claimed it was safe.