Avenue of Eternal Peace (5 page)

Outside, on an eroded hilltop, stone columns lay as they had fallen a century ago, great white shapes nuzzling each other under a velvety snow-bearing sky.

7

‘Perhaps I did not understand,' said Mrs Gu. ‘I thought you wanted to see Professor Hsu, but there is no need for that.'

In front of her was a copy of one of Hsu's papers that Wally had produced. She had changed key remarkably.

‘I thought you were insisting that Professor Hsu was at our College, when he is not, because he has retired.'

There was not even a pause for dramatic effect when the professor who did not exist was now declared to be in retirement. But Wally saw nothing to gain from pointing out this miraculous logic.

‘I did not understand that it was our work on clinical therapy for liver and other cancers that interested you. You have only to ask, Professor Doctor Frith, to tell me exactly what you want. Now I know what you want, I can help you. That area is the responsibility of Director Kang. Indeed, Director Kang has pioneered that field. He would be honoured to have the opportunity to talk with you. But I'm not sure of his program. When would suit you?'

‘I'm causing you so much trouble, Mrs Gu,' replied Wally, taking up his mug of cold, floral-tasting tea.

FOUR
April Fool's Day

1

For fifty cents, at the public bathhouse, Eagle could stand under a hot shower for as long as he liked, scrub his body all over, lather his scalp and scrape his beard (a weekly occurrence). Home, one room and tiny attached kitchen in a maze of lanes near the station, had no such washing facilities, nor a lavatory. Winter and summer alike Eagle squatted at the public convenience down the street, freezing his bum or offending his nose according to the season, in the name of the revolution.

Today he cut his shower short. If he was not at the front of the queue the beancurd noodles would be sold out. Flushed from the shower, in his freshly laundered clothes, he stood with his pannikin by the vendor's trolley for forty-five minutes as the cold drew in. He was determined not to hear the old lady croak: ‘All gone!' The Doctor was coming.

His mother had quizzed him. What did the foreigner want? What kind of person? What was her son's aim? She would not have taken the risk. But because her son wanted it, she devoted herself to the visit.

Mother Lin was old Peking—a squat woman with a dropped shoulder and doubting, jeering eyes. Once, before Liberation, her family had owned a courtyard house. She married out before the house was sequestered and when she walked down the street ten years later she found the neighbourhood replaced by a boiler factory. Her father, a very petty bourgeois with no money, had sung Peking opera. She remembered him slipping out the gate at afternoon and returning late, pleased with himself. For all she knew, he might have been a considerable artist. Only in later life had she grown affectionate towards the old opera. As a girl she had been a romantic rebel, sharp as a pin, and harangued her young man, a Communist officer from Canton, about the corrupt ways. She laughed in his face before she married him. Two years later came the Red Dawn. Her husband studied, and on graduating was reclaimed by the army. She went to work in a glass factory and kept the one-room home in the city to which he returned once a year. The 1950s were prosperous and optimistic; then only optimistic. Eventually her husband was resettled, and two baby sons crowded the house. But her man had grown cautious, punctilious, maintaining ideological correctness and discouraging contact with outsiders. During those empty, flavourless years of the 1960s and 1970s, whatever strength or joy they managed was kept close within the family circle of four. Since Old Lin was wary of milking connections, living conditions did not advance and few favours came their way, until existence was as scant and furtive as a mouse's in a borrowed hole. Out of what surprised his wife as terror, Old Lin permitted not one grumble, even within their walls or under the covers at night. His nature warped; the scholar's ideals became nasty puritanism, disguised as the uprightness of a self-denying Party member and family man. When even the smallest good fortune fell his way, Old Lin distrusted, and when the new season came he was unable to adjust.

Eagle was seventeen then. He stood in Tiananmen Square with the crowd and cried without knowing why. Beginning from that day the boy found words for trees in leaf, for the tastes of the year between his teeth, for the glint and nudge that go with foul-mouthed jokes. He was quick and fast, and tried out for a place in the district basketball team. After a couple of months of impressive play, he was selected to try out for All-Beijing. He had never been a dreamer, he was almost without self-consciousness or aspiration, not even aware of his own naiveté: a lifetime's Mao Thought had done that to him. His elder brother called him a straw dumpling. But his passivity, the stupefying creation of Mao Thought, allowed him to be pliable, to live for the day. On the eve of the basketball trial, as he sat cross-legged on the bed pondering, it seemed that his day might have come. Sport was the route to self-advancement; a successful athlete was the people's hero—and no privilege was out of bounds.

He slept deeply that night, and next day won his place in the squad. But his father was suspicious of the ease with which success had come. Good luck was dangerous. His mother worried that when he moved out to the Sports Institute, he would not be fed properly, her motherly pride unwarmed with joy, as if success was a kind of shame.

Old Lin continued to dote on his elder son, Sunshine, who had found an alternative future hawking foreign cigarettes. Old Lin saw both his sons in jeans and wristwatches: in Sunshine's case he commended enterprise without inquiring too closely; in Eagle's case he became gloomy and disapproving. Against his father's advice, Sunshine made contact with relatives in the south to whom he was determined to prove his business acumen. Eagle brought money home from the Sports Institute; Sunshine took the money out again.

Then Eagle broke his ankle. He was a good basketballer, but not the best. The teammates were closer to him than brothers, like lovers in their preoccupation with each other. But the determination to win for the sake of China, to drive himself and his teammates on to certain victory in gratitude to the Party, was lacking in Eagle. He had not joined the Communist Youth League. Neither did his family have rank or connections with the coach. There was something detached about the boy. It was decided that the young comrade should be reminded that the talent of the masses could produce ten thousand other basketballers as good. His weak ankle would always make him vulnerable. The Sports Institute could not afford to keep him on.

Eagle came home. His mother hugged him. His father's mistrust was confirmed, and he also blamed the boy for failing. Sunshine, meanwhile, had made himself plausible and a woman had taken him on. As happened when the wife's side brought the greater portion to a match, the man moved in with the woman's family and became subordinate to their operations; so Sunshine moved into a spacious flat provided by his wife in the west of the city and devoted himself to her business interests. And Eagle, the son left at home, was fixed up with a dogsbody job in a state office when his ankle was better. The family's fortunes had not been glorious. Life in Beijing opened like a paper flower with changes in the economic policy, but still Mother Lin queued for rationed noodles, Old Lin had to beg for his medicines, when Sunshine called it was to scrounge spending money, and Eagle felt buried alive.

2

April Fool's Day was a day like any other in the city, but Wally had mentioned the holiday for playing tricks, so Eagle invited him on that day. Where Eagle waited, the setting sun was a ferocious gold lion among the smoggy black clouds over Beijing Station.

When the Doctor arrived on his bicycle, Eagle held up his hands.

‘No food,' he said apologetically, ‘there's no food!'

Wally was embarrassed. ‘Here, let me—'

‘Not even you foreigners can buy food. Haven't you heard? The city's run out of food!'

Wally frowned, worried, until Eagle squeezed his waist: ‘You're really hungry, aren't you? April Fool!'

There was enough: tea and sweets, garlic shoots, spinach, meatballs, cabbage, chilli noodles, plate after plate of food. Mother Lin made the two males sit while she prepared more. She would observe what the Doctor ate, then pile up his bowl with more of the same while pronouncing on the fact that he ate this or that.

‘Eat! Eat!' she kept saying.

‘You eat!' retorted Wally.

Eagle picked gracefully while Wally ate. ‘There's no beer,' he said. ‘I couldn't find any.'

‘Is that another joke? The pub with no beer?'

‘Impossible to buy. I went everywhere.' So the Beijing good life was precarious after all. Chinese historians describe a time when the population was decimated by war and plague as ‘people few, goods many'.

‘Will you drink spirits?' asked Eagle.

Wally waved his hands in protest.

‘Can he drink?' asked Mother Lin.

‘Can he drink!'

But Wally was content with company. Mother Lin sat back to smoke, her old woman's prerogative. Voices and the sound of television came from very near, behind the walls.

Eagle removed the dishes and stacked the table and stools away.

Wally patted his heart and told Mother Lin what a good character her son had.

‘He shows his good side,' she said wryly. ‘Isn't your character good too?'

‘Average.'

She made a great joke of it. ‘The Doctor's character is average,' she called to her son—then to him, ‘Have you really eaten enough? You need to eat more than we do.'

‘I've eaten too much. It's all been too delicious.'

‘Are you used to Beijing food?'

‘I love it, especially the noodles, the ravioli, the dumplings.'

‘Dumplings! Dumplings!' She seized on the word. ‘He eats dumplings. Why didn't I know? He should eat my dumplings, and not the dumplings outside. Tell him to be careful.'

‘Be careful of dumplings? Why?'

‘Haven't you heard?' Eagle stood in the doorway. ‘In the west of the city the dumplings have human meat in them. They arrested some people last weekend. A man and a woman and the woman's little brother. They'd been luring hawkers from the country up to their flat and killing them and turning them into dumplings. I know someone who lives over there. She said they couldn't catch any more peasants so they were going to eat the brother. He ran for the police. The neighbours found a thighbone in the alley. They thought it belonged to a pig. The local doctor knew better.'

‘Horrible. Why isn't all Beijing talking about it?'

‘We are.'

‘It's not in the press.'

‘Naturally.'

‘Those people must have been quite desperate,' said Wally with automatic compassion.

‘The man was asked why. He said he'd tasted many things in his life but never human flesh. The woman said that the price of pork was ridiculous these days. The dumplings tasted like good pork dumplings.'

They snickered and fell silent.

Mother Lin added that a famous restaurant during the Song dynasty had served up babies to the Emperor.

‘Probably.'

The silence was accepting yet ashamed of the perversities they were capable of, as Chinese, not as human beings. Eagle's way of recounting the incident had flatly placed it among things possible, not in the exotic realm of cannibalism where Wally's culture would have placed it.

‘I don't taste like much,' joked Wally.

‘No, no, no!' Eagle protested too much.

‘No taste,' quipped Mother Lin.

Wally changed the subject. ‘Do you want to go abroad?'

Eagle shrugged. ‘It's not interesting to travel. I've no hope of going abroad. I haven't studied at university. My English level is low. I've got no money, no connections. So it's for the best if I don't want to go. I look after my mother.'

Mother Lin was nodding off to sleep beside the stove, her face drawn contentedly.

‘If you could have a wish come true,' asked Wally, ‘what would it be?'

‘A new flat. For my mother and me, a new flat with electricity and water and no stairs.'

3

Eagle's father had a stroke. For three months he lay partially paralysed and the family's money drained away on medicines, doctors, hospital visits and special foods. Mostly Old Lin lay staring at the wall, troubled but not speaking. He asked for Sunshine, who came sometimes for meals. He squeezed Sunshine's hand, calling him ‘Good son, good son,' as Sunshine fussed over his invalid father—then was gone. Eagle exercised his father's pet bird, swinging it to and fro in its bamboo cage. He went on buses all over Beijing in search of expensive remedies recommended by the latest quack. If his father needed soup of fresh chicken or trout, he would devise ways of procuring live produce. He emptied the pots and twice a week carried his father to the public bathhouse.

No sooner had the patient's condition stabilised, and the little household's routine around it, than a second, lesser stroke came. Time was running out, and Old Lin was dying not at ease with himself. One day as he lay in bed, he quite violently caught hold of Eagle's wrist and, for the first time, said the words he had reserved for Sunshine. ‘Good son, good son.' He made a broken speech. ‘You are my worthy son. You care for your father and mother. You don't think of yourself. You have strength and spirit. I entrust you with the duty of looking after your mother when I am gone. Your brother looks after himself.' The words were less commendation than imperative, a sealed command that transferred status from first son to second son. The resentment at Eagle's success, and the disappointment at his failure, had been overcome, and young Eagle was filled with extraordinary joy to be given the approval denied all his twenty-two years. Such was the burden, offered as blessing, that the dying man placed on the boy. Afterwards Eagle wondered whether his father intended to say more—but he was dead within three days. Eagle and his mother sat alone in the room, as they had lived ever since, waiting for Sunshine, who was late turning up to organise the funeral.

4

Right outside the door came the sound of cold windy rain pelting suddenly, making the inside chilly. ‘Aiya!' cried Mother Lin, stirring from her snooze. The rain was fierce. There were windows to be shut, pans and towels to be put in position.

‘What about him?'

‘I must go,' said Wally. ‘Doesn't matter if I get a bit wet.'

‘Stay here!' they shouted.

‘Too much trouble! Have you got a raincoat?'

‘Going out in the wet is too much trouble! The rain's too heavy. Catching cold!'

Wally argued that he had an important meeting in the morning.

‘Then leave in the morning!'

It was settled. Eagle brought a basin of warm water for Wally to wash himself. They lay down for the night, Mother Lin on the sofa, the Doctor and Eagle sharing the bed. Only when saying goodnight did the old woman let her hard-bitten humour drop. ‘Our conditions are poor. Forgive us. Will you be able to sleep?'