Avenue of Eternal Peace (13 page)

‘All very laudable,' smiled Wally with a sense of the ground sinking under him.

Kang spoke in high-falutin' terms, with an eccentric version of a laid-back East-coast scholarly manner, all the time beaming, twinkling and flopping open his fleshy mouth. He was perhaps sixty and the Italian shoes he had newly procured in Chicago sparkled.

‘When you have time, perhaps,' broached Wally, ‘there are a couple of steps in the clinical data itself—a couple of stages in the application process of Chinese drugs where I don't follow the leaps—no doubt dependent on knowing the traditional method of treatment, which I don't. I am concerned with how precisely the hormone or embryo treatment works that you indicate in your papers …If you could spare the time …'

This was the closest Wally came to a technical question. Kang rubbed his hands gleefully. ‘Nothing I like better than an exchange of ideas—Oh, if only there were sufficient time! I am honoured, Professor Doctor, most honoured. The details of course are a little fuzzy—it was all some time ago now.'

Wally stared into Kang's jolly eyes that gave nothing away.

‘I'm interested in learning something of your testing procedures.'

‘Of course, of course. Time is so precious, you know, Professor Doctor. I can gladly invite one of my assistants to work with you on the matter.'

Wally paused. It was a snow job. He rose to his feet and shook Kang's hand with an excess of joviality.

EIGHT
In Harness

1

China was in a hurry. Every month a hundred new concrete shells sprang from the earth of Beijing, cylinders, wedges, cubes, like children's building blocks. Around the clock by every available means materials were carted across a city that had become one big construction site. Teams of Mongolian ponies hauled tray-loads of bricks, donkeys brayed against barrow-loads of gravel. Glass window fittings, stacked like last week's newspapers on the back of green army trucks, slid and shuddered. Old codgers on pedicabs lugged girders three times their length and twenty times their weight. Burping hand-tooled contraptions carried mounds of cement that blew away in the wind. Sooty-faced boys pushed coal. So the haulage went on. At dawn as the police vans turned in, food suppliers set off for the market. Trucks of freshly pulled spinach and horses carting the first peaches of the season queued at intersections with the buses and bicycles of commuters. A big black pig trussed in a wicker canoe was ferried from suburb to suburb. Fish dangled from handlebars. Poultry rode squawking in panniers. Newlyweds hauled plush two-seaters and washing machines smelling freshly of Japan, the proud groom clenching his teeth as he pedalled forward. Child coffins attached to bicycles bore haughty Young Master or Miss of the one-child family to school, while at work their parents transferred to unit car or minibus to be conveyed again to meeting or shop; their conveyances became softer as they rose higher in the system until they approached the condition of their leaders who glided past, visible through the black windows of Benzes at an angle of semi-recline, hauling the country into the future. What if the ropes broke? What if the horse threw the rider? Gazing straight ahead of themselves after lunch the leaders in their back seats dared not think beyond the pure pronouncement of their decrees. The old lady heaves her trolley to the corner where she sells dirty iceblocks for five cents each. The ancient rag picker creeps along like a tortoise to find a couple of dry dumplings, a plastic bag, a crumpled culture magazine, a piss-sodden greatcoat, a discarded electric hairdryer. And so movement continues till morning, when young Eagle jogs by on his regular run.

Gently does it, says Eagle, convinced that training, rest, diet and Chinese medicine will strengthen his weak ankle. Each afternoon he works out at martial arts to achieve not only a peak of physical fitness but also a depth of spiritual determination. Given the chance to try, he would now perform so well that he could never be excluded from the team again.

2

To test the water, Eagle visited Pearl's house and presented her mother with the bags of bananas and dried bamboo shoots that his brother Sunshine had brought up from the South. He chatted and smoked with Pearl's young uncle while her mother poured hot water and Pearl sat button-lipped. She wore the mauve mohair cardigan from Paris and a slinky foreign frock that had been washed too many times. Her hair was in a chignon too complicated for someone staying at home and her face was professionally made up. She was displayed as one of the assets of a prosperous family. There were few occasions on which Pearl could dress up, now that modelling jobs came less frequently. If she displayed her foreign beauty techniques in public around Peking, people would get the wrong idea. Nor, being unmarried, would she go to the city's nightspots. Practical not ethical considerations forced her to sit home by the television. The maintenance of virtue was an investment in her future.

When Eagle arrived, rather than showing her pleasure, she looked pinched. Her mother's welcome was enough for two. Pearl merely sat by, wondering if she had cast him aside too lightly. It had been many months. During his brief stint in the model troupe, Eagle and Pearl had been leading boy and girl. She was hard and cold and needed a good-looking man. But modelling accorded ill with ‘socialist spiritual civilisation', and when the troupe was disbanded, only Pearl got to stay on as a professional, apparently because Pierre Cardin personally had insisted on using her. She was placed in the Department of Product Popularisation at the Ministry and went to Paris several times. She detested foreign men. She always returned to Beijing and once upon a time it had been to Eagle, who as a prospective basketball hero suited her. When she found out about his ankle injury and his sacking from the Sports Institute, she joined the others in blaming his bad attitude. She said that only if he worked to join the Party would the team take him back, and only if the team took him back would she do likewise. It was her ultimatum. She didn't want her man out of a job. She didn't want a man with an injury that would cripple his chances for life. After all, there were other fish in the sea. The marriage their talk had been tending towards faded, and with it the large new flat with water and gas and heating and a lift that came as Pearl's dowry. Diplomatically they stopped seeing each other. But Pearl had not found a replacement. Her modelling work was thinning out, and she was wearing the same clothes she had been given in Paris two years before.

Yarning, laughing, feeding one piece of information after another to Pearl's uncle, Eagle made the deal clear. He was in top physical condition. The team was sure to take him back. What about it?

This was business. There was no immediate answer, but the provisos were in place.

Draping the mauve cardigan over her shoulders, Pearl stood in the doorway to see him off.

‘Come back when you've got time,' she said.

‘The man came again today from the neighbourhood committee,' said Mother Lin, knitting when Eagle got home. Sweet summer air filled the room from the open door. ‘About the demolition of our street.'

3

The Doctor and Song turned to small talk as they completed the experiment. He was fishing for news. Song said that Jin Juan was unwell and had gone out of town. As they changed out of their lab coats, Wally told Song about his initiation into Peking opera. ‘Jin Juan and her cousin seem very similar,' he observed.

‘Two brothers married two sisters,' explained Song. ‘They are double cousins.'

‘Jin Juan should have been a singer too,' he joked, sensing that Song was in the mood for gossip.

‘Jin Juan could do many things.'

‘She seems wasted in the middle school, with such marvellous English.'

‘She is too unlucky—' Once they were through the door to outside, where there was no chance of being overheard, talk loosened. ‘At graduation from the Foreign Languages Institute Jin Juan was the top student. She should have become a research student and gone abroad. But there was no chance.'

‘Why ever not?'

‘She was asked to work here at the hospital translating medical journals and training doctors in English. But the decision was reversed.'

‘Why?'

Song shrugged. ‘On high.'

‘Was someone out to get her? Someone from the College? What was her crime?'

‘You don't need a crime.'

‘You've known Jin Juan a long time, haven't you? How can her situation be so different from yours?'

‘Her background is different.'

And a different personality, Wally noted, imagining in Jin Juan a stubborn, principled streak, whereas Song was a flexible practitioner and probably the cleverer of the two. Something about Jin Juan invited trouble … He remembered her at the theatre, sharp towards the arrogant fellow on her arm.

‘She's not married?' asked Wally, adding quickly, ‘She had a chap at the opera—I wasn't sure who he was.'

‘Her fiancé,' said Song, ‘of long standing.'

Wally took the inference. ‘Long engagements are the custom in China.'

‘Not so long as this one,' Song commented sourly. She despised Zhang. Her own parents were peasants. The turbulence of the Cultural Revolution had opened up opportunities which she had utilised with hard work and brains. Now she saw her country being destroyed by smooth privileged parasites like Zhang. She put it bluntly: ‘They should have married years ago. He's taken advantage of her. Now she's too old and too inconvenient and because his family's gone up in the world he can do better. His family has made difficulties. I blame Zhang.' The story made sense, though Song would not be more specific. Instead she invited him home, for ‘a very simple dinner'.

Once again her husband David did the cooking while the colleagues talked, Wally's offers of help being thoroughly overpowered. The daughter bounced on the sofa chanting, ‘Mogadishu, Moscow, Monte Carlo.'

‘The crèche does a fine job,' said Song, raising her eyebrows.

Also present was David's younger brother, a law student at Peking University. As the mood progressed, and food and beer were consumed, Wally asked whether the boy studied Chinese law or Western law.

‘There is no Chinese law,' he answered smartly.

‘What do you study then? Are we not developing the legal system!' David laughed.

This light-hearted approach was as a red rag to the bull. ‘We are developing rules,' said the boy. ‘We are strangling ourselves with rules, but there is no law to protect the people, to safeguard justice and confer rights. Power is the only law.'

‘That is so in the West too,' offered Wally.

‘I don't know about the West. I'm not allowed to go there. I know there is no law in China.'

David, shiny-faced from the cooking, began to admonish his brother in heated Chinese for spouting heretical opinions in front of the guest. The boy called David a coward. An argument developed in crossfire over Wally's head as the brothers grew passionate. From the key words, Party, economics, modernisation, democracy, freedom, Wally could guess at its general drift.

The boy argued that China's failure to develop an effective legal system arose from a deep antagonism to the divesting of authoritarian power that law implied. Similar failures in scientific and technological development, in the economy and in culture, stemmed from the same refusal of the political system to budge. The Reforms were welcome, of course, but were too slow, too cautious, often sabotaged, and fundamentally half-hearted. In the West, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, development had occurred rapidly because people were free from the repressions of socialist central planning. If freedom of speech could be protected in law, then a true new people's China could be created. What the Party most feared, however, was the uncontrolled release of the potential for continuing change on which it had ridden to power itself.

David did not particularly dispute his brother's opinions. Yet he urged him not to voice them. Caution and gradualism were to be recommended. Intellectuals could see a long way into the future, David said, too far sometimes, to a future that would never exist. They should also make the effort to look back. He understood that for his brother there was no past. What beckoned was a fresh start for a generation that had been spared disillusionment and which, encountering obstacles for the first time, swore to abolish them. David had spent the years from fifteen to twenty-five in the countryside, never quite achieving the desired state of perfect re-education. On his return to the capital he had wept tears of hope at a Democracy Wall that was rapidly cemented over. Now he recognised the dream of reform as a calenture. He contented himself with the rhetoric of democracy as an infinitely-to-be-postponed goal. The greater danger lay in too much complaining, too much demanding, too much belittling the past of the martyrs. If the old men on high were piqued by the ingratitude of their offspring and underlings, then the thunderbolts would fly. History could only be reversed in a patient manner that would save the face of the people. Within the shell of his idealism, David had found a place for what experience had taught him, that the world cannot be improved and that life must be endured. Or perhaps that was the contempt of middle age.

The kid took David's views as a provocation, appalled to see his brother only ten years older already manoeuvring himself into the robes of a Confucian elder. Why did all Chinese feel the need to preach rectitude to those ‘under' them? How could his brother bear to promote the older generation's world-weary apathy in the name of order and acquiescence and don't-rock-the-lousy-leaking-boat? The kid scowled.

‘The truth is we would be better off today if the Kuomintang had beaten the Communists shitless. We could have used our energy to go forward instead of constructing this palace of terrors!'

‘Now don't get too crazy.' David wagged a finger. ‘Don't forget that before Liberation our country was also backward and feeble. Anyway, I'm fed up with politics. Put more money in my pocket and I'll be content. Just like the masses—and a bit of cash would shut you students up too,' he said sulkily.

‘That's where your thinking is deficient. There ain't no more money, and there ain't going to be no more until we change the system. It's politics first.' The boy was flushed. Changing tactics, he appealed to the visitor.

Wally wished he had not been asked. But it would be pusillanimous not to make a stab.

‘Well, I'm a doctor first of all. I believe in health, which is really another name for the opportunity to continue growing. We'll never know what the perfect conditions for growth are, and that's lucky because we could never achieve them anyway, but we do know what's harmful in an environment and we can recognise which conditions are good enough. I guess I believe a good society ensures those opportunities for healthy growth—food, shelter, security, education enough, equality enough, love enough—but what it really boils down to is room to move. Freedom to think about things and act on your thoughts. Space to create, to continue. I believe in space. I'm an Australian. We have lots of space and we haven't had to think very hard about what happens when space is constantly encroached on, about the kind of organisation and adjudication necessary. The harness of community is not a big thing with us.'

Was it gibberish? He scratched his head. The kid seemed to warm into a fuzzy drunken happiness, thick hair flopping round his eyes and ears. He wore faded jeans and a bulky black sweater. From his wrist hung a silver bracelet, and a paisley rayon scarf was stuffed around his neck. He looked for all the world like types Wally had hung out with in Cambridge; rosy red cheeks after a couple of pints, wispy sideburns and moustache, a sullen underlip and the same tense body language. In the Cambridge of 1968 Wally had been unswervingly convinced of what he believed. Had he uttered such woolly benign thoughts back then he would have been hooted from the pub. The trouble was, his present formulations lacked all ardour, because he knew no way to guarantee the growth and continuance of creativity that he valued. The fact of life was sickness, not health. Unable to get round that fact, doctors became in the end the most indifferent or the most despairing of people—which was why he had reverted to research. Was he giving up the fight? He had always resisted the tribal assumption that firebrand youth led on inevitably to crusty conservative old age, had always kept in mind those elders who defied the rule by luxuriating in their old age like tropical blooms. But was he now, like David, preparing to change his clothes and his colours—shuffling off?