Avenue of Eternal Peace (22 page)

Is it the odour of the ocean that invigorates, or its sheer space and constant inanimate life? We keep the boys in Chinese wicker hoops on the deck. They can stand up and move about, and I watch like a hawk all the same, lest … Jerry is content, but Lionel protests. W. demands they keep still as he experiments with his camera. I write to record, despite being in low spirits. The insomnia continues, and my nerves are torture to me. So, to be brief. We were woken from sleep by an almighty din. Waldemar ran down as he was and saw the great round hole gaping in the wall of our courtyard. It was not yet dawn, a clear night. The cannonball lodged where it had smashed a water jar. Brave W. stepped out through the gate, standing in his nightshirt, and began to remonstrate. The Patriarch's cannon had been moved outside our gate and the clan was lined up behind it to enjoy the sport. While W. stared, a second ball came whizzing through the air. ‘Good Lord,' W. reported as his oath. The missile overflew the wall and landed square in the fork of our magnolia tree, splitting the wood in an outburst of flames. I had hurried to the boys, and from their window, hugging them, saw the burning tree. W., furious, strode across the parade ground, but Patriarch Lu led his contingent away. Demonstration over, W. was insulted with their backsides. The shaman had promised the Patriarch that his manhood would revive if the barbarians were exorcised.

Well, my husband is not one to retreat from difficulty. Indeed his principles are founded on strength of will. Yet as we took counsel in those small hours, something turned him round to a wiser resignation. It took us forty-eight hours to make preparations, before we could leave on our arduous cart ride over the mountains, whence we came via calls on Bishop Mowbray at Ningpo and the Professor of Anatomy at St John's, Shanghai, to embark on our voyage home.

Only before departure I was permitted a visit to the Patriarch's house, where in full view I made my farewell to Peg. She was pale and puffy. I squeezed her hand. I made a presentation to her of our best books, dictionaries and textbooks. ‘Save you. Don't forget. I am always your friend.' She showed no emotion. I understood from the toughness in her young face that she would hold on, she would defeat them, she would survive. Yet my heart aches, with each day the unconscionable burden weighs heavier on me, that she has been abandoned to her fate.

I take nothing from this land that I did not bring. My boys were born here, but they are not of here. My Wee One, my strength, my belief, dare I say my husband, my God, my Peg. What I take with me from this land are absences only.

W. strikes the board and declares he will go in for straightforward General Practice when we arrive in South Australia. He no longer holds himself so stiffly: He too has lost, or gained, a quality.

Mercy upon us. No more.

Added in another hand: ‘Retta Frith nee Glee deceased Adelaide aged 32, of an undiagnosed “exotic” condition.'

Replacing the hand-written pages in their envelope did little to banish his grandmother from Wally's presence. From the unknown woman, whom he could visualise only according to the posed studio portraits in the family album, his thoughts glided to what he recalled of Nobodaddy Grandpa Frith, across a span of ninety years between the two Chinas, the two worlds, they had known, and back to Jin Juan and her grandfather. Professor Hsu, and the fuzzy photograph of Hsu's wife, Jin Juan's grandmother, who had once, probably, been Peg. But did it matter that he could not prove the connection? It would remain a hypothesis which even Hsu, if he knew and if Wally asked him point blank, was not in a position to confirm or deny. The black pond that ran under the house returned no reflection, only darkness. Wally's disappointment was quite irrational. Hsu had spoken, at the last, clearly, openly, and no mystery remained. He spoke matter-of-fact, clarifying language, and perhaps there lay the problem: no mystery remained, yet no answer had been given. And if the wise old man's dry assumption was that no answer need be given, then surely the implication was that no question need be asked—which snubbed Wally's exploratory, inquiring urges. He felt hollow and anxious, his anger displaced, for where was there now to go? He was coldly amused by the deft way Hsu had disposed of Kang's perfidy, by disowning (and why not truthfully?) his own part, by removing one backdrop to expose another, and behind that another, in infinite regression. He stared blankly as a sheen of light began to glow on the pond. He wanted to talk practicalities with the Professor, believing that somewhere, just beyond the reach of them both, were things of great usefulness; pointers he could triumphantly place before doubting colleagues. But the old man resisted. Was the Professor muddleheaded, out of touch, pleading to be handled gently? Was Wally a fantasist? Was the greatest secret human ignorance? He had come up against not a brick wall but a rectangular stretch of black water that had no measurable depth and no visible boundary, showed no motion and offered no reflection. And where was there boiling water for shaving?

7

The white churned-up dust on the narrow mountain road clouded the bus and reduced visibility to zero. To the valley from which they had climbed was a sheer drop, but still the loutish driver in his mirror sunglasses continued to pass the timber and cement trucks, and the timber and cement trucks groaned after the bus in billowing dust clouds. The scrubby conifers had curious nibbled bundles of hay halfway up their trunks, and the laden orange trees were snow white with dust. Jin Juan, who had a seat, and Wally, who sat in the aisle, screwed up their eyes as much against their possible fate as against the dust. With each jolting stretch of the ride from Shaoxing, each breakdown and cranking, their bodies became more cramped and knotted. At the top of the mountain was Heaven's Terrace, Tiantai, a ramshackle dust-fertilised town with Red Star 1950s buildings that looked as ornate as those remaining from the Ching dynasty and the one formerly Christian hospital.

After Heaven's Terrace the road flattened for the coastal run through orange groves that shone like enamel and well-watered rice paddies overseen at intervals by cosy villages of grand two-storey houses with stepped roof decoration and eaves curling upwards like stretched toes. There was little to distinguish the oldest houses from those under construction. Sometimes a woman in scarlet satin smock, belly swelling, would stand on the balcony to watch the others march home across the fields. The peasant's dream was well on the way towards realisation here: a house, a mate, a kid, a grandson. In their sleepy, deceptive prosperity, protected by high breaks of flowering black bamboo as they were protected by the mountains on one flank and the river that wound to the sea on the other, the villagers of the county were at once the most conservative and the most radical of Chinese, with regard only for their own laborious livelihood.

After dark the bus reached the river town. It was the event of the day to judge by the hawkers and scouts who assailed the passengers. Jin Juan shooed them off, until one middle-aged woman came quietly forward to say that she ran a private inn.

They were received, through a door off a narrow alley, at an agreed price with no formalities. It was a farmhouse really, but the man of the house, who had twenty years earlier served as an indentured labourer on a Chinese construction project in Africa, had shown enterprise by setting up a hand-turned printing press in an annexe of the house, and began putting up his assistants in the loft. Where his wife was silent, if not demure, the man was coarse and sociable and shook Wally's hands with great enthusiasm—the Australian was the first white man he had seen in their town.

Asking no questions, he led them up a ladder to a room where they might sleep: in it were three wooden beds covered with tatami mats and bedding and draped with mosquito nets. There was a basin and a chamber pot, and a flask of water and mugs for tea. The floor was laid with smooth black boards, and air flowed from a window that looked to a modest mountain against the starry sky.

They were assured of no noise or disturbance, but the host first insisted on bundling them across the market square to a place where they might eat, by one bare bulb, the local river crabs and frogs fried with garlic. Then it was time to retire.

The courtyard of the inn had a profuse bougainvillea and racks of flowering pots. The air, under the sparkling night sky, was fragrant and bracing. Wally stripped to the waist before an urn that was big enough to stew two men and ladled washing water into his basin. From a kettle simmering on the coal stove he added some hot, and rubbed the dust and grime from his skin, arching his neck to the heavens as the water trickled down his throat to his belly button and inside his belt. The pleasure of making do was combined with the special virtue of cleanliness and the sense of having gone farther from his moorings than he had ever imagined. But because he was with Jin Juan, as a friend and as his true companion, he did not feel estranged. She brought him a human focus, and plenitude. He passed her by the ladder with her towel and toothbrush. She looked happy.

The host pointed to a round basket by the foot of the ladder. ‘Kee-kee kee-kee!' he imitated the rooster that would wake them before dawn. But they were warm and content in bed and slept through the rooster's crowing, and the market was in sunny mid-morning bustle when they first looked out.

Half-heartedly Wally returned to his quest. Was it not already an achievement to have come so far? Quest was simply a sluggish flow of the current. He had reached the town where his grandparents had built the mission hospital, where his father had been conceived and learned to toddle; the place that had been reconstituted in family lore and a young boy's myth of China. As a scientist, Wally had felt obliged to check for traces since the town was only a day's journey, however arduous, over the mountains from Shaoxing, and Jin Juan had been willing to accompany him. On the other hand he expected, in fact, to find nothing. Traces, like radiation, were more often than not a leftover poison.

In her high-heeled sandals Jin Juan stepped like a Sui princess through the streets of the undistinguished town to which the century had bequeathed its haphazard layers. The old at each stage remained, with the new grafted clumsily on in a wonderful palimpsest. Abutting a storehouse of functional Socialist Reconstruction ugliness (poverty's Bauhaus) was a minor Daoist shrine, like a rotten pulled tooth, standing askew but still standing, because no one got around to heeding the order of demolition.

Softened by plane trees, the grid of central planning was upset by asymmetries of nature near the surging coffee-coloured river. At each point they inquired: ‘Was there an old hospital hereabouts? Was there a place where foreigners had lived long ago? Was there a Christian church?'

Every tongue, eye and hand pointed a different direction and they wandered in pleasant confusion from one perimeter to another and along the squelching riverbank where a sow and piglets wallowed in the sun and ducks skittered across the mud to bob on the water in the shadows of low-bottomed boats. Across the river the bright fields stepped rapidly to high ragged mountains that were washed in sunlight to the colour and texture of stone-scrubbed denim.

Coming on a weedy survival of the old city wall, and the site of a stone ford, Wally's memories were stirred, and after interrogating a string of old pipe smokers who were helpful as far as their dialect permitted, they came to a walled compound and a locked gate. Through a crack in the gate they saw an old crone dandling a baby's naked bum in the sunshine. They called and called. She was preoccupied or deaf. In the end Wally shinned up the wall.

Amidst a commotion that combined utter astonishment with utter acceptance, as if the Second Coming had occurred, Jin Juan was admitted and the two visitors were ushered to an upper room. At one end were wide open windows flooded with white light. The walls and low ceiling were white. Varnished wooden chairs were arranged in rows. A ceiling fan was motionless below the height of Wally's head. At the front was a large chest covered in a flower-embroidered cloth, on which stood two glass jars of plastic flowers. Beside this altar was a lectern at which a white-haired man was speaking inaudibly. As they moved closer, he did not register their presence, until they were right in front of his nose. There were two people listening to him, and for them too the words must have been almost inaudible. They stared from swarthy faces under mop hair, frightened.

The preacher hurried down to greet Wally and Jin Juan. The film over his eyes indicated his immense age. The man spoke no English or standard Chinese, although the word ‘theology' seemed to emerge from his babble. With the greatest difficulty, at the top of her voice, Jin Juan tried to explain who they were and why they had come. With hand gestures the man communicated that he was ninety-five years old. But they could get no further sense from him. His hair was neatly combed, his clothing stained but correctly buttoned (unlike the tatters worn by his audience of two), in his face was a lambent, baby-like emptiness. Wally guessed that he was far gone into senility. This hypothesis was disturbed when the man began excitedly pointing at the other two, who were much younger, though not young, indicating his brain and their brains. If Jin Juan understood correctly he was explaining that they were crazy in the head and came to him for help. They were two black sheep and he was their ancient shepherd.

The preacher led them downstairs to a reception room, and here Wally noticed that the fittings of the building, the style and materials, were different from the upper storey. The room was darker for a start. There were exposed beams and dark panelled doors that were tall and wide, not built to Chinese proportions, with broad, elaborately grooved lintels. It was the work of an amateur Victorian carpenter, Wally surmised. Outsiders must have assisted in the construction of the sturdy lower storey which had survived assault and refurbishment to this day.