Avenue of Eternal Peace (25 page)

‘You'll have to go to hospital,' he concluded, ‘for further examination. My guess is that the knee will have to be opened up. A tricky business.'

Mother Lin panted, her hand on her heart. The obstacles that lay in the way were beyond explaining to the foreigner. Eagle reverted to his dull stare.

‘The doctors say I should rest here,' said Eagle flatly. ‘They say I do not need further treatment.'

‘Rubbish.'

‘I'm not eligible.' Wally saw what his part was to be. The operation—the reshaping of the knee, the resetting of the bones, the process of cartilage healing—was long, complicated and expensive. In China medical treatment of a high quality was in short supply. Access was a privilege. The underpaid medical profession was compensated, to an extent, by its power over the distribution of the privilege. He had been in China long enough now to have a crude understanding of how the system worked. He had his trump card. Immediately an appointment should be made with Mrs Gu, and through her a meeting requested with Director Kang.

He rubbed Eagle's shoulder warmly and shook Mother Lin's hands, giving his word that he would return.

So it was that two days later a car sent from the College arrived at the entrance to the narrow
hutong
and Eagle was laid carefully on the back seat.

Mrs Gu, recognising the Doctor's determination, had wasted no time in setting up a meeting with Director Kang. Wally had so far kept his discoveries secret from the College, though he assumed that Song knew, and that through her some information would leak out, which would not hinder his purpose. He need do no more than allude subtly to his bargaining point.

The meeting with Kang was amiably circuitous, the easy manner helped by the Director's muting of his habitual excessive humour. There were compliments, inquiries after health, regrets that they had not seen more of each other, expressions of unavoidable commitments and healthy reports from both sides on the state of research, and a profession of sadness from the Director, polishing his brow, that the Professor Doctor must soon be leaving their College. Director Kang insisted that if the Professor Doctor, a man of such wide experience, had any suggestions for improvements in the running of the College, then he must be frank. And if there was anything, anything, that the Director could do to assist …

The offer appeared to play too close to Wally's ulterior motives, so he substituted a lesser request. ‘As a matter of fact—' and went on to explain how in his opinion the College suffered not from any deficiency in medical expertise but from being a little under par linguistically. To put it bluntly, there was no one with adequate capacities as technical translator and interpreter. The matter was essential if the College was to keep abreast of outside research and if its own attainments were to be truly recognised by the medical fraternity at large. In short, the authorities should appoint a person with sufficient English-language ability and if possible a medical background, preferably someone young and energetic, with a commitment to the work of the College. This should not be regarded as a low priority, but of prime importance, and the College should endeavour to find someone of high ability by offering suitable enticements.

That was Wally's bid.

Not understanding what he was getting at, the Director nodded with a practised combination of general approval and specific disengagement. It was possible, after all, that the foreigner was making a disinterested suggestion that could safely be ignored, sensible idea though it was.

Talk of translation allowed Wally to introduce the topic of rewarding medical reading, how enormously he had profited from studying Kang's papers—congratulations—and how even those in Chinese had been illuminating once a translation was made by a linguist friend who happened to be researching at the Traditional Medicine Academy—and by a further happy chance the archives of the Academy had proved to house fascinating unpublished papers by the same Professor Hsu Chien Lung whom Wally had been seeking.

‘As a matter of fact,' said Wally, ‘I finally did track down the old Professor over the summer.'

‘You visited him?' Kang laughed. ‘Ho-ho-ho! I didn't know.'

‘He sends his regards. Anyway—' and with an abrupt change of subject, so the connection would be clear, Wally made his higher bid. He wanted a room for Eagle in the best part of the hospital, where the high cadres go, and he wanted the best orthopaedic surgeon in Beijing in attendance as soon as possible.

It was perhaps a more difficult request than Wally realised, and Kang became more thoughtful as Wally described Eagle as ‘his friend'—who proved to be an unemployed worker with no status at all, a person the Doctor should never have known.

But it was too late now. ‘I vouch entirely for the genuineness of the person and the case,' said Wally, ‘and I will regard your help as a personal favour to me.'

Kang looked unhappy as he promised to make inquiries immediately.

‘I hope you'll be successful, and quickly,' concluded Wally, who made as if to stand, then sat again for his last statement.

‘By the way, I learned less from old Professor Hsu than I had hoped. He's quite lucid. But when I leave China and write up the results of my medical experience here, I suppose I won't have anything to say on that score—a pity—since all over the world, at every conference, people are asking about what goes on in Chinese medicine. Anyhow, I mustn't keep you. You've got phone calls to make. Let's get together again soon. Oh, will you let me know through Mrs Gu as soon as possible—about my friend?'

6

In the autumn of the year a disparate chorus of voices was raised for democracy. The workers were complaining about rate rises. The Reforms had loosened a few screws in the economy and income had not kept up with inflation, nor spending money with rising expectations. In Shanghai a chemicals factory burned to the ground while the workers passively watched. They recognised the new face of exploitation. Middlemen grumbled that the Reforms were not moving fast enough and that bureaucratism strangled opportunity. Each day China seemed to slip further from its grandiose goals. But hope persisted. Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a hundred schools of thought contend! appealed the Party, enticing people to speak their blueprints for the future. Blinking like tortoises, they stuck their necks out.

In an environment of optimism the students nurtured hopes as dazzling as the grand propaganda dreams of their parents' generation. They grew their hair and pirated videos of ‘We Are The World, We Are The Children'. They experimented with new notions of romance, sexuality, psychoanalysis, existentialism and democracy. They planned to get rich by doing Chinese computer programs for IBM. Either they must change their country or it would change them. If the curve of hope continued upwards, they would be the generation to make China open-minded, scientific, modern. They would put the Chinese in space. They had a slogan, ‘Break out of Asia, advance on the world.' And in the autumn of that year, it might almost have been possible.

On Saturday afternoons throughout the city, salons for democracy were held. Items on the agenda included: modern management techniques; cybernetics and systems theory; artistic individualism; an independent press; the separation of Party and government. People talked their heads off.

At one salon Philosopher Horse was invited to speak. Transformed, as his fame had gone before him, he gave a rousing address which had a packed crowd of Beijing Teachers College students clapping and chanting. He argued against Marx and for Nietzsche, asserting the power of the individual will to recast the world. Nietzsche's texts were a new bible, the other path.

Bizarrely they chanted: ‘What do we want? Nietzsche! What do we need? Nietzsche!'

At the end of the speech Philosopher Horse produced a thick bundle of mimeographed sheets. He announced that he had formed his own political organisation. The document laid down some basic principles. It appealed to the spirit of Wei Jingsheng who was still imprisoned for demanding the Fifth Modernisation, Democracy, without which the Four Technological Modernisations could never be achieved. ‘
Let us try to discover by ourselves what is to be done
,' quoted Philosopher Horse.

The leaflets were eagerly grabbed. And as he left the seat, he called out the name of his invented party:

‘Defend the People!'

The phrase raced around the salon.

‘Defend the People!'

In early December in Shanghai tens of thousands of students and workers assembled in the People's Square. There had been nothing like it for a decade.

7

Clarence joined the Beijing press in the rush to Shanghai. In the afternoon, as he was running to catch the taxi, a letter from Autumn arrived at the office.

Dear Clarence,

It is already two months since I left Beijing. I have recently passed my twenty-first birthday. According to the regulations it is permissible to volunteer for the army between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. I have decided to become a soldier. It is a good opportunity. Shovelling coal at the Vehicle Plant is too hard and the pay is too little. The army will give me the opportunity to study and to see other places. I am also happy to help the motherland. The fitness training is already over. Soon we move, and I will learn to use a typewriter and to drive a car. It's real fun.

After I left Beijing I needed to return to my village to get approval to enlist. I had a health check, then joined the army in the county town. I had no opportunity to return to Beijing to farewell you. Excuse me.

We two have different nations, different languages, different backgrounds. Our friendship has left a deep impression on me. You have treated me with respect and kindness. There is genuine love between us and I miss you ardently. But I do not think you can take me with you to your country. It is an impossible dream. We two must travel our separate roads. For this reason I have decided to join the army. In the barracks I dream of you. I imagine you by my side. In the future perhaps we will meet again.

I hope your health is good. I hope your life goes smoothly. I wish all things may go as your heart desires.

Your friend, Autumn

The press corps clubbed together on the Bund, in the Peace Hotel, but Clarence deserted for a back alley place where a chuckling old lady was glad to pour scotch into him. He saw Autumn's skull shaved of its permed curls, a brown belt encircling his slender waist several times, khaki billowing, his pocked complexion growing pasty on mess food. Television paraded the legless and blind veterans, of twenty and twenty-one, who came back from the nasty border war with Vietnam. What of the others? All China's borders were in conflict. There was a saying that military boots required iron nails. But the boy was right. Clarence's fantasy of taking him to London in his suitcase, lugging it from the cab, opening it on the porch of his mother's Nash terrace, would never have eventuated. The Englishman's stomach twisted. Fuck! The boy was gone. Nothing ever lasted. It was better to feel nothing. But he would be taunted by the memory. The boy at least—the letter said nothing to the contrary—was alive, and well out of his lover's way. Clarence stumbled from the bar, took a wrong turn in the alley, spat and blindly wended forward. The air was opaque with a putrid mist, not exactly rain, that descended slowly from the heavy sky. Shanghai was sodden with water that seeped up from the spongy ground and subterranean net of canals into which the city was said to be sinking, like Venice. Clarence wandered towards Suzhou Creek for the hell of it, the moored barges reminding him of patients in a stinking ward. As he crossed the humped bridge he sang in a throaty theatrical imitation of Marlene Dietrich,
Johnny's gone for a soldier, Johnny's gone for a soldier
. He could only remember one line. A bundle in the gutter reared its head.

He made a wrong turning, revolved, retreated, and found flagstones under his feet, with obscure yet familiar inscriptions that demanded attention. Tombstones. Humphrey Stenhouse Waterman, d. 1919. Juliet Jane Keswick, d. 1922. Marcel Hubert Villeneuve,
aetat
. 27. Felix Kleyff, Berlin 1874—Shanghai 1924. The road was paved with slabs removed from the foreigners' cemetery. Clarence's feet passed over their memory as if he were a ghost with them. Then he sang his despairing line again. Then he emptied his guts good and proper, and found his way back. With sham dignity he disturbed the night porter of his hotel, and took the lift seven flights to his room. Watercolour was rising from the river, juices excreted according to the body rhythms of the monster city of solvents: liquid and money.

The morning began with crowds of demonstrators invading the Mayor's office. They were young, curious and passionate. In the afternoon a car was manhandled, overturned and set ablaze. It was a sign that things were getting out of hand. Mao said it takes only a spark to light a prairie fire. Clarence took the shot that was used worldwide by the Western press.

At midnight, returning to his hotel with his camera, he was prevented from crossing Nanjing Road by a mass of people moving towards the Bund. Like a mighty water dragon, the crowd followed the riverfront and pressed up against the blockaded portals of the Municipal Building, the headquarters of the city authorities. They carried bread rolls in their hands, hundreds of bread rolls that were hurled at the iron grille.

8

It froze early that year. Againsta classic winterscape of broomstick trees, russet pavilions on exposed hills muted by draperies of mist, and the veiny rumpled ice leading to treacherous patches where water was visible beneath a glass membrane, Wally and Jin Juan ventured out onto the ice at the Summer Palace. Wally, who had not skated since New England, trod cautiously as an old fox. His feet shuddered painfully on the high blades. Wistfully he watched Jin Juan describing loops around him, swift as a vixen. He attempted a figure of eight and, hearing the ice crack behind him, just managed to reach the safe, thick part. Then Jin Juan came up behind and pushed him down, and stood there laughing at his long struggle to right himself.