Avenue of Eternal Peace (3 page)

‘In China it takes three to tango. Come on!'

And Foreign Trader and Party Greenhorn advanced from the shadows to do a crab-like disco on either side of the woman, encircling her with their pincers.

The barman watched with a saintly, lit up expression, until the sweating manager impulsively pushed the Eject switch and turned on the light. The dancers blinked, began murmurs and protests, then Dulcia screamed. A large fat rat was scurrying (in not too much of a scurry) along the skirting boards.

Earlier in the day the same rat had crossed the room while the hygiene inspector was discussing with the manager catering arrangements for her son's wedding, and a discount was struck.

‘Closing time,' announced the manager, herding the gang towards the door marked Man Closet Woman Closet.

‘It's like those wartime jokes,' said Dulcia. ‘An American, an Englishman and an Australian in a lousy bar in Peking.'

‘A damn Yankee, a whinging Pom and a gullible Ocker,' said Wally. And thought to himself, a sceptic cursed with the need for values.

‘Won't you tell us the punch line?' asked Clarence.

‘They danced with each other! Nice to see you again, Doc,' she called as she threw a leg over her bike.

3

Clarence walked into the cold. At night, disguised like a homecoming worker in cap, scarf and coat, he became a faceless swimmer in the darkness. He loved the night, when his camera was stowed and he could cease looking for shots. He had come to Beijing to prevent his mother turning him into a character in one of her novels. She had only the notoriety of literary London to confer. Clarence the child, Clarence the teenager, had been utilised more than once in the Honourable Ann Codrington's heightened fictions. Growing older, he had learned to put himself out of reach, studying a language that could not be quoted on the page, and then moving safely East. His mother's mighty pen had hung over his head through adolescence, forcing private turmoil back on itself to escape expression. He started playing round with the camera then, and photography irresistibly became his medium: art without a voice. What he loved was the accident of the shutter, and his soul remained the amorphous dark against which images formed—tender and witty and lonely, speaking no language, wearing no dress.

He walked past the locked-up bird and fish market where by day fanciers traded rare breeds and curios, past the Kismet spires of the Soviet-built Exhibition Centre, and the zoo where the polar bear was bellowing, into the area where itinerants gathered, Mongols and Uigyurs and prostitutes, forming compositions of fur, leather and padding in the steamy glow of the noodle stalls.

Clarence crossed a scrap of park with solid ice puddles on the paths and trees hacked like iron rakes; and entered the unsewered, draughty lavatory where, shuddering and holding his breath, he relieved himself: a little dragon emitting steam. Opposite, the rooftop of a foreign hotel sent out a lethargic light show of coloured stars. He would go to warm himself on free scotch and gossip from the bar boys; that would do his cold good.

4

Three fates in black tangling their yarns: had they been construing China or themselves, Wally wondered. The shapeless, murky depth of the city had somehow to be placed within a framework of understanding, otherwise you were nowhere, anywhere, at middle life, far from boundaries and bearings, in the Middle Kingdom. He had drunk too much, heard too much, talked too much, and his body was too big for the damned bed, and the damned bed was too big for his damned body. He scratched frantically, pinched the back of his neck as hard as he could, squeezed the acupuncture point between thumb and forefinger that's supposed to induce sleep, and, trying to summon Australian sheep milling realistically through a shearing run, managed only cartoon blobs of wool. On the bedside table lay the photocopies of Hsu Chien Lung's articles. The disappearing man. Wally had flicked through the greyed pages of oldfashioned print and wondered why he admired their elegance so. In one gesture they pointed a mystery and hinted a solution, although the site of that solution had receded. Was his attachment to those old papers purely a road not taken, that he had sentimentally rediscovered as need dictated? He cursed with an insomniac's impotency—and returned on the ferris wheel to the bottom. Where was he? And why?

There had been relics, a black leather-bound Mandarin bible, printed Shanghai 1898, a silver pipe that the children fancied smelled of opium, big black placards with gold characters meaning longevity. There were photographs of the white house with black tiles and turned up eaves, a woman with a plait in a white pinafore, swarthy converts in tight round caps assembled in a courtyard. There was the brusque memoir, a gathering of stock anecdotes, that Grandpa Frith had awkwardly typed for posterity. There was the fact that Wally's father got cross whenever China was mentioned.

Most beautifully there was The Hut in the hills that family legend whispered had been built by Grandpa in memory of his first wife, Retta. Wally never knew that real grandmother, but he knew The Hut, a cottage of tin and wood and stone where he used to go for holidays as a boy. The soil and climate made exotic things grow there: a Nepali deodar with a cave inside, a spreading lime with leaves of see-through tissue, mountainous rhododendrons, liquidambar, crepe myrtle, peonies, red toadstools with white spots, persistent bamboo.

Viewed from the bottom road the landscape arranged itself in descending terraces and framed The Hut with lofty trees, some European, some native, some oriental, shaded, half-hidden, with an illusion of great distance; revealing, as Grandpa had planned, the Chinese proportions of a roof that yearned upwards with curving iron eaves. It was Grandpa's shrine, or apology, where Wally the child had been happiest, in summer, sitting out on the latticed veranda surrounded by the rattling leaves of the great magnolia whose masses of wide open flower moons made the air divine ether.

Visits to The Hut were special, planned from afar. His parents had settled interstate out of Grandpa's reach. Then they would drive hundreds of miles to stay with Grandpa and Patsy in The Hut, and everyone always said the time was far too short, until afterwards in the car Wally's father and mother said they could not have stayed a day longer. Patsy was a divorced woman when Grandpa married her, of Scottish stock, staunch, forthright, likeable. She had a daughter from her first husband and a tribe of relatives, and bore two more Frith children. With his high moral tone and medical man's common sense, Grandpa fixed up the mess to his perfect satisfaction by making the second, immediate family the one that absorbed his interest and life. Wally's family was left out.

Family never meant much to Wally. His father's childhood had been broken by Retta's death and ever after his father's relationship with the old man was strained by unexplored resentments and stubborn independence. Jerry, Wally's father, was utterly unsentimental where family was concerned; and Wally's self-sufficient mother was of the same breed.

Against that background, the ritual pilgrimages to visit Grandpa Frith were steeped for Wally in momentous alienness. In the fabulous leafy old world of The Hut the boy found much. Grandpa teased him with oriental mysteries, the white mane shining, gaunt limbs on the chair arms, bones stuck under clothes, eyes darting as the voice croaked its summons for the boy to enter the presence of an ancestral spirit (who was dying, Wally later knew).

He was too young to appreciate old Waldemar Frith's wit, or the sturdy aphorism inscribed in the Mandarin bible that came down to him:
The courage we desire and prize is not to die decently but to live manfully
(Carlyle). But the spirit image stayed in Wally's memory. Jerry had gone grey by the time the day came to fly from Wollongong to Adelaide for the funeral. He didn't say much to the kids afterwards. The clan stopped gathering. That year, when Wally was ten, the year of the last visit to The Hut, summer magnolias stirred riper-than-ever fancies, the Soviets put Sputnik into space and in China Chairman Mao allowed a hundred flowers to bloom before they were quickly scorched. Then came the Great Leap Forward.

5

The snow froze. The road was hard and still, long, empty, unbending. The breath of a puny Mongolian pony pulling the cart home along the usual route formed a little cloud of steam. Clop-clop, clop-clop, it moved from city to country with a heavy load of nightsoil. Atop the cart, bundled in greatcoat and fur cap with earflaps down, the old farmer snoozed, and from his nostrils smoked tiny runnels. If he woke he would growl, but the animal knew without commands to go fast when the road was hard and empty and home approached.

After missing the last bus and taking a roundabout way, Jin Juan came through side streets towards the crossroads. Accursed Beijing she knew like her own nervous system. She came home having argued. Her hair was stuffed inside the hood of her down jacket. Probably to the outside she looked no different, but she no longer felt, or cared to feel, clean and pretty. Her perfume annoyed her. She would have to wash it off before class tomorrow. She felt, in fact, strong and savage as her feet hit the iron-hard ground. She had decided; she knew he had decided; the matter was communicated in their bodies, though for so long they had played ring-around-the-rosy with hopes and promises, just as her country had gone on waiting and waiting for the Red Dawn so long that no one knew now how to break the circle of chains. If only … Jin Juan decided once again that she would win, that her anger and his edginess were but raw materials, and that, rather than exploding, her energy must be used to turn all that recalcitrant matter into well-tempered love. She was tenacious, with a discipline that brought her back from the edge of violent destructiveness to a new deep vein of persistence.

She was conscious first of an intrusion on her thoughts. The animal knocked into her, was trampling over her, and she was down among its hundred-seeming legs. Her body was rolling under the cart. Trotting along the familiar road, the horse could not be expected to take account of a young woman crossing in the dark, and scarcely registered the disturbance, scarcely stopped. The old man snorted and made a lame attempt to pull on the reins. He was not about to apologise. Jin Juan rolled like an acrobat and was on her feet again. ‘Nothing, nothing,' she said, ‘no harm done.' The farmer would only swear at her if she let him. Perhaps her cheeks were grazed by the ice. There was no light to see what state she was in. She shrugged, laughed, turned and made her decisive way before the sleepy farmer abused his puzzled horse into motion once more. She walked away. What guts she had. She sniffed. She did not look vengefully back at the honey cart. Was the stuff all over her? She smelled the perfume, like a film of pollution. She smelled her body, his, their, bodies. She smelled shit. Golden grace spiking ice down the road's black centre, Jin Juan walked decisively.

THREE
The Way

1

The driver went through the regular litany of questions as the taxi crawled across the city. What country are you from? Wally answered faithfully, except sometimes he said Iceland. What are you doing in China? How old are you? Are you married? Yes, he fudged. Children, yes. (Contrary, baffling Jerome, his son.) Home? Car? How much do you earn? By any standards he was comfortable, though his colleagues grumbled, too comfortable. Chinese people too many, Chinese history too long, China too poor. If I go to your country, how much money can I make? What do you make of Chinese people? Wally pronounced the word he had learned to describe them:
lihai
, meaning fierce, a force to be reckoned with, like the hottest Sichuan food.

No one was skittled on the way, though human shapes drifted out in front of the taxi that sailed through the streets like an air-conditioned barge.

Eagle was waiting for him at the Daoist temple, standing at attention against a sunny patch of wall. He wore navy running pants with a white stripe, white running shoes and a bulky sweater knitted with the Armani eagle. Full of energy, he led the Doctor across the swept flagstones to the first courtyard where monks with topknots were pottering about. He tolerated the foreigner's interest in such quaint things, though he had seen too much fakery to regard these Daoists as close to any source. Yesterday's stinking superstition was today's colourful tradition under the Party's magic wand; and the monks, with baggy robes and inturned eyes, performed well.

‘If they can't get a better job, it's not a bad living for these guys to be transferred here,' he commented.

Wally was thinking philosophically of Lao Tzu. Yet Eagle was the truer Daoist, always taking the path of least resistance. Even the movement of his frame suggested the flow of fish in a stream. Cheeky sarcasm communicated itself in his facial gestures as much as his broken language. He was open and virtuous, while entirely pragmatic, serenely following the accident that had first thrown him together with the foreigner. If the Cultural Revolution had deprived him of education, he had become an alert autodidact, and although he had only a badly paid and boring job in a state office, he seldom proclaimed his grievances. There was more to life than the refrigerator, the video recorder and the foreign passport that his contemporaries worshipped. Wally liked him. He preferred being with Eagle to being with the people from the Medical College who were eager, for their own motives, to act as his guide. With Eagle he felt unconfined and could question frankly. It was necessary to trust someone. When Eagle said he had been a basketball champion in the city, Wally believed him. His height distinguished him, and he had an affable grace that athletic prowess might have conferred. Wally committed himself to the relationship, and would not let Eagle down when the time came. Meanwhile he pestered him with questions, as if Eagle were the representative Chinese who could answer all inquiries about his people.

They stepped through bright red and green paintwork into dark lustrous chambers hung with banners and out again into white winter sunlight, accompanied by the monks' babbling wooden music. ‘Actually, why did you come to China?' asked Eagle in return.

‘You're like the taxi drivers. You ask direct questions and expect direct answers. Why can't you be inscrutable like you're supposed to be?'

‘What you say?'

With some exasperation Wally explained that he wanted to learn from China.

‘Can you learn from China?' Eagle seriously wondered.

‘Like the man said about Everest, it's there.'

‘You are going to climb Heaven Mountain?'

‘Heaven Mountain you call it? I can't climb Heaven Mountain because China has got in the way.'

Eagle hung his head in helpless resignation. To be presented with such metaphysical reasons for behaviour, to have placed before him the world of Wally, where great actions were undertaken for whimsical motives, where practical considerations were irrelevant or beneath mention, was perplexing.

‘Do you believe in religion?'

‘Not exactly,' said Wally, fluffing it.

‘I don't believe,' Eagle stated flatly.

2

Wally's grandfather had believed. That, indirectly, provided a reason. But the oblique causation was not easy to explain. New China had begun in 1949, and was already the burdensome past to New Age China of the 1980s. In thinking of his grandfather Wally was harking back to the late Ching dynasty, that perfumed twilight merged already with legend. His grandfather had been a doctor and a Christian in the South at the turn of the century, a craggy old chap whose perdurable Saxon Christian name Wally had inherited. Jerry, Wally's father, had been born in China. On winter weekends in Wollongong, when rain beat down over the ranges, while ma and pa snoozed after lunch, Wally loved to sift through his father's desk. It wasn't snooping; Jerry had nothing to hide, as long as the boy left things as neat as he found them. The father's desk was a model to the boy, of bookkeeping, scrupulosity, and how to get rid of useless clutter. Wally wished for more clutter, though he was scientifically minded and liked to have names on things. He liked best the folder of documents kept in the locked drawer, and his favourite thing there was his father's birth certificate.
Jeremiah Columba Frith
, in browned copperplate,
8th August 1905, Hangchow
. The names and occupations of his grandparents written out in full.
Waldemar Thomas Frith, medical officer. Retta Frith née Glee, nursing sister. Address: The Mission Hospital, Taichow
. In the bottom corner of the yellowed certificate was a vertical row of tiny printed characters, to designate, perhaps, a Chinese manufacturer. The certificate threatened to fall apart along its crease lines from a lifetime's folding and unfolding.

Wally often raised these matters with his father, but Jerry—having long ago ditched the thundering moniker Jeremiah—showed little interest. He had no recollection of China. When the family was shipped from Shanghai to South Australia, Jerry was four. Nor, in later life, was he in touch with his elder brother Lionel, a scapegrace who might have remembered more. Wally's curiosity was kindled but never fanned, not after Grandpa died. The link with China was a stray thread in a life otherwise well ordered, hardworking and determined. Jerry was a professional soldier, a communications engineer. During the war years, of middling rank and no longer young, he met a woman similarly placed, and when peace came they married. In his forties he entered upon domestic life and a General Post Office job at Wollongong that lasted till retirement. From both his parents Wally got no-nonsense attitudes: do what's best for you; make a good job of things; make the most of what you've got. He was also brainy. In the spirit of his country and the times, the early 1960s, he was encouraged to go for broad horizons and high endeavour. He came top of the class in his final year at Wollongong High; he worked for it. He was offered his first choice, a place in Medicine at Sydney University.

Wally was a straightforward young man, though neither he nor his mates, who read philosophy and literature and talked politics, self-consciously, and involved themselves in campus activities, were typical medical students. Wally was secretary of the Student Socialists, an unfrivolous lot regularly assailed by the more numerous Libertarians, a flamboyant anarchic set who were not politicised until Australian boys died in Vietnam. Wally did not need a stinking post-colonial war to establish his convictions. He was a socialist on scientific principles. He believed in the common good being served by common cooperation. Knowledge as much as wealth was power and neither should be the privilege of a few. His views set him at odds with his brothers in the medical school, who had sharp eyes for money under the blazon of the Hippocratic Oath. Wally's altruism was bullshit, they said, and Wally was a bore. Their attitudes turned him towards a career in medical research rather than lucrative practice. He was superior, even if he didn't come from the North Shore; and he stuck by his thinking mates and kept himself clean.

In the summer holidays he worked on the Wollongong docks, loading ships that took Australian wool and minerals to Japan, and later at the steel smelter, and eventually in the workers' compo office at BHP. To put in the twelve weeks each summer he turned down more diverting proposals, again out of pride and a desire to have the stuffing knocked out of him. To the blokes on the job, who wished he was more talkative, he was known as Doc. He sat around with his nose in a book. When he did open up, he was all opinions and hot air.

On weekends, Wally walked in the bush and on the mountains that ran along the south coast. He roamed the Budawangs in drowsy fragrant heat, through stands of eucalypts whose curling boughs created crackling grey-green canopies, through tufty buzzing clearings, into cool gorges dense with wattle, to creeks and pools overhung with willows and wild apples and spiky melaleuca, and up, at high altitude, to outcrops of rock split by ice and heat. To walk the ridge of an elevation was Wally's pleasure, to find the natural trail or swear by the compass and reach a crest where under the purest indigo sky the softened furry mountains, sheer cliffs and spread plateaus rippled into terrain that, however ancient, answered to human contours and desires. To him it was a more seductive sight than the flat shimmering sea stretched to disappearing in the other direction. Once he climbed Pigeonhouse, a mountain topped with a rock that from out to sea had reminded Captain Cook of a dovecote: or perhaps that was Cook's discretion, since the mountain was a huge breast with nipple aroused which, from afar, or if he was standing atop like Gulliver in Brobdingnag, fed Wally's fantasies. On the horizon of the sea, where Cook's ship had sailed, passed the dark shapes of cargo ships heavy with ore, wheat, wool, the vessels of trade going to and from Wollongong, Sydney, Newcastle. On their stained sides, the young man had seen at close quarters, some had Chinese characters. Now Wally's people were creating a blockade of incineration and carnage in Vietnam to stop the Yellow Peril. His mother said she didn't want to break her back in a rice paddy and eat stones for bread. His father said that if the Chinese stood in a line holding hands they would ring the globe.

Exhilarated on the summit of Pigeonhouse, he wiped the sweat and grime from his brow. The breeze tugged at his sandy curls. His face was burnt pink with blotches of orange freckles. From his peak in Darien, he considered, the world lay all before him. He was twenty-two, a few days into the New Year 1967. His resolution was to be an explorer of whatever terrain the modern world laid open. A letter had come to inform him of his final results. He had won a scholarship to study overseas. He did not know he would still be out of the country when his father died, and then his mother.

3

In the courtyard, incense smoke arose from a bronze urn over which dragons played. Wally and Eagle followed an elderly monk into a pavilion where the rite was in progress. Amidst hangings of scarlet and yellow silk embroidered with cranes of longevity and pink clouds and flowers and many-splendoured butterflies, the monks lined up to chant. They wore black caps over their buns, and over their white stockings and blue smocks they wore scarlet cloaks bordered with black. They were mostly young. ‘Unemployed youth,' whispered Eagle. The chamber was lit like a theatre, to make the most of the dusky images and the shiny purple Ching dynasty vessels. The music began, syncopated and percussive, as gongs, bells, copper strips and hollow lumps of wood were struck. The indecipherable grumbling chant commenced, with a moderate amount of ducking and rising, to bring the living and the spirits of the dead together. The spectators watched blankly, too humble to be sceptical, until a plain man in a blue cotton dustcoat came forward, lit a handful of incense, kowtowed, and led forward a frail, shuffling woman, also in a cotton dustcoat, evidently his wife, and placed her on the kneeler. She was blinded by glaucoma, Wally diagnosed. Afterwards, neither husband nor wife having met the eyes of an onlooker, she was led away, lifting her feet high over the raised threshold of an entrance she couldn't see.

In the attached museum Wally studied a Daoist chart of the human body which made the names and relationships of the body's organs and passages into a narrative about spirits and demons.

At the kiosk, buying postcards from a young monk who came of Marxist-Leninist parents in the barren North-East, and who had chosen Daoism because his parents could not feed him, Wally asked what was the aim of the faith.

‘Long life,' said the monk succinctly, and implied that no other religion laid itself on the line so frankly.

‘How is long life achieved?' asked Wally.

With suitable circularity the monk replied, ‘By training.'

4

Wally Frith was an educational product of Sydney University and the two Cambridges, in a process that took sixteen years of his life and sailed him into intellectual and social waters unimaginably far from his boyhood mountaintop.

In Cambridge, England, he was a graduate member of Christ's College, a chap with a tawny beard, blue jeans and a shapeless tweed jacket, whose family was the lab where he worked with unflagging discipline as ideas sparked. In the same buildings a few years earlier, the DNA helix had been isolated by Watson and Crick. As a phalanx of researchers marched abreast to realise the implications of its discovery, embryology enjoyed a revolution. Wally went to the wildly hypothetical forefront—gene pathology and its links with cell mutation. The time was the high 1960s, when briefly the prospect of a massive social transformation offered. Wally's former socialist principles were strengthened by his encounter with the nobs and yobs of Old Albion; but unlike others he had no time for full-scale revolutionary theory, not at the expense of embryology. It was with difficulty that he held his own in political debate over a pint. His work demanded, and absorbed and satisfied, as only a vocation can. In May of 1968, when the rallying cry issued from Paris and spring burst in red flags over the Cambridge meadows, Wally was in the lab eighteen hours a day, refining his data on the oncogene: what a colleague nicknamed the human face of the Brave New World.