Five Bells (15 page)

 

One day in Sydney's Chinatown Jimmy had introduced a new friend, Lin, a young man in a leather jacket and with hair gelled into a high dark helmet. Pei Xing thought he looked like a gangster from a Hong Kong movie; she imagined black dollars, heroin, bad luck, spilt blood. His family, said Jimmy, was also from Shanghai; you should meet his mother. And so to please her son, who for some reason wanted to impress this young man, to forge
guanxi,
connections, to get ahead in some obscure and possibly criminal way, she agreed.

When Pei Xing stood for the first time before Dong Hua, she felt a surge of nausea. The tapeworm in the gut. The body remembering its beatings. A shrill inner cry she had tried for long years to smother.
No, no, no.
This woman was responsible
for her debasement, had been sadistically cruel, had made her consider suicide. She carried a new name and a new hairstyle and had aged stiff and metallic, but it was still the same person; it was still Comrade Peng.

The woman who now called herself Dong Hua had also looked shocked. Their sons had contrived a meeting neither would ever have wished. Pei Xing held herself together – was that the English phrase? – and made vacuous small talk for fifteen minutes, after which she invented an excuse and left. She told Jimmy she would never see this woman again, this woman who, she said, without going into details, had been her guard at Number One Shanghai Prison. It was incomprehensible, this fold in history, this diabolical return. What afterlife was this?

But within a week Dong Hua had knocked on the door of her apartment. ‘I need to talk,' she had said.

‘Go away,' Pei Xing responded. ‘I have nothing to say to you.'

But Dong Hua had wedged her foot in the doorway – that old joke about salesmen and Jesus-people – and would not leave. Pei Xing remembered how Comrade Peng had borrowed a pair of boots to kick her senseless on Mao Tse Tung's birthday. She remembered the blow to her face that had broken her nose and the sour taste of blood at the back of her throat. She looked down at the shoe in the doorway and thought she would faint.

‘I will call the police,' Pei Xing said weakly.

But still Comrade Peng would not leave or withdraw and Pei Xing, caught in the seizure of her former role, would not have dared to crush the guard's foot in the door.

Pei Xing thought to herself: I can never escape this, never; it has followed me to Australia. I am Australian now, and still it is here. Still it is here.

But they had talked, and shared tea, Pei Xing striving to maintain face for the sake of her son. Hua spoke of her childhood. Her father had been of the virtuous proletariat, working in the Shanghai Number Four Steel Factory. Hua talked about her life in the Red Guards and how exhilarating it had seemed, how she had worshipped Chairman Mao, how proud her family had been. Even with the failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign, when their family was starving, when a small piece of pork that had been two yuan was selling for fifty yuan, she still believed everything she was told. She had been chosen in the
da chuanlian
period to travel with other young Red Guards to spread Mao's words across the country. She had never travelled before; it was an exciting time. She spoke of her years working in the prison, how she had believed the inmates were evil, dupes of foreign devils, conspiring against China; she believed too in destroying the despised Four Olds, that everything traditional should be crushed and eliminated. It was our history, she said: Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution, the thoughts of Chairman Mao. You were an ‘educated youth', she said, of the bourgeoisie, a basic class enemy.

As she spoke, Pei Xing heard the same old excuse: we were all in it together. Millions were Red Guards, millions were persecuted, millions were sent to the countryside for re-education; your story is but one and worthless in the scheme of things. Guards, prisoners, all the same. It was a murderous time. Brutality occurred. The mighty dialectic of historical materialism held them all in its sway. Pei Xing felt the exhaustion of so unremitting a narrative –
a revolution is not a dinner party, said Chairman Mao –
its crass inhumanity, its dark determinism.

There was a pause.

‘But my violence,' Hua added softly, ‘that was inexcusable. I am sorry,' she said. ‘More than I can say.' She lowered her head. There was a long, awkward silence.

It was as if the sky had fallen in. Pei Xing stared at this woman she had spent most of her life hating.

‘I'm sorry,' Hua said again. ‘Please forgive me.'

Pei Xing was in a turmoil of mixed responses. This woman, she thought meanly, was pleading not to be hated. An ignoble plea, a denial of her actions. A suggestion that history was essentially vague and impersonal. But this woman, she thought more generously, was asking forgiveness, had surrendered herself to another story in which she was the villain. She had no reason to ask forgiveness if she believed she had acted without choice.

 

Guanyin, Goddess of Compassion and Mercy.
Her mother had owned a small Qing statue, of white crackle-glaze porcelain, elegant and pure, that was crushed by the Red Guards. Pei Xing still remembers the
pop!
sound as the god's head was flattened underfoot. Guanyin was first among gods, her mother declared, and though she considered herself too educated to be a sincere Buddhist, and was committed, like her husband, to staunch Western secularism, she loved this delicate figure, which she had inherited from her own mother, and knew all her tales of miracles and redemption. Guanyin had a narrow, thoughtful face and an expression of loving kindness. She stood in a lotus blossom and held up one hand. The statue had rested in a small alcove by their front doorway.

Pei Xing said nothing. She would not forgive this woman. She would not befriend her or hear any more of her self-exculpation.

 

Dong Hua continued to visit, uninvited, and with infuriating determination. Each time she visited she repeated her formal apology. She offered gifts of ginseng, rice wine and candied ginger, which Pei Xing found easy to dispose to the garbage. She stayed only for short periods, ten minutes or so. Then she
set off for the long walk back to the train station. Pei Xing was determined to remain strong and not relieve this brutal woman of the guilt she must be feeling. There was almost a pleasure in watching her walk away unsatisfied, seeing how she struggled in the heat and moved with a slow, unhealthy drag.

But the challenge of Dong Hua was to her deepest self. If there was no recovery within history there was no point to suffering. If there was no meeting, no words, there could be no escape from the hateful circle of vengeance, there could be no peace, there could be no future. After each visit Pei Xing was obliged to confront her own intransigence, to consider the dreadful power of her own stubborn reasoning. After each visit, Pei Xing wept.

 

She remembers exactly when it was she decided to forgive. It was just before sunset, the sky full of the last flickering glimmers of the day. There were puffy clouds lying stretched and copper-coloured on the horizon, looking Chinese, as they appear on watered silk scrolls. There were the distinctive calls of Australian birds, which always sounded to Pei Xing a little dejected, and she was sitting with her Dragon Well tea at the window of her apartment. Below, a boy was circling a small area of asphalt car park on a skateboard; its massive clatter and rumble – angry-sounding, repetitious – reverberated with hard energy against the brick walls that surrounded him. Looking down she saw this boy, caught in his noisy curves. He was insanely intent on his confined route, almost imprisoned, when he might have been out there, flying along the street.

 

Pei Xing closed the novel. ‘Now we shall take a break,' she announced, ‘and have something to eat.' She cradled the old woman's head in her hand and with a teaspoon fed her portions of rice porridge she had brought from home. She placed the rice at Hua's pleated lips, pushed it in, tipped a little. Then she
wiped the shiny trail of food with the edge of the spoon, as one does with an infant. Hua's skull was heavy, motionless, and it was the thinness of her hair that truly suggested her frailty. A nurse came and went. Time slowed, seemed to pool. There was the drum of an air-conditioner and the minute clicking restlessness of electrical objects. There was the languid quality to time that rests in hospitals for the aged, something entropic, slightly fearful, something Pei Xing associated with worn decks of playing cards or those rust-coloured chrysanthemums that fall apart in a mess, petal by slim petal.

On the table before them lay the novel they had shared. Their reading was moving towards the inevitable conclusion. And they had been visited again by a kind of provisional peace; they had entered the fluidity that composed them; they had read their chapters.

At Circular Quay Catherine rejoiced in the sunshine.

God, it was bright. Such a shine to the world, as Mam would say, such a shine to the world and all the Good Lord's creations.

Catherine had stayed for a while in the semi-circle of people watching the didgeridoo player. He was an Aboriginal man, covered in what looked like ceremonial white paint. Like the best buskers, he paid no attention to the crowd, but entered his music as though it were a room he might rest in. Sitting on the ground, the instrument between his bare legs, held by his toes, he also paid no attention to the electronic backbeat issuing from two fat black speakers set up on a ledge behind him. He entered the autism of recital. He was deliberately alone.

Catherine wondered how authentic this performance might be, and whether they were listening to music that was
wrenched from a community somewhere, and a dark night, a long history and a secret sacred purpose. CDs were on sale, and she considered buying one, but instead dropped coins into the hat splayed on the path for that purpose. It was the beauty of the sound that most surprised her. She had imagined a wearisome, uniform thrum, but heard instead a set of nuanced tones, at times like a human voice, distant, misremembered, at others like wind, or blown rain, or the amplified sighing and heartbeat one hears during illness or love-making. This was romantic, no doubt, and perhaps some honky-white fancy, Irish-inspired, but knowing nothing of the culture she responded only to the sound. This wooden tube of breath, pulsing and alive. She must tell Luc, who had an interest in ‘world music' and who had once, in a similar moment, hearing the sound from a loudspeaker broadcasting to the street, considered buying a didgeridoo in Paris.

 

Catherine's mother had a saying:
Remember Frances O'Riordan!

Frances O'Riordan was a thirty-seven-year-old Cork housewife mysteriously cured of her deafness when she went to see the moving Madonna at Ballinspittle. Completely deaf since twenty, she had stood before the Virgin and been touched by acoustical God. Glory be. When Catherine was listening to U2, with the volume turned up, Mam would shout out:
Remember Frances O'Riordan!
It was an ambiguous message. Catherine was never sure if her mother was telling her that hearing should be preserved for holy sounds, or that amplified U2 would drive her to ungodly deafness. She thought of it now, her mother's high call, and calculated that the good woman must be sixty this year. Happy Birthday, Frances O'Riordan.

 

The didgeridoo music followed Catherine as she walked towards the area called the Rocks. When she passed an ice
cream kiosk, she realised she was hungry. She walked beneath the massive train line suspended above her – just as a train roared on the iron tracks, slowing, arriving – and crossed to a street of old sandstone buildings, mostly modest and quite small, the barely preserved but gentrified remnants of a colonial city. The Harbour Bridge loomed at the end of the street; it hung against the sky like one of those dream-catchers you find in hippy homes, a net for invisible entities and the gluey stuff of the ether. Ruthy once owned one, before Mam declared it Protestant and asked her to take it down. Catherine decided to find lunch, then visit the Museum of Contemporary Art. In the rising wind fluttered red banners advertising Conceptual Art from Osaka. They depicted what appeared to be a simple black hole. A simple black hole on a bright red flag.