Five Bells Page 12

  Hua sat propped in a wheelchair, tilted to one side. Her face was pulled back towards the bone, burnished and hard, like beaten bronze. Pei Xing saw the twitch of the mouth on the right side that indicated recognition. Hua, or one of the nurses, must somehow keep track of the days, since she was always there, in a clean blouse, with her long hair brushed, parked beside the empty visitor’s chair.

  Pei Xing crossed the room and lightly touched Hua’s hand. Then she straightened her collar, which had folded under. A tear sprang from the corner of the patient’s eye; more lightly Pei Xing wiped it away with her finger.

  She did not ask the usual rhetorical questions – ‘so how are you today?’ – these only upset Hua. Instead, she announced matter-of-factly:

  ‘We are almost at the end of Doctor Zhivago. Chapter Fifteen. Conclusion. But don’t be fooled. After Conclusion there is Epilogue, then sixty pages of Zhivago’s poems. So we have a few weeks yet.’

  Pei Xing flicked though her book – another fifty pages of story. ‘The Conclusion is seventeen chapters,’ she said. ‘Let’s see how we go. It takes Mr Pasternak a long time to finish his story.’

  In truth, she was pleased with Mr Pasternak’s delay, with the story that went on and on and on. She always remembered her joy as a young woman when she discovered that after the Conclusion, after Zhivago’s death, which she now approached with serious trepidation, there was the story of his discovered daughter, the laundrywoman Tonya, living in a labour camp.

  Pei Xing made herself comfortable and held the large volume before her:

  All that is left is to tell the brief story of the last eight or ten years of Zhivago’s life, years in which he went more and more to seed, gradually losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and a writer, emerging from his state of depression and resuming his work only to fall back, after a short flare-up of activity, into long periods of indifference to himself and to everything in the world.

  Pei Xing glanced up at Hua. She was staring into the distance, but was certainly concentrating. Hua looked over as if to ask: why have you stopped? So Pei Xing resumed:

  During these years the heart disease, which he had himself diagnosed earlier but without any real idea of its gravity, developed to an advanced stage …

  Pei Xing read from an English edition, and in the beginning had paused every now and then to explain a word or a phrase she thought Hua might not know. But she quickly discovered that Hua preferred her to read right through. She may have been guessing the meaning from context, or learning as she went; she may have had a better knowledge of English than Pei Xing had surmised. Pei Xing recalled how many words she had looked up in the dictionary, the first time she read it, and how many idiomatic translations she had found difficult to understand. ‘He went more and more to seed’: how unintelligible that had sounded. From Doctor Zhivago she had learnt a smattering of English phrases, formal syntax and a broad and rather old-fashioned vocabulary.

  After five minutes or so they had entered their rhythm: the reader’s voice in a steady current, the tone even, firm, and Russia, textual Russia, entered the room, seeping under the door, flying through the window, infusing the summer air, bringing to North Sydney the Red Army and the spring of 1922. The plump nurse quietly placed a cup of tea at Pei Xing’s elbow, and she sipped as she read, kept up the cadence, and pronounced as confidently as she could all the polysyllabic names.

  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 m
ore 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.

  Give it a go, whatever. You never know now, do you? as Mam would say.

  Up a side-street, beyond the bustle, Catherine discovered a French patisserie. It had white tables on the pavement, a busy brown interior and a courtyard out the back, surrounded by trailing vines. Couples sat close, sipping coffee and tackling baguettes and tarte tartin.

  Luc. Ah my lovely, hungering for your touch.

  They had met in a place not unlike this hidden-away café. She had fled Ireland to Paris after the murder of her heroine, Veronica Guerin. Though not yet finished her journalist training, Catherine was star-struck with Guerin; she wanted to be like her and to write fearless stories, to work with a risky profile on the Sunday Independent. She wanted to play Camogie like a demon and defeat the champion team from Cork, to expose the murdering bastards who drug-dealt junk at Ballymun, to talk with such confidence, to display blonde cool. C
atherine and Brendan marched in street demonstrations after the news of her death. Together they wrote letters against the Gardai, and felt dismally outraged.

  Catherine admitted only later that she had been afraid. A coward, to be sure. It would be easier, she told Mam, to be a journalist in London. She would visit Paris first for a short break, a few days’ holiday. Then London. Across the water.

  It seemed that everyone in Dublin in ’96 had an urban tale about Guerin. Someone had known her at school; someone else knew gossip or scandal. She was a saint or a complete bitch, or a fucking brilliant journo. Her image was everywhere. Her name was in the papers. But Catherine had never met or seen her, other than on television, and knew only in a remote way that there might be brave acts of writing, and that this murder on Naas Road, this silencing of one writer, would punctuate and determine the course of her life. Remorseless killing, that’s what the papers said. At stake was the precarious self she had only just begun to confirm, the one that found the world comprehensible, that wished to report it to others, that wanted to be part of the great otherworld that is our lives in print. This was only a nebulous understanding, and an instinct to flee. But it was enough to impel her to act decisively and finally to leave. Her sisters were married, all except Ruthy, her favourite, who seemed to be enjoying her job at the lingerie counter of Dunnes. Her Mam had settled into the paralysis of life at Ballymun. Catherine felt the need to escape the local nets they were trapped in.

  Brendan was staying put. He had at last finished his doctorate, a study of Seán Ó Faoláin’s editorship of the literary magazine called The Bell, and had just been appointed at University College, teaching literature. ‘I’m Modern Oirish,’ he proudly proclaimed. He had taken to wearing new clothes and quoting James Joyce to visiting Americans. They apparently found him adorable and wanted their photographs taken with him, with their jointly literary smiles and their muck-about attempts at the brogue. Catherine wondered then if Brendan would write a fine book one day, a real book, in hardback, with real ideas.