Avenue of Eternal Peace Read Online Free PDF Page A

pollution’.
    But according to the regulations, as interpreted by the hand-wringing manager, three foreigners were allowed to dance together. He cordially invited the two men to join Dulcia, who broke up over the regulation—a sly number, three.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Closing time,’ announced the manager, herding the gang towards the door marked Man Closet Woman Closet.
    â€˜It’s like those wartime jokes,’ said Dulcia. ‘An American, an Englishman and an Australian in a lousy bar in Peking.’
    â€˜A damn Yankee, a whinging Pom and a gullible Ocker,’ said Wally. And thought to himself, a sceptic cursed with the need for values.
    â€˜Won’t you tell us the punch line?’ asked Clarence.
    â€˜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