Avenue of Eternal Peace Read Online Free PDF Page B

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