by Rod Jones
He still found himself eagerly ‘eavesdropping’ on the private worlds of women. Perhaps a line, a word under hypnosis would excite his imagination in the old way...but there was nothing. He became more harsh and ironic with his patients. He had lost faith in his calling, in the whole scientific approach of psychoanalysis.
He still presented himself at the Long Bar early each afternoon and after luncheon retired upstairs to smoke in the reading room, that wonderful cocoon of quiet contentment in a city of jangled nerves. There, ‘boys’ in white jackets with brass buttons appeared as if by intuition when it was time for another brandy, there were deep leather armchairs and green-shaded reading lamps and the air was soft and spicy with cigar smoke and one could safely expect to meet men of comfortable opinions.
It was there, sunk deep in his chair in the quiet gloom of shuttered daylight, Ayres overheard a British naval Commander who had recently come down from Manchuria telling another man—‘War’s a nasty business, all right.’ Ayres stifled a yawn and turned back to his newspaper.
‘One thing in particular...the Japs herded together all the Chinese children in one village and systematically punctured their eardrums...’
Ayres heard the words spoken, just like any other words of a gruesome century. The moment passed, the naval Commander left. Soon it would be time to head for home.
But the simple horror of it stayed with Ayres, and in the taxi on the way back to the Astor House he could still picture the uniforms and the Japanese officers’ caps, the fixed bayonets and the little bundle of thin bamboo skewers—and suddenly his cheeks were wet and he was struggling for breath. He took out his bandana handkerchief and covered his face, wiped the perspiration from the edges of his beard, looked around. The driver had not noticed.
In his rooms at the Astor House that night he took out the box of Julia’s photographs from where it had lain all this time in a cupboard. He looked through them until he came to a certain face. The eyes looked back at him frankly, even curiously, but without accusation. He recognized the street where the photograph had been taken. It was still the same. He walked down there sometimes. It was still haunted by the little ladies, just as much a part of Shanghai as the sampans in the Creek, the cranes on the skyline, further out the ships riding at anchor. He remembered the first morning he had disembarked in 1922 and melted into the city, anonymous, free. Now this face in the photograph looked across history and recognized him.
Later that month, in February 1932, the Japanese bombed the Chinese quarter of Shanghai and the barbed-wire barricades went up on street corners. In March an agreement was signed to cease hostilities around Shanghai, but Ayres’ decision had already been made. He had used medicine as an escape before, so why not again? That same month he tidied his affairs and quit his rooms at the Astor House Hotel. He took the train to Peking, huddled in a cold third-class compartment without blankets, unheard of for a European.
He leased the servants’ compound of a Chinese house on the outskirts of the old Tartar City and there, amongst the shrieks and brays and family quarrels, he commenced his practice. He made beds from scavenged mattresses; his operating table was converted from kitchen uses. He secured pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies with the aid of the local bishop and the Englishwoman whose little auxiliary liaised with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Shanghai. He made do with whatever materials he could get his hands on; but always there was opium. He charged a fee only of those who could afford it: there was the small inheritance from his father at his bank in Shanghai; somehow he managed to make do. On Sundays he packed the contents of his medical bag into a rucksack and took long walks outside the city walls, followed channels towards the hill towns, stopping along the way wherever he was needed. He was drawn further and further into the countryside...
Camels were still common in that quarter of Peking and he conceived the idea of travelling by camel into the Interior; but with the help of the bishop he secured instead a Bedford truck, which he converted to an ambulance with plywood sides. It took him several weeks to learn how to drive—he had never driven even a motorcar before—and he was the object of amusement and the cause of not a little alarm as he practised, crunching the gears, tooting and reversing up the dusty roads outside the city wall, the little English bishop jumping up and down in the passenger’s seat beside him, urging him on.
Thus began his series of slow, circuitous journeys which took him through many regions of northern China, ministering to the sick in the back of his truck or in the hospital tent which was sometimes pitched for weeks at a time in the more isolated towns. The Chinese say that a devil must walk a straight line, but the routes Ayres took criss-crossed, forked, and wound back upon themselves, so that if they had been drawn on a map they would have formed a kind of cat’s cradle over northern China. He referred to his map only to calculate distances to towns for petroleum, and every few months he turned up in Peking for medical supplies, to fill his fifteen fuel cans, to stock up on food and tobacco. But mainly he travelled without maps, relying on word of mouth to tell him where he was needed.
He became known through vast tracts of the north, but not in a run of syllables like other foreigners revered by the Chinese—Li-Ti-Mo-Tai or Ma-Li-Sun. He was known simply as Ayres—‘es’ they pronounced it. ‘Ayres will be here next week’ or ‘They say Ayres is in Honan, where there is a smallpox outbreak.’
Sometimes he travelled in convoy with other volunteers; at other times, stuck on a roadside with a broken axle or cut off by flood, he was so lonely he heard himself speaking to the spider which lived in a cobweb in the corner of the windscreen.
His beard went prematurely grey. He took to wearing slender, wire-rimmed spectacles, a leather aviator’s helmet with ear flaps against the cold, a quilted blue coolies’ jacket...gradually he got his tongue around the dialects.
The Communists completed their Long March to northern Shensi; Ayres was there for a time. He travelled through the Japanese-held regions of Manchuria and in 1937, when the war broke out in earnest, he followed the battle fronts north and south, now with the official Red Cross emblem on the sides and roof of his truck. On several occasions he was strafed by Japanese air attack, the bullets splintering the plywood.
After taking Shanghai, the Japanese forces moved westward by river, land and air. Ayres saw gangs of civilians roped together and machine-gunned by the Japanese for sport. He witnessed shocking crimes committed against women. When the Japanese took a town, not even the very young or very aged escaped violation; then they were ruthlessly bayonetted.
Curiously, the Japanese showed no interest in Ayres. In one town he sat on a wall, smoking, while the shells burst around him; in a very real sense he ‘walked among the dead’. In his foolhardy exploits he sought the death he had so earnestly desired, but it was Ayres’ predicament in those years to be condemned to life...With his motley Red Cross unit he followed the battle fronts in the Siang river valley; north of the Yangstze; in Shensi, west of the Yellow River; in the mountains of western Hunan.
In the permanent war that was China in those years he saw Gertie’s face in the pestilence, famine and filth, in the open graves with hundreds of bodies when Ayres himself had to use a gas mask; in the devouring of girl-children in besieged towns; in the riots and tramplings when rice relief arrived.
Once in Hsuchow during the Civil War he arrived at a local hospital where every patient was dead. They had been left in their beds and starved when the hospital staff had retreated. The building was perfectly cold and silent and at that moment, too, he had thought of her face.
By the end he welcomed the victory of the Red Army, if for no other reason than it would put an end to the suffering; so it was her face, and not her politics that he blamed.
War took away Ayres’ interest in food and he even became resigned to smoking the harsh local tobacco in his pipes. On his brief returns to Shanghai he stocked up on the luxury of tins of Gallaher’s Honeydew from British diplomats. He rem
ained celibate all that time although there was a Christian Chinese nurse he worked with for a while named, improbably, Florence, whom he privately loved. He got out in ’forty-nine, in the month of the lull, on the Dutch luxury-liner Boissevain, and jostled in the customs shed with the rich Chinese, the Jews, the White Russians, the pimps and gangsters and Filipino dance bands. Eventually he returned to his birthplace to live in retirement in his flat in Princes Street.
Julia Paradise was lost somewhere in all that. He received several letters from her on his returns to Shanghai. Perhaps there are letters being forwarded somewhere in China still from the Astor House Hotel. Her letters addressed him in warm terms and described her dull life as a schoolmistress in a country parish in Australia. Ayres really had no idea why she had written, for she had nothing to tell him, or if she did she did not include any of it in her letters. They were precisely the kind of letters one might write to a distant rich uncle, unconvincing. They bore no relation to that distant time when she drifted with Joachim through the raucous river birds, when ferns grew eyes and moved. But he continued to float in that boat, trapped in her experience. Once initiated into that malevolent zoöptic universe there was no escape for Ayres. He believed stubbornly that if he could read deeply enough between the lines of those bland letters he would find those mythical animals still lurking somewhere. In an essential way he had never passed beyond that first Tuesday when she had initiated him. The jungle had spread over him, crowding out the sky, the thick green branches and vines brushing the boat, the surface of the Duck River lit by the brilliant green scum of vegetation. Was it so surprising that now he found her present world rather unreal? Julia’s magical neurosis remained a mystery. His own words came back to him. ‘The East...the solution is sometimes as simple as a steamship ticket home...’
And, as in life, the mysteries remained, became subterranean and mapped out only in his dreams. Ayres never heard of Morgan McCaffrey again. He had the occasional pipedream of migrating to Australia, but he relegated that to the realms of the imaginary, the mythic. He knew he would only be disappointed to find the real Mem, if it existed. He examined maps in the university library in Edinburgh, though, without result.
Slowly, even China faded, although the words Duck River puzzled the gum-chewing nurse in 1950 who heard him mutter them on his dying breath. Before he died Ayres had begun to dream of forest fires, of girls in white nightgowns leaping from burning windows. It wasn’t Dante’s hell he dreamed of. He was in a dry mud-coloured country, infested with eucalypts. Julia was there. And Gertie. The great trees each with a swooping sigh became burning torches, beacons in the night.
* The Chinese character for pig is homophonous for Lord.
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