by Gail Jones
After two years, after – for a second time – she was bashed on the occasion of Mao Tse Tung’s birthday, Pei Xing confessed that her brother had been an Enemy of the State. He was abroad and safe, she reasoned; so she concocted a story about his extravagant anti-Party activities in Hong Kong. She was asked to write an account of his perfidy, then signed the form in her flawless handwriting and felt ashamed. It was then they told her that her parents had died. Comrade Peng stood at the door of her cell and announced in the same sentence that she would be released from prison and that her parents had died. When? How? They ignored her questions. Pei Xing felt blank, unmourning, pointlessly relieved. They were free too. They were ghosts she might meet. She left prison in the daze of one unsure of her own measure of reality, stepping into the streets of Shanghai clouded over, like a shadow of herself.
There was no rejoicing and there was no true mourning. Something was demolished that could never be rebuilt. Years later, when Shanghai was under reconstruction, when cars largely replaced bicycles and steel high-rise loomed everywhere, Pei Xing saw ‘cui’, ‘destroy,’ written in white paint in a circle on the walls of condemned buildings. Everywhere she saw it: cui, cui. And felt as if she too was marked with such a sign.
Though released from prison, Pei Xing was sent to the country for re-education. One month later she found herself joining other ‘educated youths’ on a farm on Chongming Island, not far from Shanghai, nestled in the mouth of the Huangpo River. Their revolutionary task was land reclamation. This involved cutting reeds, laying them on salt flats, cutting reeds once again, laying them down once again. Then growing grass, cutting grass, burying grass. Eventually, they were told, this would desalinate the flats and crops would be planted. The reed roots in the bare marshes often cut their soles; some wore thick slabs of rubber tied to their feet, but most had no shoes and ended the day bleeding into the salty water. Pei Xing had not known that cut feet could cause such agony. At night, in the rickety shack that would be flooded at high tide, the young workers sang revolutionary songs, ate meagre meals, then fell into dead-tired sleep upon mats of damp reed. Lice infested them, insects bit at their bodies, many became ill.
Pei Xing no longer told herself Doctor Zhivago stories. She was lost to herself. The stories were gone. Her life was a repetitious cycle of brute hard labour, and she was often mistreated by cadre leaders because she was of ‘the criminal class’.
But there was sky and wind and occasions of numinous delight, when a kindness was shown, or solidarity expressed. There was the surprisingly open, capacious view; and here surrounded by the river there was a sense too of distended time. Pei Xing saw birds winging in from Siberia, looking like cut-paper artwork against the sky, watched the currents of water finding their shiny channels and confluences, sometimes trapped a fish, or an eel, or a soft-shelled crab. At sunrise the streaming light across the Huangpo suggested the careless serenity of heaven. At sunset one might believe in the rosy radiance of the future. It was a magnificent thing, the water beyond the marshes, extending into the sky.
Pei Xing was by then only nineteen years old. She had missed her chance at higher education and wondered, in practical terms, what might become of her. She kept to herself and survived, and when something happened to please her, like a rare bowl of fishhead soup or boiled turtle, like a kind word or the tentative beginning of a friendship, she made herself remember human gratitude and the scale of what might unfold. After two years, Pei Xing’s work team were moved into thatched huts with beds, and to other forms of labour. Her sense of relative comfort had so distorted that she wept for joy the first time she lay again on a bed that was dry, above the floor, and under a rain-proof roof.
In her fifth year on the island Pei Xing met Wang Xun. A thin man, consumptive, already chalky in complexion, he arrived wearing a badge that said ‘In the Service of Chairman Mao’. He was a low-level cadre who had volunteered to work in the provinces. He had been in the remote far north-west, a hardship post, but was then sent south, nearer his home city, when he became ill. His father was high up, they said, big time in Shanghai.
It would always be a mystery to Pei Xing that they met as individuals. She had accustomed herself to the impersonality of the crowd, to the revolutionary work unit and its indistinctive uniforms, and to a kind of habitual loneliness and self-subordination. Prison had taught her to hide inside herself. Work had abridged her conversation and the camp had narrowed and mutilated what might be said. She had not looked into a mirror or imagined herself in the gaze of another for years. That season they were assigned an easy job, the harvesting of corn, and found themselves working together, side by side, in the rustling, strangely private corridors of leaf-light.
Xun was a talker. Others were driven to silence by years of rural labour; he retained a chatty disposition and idealist convictions. He had not lost faith. He did not think the world corrupt. He wanted to be a writer, some day, and tell the daunting huge story of the great Chinese people. The peasant class, he told her, were remarkable for their courage, they persisted in the face of suffering and endured beyond all reason. ‘They congregate beneath the stars,’ he said enigmatically. ‘They understand the sky.’
Xun talked not in Maoist slogans but in a kind of literary language. He talked, Pei Xing thought, as if words mattered, as if they might be relied upon to untie the tongue into praise songs to the world, to describe falling snow, perhaps, or the shifts in fluid light on the surface of the Huangpo River at the very moment at which a migratory flock of birds ascends.
One day Xun discovered Pei Xing had also studied English, and that she shared a love of reading. He began talking in a low secretive voice, almost sexual in retrospect, about Jane Austen. His favourite writer, he declared, of all nations and all times.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ he announced.
Pei Xing stared at him, disbelieving. What he said was seditious and ideologically unsound. This was a confidence of the most dangerous kind. Had he been discovered talking like this he would be accused of counter-revolutionary sentiments and ‘capitalist-roader’ veneration of the despicable Four Olds. Yet Xun trusted her, implicitly, and spoke to no one else in this way. Once he leant so close that she felt his confessional breath upon her cheek; this was the moment in which she was reminded of the softness of her own body. This was a moment – his breath – of sensual implication, and one from which she retreated at first, bewildered and alarmed.
Then there came a further literary revelation: Xun had read her father’s translation of Doctor Zhivago. Pei Xing quietly quoted a few lines and nervously watched for a response. Xun smiled. He too knew the famous section on inward music.
‘It is true,’ he told her; ‘the irresistible power of unarmed truth. For all the problems in our country there are still those who know this, still men and women of virtue who will not compromise. We are a great nation. We are a great and full-spirited people.’
Pei Xing had thought this a redundant rhetoric. It gave her pause. She knew that she was not a woman of virtue; she would never tell Xun that she had constructed a false story about her brother. That she had lied, just to save herself. That she had blackened his name.
But still they grew close, in shy and tentative increments, and began to see in each other not only words but a sensibility in common, miscellaneous likes and dislikes, lost and found attachments and expressions. Xun told her that when he went to the North West Provinces the only personal object he had taken with him was a favourite shuttlecock, a Swift Pigeon, slightly damaged, that he had kept from his childhood.
This was the moment in which Pei Xing realised she loved him, when she imagined the man with a handful of ragged feathers, invaluable, saved from the past. The moment when just one toy from his boyhood alighted in her mind, soft and affirming, with a candlelit glow.
In the Museum of Contemporary Art Catherine stood before a huge installation in perspex and steel labelled Cosmos 4. She had moved from a room in which all the artwo
rks appeared demolished and ruined, mere scraps assembled with proud disarray and charmless autonomy, and found herself now confronted by a sequence of objects that might have been constructed by robots. They were of space-age substances and undetectable handiwork. They had a technological sheen and a kind of high unheard frequency; a dog led to this place might suddenly begin howling. Catherine leant forward to read the little caption pinned to the wall and discovered that the artist was younger than she and had been born in Berlin. But she was none the wiser about the artwork and felt excommunicated. The sanctimonious tone of galleries often distressed her; she felt once again like a working-class girl from Pearse Tower in Ballymun, that she knew nothing, really, that she was ignorant, stupid. She had studied, as one does, potted histories of art; she had read the currently fashionable coffee table books on art movements and styles (it was cool to adore Gaudi, Boltanski, Bourgeois and Viola; Fluxus was back in, and posters from Cultural Revolution China), but faced with unfamiliar works she often found herself dispirited.
This gallery seemed also to have within it a hidden hum, as if circuits were at work in cables and grids, and technicians, invisibly efficient, were twiddling knobs and keying symbols behind the scenes to keep the electric lights low, the temperature moderate, and the atmosphere one of a lost city newly discovered with all its indecipherable artefacts. A sculpture of multiple breasts in pink neon drove Catherine from the room.
She took the lift to the third floor and there she was humbled. On the walls were Aboriginal paintings from all over Australia and though these were also in a strict sense incomprehensible, she could see in the patterns of dots the suggestion of lavish effort and deeply responsive notations of the world. There was a group of works by women with mellifluous names – Kathleen Petyarre, Gloria Petyarre, Emily Kame Kngwarreye – these she found particularly compelling. These women seemed to believe that pattern was everywhere. Pattern was thought, and spirit, and land, and time. Here were no portraits or conventional depictions of objects, but something aquiver, energetic, like human activity seen from the sky. Australian earth from the sky. That must be it. Dirt-coloured: ochre, iron, quartz.
Catherine recalled the ring of the angelus, how Mam had made them stop still at 6 p.m. when it came on the telly or the wireless.
She did not understand her own response. She was addressed by these paintings as a stranger, but it was a welcoming address, and in order to be receptive she had to quell her own Irish scepticism. When at last she moved on she realised she had felt, or had imagined, a fellowship with the images. And she thought for the second time that day: beauty as a kiss.
Catherine stepped into the sunshine. She would take a ferry ride, she decided, for no reason other than to cross the Harbour and come back again in such splendid weather. And she was thinking once more of Brendan, and how he would have loved this, the mysterious paintings, the light, the unruly adventure of Sydney. Before her the water in the Harbour shimmered. With the change of light it reminded her of sugared ginger. How could anyone, no matter with what burden, bear to leave this world?
When Catherine boarded the ferry she remembered the unbeautiful kiss, the last time she had seen Brendan, lying in his coffin. She had flown in from London and the business was already done; there he was in the funeral parlour, the smart one in Finglas, in a suit of new clothes she’d never before seen, ‘all done up like, and fancy’, Ruthy said, ‘and dressed to kill.’ Catherine was surprised to see that his face was at peace and unmarked, but for a small yellow bruise in the centre of his forehead. She leant down to him and kissed. It was true what they said: the dead are cold. Her sisters and Mam also kissed Brendan’s cheek; each in the ritual was saying goodbye, each was silently weeping.
The accident was commonplace. Traffic. It happens all the time. A car crash on the M50 and probably no one to blame. Brendan had hit another car and both drivers had died, the other two days later. There was no explanation or meaning. No point, none at all, not a skerrick of making-sense she might present to poor Mam, sobbing her eyes out at the kitchen table, wringing her apron as if she would tear it in two. A paramedic Catherine tracked down said that when they pulled Brendan from the wreck he was already dead, and Charlie Mingus – he recognised the track – was still playing from the car speakers. Catherine was not sure why this musical detail had been mentioned, except that the fellow was keen on displaying his knowledge of jazz. She hated to think there was a soundtrack, a Mingus riff on bass saxophone, sad and sultry, to accompany Brendan’s premature and smashed-up dying. She had liked Mingus too, and knew then that she could never, never again, listen to him play.
At first she coped. It was Mam who went to pieces. Catherine was so preoccupied holding her mother against loss that she would not allow herself to feel what might break and undo her. They were a community now of women, the two men of the family gone, and they were like a Greek chorus, wailing in harmony, sounding ancient and forlorn and meanly damaged by the gods. They even moved in concert, all bending at the same time, reaching at the same time for the pot of tea, rising up as one body when the phone rang, or there was a knock on the door.
The accident offended each of them by its ordinariness. They thought differently of Brendan, that he was special, and clever, and had been a centre to each of them, that he was solid, more defined. So that when they were telling people at the estate it was a dull-as-ditchwater story; nothing they said could make Brendan’s death even halfway worthy, or rescue him from the awful banality of his fate.
A fuck-up on the M50? Ah, for fuck’s sake. Wouldn’t you know it? Another one. And him so young and sprightly, apple of his dear mam’s eye.
Within a week of the funeral, in a snowy winter, Mam decided on a pilgrimage to the Holy Mother at Loreto. She asked Catherine to take her and Ruthy, then still living at home. Mam had been educated as a child by Loreto nuns, and had always loved the story: the little house in Nazareth, simple and pure, where Mary was visited by the multifeathered Gabriel, had been lifted up and flown around the planet by a team of angels. First to Croatia – ‘of all places!’ said Mam – then on 10th December, in the Year of Our Lord 1294, the angels lifted the house once again and flew it to Loreto, in Italy. Mam loved the fact that they knew the exact date. This seemed to her unimpeachable evidence of the truth of the matter. She always celebrated the Feast Day of Our Lady of Loreto on 10th December and she kept a card from her schooldays that the nuns had given her – of broad-winged angels fluttering in the sky around a little stone hut from which Mary, dressed in blue, with her shiny halo, peeked. The sky was awhirl with diaphanous gusts and the soft breath of God, a splendid lapis screen, with a sprinkle of stars.
Neither Mam nor Ruthy possessed a passport, so Catherine’s stay in Dublin was longer than expected. After the funeral she rang Luc to explain and he told her to take the time she needed, not to fret or worry. He would ring her office and plead for an extension of compassionate leave; she could accompany her mother and sister to Loreto. He would join them, if that helped. But Catherine said no, just as she had not wished him to accompany her to the funeral. It was difficult enough hiding her apostasy from her mother, and her sense of helpless loss, and this slap-bang wallop of grief. Luc belonged to another history. Luc was another world.
Catherine arranged the photographs and passport applications and visited a travel agent in the city who specialised in ‘holy tours’. He gave her a handful of pamphlets and said he was sorry for their loss, but that the Holy Mother in Loreto would surely console.
‘I doubt it,’ said Catherine, and she realised she had spoken her disbelief out loud to the man, who had a mild and unassuming manner and a crucifix above his desk, and who would not understand, could not understand, what vast hollow in herself she might be implying. His round face looked like the surface of the moon, remote, pitted, without any connection.
‘Well, you never know, now, do you?’ he calmly replied.
So here, on the ferry, bobbing past the Opera House, Catherine re
membered her brother yet again, and the wake of his death. Wake, the parting of water, this design of ripples they are making. This pattern on pattern made in the shock waves of uncompleted mourning. Brendan’s Wake, she was thinking, by Mr James Joyce. Undiscovered manuscript by the master, rollicking portrait of the artist as a young man untimely ripped, set in the fluid anachrony of elegy and the lonesome no-tense of remembering. Or the movie, starring a younger-looking Gabriel Byrne. Young genius of Erin, ladies’ man and ultra-literary, visits China to protect good-looking, adoptable orphans, all of them wide-smiling, from an epidemic of typhoid. Dies a heroic death: Brendan Hero. Toga and sandals man on mythic travels with his sister around Dublin and the Globe. Exploring this gorgeous mad fuck-up. Ballymun is Ithaca, Ireland wins the World Cup and the Eurovision Song Contest, the Celtic Tiger roars: Brendan the Sailor by Mr James Joyce.
Rejoyce, rejoyce. Catherine smiled to herself. Like Brendan, like Joyce, she enjoyed the opportune pun. She watched the wake on the water, the decoration of where they had been, the backwards vision of any journey.
Brendan the Voyager, Apostle of Ireland, Saint’s day and his birthday, 16th May. With you in spirit, my brother, I ride across water.
Mam had hated the flight, but enjoyed the train journey from Rome, and the three nights they stayed in a pensione in Loreto. Ruthy read out segments from a guidebook and remarked on the food. Too much garlic, she said thrice. And all so oily. She was perplexed to discover that Italians seemed never to drink tea. And that every bar had a television, and that every television showed a football match, at all hours of the day and night.