Five Bells

by Gail Jones

  On the pier Pei Xing thought suddenly of Aristos, who would have finished his work by now and perhaps, at this very minute, was sitting on a bus, gazing out of a window. His face appeared in her mind, shifting even as it arose, sped away behind slick reflections.

  Aristos, whom death was stealthily following.

  Pei Xing looked at the sky. It was shifting colour once again; there was a fine salmon streak to the west, and a change in the weather coming from the east. Beneath omnipresent human speech she heard the murmur of wavelets and flags and the cloth domes of umbrellas. Pei Xing crossed the concourse beyond the five jetties of Circular Quay to check on her friend Mary. There she was, sleeping, nestled in the home she had made beneath her hoarded plastic bags. She was returned, safely returned. Mary snored a little and looked content and comfortable. She was secure in her own world, blindfolded into sleep. She bore a ravaged face, deeply creased, and her hair was grey and matted with dirt and leaves. On the surface of her tired skin lay a glaucous bloom, and there was something, some kind of note, clutched in her sleeping hand.

  How the poor of any city vanish and reappear.

  Respectful, quiet, Pei Xing stood for a moment, offered Mary a blessing, then rode the escalator upwards to catch the train.

  The Bankstown Line formed a stylised map in her head, a little train track in black, and a series of perky station names: Redfern, Erskineville, St Peters, Marrickville … Lakemba, Wiley Park, Punchbowl, Bankstown. They were a chant she had learned, and a series of familiar vistas. As she rode through the damp twilight Pei Xing dozed a little. Then she roused herself at her destination and prepared for the walk home. She thought of food as she trod the lit footpaths to her apartment block. Xiaolongbao: steamed dumplings. Bamboo shoots. Moon-cake. Peking duck. She recalled her mother standing outside Old City God’s Temple, waiting in a line for crab xiaolongbao, warning ‘Too much crab will make you cold inside.’ Food lore: Chinese knew all the secrets of the body. Xun had brought her snake’s head soup when she was breastfeeding their son; to this day she does not understand how he procured and afforded it. But she had felt instant strength and her milk flowed swiftly.

  In her apartment Pei Xing brewed herself tea. She selected and played a favourite CD: Liu Fang’s pipa solo, ‘Fei Hua Dian Cui’ (‘Falling Snow decorates the Evergreen’). In the strings plucked forward and backward she heard the descent of the snow, there was lightness, pause, there was the floating of single flakes and their moist feathery touch; there was the sense of stilled time and Buddhic possibilities. She imagined Liu Fang’s beautiful fingers sliding the neck of the instrument, playing, her eyes closed, on a concert stage in Germany or Canada or France, spreading notes as if snow, falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling.

  Pei Xing felt calmed and returned to her self-possession. Some of the pieces on the CD were hundreds of years old. This was music that had endured; this was sound ever-flowing, ripple-effecting, beyond clockface time.

  Over a large bowl of beef and noodles, Pei Xing listened carefully to several pipa recitals and when she had finished she managed a plate of vanilla ice-cream topped with chocolate sauce. It was a satisfying meal. Not turtle, but satisfying. Instead of cleaning her dishes Pei Xing unlaced her shoes, eased them from her feet, then reclined on the sofa. She switched on the television to watch the nine o’clock news.

  The story of the abducted child at Circular Quay seemed to Pei Xing unreal. The ringed heads, in which she saw herself and the woman who exchanged glances at Kurraba Point Wharf, and a young man and woman, neither of whom she could recall, was a kind of adventitious device, surely not useful in solving a crime. But calmly she rang, and calmly she received word from the policeman that a police car would come and collect her for questioning at the station. He noted her name – asked her twice to spell it – took down her address and her phone number, then thanked her for taking the trouble to call.

  Pei Xing had not really noticed the man caught in the photograph with his hand on the girl’s shoulder, but she remembered the child, a pretty girl with Chinese-style plaits. She had been attracted to the girl, who seemed unsure, somehow, and a stranger to the Quay, but also filled with the excitement of novelty and apparently unafraid. She had wanted to say this to the policeman: she seemed unafraid; but was not given the chance. So she thought that perhaps the child was in no danger at all, there had been a domestic argument, some misunderstanding; her father – for so he seemed – had simply wanted more time alone with his estranged daughter.

  In her fretful imagining Pei Xing wanted to save the child, to think up a narrative, and an ending, in which she would be vouched safe. At the police station she would say this: she seemed unafraid. She would dress well, and look serious. A reliable witness. She seemed unafraid.

  After Mao died in 1976, China began rapidly to change. By the time her husband had died, in 1982, Shanghai was well into its transformation. There were gangs, she heard, who kidnapped children for ransom. They had a test. They let the child grow hungry, then offered them fish. If the child plucked the eyeball with his chopsticks and tried that first, he was a rich child and it was worthwhile pursuing a ransom. However, if the child reached for the body of the fish and a mouthful of flesh, he was more likely to be from a poor family and hardly worth keeping. It may have been urban myth, but stories sprang up of precious offspring of the one-child policy being stolen away and huge sums demanded for their safe return. Sometimes the stolen child was never seen again. Pei Xing had warned little Jimmy – or Lun, as he then was – to stay close by when they went to market, and if offered fish by a stranger to eat as if he were starving. This way, she reasoned, he might be let go. It made her afraid, the idea of stolen children. And she had made her son afraid too. Even now he ate greedily, as if vigorous consumption was a test of his permanence.

  When Xun died Pei Xing was working as an English teacher. Those skills once despised as corruptive were now regarded as essential. She gave classes at a middle school, and taught private students in the evenings. It was hard to make ends meet. Xun’s father had also died and there was no provision made for the grandson, or for her, nor did she have any remaining family in Shanghai to support her. She waited, just waited, to see if her parents would be rehabilitated, to find a way to join her half-forgotten brother, now living in Australia.

  For years after his death crowds visited the embalmed Mao Tse Tung in his crystal coffin. They lined up for hours around Tiananmen Square, just to file past and pay their respects. Mao persisted undead, his bubble face waxy, glimpsed through the casket manufactured by Beijing General Glass Factory, Number 608. He hadn’t disappeared; he was just more object than ever. He was the emblem of the Chinese capacity for glorification, the great face-object of a monstrous fame.

  Pei Xing believed that history was still uncertain and China might, without warning, again turn violent. She returned to habits of quiet and careful circumspection. She would lie low and hide out and disappear if necessary. She would guard her child. She would practise discipline and survive. No degree of caution seemed too large. But Pei Xing enjoyed being a teacher, being out and about in the city. And when she looked over the black-haired heads of her students, all of them reading silently, all of them inward and quiet, she felt that they existed within the compass of her care, and that she might love, if permitted, each and every one of them.

  The telephone rang and Pei Xing leapt up, startled. It was a nurse from the hospital saying she had left her plastic rice container behind, and would she like them to hold it for a week or post it in the mail? Pei Xing was touched that so trivial an object had prompted a call, that someone had bothered whether or not she might be concerned at what she’d left behind. She suggested they hold it, thanked the nurse sincerely, and replaced the receiver.

  When the policeman knocked on the door Pei Xing was ready. There was a man and a woman, both very young, and she was touched to see that the man had the marks of adolescent acne still apparent. Just a boy, as Jimm
y was. A blemished, particular boy. He had the slightly abashed manner of adolescents, not sure exactly where to put his hands, looking away to remember what came next. Pei Xing was not afraid as she allowed herself to be guided into the police car, and was pleased that the officers were unenthusiastic and wished for no small talk. They were no doubt bored with this errand – treated like taxi drivers, taking an unimportant Chinese woman all the way to the central police station. For Pei Xing it did not feel compulsory; she felt she was doing the police a favour.

  Predictably, they took the M5 route into the city. Pei Xing rarely had a chance to fly like this along the freeway, since she owned no car and went everywhere by public transport. But it was almost exhilarating, the speed at which they moved, the dark night flashing by in a neon rush of even-spaced lights, the glassy effect of staring through the window, alone with her thoughts. There were long and sinuous tunnels, foggy with chemicals, like something she had seen in a car chase in a Bruce Willis movie – all that thunderous truck-tonnage ready to detonate in a fireball, or replayed again and again as Princess Diana’s final moments – the artificial quality of the light, a pinkish gel, the way the fast-shifting walls swung distorted and dangerously close. Pei Xing was relieved when the car shot out of the tunnel, back onto the open road. When they passed the airport, and entered the short tunnel beneath the runway, there was the thrill of proximity to aircraft landing and taking off. All that activity in the sky, all that national and transnational coming and going. The paranormal roar of the planes set off a tremble in her body; the boom of machinery lifting into the air, the improbability of it all.

  I am young, Pei Xing thought. I am still a young woman. She turned to look out of the back window to see the jet angling away.

  At the police station she was asked to wait a few minutes. On the wall in the waiting area was a poster asking in many languages, including her own, if she needed a translator. There was another of missing people, six by six squares, melancholy portraits garnered from albums and passports. Pei Xing leant forward to examine them. Some were trapped in dead-eye snapshots, eternally misrepresented, some were animated at a party or cutaway from an embrace, some were neutered for passport protocol, lured prematurely to anonymity. The stylistic incoherence of the photos – when so much these days was blandly standardised – seemed to Pei Xing especially poignant. For one man the sign of his existence was a bleached, almost featureless face, resting like a mushroom in an unlit hollow. How could this image possibly help find him?

  The door opened and the woman Pei Xing had seen at the wharf was shaking hands with a detective and being thanked for helping with their inquiries. She leant back from the portraits and saw the woman recognise her.

  ‘I saw you today,’ she said. ‘At Kurraba Point Wharf.’

  Her accent was what? Irish. A tourist, perhaps.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You waved.’

  ‘Yes.’ And Pei Xing thought: she is seeking reassurance. This is a young woman, far from home, who cannot bear the thought of a lost child.

  ‘She’s safe, you know, that little girl. She is safe.’

  The woman sat beside her. They stared ahead.

  ‘She was happy, not afraid.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘She was happy, not afraid.’

  ‘Ah, I didn’t really notice.’

  Pei Xing imagined she could hear the breathing of the woman beside her. They sat close, like relatives awaiting bad news. Like mother and daughter. The policewoman behind the reception counter shifted in her seat, to remind them both that she was there, superintending. Pei Xing gently touched the Irish woman’s hand.

  ‘Safe,’ she repeated.

  The word would make it so. And then the young woman was called to a taxi and rose in a hesitating manner, as though she had a confession she was anxious to impart. In an instinctive movement she leant down and kissed Pei Xing on the cheek. So much, apparently, lay beneath this clumsy gesture. So much beneath a few exchanged words. It was the contraption they worked with, words, and it was insufficient.

  ‘Well, good luck.’

  It was effortless good will. Pei Xing raised her hand in a small wave and watched the woman leave, half-turned back to her, through the sliding glass doors. She readied herself for the interview: to say she seemed unafraid.

  When, half an hour later, Pei Xing was driven home in a taxi, this time feeling disappointed and subdued, she reflected that she had not persuaded anyone at the police station that the child would be safe. They were already writing in a file somewhere that she was an unreliable witness; they were already tagging her as a helpless optimist, unrealistic and deluded. Chinese. The Chinese woman was no help at all. Perhaps the Irish woman had seen something meaningful. She had appeared burdened and in need of solace; perhaps she had already imparted some crucial information and was dragging sorrow and a surer knowledge of what might have happened. Pei Xing leant her tired face against the cool glass of the car window. The night was humid, electrical. There was the buzz and hum of imminent lightning and a wavy disturbance in the sky as the weather assembled and shifted. Soon the wind would whip up, the sky become ocean, the streaming rainstorm obliterate all one might see.

  Back through the perilous tunnels. Back towards Bankstown. This time she closed her eyes.

  In her reading that day of Doctor Zhivago, Pei Xing had paused after the drawn-out account of his death. Hua was weeping through her expressionless, frozen face; a line of tears soaked her collar. Yuri Zhivago had a heart attack on a stalled tram. Feeling faint and in need of air, he had pulled and pulled again at the leather strap on the window, first down, then up, then roughly towards him, even though the crowd shouted at him that the windows had been nailed shut. He was so confused and in such pain that he did not understand. Something inside him simply broke. Somewhere in the heckle and jeer, his heart was bursting. He could hear nothing. He stumbled from the tram and fell beside it onto the hard cobblestones. A crowd gathered and someone announced that his heart had stopped.

  Pei Xing knew what Hua was thinking, that it was an ignoble death. But they were both moved, and it was not possible to read any further. Pei Xing was not weeping, but felt choked and tight in the chest. She tended to Hua as if they were both bereaved, talking to her of other matters, fussing a little in her ministrations, pulling the hospital shawl closer as if wrapping her body against the chill wind of mortality.

  But now, after the worrisome television news and her general unsettlement, after the futile trip to the police station and her implicit disqualification, Pei Xing opened the novel to read what she had not read to Hua, the Conclusion, and its redolent, distressing last paragraph. It concerned Zhivago’s beloved, Lara, who had returned to the city to try to track down their lost daughter.

  One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.

  It was this section that prompted Pei Xing to weep. This paragraph summoned the fate of her mother and her father; this was the proxy tone of unremarked death, the impersonal sweep of fate and the atrocities it enacted. It was not all ‘struggle sessions’ and mass criticism and public executions, sometimes there was just this, a quiet disappearance. A number mislaid. One person gone. Two.

  In the inhuman dark Pei Xing could not sleep. The encumbering past was too much with her. The little girl on the television was too much with her. In the unresolvable story she had been given to live there was no guarantee that everything finally and securely would repair. She realised too what it was in the television photograph that had bothered her: it was the four heads, ringed so emphatically in red. Four was a bad luck number in Chinese, four was the homophone of ‘death’. Four people, the television announcer said; four people, he repeated. Four. So she must remember five. There might be four adults
, all come together in failed witness or a momentary pattern, but there was always too a fifth, a child who must be disposed finally to life, not death. She was aware of her casuistry, her number superstition, aware she wanted, in her sleepiness, just to make things settle and become right. But it seemed to her a neat formulation. Five. Only the inclusion of the child promises something in the future. The humid darkness held Pei Xing in her bed. She lay still, quiet, sifting her day. She could hear traffic on the M5 and the distant sound of aircraft. So many were lost. So many.

  But there was snowfall, and the Opera House, and Doctor Zhivago. There was the sound of the pipa, ever so lightly plucked. Not everything, surely, was known through four. Every pattern broke open into mystery, and what is yet to come. She told herself this, still anxious in the darkness. She told herself five.