Julia Paradise Page 9

  He would relive for a long time everything she said in the room at the mission. He would recall the way her voice had grown thicker and thicker, and how her head had begun to hang to one side from the exhaustion of her telling, and how, the second time he had made himself face the photograph of the dead child, Julia had looked up and said, ‘That first Tuesday I came to your bed, I wanted to know what kind of man could do that.’

  Willy Paradise was a small fish swimming in a dangerous stretch of ocean, as the First Secretary, Gerald Cole, pointed out to Ayres in the Long Bar. He would see what he could do, but really what was the point of a diplomatic Note, except to give some Chinaman a laugh, when it was taking every British and American marine available to keep the nationalist troops out of the Settlement? So Willy Paradise simply disappeared.

  Several months later Ayres visited the actual building on the outskirts of Shanghai where the Nationalist secret police had kept their headquarters. It was a derelict grim-looking house with an overgrown garden behind a high stone wall. He peered through the empty doors and windows. There was simply nothing to see; certainly not Willy’s ghost, even if Willy had been taken there. There were several small rooms in the cellar, but no blood, no human faeces, no hint as to what purposes they had served. He climbed the rickety stairs to an attic room whose window looked down onto the garden at the back, also full of weeds. He saw the brick wall with the three whitish patches where the bricks and cement had been chipped away. He went down the stairs and into the sunshine for a closer look.

  The white patches had been chipped away by bullets. He could see where the prisoners would have stood, three at a time, facing the wall. Then the volley of bullets. The holes in the wall were deep: the process had been repeated hundreds of times. He worked his way back to where the executioners would have stood. Hundreds of bullet cases littered the ground under the weeds. The brass cases glittered in the sun.

  Ayres looked around him. Behind the wall were telegraph poles, an ordinary thatched bamboo garden fence, roofs of houses. The noises of the morning drifted into the derelict garden, the everyday cheerful neighbourhood noises of voice and car and rooster. The perfect ordinariness of the morning the other side of that garden wall hurt him. He realized that he hated China almost as much as he hated life. Shanghai was, after all, a detour he had never intended. For years now, he had been holed up in this sordid stopping-off place. His home was still a hotel. He felt that he had lived for nearly thirty-five years in this world and he had understood nothing. And something else: he felt that he had failed to understand the import of Julia Paradise’s gift to him.

  She was like a brilliantly-coloured jigsaw puzzle dismantled and spread across the floor of his mind. His thoughts continued to inhabit small sections of her life—or what he increasingly thought of as her ‘lives’. He talked aloud to her, pleading with her to clarify this point, to explain the apparent contradiction between this and that to make sense of the brutal pantomime he played over and over. In short, he became obsessed.

  Even in the Master he found only discouragement. Freud himself had written, ‘It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories...’ And from his own lecture notes of 1919: ‘Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.’ Ayres thought of his own inability to love. Could he aspire to being no more than a helpless voyeur into the lush interiors of women? He felt that his training, his scientific method, had failed him.

  He seemed always to be hungry, even after a big meal; but his hunger was a restlessness which raged through his nerves, so that in the evenings he had to get out of doors and walk the streets, and he found his footsteps always leading in the same direction...there was nothing else for it but to pursue her in the thin ghostly figures of the girls, who either turned to him openly with painted smiles, or who fled from him down the unlit streets. He shivered when he remembered certain parts of her ‘telling’ and he felt sudden fierce desires to walk down Bubbling Well Road to find such a one who might initiate him again into the mysteries, with the river lapping, the parrots shrieking, and with the overpowering scent of the eucalypts. But no matter how often he took their little bodies, he remained excluded from the world of the Duck River.

  He sought out the Australian foreign correspondent who drank at the Long Bar. ‘Duck River, you say—’ The man looked hard back at Ayres, then shook his head. ‘Sorry, old man.’

  Then, out of the blue, the following year she telephoned him at the Astor House Hotel. Could she see him? That afternoon? In front of the post office in Szechuan Road at five o’clock?

  Ayres left the hotel early, before four. It was a bright summer’s afternoon outside with a delicious soft sea wind. There were several empty rickshaws pulling up Szechuan Road but he decided instead to walk. The prospect of seeing Julia again excited him. A sudden happiness filled him, and he realized how deliberately he had been trying to wean himself off the thought of her. He got there exactly as the post office clock struck five.

  Julia was already waiting. He barely recognized her. She looked much better. Her eyes still had that excessively tired look of the habitual narcotics user but now, he saw in the sunlight, she had exaggerated the effect with mascara and kohl. She had put rouge on her lips and her cheeks looked healthy, blooming. Ayres could tell straight away that she had come to rely less heavily on morphine.

  But she wore her heavy overcoat against the clear, hot day and had the same silk scarf knotted over her hair. ‘No news of Willy?’ Ayres asked her immediately. She looked back at him, almost uncomprehending. He hailed a taxi and took her straight to Delmonico’s for something to eat.

  When they were inside the restaurant Julia took off her coat and scarf. He was surprised at her fashionable dress. The skirt ended just below the knee and the sleeveless bodice was deeply bloused over the hipband. She wore a long string of pearls around her neck. Her hair had been cut recently, too, bobbed short in the new American style, which caused the Europeans at the other tables to turn around and look at her.

  ‘I need money,’ she said straight away when he had ordered.

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t asked me for it sooner.’ She looked away. ‘How much?’ he asked.

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘How much is a lot? Ten pounds? Twenty?’

  ‘I need a hundred and sixty-five English pounds,’ she said seriously.

  ‘I can’t lay my hands on that amount at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘You haven’t got it?’ There was a teasing tone in her voice, the irony and self-loathing of the blackmailer.

  ‘I’ve got it, of course. It’s just that I’ll need a couple of days to put my hands on it. I shall have to draw a draft on my bank.’ Ayres knew that he could walk into his bank at ten o’clock the next morning and be given the notes, but he wanted time to decide if she really needed it. And whether he needed to give it to her. He said, ‘You’re not pregnant?’

  ‘Not pregnant.’

  ‘Is it political?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘In the Concession. I’ll give you the address later.’

  ‘You’re staying with friends?’

  ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘In a boarding house.’

  He looked at the tired, black-rimmed eyes, and a sudden thought struck him. ‘Where are you getting your supplies of morphine?’

  ‘I’m all right.’ After a moment she added, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘This boarding house. Is it the kind of place I might want to visit?’ Her eyes watered and her cheeks reddened so suddenly she might have just been slapped across the face. She did not answer, so he said, ‘Why do you need the money?’

  She started to speak, then took a little breath, and said in a quiet, dignified voice, ‘We are going abroad. We are going to live in Germany.’

  ‘We? A man?’

  She shook her shorn head and said quietly, ‘I am not going to continue to live in this country. A ma
n has arranged passage for us on a liner leaving at the end of the month. But I have to find a hundred and sixty-five pounds to pay him.’ She had said all this looking down at the table top touching the saucer, the teapot, the half-eaten cake on the plate in front of her. She looked up and said quickly, ‘Can I have a cigarette?’

  The simplicity of her request moved him, and he raised his hand for the waiter. He knew then he would give her the money. She said, ‘There’s one last thing I have to ask. I want you to visit Gertie...’

  The address she had given him was a run down two-storey house in the American Concession. It was in fact in Szechuan Road, directly opposite the post office where he had met Julia the previous afternoon. Their rooms were on the upper floor, above a brothel. The small garden at the front was overgrown and most of the mosaic tiles on the front porch had been chipped away through neglect. The front door was open and as he walked down the passage a door on his left opened and a man looked at him, a smiling Chinese in his late forties, with brilliantined hair and a dirty yellow shirt collarless and open at the neck.

  Their rooms were surprisingly spacious. There was a window overlooking the Soochow Creek. Gerthilde Platz received him alone. The door through to the bedroom was shut and he wondered if Julia was in there. His former impression of the German woman was reinforced by the clothes she wore: the same dark, shapeless woollen suit, although he noticed the silver crosses were gone. He saw that her head had been close-cropped like Julia’s. She smiled and shook hands with him. By the window she had set up a low tea table with a damask cloth with her books, notebooks and pens laid out, and a couple of wicker chairs with soft cushions. On the window ledge she had several small potted plants growing towards the light. The room had the austere feel of a cloister, and on the wall she had tacked cheap lithographic poster-pictures of her three saints: Marx, Engels and Lenin.

  She said in her rich, rounded accent, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know where to start. The fact is that we have been less than entirely honest with you.’

  He sat in one of the wicker chairs and took the brown envelope with the hundred and sixty-five pounds out of his coat pocket and put it on the table in front of her. She looked down at it, not betraying any satisfaction she might have felt. Then she opened the flap of the envelope, which he had not sealed, and began counting out the wad of ten and five pound notes.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘It is important. I think you do not lead so sheltered a life that you have not heard what they are doing to communists here.’

  He looked at the titles of the few books and pamphlets lying closed on her table: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism; Reform or Revolution; Die Krise der Sozialdemocratie; ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward’; a tattered German edition of Das Kapital. He looked down at the open page of her diary half-filled with her spidery black handwriting. He wondered what had happened to Willy’s manuscript on the propagation of Pacific coral...

  ‘You know the word Heizer?’ he asked her.

  She looked up from the half-counted banknotes with shock on her face. ‘Julia told you that?’

  He nodded.

  For the first time since Ayres had met her she looked embarrassed. ‘A private term. How shall I put it—“One who makes the fires?”’ With a slight sweep of the back of her hand she indicated the lower part of her body. ‘I thought you knew about Julia and me, you see. I thought you knew about us before we went to Hangchow. Yes, Hangchow,’ she smiled. ‘The mountains, the lake. But we did not go there to take the air. We went to hear Michael Borodin speak to a meeting of comrades.’

  ‘And the other fire?’

  She looked at him for a moment as though she did not understand. ‘You were under instructions?’ Ayres pressed her. ‘Those soldiers were coming to break the general strike.’

  She said quietly, ‘No, I hadn’t planned it, if that’s what you mean. I can’t tell you why I did it.’

  ‘Spontaneous combustion,’ sneered Ayres.

  ‘Spontaneous. You Freudians are even less comfortable with that word than we are ourselves. Let’s just call it an “infantile disorder”. Do you know Lenin?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘A shame. You should read him.’ She went on more brightly, ‘You might as well also know that she told Paradise. Not only about us. About you.’

  ‘The night of the fire.’

  The woman nodded curtly, once.

  ‘She might have chosen a better time!’

  ‘She wanted to hurt him as little as possible. But you have not come here for me to trade recriminations. I have asked you to come because I want your help.’

  ‘If you want more money—’

  The woman held up her hand. ‘No, no. I want to ask your advice on a medical matter.’

  ‘An examination.’

  ‘Just so.’ She smiled grimly and nodded, and continued to nod to herself after she had spoken, as if to put off the moment of her next action. Then she stood and began to unbutton her shirt. The weals of her skin disease stood out clearly in the light from the window. Her skin was discoloured from the area between the left breast and the armpit down along the side of the stomach. The colour was deep brown in patches, in others the yellow or tawny colour of a lion’s skin. Near the armpit the weals and nodules of cutaneous thickening appeared.

  ‘Hansen’s Disease,’ said Ayres. ‘Leprosy.’

  She nodded back at him with the same ironic smile.

  Ayres said, ‘You’ve had it treated? Hansen’s Disease can be mildly contagious.’

  ‘What about treatment?’

  ‘Isolation. There are leprosaria for the purpose.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Chaulmoogra oil has been used in the past. Nowadays many people question its value.’

  ‘Life expectancy?’ she demanded.

  ‘Ten years. Perhaps longer if secondary infection doesn’t set in.’

  ‘Can Julia get it?’

  He regarded her watchfully for a moment. ‘She could.’

  ‘Then isolation it is,’ she said, nodding. She buttoned her shirt and sat down again. ‘My political work in Germany will have to wait.’ She sat and looked out the window for a while at the hundreds of sampans crammed in at odd angles along the bright, straw-coloured water of the Soochow Creek. ‘Are there leprosaria in Australia?’ she asked.

  ‘My good woman, I don’t even know where Australia is.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Julia wants you to have these.’ She reached down to the floor under the table and handed him the cardboard box of photographs.

  ‘Julia is really very much better. There is still the morphine, but I hope to wean her off that slowly. The fact is that when she came to you she was broken to pieces. She is strong now, really strong. Her will is strong.’ She was smiling that same knowing smile again. Ayres looked into her face and it always seemed to him afterwards that he had been looking into the face of the future, the face of the twentieth century.

  Ayres saw that sure face many times during the next twenty years in China. He saw her in the faces of the peasants, workers and soldiers as they joined the struggle. In his old age, on quiet mornings in his flat in Princes Street in Edinburgh, he would think back to that face and ascribe to it all that happened, all that he saw as he followed the battle fronts north and south with his temporary field hospital, the old Bedford truck he had converted into an ambulance. All this did not happen suddenly, of course. He remained as aloof from the world as ever through the rest of that year as Chiang Kai-Shek’s purges of the communists spread from Shanghai to other regions under conservative commanders, and Borodin and the other Russian advisers were sent packing back to Moscow. He could still remain detached from the stories he perused in the South China Daily News of Chinese communists being hunted down and executed in ordinary gardens in ordinary towns with telegraph poles and chicken runs and the whoops of playing children and patches of chipped brickwork on garden walls...

  He found
himself smoking more opium, sometimes six and seven pipes a night. But the relaxation they produced brought not soothing dreams but a power and clarity of imagination that allowed him again to inhabit Julia’s ‘region’. And no amount of the drug could relieve the tense, unpleasant beating of his heart.

  Nor did it happen the next year, as the Nationalist army advanced north, inciting the people against the Christian churches and hospitals and schools, and the propaganda posters went up on the walls of Shanghai, bizarre as something out of Julia’s ‘childhood’:

  The foreign devils worshipping the Pig. Beating the foreign devils and burning their books. The Practitioners of the Grunt of the Pig removing the foetus. The terrible punishment of Christ, the Pig Incarnate. Only after seeing the saws cutting, the pestles pounding, the cauldrons boiling and the grindstones grinding in dark Hell’s eighteen levels, will the foreign devils know. You who in this world have committed a thousand times ten thousand crimes, who have castrated boys, removed the foetuses from pregnant women, gouged out peoples’ eyes, and cut off women’s nipples...After we have pierced the Pig’s body with ten thousand arrows will the monster again dare to grunt?’*

  Nor did the Mukden Incident and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria or the stories of the horrors there move Ayres, at first. All that existed only to fill the columns of the South China Daily News and the Shanghai Evening Post, where Ayres caught the snippet that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, now married to one of the Soong sisters, had converted to Methodism.

  In the Shanghai Club in the International Settlement life went on much the same as ever. Businessmen were a little more touchy about the world Depression, perhaps; Englishmen’s wives continued tiredly to pine for home; their daughters continued to pick their marks in the colonial service and when their best shots fell short, became temporarily hysterical or fell into a profound malaise. For Ayres, business was slightly better than usual, if anything.