Five Bells by Gail Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

merchants, the international energy that pulsed between languages and countries. The translations were less of words than of these perplexing combinations: shops, peoples, signs and wonders.
    In another life he might have loved it. But James was disintegrating, he knew. He was becoming fissures and gaps, as if something in his body had torn. Time past was leaking in, and shame, and regret, and too much irksome reality. He continued his walk through the city, hearing her name in his mind: Ellie, Ellie; Ellie, Ellie . The name he sighed in his sleep. As though she was a Buddhic chant, or a compass alignment, or the talismanic code to a forgotten world. As though the sound of her name was a kind of inward music.

    Pei Xing had woken that morning thinking of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago . Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago , the poet-doctor. Apart from her father, the first man, though unreal, she had ever loved.
    Before she opened her eyes she had felt him in the bed beside her. It was as if he had flown through the window from theRussian cold to find warmth beside her body, to nestle his dark head between her small breasts. He appeared as he did in the famous film version – played by Omar Sharif – those enormous brown eyes, that air of sexual distraction. The first seconds were snowy, image-confounded and fabulously arousing; and she might have been holding his face in her hands, so sure was his incarnation.
    When Pei Xing realised she was awake she found that her cheeks were moist with tears. Doctor Zhivago had been her father’s favourite novel and his most famous and prestigious translation. Though dangerous and counter-revolutionary, a target for the Red Guards and the Mao Tse Tung Thought Propaganda Teams, he had cherished it, with tortured obstinacy, until his very last breath. He liked to quote a section from the opening about ‘ inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example ’; and even now she remembered the whole paragraph, though she had once striven to forget it.
    â€˜We all possess an inward music ,’ he had told her, sounding like a teacher. ‘Every person on the planet. Every single one of us.’
    Inward music. What was that? she had often wondered.
    Her father was prone to announcements. Every now and then he dispensed an aphoristic sentence, or felt obliged to comment, in italics, on literature or politics. What others might have derided, Pei Xing found endearing.
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    Her father owned a Feltrinelli first edition, in Russian, from 1957. And then one in English, Harvill, from which he wrote his translation. She had watched him work night after night at his desk, in the glow of a brass lamp, with English-Chinese and Russian-Chinese dictionaries by his side, and a Great China brand cigarette dangling from two fingers. She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one worldto another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father’s head. She could see how he concentrated: ‘ cher ’ in Russian, ‘ neve ’ in Italian, ‘ snow ’ in English, until he arrived at the sound ‘ xue ’, and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms. As he removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, Pei Xing felt a pure, focused pang of love.
    She considered her father the most intelligent man in the world. She competed with her brother for his attention, but somehow knew that her bookishness gave her a clear advantage.
    â€˜There are many words for snow,’ her father announced. And he tilted his head back and chuckled, as if he had just told her a