Five Bells by Gail Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

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    In the bonfire the Red Guards lit in their lane in 1967 Doctor Zhivago was aflame in the pile of books deemed ideologically treacherous. Pei Xing watched the book-burning with her parents, who were forced to kneel in mute witness. Her father’s face was bruised and her mother looked absent.
    The immolation of books took longer than expected. Sometimes a book would flip open page by page, each separately blackening, curling, igniting, disappearing, and still there were more pages rising softly underneath. The pyramid of paper seemed for a time to resist its own fire, so that a Guard poked at the smouldering mess and called for kerosene. When at last it flared up, with a kind of fierce luminosity, everyone was relieved that the event was at last consuming itself. And because she could not look at her parents’ faces, and because she was afraid, and because history had become this incrediblewill to erase, Pei Xing watched the bonfire with devoted attention. It was impressively bright.
    The past never left her. Her parents were always there, always kneeling, the last time she saw them alive. The pile of books was perpetually burning.
    And the seductive Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago seemed almost more real to her than her own parents, since he lived on robustly in cinema and words, and since his own life story had a definite, well-described conclusion. This was something her father believed in, that fiction might eclipse life. It pained her to think of it now, how distant he had become, how vague and how replaced. Her mother was more present: the ministrations of food and comfort, the Guangdong folk-tales, the sound of her piano as she practised a Brahms piece, or a Bach. These memories greeted her more frequently, and more often in moments of happiness.
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    It had rained during the night but the sun was now shining. The day was fast heating up. Pei Xing rose, splashed her face, and went immediately to the kitchen to prepare her Dragon Well tea. There was some cold sticky rice left over in a bowl in the fridge; she covered it with condensed milk and slices of mango and ate her breakfast standing up, as she always did, looking as though searching into the far distance.
    Beyond the window above the sink lay the broad sprawl of Bankstown and the outer western suburbs. Mighty trucks were rumbling along the freeways with homicidal speed; there were houses of dubious design, with utes on the front lawns and chunky letterboxes made of bricks; there were factories and steelworks and a huge hardware store, the size of a jumbo-jet hangar, spread over an entire block. A mattress factory and a glass factory stood absurdly side by side. Aussie Mattresses. Down Under Glass.
    In the shopping centre beside the train station there were dozens of small businesses with signs above the doorways in Vietnamese and Arabic; these Pei Xing found particularly enchanting. She loved to look directly into the faces of people on the street: men with powerful forearms and forthright eyes, and women in hijabs and scarves walking together in friendly clusters. Their children all looked plump and smiling and for some reason reminded Pei Xing of nutmeg. Then there were Vietnamese at the fishmongers on the corner, a meeting place of sorts, and casual groups at the Pho shop, who all seemed to know each other. This version of Australia was Asian and Arab. These people moved in an aura of their own, not afraid to claim space; and among them were other populations, migrant as she, each pulled from another history and cast up at the bottom of the world. On the street Pei Xing always felt cosmopolitan. She felt she was moving among friends in a spacious new world. She thought people from the Middle East, especially, were very exotic. She tried not to stare.
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    Conspicuous beneath a sun umbrella, Pei Xing walked the streets of Bankstown to catch an early train. She looked at the signs above the stores and saw again how beautiful a script Arabic was,