Five Bells by Gail Jones Page A

tongue. Her teacher was pleased to remind his class that Mao Tse Tung once worked as a primary-school headmaster in Hunan – anyone could be a Communist leader! – and each week they learnt about a new hero of the Great March of 1935, some modest fellow who had sacrificed all, melodramatically, for the People’s Republic, or who had starved, or martyred himself, or believed in Mao beyond all others. In storybooks these figures always appeared in the same poses, three-quarter view, one arm raised, peering towards the future, and the illustrations of valiant deaths made Pei Xing cry. She knew she belonged to an incomparable nation with an inviolate leader, a leader, fortuitously, who shared her birth-date.
    Mao’s balloon face would become better known to her than her own father’s, that mole on the chin, that spaced-out stare, the way the single button in head-and-shoulder portraitsalways looked so exact and rhymed so perfectly, so centrally placed, with his mid-chin mole. His head would float like a dirigible throughout her life, beyond gravity, weightless, in the corner of her vision, always sweeping into history with the bright awful glamour of a God.
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    The weather was already cold, though it was only early autumn, and the visit to the First Department Store was an outing she remembered because her mother had made a fuss. Her daughter needed a new woollen coat because, she predicted, it would snow in the coming winter. Pei Xing could not remember having ever seen snow before, but believed – in a kind of magical thinking – that the purchase of the coat would be answered by a wide white heaven. Lao also wanted a coat, and mother said she would see how much money was left. He was carrying a kite. It was a time in her brother’s life in which he always carried his kite, as other boys carried books, pocket-knives and fighting crickets. The kite was homemade with a painted phoenix outstretched on the brown-paper diamond. It crackled as he held it, a fragile precious thing.
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    The women behind the counters chanted a greeting: Huanying guanglin! Huanying guanglin!: Welcome, brightness draws near!
    Pei Xing looked into their broad friendly faces and felt that all was right with the world; it was an auspicious day, and she would choose scarlet.
    She had never known before how various and how many were the products of the world. She had been to markets, of course, and to smaller local shops, those near Hua Shan Lu and further up Nanjing Xi Lu, near the Jiang’an Temple, but her first visit to a department store was a revelation. When they selected a coat from a rack of hundreds it was exactly as she had wished – of scarlet wool, with four buttons,two by two, and a neat symmetrical collar of two black triangles. There were side pockets for warming her hands and a black trim around the sleeves. Pei Xing remembers her mother standing behind her as they looked together into the long tilted mirror. She was smoothing the coat across her back and tugging at the sleeves to check that it was not too small.
    There was not enough money that day for Lao to have a coat too. But he was placated by a trip across the road to the People’s Park, where mother bought them onion-salted pancakes wrapped in rice paper. Lao flew his kite with other boys on a large oval of grass while Pei Xing sat with her mother on a bench beneath the shedding trees. An old man nearby was playing an erhu and singing in a thin reedy voice. He plucked at the two strings intently, as if every emotion was caught there and must be released.
    â€˜From the provinces,’ mother whispered, with a hint of approval.
    Pei Xing was wearing the new coat, taking care not to stain it with her snack. When she finished eating her mother leant over and wiped her fingers with a cloth. It was a moment Pei Xing would return to again and again, first when she was in prison, and later at the Cadre Camp. For some reason there was a purity