by Stephen Chan
Ah, from time to time, the men rebel. Gilgamesh, the great Sumerian king, four thousand years ago, drunkenly refused his fate. One desperate night, at the full-moon feast, he tore a leg from the sacrificial ox and tossed the charred and broken rump into the heavens with all the strength of sun-born kings. Ishtar, the goddess of the moon, thought it poor substitute for Gilgamesh’s heart, and took away the single chance the king might have for everlasting life. Atop his bold ziggurat, Gilgamesh accepted that his life was costed out, and hearts were the only fare for the beautiful carnivores of love.
His grandmother told him stories of ancient heroes. One, with full beard, almost like a barbarian’s, had also only one leg. He swung a fine sword meticulously balanced. But when he wanted to deliver a high side-kick, a supporting leg would instantly grow and anchor hero to the earth. A man entire only when he kicked, and only past a certain height. There was a moral somewhere in that, perhaps; but he hoarded the fairytales and learnt how, in sunset’s blaze, the long-haired sword-armed messengers of justice would sometimes translate themselves into the high birds of the sky. And stories were the only hoard of gold in the poverty in which he grew.
Poverty was brown. The electric light that shone on it was brown. The room in which he slept with his parents had no windows and he never recalled the dust being swept nor sunlight’s shaft on dust dancing in the dawns.
His father sought to turn this lack into an advantage of sorts. For an hour each day, between work’s end and the child’s time for sleep, he laid out the trays and second-hand equipment of a photographic darkroom. This moonlighting he called Happy Snaps, but most of the happy snaps he took were of the growing, smiling child – a child with hair that sprouted thick and long, and over whom strangers would make prophecies – few commissions came the father’s way and the child reasoned early that the camera was not for business but his parent’s one escape. The child hoarded stories, the father images of his life – appropriated for a golden dust-free future, when the past was both a record and something he could richly mock. The aspiration was great: to have a light-meter you must first have light, and the room should not be coloured like sleep before you even kissed the pillow and closed your eyes.
Closed your eyes, then made a moon in your mind to illuminate the brown, reciting to yourself a favourite child’s poem of the moon bright he had learnt from his mother. One day, when he learnt the rigours of speech, he thought, he would say this poem – not mother, nor father, but moon bright, after that the word for want.
From the grandparents’ room came each night a certain whine, a mechanically arbitrated whine that nevertheless suggested a higher, more courtly, more educated Cantonese than that with which he was addressed. Ah then, he thought, a hierarchy in language. It was a tape recorder, clumsily unwinding reel-to-reel a ritual opera with timed intonations, drum beats and cymbals clashing. In bed, the moon switched on, a brown music nevertheless intervened against that slippage to unconsciousness, and his dream of the moon and what was signalled by the acne on the moon’s full face.
The evening’s progression would be from dinner, all seated on wooden crates, Chinese newspapers spread as tablecloth, the table itself prefabricated from banana crates that were taller than the orange crates that served for chairs. A cat sat on one corner of the table, unable to eat except as a full person; chicken, blood pudding, fish would be served – particles of each to the cat as well. Afterwards, debris would be rolled up in the newspapers, and the apparatus of dining dismantled like magic. Magic is a rehearsed routine, he thought. Then bed, then moon, then the brown music.
And the music would always be of love, love lost or love divided, death or near death, reclamation of love on earth or in heaven. The division of love, more specifically of lovers, would be accomplished in a court populated by corrupt magistrates, inquisitorial lawyers, and parents anxious to divide the anguished pair. A last hopeless cling, and they would be ripped asunder, the girl to be imprisoned in her parents’ house, the boy to be sent off, a single cloth bag over his shoulder, to a distant university. Years later, for the most part, he would return – perhaps on a white horse – to find her grave stone, marked by the incense of her broken heart.
What the child marvelled at was how love could be subjected to inquisition. Grown, bearded men in the hats, stiffened belts and regalia of judges and lawyers would denounce, in those days, something merely aspirational, virginal, and flowering for a first and only time.
Although all the operas had the same theme, he had a favourite – an aria in which the high notes were deliberately cracked, a duet between two men, the pale, love-lorn scholar praying for God’s miracle – ‘if the peach blossoms open’ – and his encouraging companion clasping his shoulders and singing sturdily, ‘of course God will let the preach blossoms open’, but it is the middle of winter, under a stark moon, and the merciless magistrates of love had smirkingly delivered a judgement that the pale scholar and his beautiful love could marry if only, and only on that winter’s night, peach blossoms would open. In his child’s dream, the sturdy friend would rush in at dawn, shake the hunched, slumbering shoulders of his friend, and point hard, like a communist poster, to a very great tree in ecstatic bloom. Only the child could see, flying up a sky-beam, the angel of God resheathing, as he grew smaller, the pure sword of winter flowers.
This image of the angel, hair flowing, tiny in the distance, tiny against the immensity of the sky, infiltrated his later dreams. But, before then, the angel would fade out and a close-up of a peach blossom fade in and, in dreams alone, the forces of evil would be defeated. In dreams, music was not brown.
He knew when moon girls came. Friends always said he was old enough to know better and, indeed, each time he was older and knew even better what was happening to him, and what was happening was that pure, aspirational flowering of the heart for an impossible, peach-fed love, as pure as the very first flowering of countless incarnations ago. One day, some life, he would marry all the moon girls but, by the time of Marja, he thought he had already once married her, then lost her tragically in the laws of the past, and this was the rediscovery, if never the reclamation, in the heaven of a millennium’s end and the weariness-defeated start of all possibilities.
He never wavered. When a moon girl appeared he fell in love instantly.
His father was strong. Years later, when the doctors diagnosed terminal cancer, he remembered – and the memory was of sinuous elegance, like Roberto Baggio playing football in the World Cup of the sky. Feet placed astride litter, the father would lift, turn at the waist, and stack shoulder-height rows of fruit-filled crates. Particularly the long banana crates, he recalled. It was the way he turned the waist. Even when the father had grown prosperous and fat, the shoulders, forearms and calves – lift, grip, and propulsion – were still evident; but he remembered only the waist. He had never seen his father naked, but he must have had abdominal muscles like the ridged washboards his mother used.
When they afforded a second-hand washing machine, he would sit for hours, or what seemed hours, watching the clothes fed into the wringer and emerge in an endless variety of flatness – mother’s sleeves rolled up. Father’s sleeves rolled up as he stirred with a long stick carrots in a huge vat of water, to take enough dirt off them for sale. Father’s fingers as they peeled the outer layers of onions, mother’s tears, so that the onion displays would not be ruined by flaking skin, onions as smooth as apples. There would be a whole room full of the detritus of onions, lined along the wall, all the way up, with father’s stacked crates. He’d once run face-first into them in a childish panic, or enthusiasm. Learning to swerve would come later. Learning to turn the waist, adjust the feet, put out a palm to halt the forward rush. By the time he realised he would never have the chiselled features of the Roman epics, the Tarzan films, the Steve Reeves films, the Batman comics – that he was flatter than Hollywood allowed – he put it down to that childhood impact, face into father’s strong-built stacks.
2: The
flowers
When he was three, the story goes, when he was free, his memory of the story went, sixteen years before his hair grew over his shoulders and was bleached a rusted red by the sun, which nevertheless conspired to look a glossy black by night, almost blue-black in dreams, he was taken to a graveyard, a memorial visit to his mother’s mother, a sickly girl who, because sickly, could be married off only to the much older foreign-stained gold miner returned from a land that was called, by the savages who lived in it, Heaven’s Cloud, and his hair was already white and she barely fourteen but even with his shovel and pistol-callused hands, he was gentle and had fallen in love with her on sight and called her Mirrored Moon, as if he had stared at her in a still stream whenever Heaven’s Cloud had opened for his soft moment, rationed moment amidst savages and thugs. But the savages had been gentle to him, knowing from a distance why and how he longed whenever the moon was mirrored, and she thought at first marriage to someone so much older and who had become a stranger to his own land, his own people, must be punishment for sickliness, but his eyes were kind and she, impoverished at fourteen, had nowhere else to go, and when she fled to New Zealand years later to escape the arms of war, she brought up her three children in an iron-sheet shed, and then she died, and one of her daughters, the one who had stolen lychees and laughed in White Stone, was first taken as a ward and then sent in arranged marriage to an eighteen-year-old boy with long muscles and a single pin-striped suit with Oxford bags, a floral tie and long hair that was Brylcreem-shaped into that Clark Gable look that eluded all efforts by nature and, after they had a son, conceived in the brown room with no light, the family came to her grave, and the son danced on the marble slabs and placed flowers for the grandmother he had never known and, of whom, one photograph existed and she was seated and a sheet of painted books was stretched behind her.
And, as the sun shone fitfully through Heaven’s Cloud, and the boy danced from grave to grave, singing some nonsense to himself, the others began the memorial picnic, offering first the roasted meats to his grandmother, and then looked around for the first-born son in his brown beret, and almost rushed to stop him, but withdrew to watch, as he had found a grave unloved by flowers, unvisited by picnicking loved-ones, and the son was walking a circumference he had plotted in that mind of children who know circles, and he was, like the socialist commissar of the graves, collecting a single flower from each grave and, a sufficient bouquet collected by circle’s end, brought them to the grave unloved and placed them in the headstone’s vase with such a studied tenderness that all the prophecies that had been intoned at his birth sprang to the parents’ minds, the child of flowers who would limp in a muddied world of black people and wave a centuries-old sword of fire beneath the moon and the black soil of heaven’s garden of stars.
And had sought, before he was theirs, to wear sky in his hair, and had been returned, a refugee’s son, to relearn the limits of life and of grace, and to give up his heart to the creatures of heaven.
3: The shop at the end of the world
Because he was proud and had grown weary of the slights of his parents, particularly his dragon mother and, anyway, the bands of stomach muscles could not constrict the black hand, and the timetable of the hand gave him ambition, because the timetable might be short and he had to hurry and he wanted to look back on this time of life with contempt, and because he had fallen in love with Meil Wah, he was indignant with himself that he could not prevent his wife from being subjected to the indignities, commands and deprivations his dragon mother had first dealt out to him.
But there was nothing he could do. They were poor. They lived in the shop with his parents. His wife had come without dowry and she redeemed this lack by accepting the home and the hegemony of the dragon. And if, in the stories, most dragons were the benign angels of God, messengers of glad tidings and playful in the heavens like dolphins, this mother-in-law she thought was the unlovely rogue of the skies who had been beached in the tree-fringed backwater of Parnell, and had the temper and scorn of an excluded creature, but her China of old, of warlords and slaves, was changing even then. The sickly mother of Meil Wah had died and her father with the heart of adventure before her and Meil Wah had accepted, because there was no choice, the marriage brokered around her, and the husband-to-be, she thought, could be loved, or something comfortable that usually grew in the wake of love might grow, even if love never did; but the in-laws were the hefty conditionals of the protocol she was imagining. That was in 1948, and in 1949 the Red Star Brigades swept China, and it seemed like marriage in Parnell forever, in the shop at the end of the world and, in that tumultuous year, born under that star of tumult, came the son bruised black from her two days of labour, the long slippery savage of her womb, and his hair was long at birth, and she loved him like a sole gift.
He was put, first in a pram, then a pushchair, tethered to a pillar near the double doors of the shop and, as his parents worked, he would silently, never crying, examine the world of trams, children in uniform returning from school, and an unfinished cathedral that shared, with the shop, the apex of a hill, and the sun set like a ball of fire at the horizon that stretched flat from the foot of the hill.
Tethered, he became the centre of attention, and a loving conspiracy. His first motor actions were to learn to shell the small and tender peas, since he was always parked by the bin of peas, eat the peas, replace the empty husks. For weeks, the customers happily bought the husks of peas and only when a stranger complained did the regulars laughingly confess that they had watched delighted at the child’s delicate skill and sought no end to the opera of his fingers.
But the grandfather, in order to chasten the child, would wait till night, when the family had eaten, and creep outside, and his hand would appear in the window shaking keys and intoning wrath, and the grandmother would say, ‘key key soll will come and get you’, soll being the Chinese word for ‘hand’, so the monster outside the window was clearly a hybrid, and he cared not for the efforts of grandfather hand, ate peas from time to time, and listened to his heart beat late at night to avoid the whine of lovelorn music, like his father husbanded the insults borne by his mother, and, although he sat on the grandmother’s lap and heard the tales of heroes, waited for night when the heart beat like the heavy march of his army.
Tethered, he watched children return from school. He watched his father work. And life was a shuttle before his eyes and shuttle behind and beside him, and he knew his father hoarded his meagre wages for a shop of his own and he knew the shuttle would be more frenetic, even more urgent then, and pride and richness would make the father love his shop as he already loved his dream of it. And the child thought of schooling and of the white tower; he wanted to own the tower so that, somehow, he would learn its secret; and he measured out the days of school until in his mind he reached the tower; and he knew, one day, though sick and wrapped in a shadow, his father would insist upon entering his shop, for the last day at the last shop, and serving a magically-coloured stone to a customer, would turn from the green emeralds and look at the sapphire dome of the sky.
4: The white horse
Years later, in the last days of illness, the Patient Heart sent again the white horse. He did it like this: sitting in meditation posture, facing his garden through the French doors, facing an English summer that was as yet still green and the roses climbed, and the ash trees rose over all. The walled garden of the English dream, although he’d been trying to sell this dream for a year, ever since his wife, Penny, had left and the moon girl, Marja, had spent too little time with him there. Yet, exactly there, where the sun came through the French doors, entered from the garden exactly framed, he had made love many times to Marja, and she did not fly off to the moon, and he felt very briefly a normal scholar amidst his books and paintings, and the outside world was ordered though luxuriant, and the outside world met the inside world in a shaft of sunlight on the carpet where the girl of his dreams lay for him and the high birds watched.
&n
bsp; Now he knelt there, loosening his knees for the lotus to come, regularising and sinking his breath. And in the weeks just past it had snowed on him in Johannesburg and he had shivered sleeplessly on the high veld nights, it had shone reliably on him in Durban, and it had rained reliably on him in Cape Town, and by day he had been the designer-suited lecturer of authority – cited by many South African PhDs – and by night he had been the white-suited karate master, the long-haired magazine cover made flesh. The effort of switching identities smoothly made him stand up one winter’s day in Johannesburg, then faint, and when he came to he was soaked in the coldest sweat he could remember, having fallen well even though unconscious. Now he was sinking his breath, he had completed some hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups for the sake of his father’s sight of him, and had tied the hair in the glossy tail of the dream heroes, and he was naked facing his summer-lit garden, and on the other side of the world it was night and a life was coming to its end, and he had read how hard it is for souls to escape the body’s fitful ways of dying. Those shot in war, as he had seen, had an easier time of it than those in the last bed of their lives. So he was preparing now, the soul-master who had jumped several lessons in the lexicon on meditation, out of grief, love, and because he knew he could do it, the crippled soul-master of the Kentish walled garden, to escort his father across the bridge of life and to say farewells to him on the edge of the honey-rich plain where, as his father’s father had said before him on his own deathbed, the souls of the dead begin their journeys to heaven, where they are embalmed in the new bodies of their next lives. And the Patient Heart, a.k.a. the White Warrior, knelt somewhere in summer Kent and some part of that well-trained heart of his was bitter like unsmoothed gravel and yet he had, in order to do what he proposed to do, to take out the heart’s rake and soothe the gravel into the tall roses and the green chamber of a garden like the one that faced him, to make heart and garden one, so his soul could fly in the summer blue and cross the bridge of the world and take his father’s hand on that walk across the bridge of life, and the neighbours heard the first great sigh breathe out from the garden since a beautiful Finnish girl had lain briefly there, but this sigh, measuring itself away from bitterness, was of the resignation a warrior feels when he stands amidst the last hundred of his fallen companions and wraps some dreamt-of Roman commander in his final red and red-stained cloak.