by Stephen Chan
Because when he had left for his five-week tour of southern Africa his father had sounded strong – for the brief sentences he voiced on the telephone – but when he returned the voice was pathetically weak and limited to a lone sentence, and even his mother, topping and tailing the father’s words as usual, no longer concealed the gravity of his sudden decline. And the son knew even before he phoned since, on his return, he found the plaque his father had given him fallen, face-down on the floor and, the next day, visiting his office, every one of his paintings hung limply on the walls with broken cords. And, he said to himself, he may have been misreading the signs of late, for a full year in fact when it came to the Finnish girl, but there was no doubt someone was sending him signs, and their range of reading was, he thought, sucking in breath, bitterly narrow and he exhaled the taste of it in a bubble over the grubby complex of the LSE and it pulsated like a child’s blown bubble, a child’s breath, over the thunder of Aldwych and Holborn, and became one with the exhaust of one thousand slow-moving summer cars.
And this was how he did it on that Saturday afternoon before his garden, having composed himself and entered himself and summoned the White Warrior and made him pristine and sent him off around the world. It was hard to reach the other side, it was hard to reach the father, harder still to enter him, and he could not construct the necessary narrative, and in Kent his injured knees were hurting and when he finally entered the father, he could only play three images and he played them over and over and they intercut and he thought these were the last strobe-light visions of his father, the living linking parts were being excised.
1. He saw the White Warrior face-to-face with his father. The father’s back was to his camera and the shot was framed from the upper back rising, and the father had in his soul not lost weight and was the hearty father of his memory and the Warrior was looking into that part where his father’s eyes would have faced him and they could not yet have been death eyes for the Warrior was speaking to him with his eyes and the two men would bring their right forearms together over and over and, in Kent, he was thinking ‘this is the edge of the honey plain, but the Warrior cannot cross to this side of the bridge,’ but it was not the honey plain, merely its precursor as the dying soul imagines where it is shortly to go.
2. The camera has moved back now. We see more of the precursor plain. The warrior son is bowing and sweeping his arm – strange, it is his useless left arm – in the direction of an unseen bridge. Then the image cuts and plays again, then cuts again, then the two men are in close-up once more reading words in each other’s eyes and making arms clash in that futile last gesture that says love has the strength of well bodies. It is a muscular farewell, the poetry is what they say with their eyes and the camera cannot record something so reserved.
3. The son holds the reins of the white horse. When he strokes its nuzzle, reins disappear. In the mouth of the last blue cavern of life’s fountain, they are standing. There is an upwards curving hewn-stone bridge across a chasm in the stars and some full moon is in the great heaven, and the bridge leads to a small land of stone and from there the bridges lead across the outcrops of the honey plain until they come to the well-lit sunlit plain itself. The image of the moon and the mouth of the last cavern and the white horse plays over and over. In Kent, the Patient Heart embraces summer air the shape of his father. In the long cloud-strewn islands of the south the father, back still to the camera, faces the White Warrior who gestures towards the horse and the white horse by the white moon walks slowly towards the bridge and if you walk behind, no longer turning towards the Warrior who cannot cross with you, you can do it smoothly and death will not rattle in your throat because air and soul have escaped clean.
Back in Kent he comes to. He is shaking. He does not know if ever the white horse can return to him, and how can a soul fight if it cannot ride? He makes tea and it shakes in his hand and he is crying now and the sun is shining on the Downs and the five ports, and wind stirs the ash trees but no wind enters the walled garden, but it makes him look up. On his wall, holding his wide belt of office, bearded, not thin at all, is the Red Emperor, and he looks like his father and also like the emperors in all his grandmother’s fairy tales and, as he watches, the Red Emperor slowly rises into the sky and, looking down at him always, takes half an hour to disappear like a kite released by the heart towards the sun.
5: The flying fox and the mud world
There was a mud world. Wound sleepless in sheets, five years of age, the master of speech and two words in English, and for five years to come, he had every night the same dream.
There was a mud world, flat under grey skies, a land of neither blue nor green, but brown, grey. Irrigation canals kept the mud what it was destined always to be, mud; and if a man of the living world, or even an angel of heaven stood upon the mud he would sink. But there were people of the mud world who begged release from passers-by. If you passed by, arms would plead and eyes would plead and mouths, encaked, would seek to plead. There was no sound in the mud world.
This is how you passed by. Only in the repetition of dreams could you see a single cable in the sky. It grew across with not a pylon of support. Half way between man and angel you sped across the sky, both arms holding fast to the pulley of a flying fox. If you lost your grip…
And you would, feet held forward, fly over acres and miles of the world of mud, and you flew urgently for the storm of the world’s end was massing out of your sight, far from the horizon to which you sped, but you knew the storm for this was the dream of destiny.
Even the people of the mud world did not want to die in the storm. You flew, the silent roar of terrible lives seeking to live.
Suddenly the dream pitches you there. The flying fox has gone. For the brief moment of futility you fly unaided. Against a grey tidal wave the size of a mountain you are the dreamt silhouette that flies sword in hand against the last wave of time and you are, forever, that man who came too late to save a single crab in his hopeless hole.
WHITE BROTHER
1: Anton’s dream
A month after the death of his father he sat in his Finnish room in Tampere, a distinguished visiting professor, and a full moon rose over the autumn mists, and the trees, becoming gold and red, dropped no more leaves, and he had mapped out the tattoo of the Red Emperor for his back, and the Finnish girl lay in his bed and almost a quarter century ago, as she was being born, and as the second moon girl in the throes of war in Bangladesh was being born, he was lamenting the loss of the first of their line, howling like the long-haired pelt-coated wolves of the Northern wastes, and he was – just as he was now one block away from the Lenin Museum – waving a flag and felt through the seams and stitching of his heart that all the East was red, so that in Tampere all those years later he resolved to write the chronicle of how he sought to lay the first girl of the moon on a flag of red by the green trees of Parnell and, as he made love to her there, was unknowing that amidst shell fire in one country and by the melancholy lakes of another the heartaches of his future were also being sired.
The first dream Anton had was to assassinate William Rogers. So, while the others nailed together their placards, filled their flour bombs, Anton spent first one week in the Hotel Intercontinental, learning the mind and the view of a victim, calculating reverse trajectories from the bedroom below the one Rogers would occupy. Then he bought a telescopic sight for the .303 rifle he had resurrected from his late father’s wardrobe, having first cleaned the barrel and furniture-polished the stock. Fastidious, Anton; a new silk bandana, tea from a silver pot, the long-haired sniper who thought he might end a century of war, Sarajevo to Auckland, by a single bullet, start out with an archduke, clean up with a secretary of state. Even the New Zealand students knew Rogers was a dove in the US cabinet, but Anton wanted a symbol as much as he wanted a trophy, and he wanted a message that would retort around the world, bring comfort to his beloved Vietnamese, and harry the hawks who were already seeking a safe route out. No saf
e route, unless fast, was Anton’s simple message. In the Intercontinental, Anton viewed where the student protesters would gather. Flour bombs, he smiled to himself, they’ll bring flour bombs, maybe hit some policemen with their placards, and the police would form up flying wedges to dive amidst the crowd, like a kingfisher blue, to pluck from the shoals those ringleaders whose faces they had rehearsed from their briefing notes. Charge them with disorderly behaviour. The same ringleaders would plan to melt away into the university grounds around the Old Government House, confident the campus was sacrosanct and the police would stop at the gates as if a Geneva Convention ordered them. Olympian, Anton; smiled, said: no, this will be settled by a bullet to shock my little very little nation.
And where he proposed to dispatch that bullet was a first floor room in Old Government House, the first seat of, well, government in New Zealand – before it removed its posterior to windy Wellington, where the Cook Strait tempests would waft away its flatulence. Now a repository for bad colonial paintings, Kauri wood tables and very poor recent leather armchairs – filled by the local dons who had adopted the House as their student-excluded commons – there were still some deserted upstairs bedrooms and there Anton hid his polished rifle. As for the dons – fifth-raters, imposters, unpublished schoolmasters, thought Anton – they challenged not at all the tall, almost-completed image of a Byronic figure who one day trooped upstairs, a golf bag slung over his frock-coated shoulder.
Across the lawns, across one road, a clear view of the Intercontinental. Between the lawns and the road, a picket fence and a hedge of bamboo. This sure isn’t Europe, thought Anton; but the hedge didn’t cloud at all his line of fire – upwards – to the suite above the room where he had stayed, and from where he had picked his present window, where he crouched and reversed his vision and adjusted his sights.
But the bamboo hedge was indispensable to the student leaders – their boundary against the police. Ever since some tenth-rate government spy had been caught on campus – an unfortunate named Godfrey, who had been planted by a spy-master named Gilbert, a brigadier who commanded the ten-strong force against creeping Communism – the students had declared the campus an autonomous republic, where the forces of authority could not enter, and the university Council had found a form of words which both understood the student position and did not defy the reach of the police. It was the police themselves who, by and large, respected the borders of the new republic, if only because crossing it cost more than it was worth, and the students, anyway, threw only flour – which, again anyway, always fell short of the only decent hotel in town, but could someone build another one soon, the police prayed, so they could occasionally chase back the shouting hordelets, Only limited sport at the Intercontinental. Only a single bullet, thought Anton. Hit or miss, he had his own escape route planned. The golf bag to be hurriedly transported to the roof of the nearby Biology building, hung from an improvised hook inside the first bend of a ventilation duct. Then he would walk back to the demonstration, taking a non-campus path along Symonds Street. Then he would throw flour bombs for all he was worth. Stephen would say he had been there all along, throwing for all he was worth indeed, though with a fastidious action, to keep spillage away from his lovely coat.
Stephen had demurred at his plans. William Rogers is a trapped dove, he said, but a strategically-placed one. The cause needs Rogers alive, alive but frightened perhaps. Could you not arrange merely a near-miss? But he knew Anton’s vanity and vision could not retreat from the formula he had concocted, then brazenly announced, at the Parnell house hung with signs that declared it the People’s Republic of Gibraltar Crescent, hung also with Vietnamese and Chinese flags – just in case Brigadier Gilbert’s remaining nine minions were slow of reading. Beyond the house, in which disastrous parties, seeking an improbable alliance between radical students and Hell’s Angels, had resulted in almost no functioning furniture, there was the great bank of trees, and that was the Domain, and birds sang each morning for the radicalised and unradicalised alike, for those with frock coats and silk bandanas and those without, and sun would filter through the trees onto the tracks they called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which led the brave souls of the new revolution on time to their lectures from their unpublished dons. And Stephen had thrown up his hands in horror, but made no moral objection, only a strategic one, but what Stephen knew of strategy could be written on the fingernail of the Girl of the Moon, with whom he lay on the lawns of Old Government House and, each day, the professor of English, white goatee combed, would pass by and wish the young lovers well, and an entire autumn had passed like that, but now it was winter, and the trapped dove of war was encamped in the great hotel across the road, and Anton slid the rifle away behind a velvet curtain and walked out fingering the single bullet he now carried always in the cigarette case in his pocket in his dark crimson coat.
Almost two decades later, his hair moderately shortened for the sake of a father he had not seen for ten years of self-imposed exile in the cathedral streets of Europe and the war-torn fields of Africa, Stephen would marry his second wife on the lawns, by the roses, at the Kauri tables of Old Government House, seeking a domestic end to the traumas of being unable to have the second girl of the moon, whom he had left as a hidden romance on the sun-drenched plains, thinking of how she had been born on a refugees’ trek from the trail of war – the peasant women kindly helping deliver her by a river, taking pity on her well-born mother – and thinking not at all of Anton, William Rogers, or the local professors whose stars his own was rapidly eclipsing. Thinking not yet of years ahead, when the incorrigible moon would strike again, while at the same time a black hand would smother his eaten father.
Two day before the arrival of William Rogers, the police removed the rifle from behind the velvet curtain. No bullet being in it, they thought it merely misplaced property, and thought not at all of Anton’s thunder among the students who imposed solidarity with the bombed villages of a far away land.
Anton’s second dream, composed again of charade and determination, had been to hijack all television broadcasting over Auckland. High in the Waitakare mountains, standing out in the fern forests, was a gigantic television mast. In Shortland Street, in metropolitan Auckland (although Anton would never have used that term), programmes were beamed first to the Waitakare’s mast and, thence, to all the isthmus on which Auckland, sparkling-harboured, first sat then sprawled. Winding through the fern forest was a single road called, in that direct New Zealandese, the Scenic Route. Somehow, Anton had discovered a small monitoring station was attached to the mast and, within it, stood means to override Shortland Street but, for want of anything to override – for want of decent programmes to monitor, said Anton – it was mostly unmanned. So, Anton’s second dream had been to storm the monitoring station, override the broadcast, and leave hanging on every screen between the two harbours a placard – he had already prepared the slide – which denounced the war and promised victory for the Vietnamese. To have it linger there, two trusty bands of aides would fell trees across the Scenic Route, both at its start and its end, so police could not easily reach the station – he had already acquired the dynamite for the trees, he said. And when Stephen said, why blow up trees, why not simply crater the road?, he shrugged his shoulders in mock despair. But he had again worked out his escape route – by bicycle – to Kare Kare beach; and when someone else pointed out the road to Kare Kare had not been graded for some time and was a corrugated heap of unlit gravel, rather unsuitable for bicycles at night, he shrugged again. And how would the two teams of explosives personnel escape, huh? But Anton had a plan for them too, so the maps were brought out, and the hapless trees selected and the teams chosen – Stephen in charge of the one near Titrangi – and compromise refuges for everyone found in Laingholm and Helensville, and Anton promised to hand out the detonators on the morning of the mission, having already issued the dynamite and, of course, he carried the detonators in his cigarette case, and Geoff said if they went off ove
r his heart Anton would live on, not having a heart of any sort, and everyone laughed. But, on the morning of the mission it rained heavily and continued into the afternoon, and Anton never appeared to issue the two detonators, so Geoff surmised Anton had not wished to dampen his coat, and everybody went to the Kiwi Tavern near the university and, when Anton was seen some days later, he said nothing of televisions and Geoff and Stephen said nothing too.