The White Door

by Stephen Chan

  It had been on television. That’s where his family and the elders had seen it. He was wearing a camel blazer he had borrowed from his father. A flower in his buttonhole matched the jacket as he was, armlocked and bent-over, dragged out. His thinly-moustached face spoke an anti-war slogan to the camera before he was hauled off screen to a cell without windows. Afterwards, he went to live in Gibraltar Crescent, to be near the great trees of his childhood, and briefly made love to a woman with a child’s body, as her other suitors homed in on the frail beauty of the revolution. He lost her, well, he lost her, and some of those who loved her would be at the great reunion. Geoff was organising the great reunion. On board a flight to New Zealand, a Pacific dawn breaking, alone awake, sipping his whiskey and writing, a Chinese man in a black suit, his hair tied back, with lines on his face, was regretting he had left his frock-coat in London, and wondering about the measures of sartorial splendour and revolution. But Robespierre, after all, wore them and when his turn at the guillotine came, the cameras would have – if cameras could have – caught the slow moment perfectly.

  As cameras would catch Rangitoto now. Glass of wine in hand, he sits on the restaurant terrace, trying to breathe, managing to look, just look, the ozone so thin he wears dark glasses all the time, and sun filters in his aftershave, so that if he must burn he will burn slow, even his eyes burn slow. His eyes are a camera lens. They take in Rangitoto. His brain replays the videos. This has been his life: the replayed slow-motion image. Imagine a wave the size of Rangitito. He imagines it on the terrace, orders another wine, the dream hero eats salad and drinks wine, filters the lens, if he flew against the wave today he would fly… how? More futilely. But it was always a futile charge. It was always futile.

  The tide washes in. Hello, tides. Sparrows eat at his feet. Yachts glide by Rangitoto. Time has glided by. In his white shirt he is almost a stone where he sits. A tourist takes a photo of him. He is looking out forever. There is usually a melancholy horizon line. Today there is a dormant volcano. He is filming. He is filming. Gradually fire rises then dances from Rangitoto, and all of Auckland is cheering that, at last, fire is dancing. The harbour turns orange, then red, and the sky is a sunset like no other. A White Warrior feels slumber subside, the sunset colours him. He is young and red again. His sword paints the beginning of his long history.

  How is it done? The shared experience, in different faiths, of Stephen and Anton: if you look back, in a reverie look back, then, like the Shinto priests on a southern Japanese island, not prevailing much against the more Chinese Buddhist beliefs of the natives, you shave the body, oil it, dress the hair with antique resins, wait while meditating for skin and scalp to absorb it all, don the yellow robes – you are naked underneath – and enter the labyrinth of questions. There are three inquisitors. They are not attired by ritual, but you are attired by ritual; your body has never felt more holy. This is what you are good at: the ritual sacralisation of the body, the sacralisation of the ritual. But they are there to probe the mind and to suggest a relationship between the soul, your soul, and their mind. They are minded to expose a boundary line, to clarify it, then to suggest how you edged and edged and then, one day, jumped it. Nothing blue where you jumped, they say, you have leapt into a void. Salvation had been offered, salvation was refused – the jump refuses it, leaves it behind – and this is, they say, the repudiation of grace, the one unforgivable sin. They are Heaven’s ministers and, in the manner of magistrates anywhere, say no tree will flower this or any night for you. The gates of Augustine’s city cannot be permeated by you and if you permeate one, the endless inner defences will always mean another gate. One day, the city guardians will catch you, capture you, by a translucent gate, you looking in, nose pressed and peering, ha, straining for glimpses, a family member on the other side, and your footsteps thus far will be deleted. Only, as you sit before the tribunal, the three elders, archons, you are resolute. Repentance was offered, repentance was refused; you do not yet know what it means. It means origin is refused: how you grew up in a refugee family, claiming so little, hoping for so much, looking at a university tower. No one else in the family goes to the university. They look at you as a warning. You chose the tree of knowledge – of good and evil (they remember only the warning against knowing evil) – rather than life in Heaven’s wide-enough programme. But, because you grew together, look, it was a struggle, the early years were poverty, you had only one another. This is what knowledge finally excludes. So you seek after knowledge, books and paintings are your furniture, and the rest of your life is spent under the robes you wore that day. You keep oiling the hair and body, washing and washing, and the robe fades to white, bleached from all the washing, and you learn to girdle a sword to the waist, in winters trim the robe with fur, and you wander the wide world, donating furniture whenever you move on, the phantom haunting the world’s conflicts, flying and flying, not really empty in any accepted sense – you just feel weightless, unanchored, and you search for a woman to hold you down, to sleep at night, her head on your stomach. One day the right one will come.

  Under the fire of Rangitoto, the sky, he felt a colour seep into him. It dyes him, even refreshes his blood. He stands, he knows how he will enter the reunion. These, too, are long-lost brothers and sisters after all and, after all, they were there for him after the archons had stripped an origin from him. It begins here: Anton’s almost silly sit-in at an outpost of an imperial giant, on camera; and, now, the archive opens itself.

  It is held at the university. He wanders it like a phantom; impersonates a local professor; through the French doors of the senior common room, opening straight onto a lawn, sees the ghosts of a couple lying on the shallow bank. Is it a great oak that shelters them? The boy is Chinese, thin then; and the girl hardly seems to breathe. It is autumn. Leaves cover them. White-haired dons walk around them and smile at the youthful, simple love. It is simple, this youthful love.

  And, as he climbs the high stairs, the breathless girl is there again, waiting to be slowly lifted up. Suddenly, a moon appears, and it is full as he drives by the great harbour. Decades have passed, and he is standing on her terrace. There is a long, curved bench of highly polished timber. He thinks it is rimu wood. He doesn’t know – it is just the first thing that comes into his mind. A spirit is thanking him for all the care he took of her. It helped me live, says the spirit, all the subtle gallantries, the constant subtle gallantries. He is amazed. He never thought them subtle. He was just burning to love her full and to be requited part. Part would have done it. A green-steering knight wandering a great forest, seeking out a giant to have the giant cut off his head. It was just a promise. Here is my head. Here is my heart. The spirit gives him back, at last, his heart.

  When he unblinks, the sun is there again. An elder is at the top of the stairs. This is where he was told that the order to excommunicate had come through. ‘I felt I had to tell you, at least face-to-face,’ the elder said, taking off his glasses. Thank you, the younger man had replied. It is a kindness.

  Now he gains the top of the stairs. The youngest brother has not come to visit him. He imagines the tall man in a black suit, the jaw line the same, but the hair short, the body not mortified. He says to the imagination: will you let me pass? The imagination permits him.

  Thirty years after he lost his heart, told he had lost his soul, lost an origin; thirty years after he sought to reclaim these, found parts with fault-lines pencilled in, Stephen came at last to the reunion. Slightly late, spirits had delayed him and the fear of having to make a speech – what could he say? – he heard, behind the doors, the laughter of ordinary families, sons and brothers, he had to put his dark glasses back on, he had taken his father’s cufflinks, artificially compressed diamonds, a dark linen suit, he knew how to walk in. It had better be with bold steps, he said.

  They were old. Of course, he was old, but something about the New Zealand sun deepened the lines. All around him, age sat. He sat himself in age. He had to abandon his European-
ness. Lines, no matter how gained, were lines. No one else had had his adventures. He had to abandon his Chinese-ness. No one else had stormed the portals of Heaven. But everyone had stormed an American Consulate one autumn day. There was the woman whom Judith Todd recalled to him in Zimbabwe. He had to abandon his African-ness. He was back home. There was the man with the silver tongue, who had addressed the crowds at Albert Park, and who had owned a great dog. There were the bombers of the Supreme Court doors. He had to abandon the dream of his sword. Everybody had grown into a pacifism. Everybody decried the American bombs over Belgrade. He had to abandon his sense of time. The rhetoric and method of argument were just the same. The world out there, beyond the great harbours, was just the same. They looked at him. How naked he had to become to become just the same. Anton was not there. He could figleaf in honour of Anton. But Geoff, seeing his confusion, came to his rescue. ‘Stephen was always the most philosophical and gentle of us. Remember, at the sit-in, he carried a red rose.’ Stephen did not recall it as a rose. Probably Geoff didn’t either. Geoff’s easy elegance covered Stephen. The children looked at him. For thirty years, their parents had just dreamed he still existed. No one had read his writings. But the dreams had kept him alive. Now, here he was, the body so mortified by the extremes of his training and adventures, he was just the same as their dreams. Lines, yes, but the hair was still there, the dark formal suit, the voice. He rose to speak. I have come a long way. He smiled at Geoff. Geoff saw he was looking at Anton’s space. He was weeping in his heart. Geoff knew they were tears of joy. Geoff had presented him something. Look, Stephen, forget your great overlays of complexity. Look at our children with their infant dreadlocks. Look at our families. As yours drifted away like unclaimed lands, ours grew. And, look, they have come too, to see their parents’ stories made flesh. And look, Stephen, abandon your mock horrors that we still examine the world simply. Look at our work here, in this land you left behind. Let this be your soft moment. Everyone in this room, everyone, all those looking at you and your invisible baggage, that space that walks around you – we have all kept the faith.

  All around, the walls were festooned with the photos and clippings of the era. The newspaper account of his own court defence had been turned into a poster. He had forgotten he had cross-examined the consul himself. Supporters were there. ‘You passed me, going down the hill, and invited me to join the contingent. When I refused, you said, “but, ah, thou hast insufficient zeal.”’ Zeal was it? He thought it was not zeal. It was almost comical, but so serious that it inaugurated the tragicomedy of his years. Zeal was when you went single and simple-minded at something. But he recognised the saying: it had been a church inculcation, and that had been the last time he had used it. Everything now seemed like a last time. He had to beware of creating a new fiction of completions. What to do about his real family? And, if not those who were immediate brothers and sisters, what was the family beyond them? At nine that night, before the music and dancing got underway, he left the reunion, slipping out like a ghost returning to its dream. But the Buddha said to leave the table still hungry. Anyway, he was to catch the first flight out next morning, to Wellington, for the Kwoks, his mother’s line, were also convening in the name of reunion, unveiling, formally, that family tree that went back, made a declension of itself, to the high Tang. So I shall be Duke of White Stone, he smiled. I have already been a white stone. A streak of ruby colour fell on me today.

  ‘What is he like after all these years?’ said Teresa. She was laughing. Most of the relatives had never seen him for three decades. He never came to the capitol on his sporadic visits to New Zealand. ‘Well, he will wear a very white shirt, which he will have forgotten to button, a very formal dark suit. His hair is still long, but he has cut some inches off for this reunion. He will walk in, look around and, before he smiles, will look like a displaced samurai, appearing suddenly, transmitted across something as simple as time. He may be shaven. He may be sober. Who knows what he is like after all these years?’

  True to her advertisement of form, he had cut it almost too fine, racing from the airport. Cousin Frank, the clan leader, just about to begin, looked to his right. Stephen was at the door; 360 eyes turned in his direction. He was embarrassed, so scowled first, before smiling. Then he bowed. An absurd Japanese gesture in a Chinese reunion. Teresa was killing herself with satisfied smiling. He walked, very slowly, to the back of the hall. Teresa was not perfectly right. The suit was crumpled.

  It is the day before Remembrance of Ancestors Day. He was looking at a tall ship, docked beside the Te Papa Museum, where they were all seated. He imagined the lychee trees of Heaven. A portrait of Sheng Shee, a great-great-grandmother matriarch, appeared on the screen. When he took his eyes away from the boat, it was like looking at his own mother.

  He did not gasp. Something was working here. He looked at Sadie, Frank’s sister, the oldest left in the clan. In her eighties, she was what his mother had wanted to be. She watched Sadie. If you have a forbear, can see the stages of slow, but composed, decline, have a model, then it does not surprise you. But to have it come without warning. Blazing a trail and fifteen years younger than Sadie. He looked at her. She sat like his mother.

  Children were looking at him looking at her. He had a small tear in his stomach muscles. From time to time the sudden white pain would crouch him over. He let it happen without expression.

  Sadie looked back. She had no idea who he was. She had her own runaway son, somewhere in America. The idea that there could be more than one did not move her. She closed her eyes to hear the names Frank was reciting. She shook her head, as if recognising them all. He was recognising her recognition.

  He looked back at the white ship. The sky was blue. Somehow the ship was leaching colour from the sky. The sky was white now. Whiter. Sadie was making him enter it. There was a boulevard of red pohutakawa trees. They became lychee trees. He saw horses he knew. They led the way beyond the red flowers. The tumult of their hooves gave way to the tumult of a Heaven he had not imagined. The wind blew at him through a huge glass wall. The horses also passed through the wall. Not this time, he thought. He took out his sword to cut his way through the glass gate. On the other side he was simply swept into a maelstrom, becoming something so white it reflected all of Heaven at night.

  He emerged slowly back at the reunion. The ship had pulled out and was still blowing its horn. Frank was almost weeping, urging the need for families to stay together. Others were weeping. He had missed the linking bits again. Teresa was looking at him. He was not sweating, but he was paler from the transmission. The Empress Wu is in Heaven, he thought, thundering against all things past. Frank is weeping and it is as if, at last, he has written, so that he might close, a great book of the past.

  How do you close a book of the past? Frank was walking all the relatives down the streets of White Stone. For the next few days after the reunion they all kept walking. Teresa had said that, when she and Mother walked them, Mother found memory springing to life, restoring itself. She knew where the school had been, how far away Untouched Boulevard had seemed. Only a mile, with a hill of lychee plantations between. But, before the adult imagination and the adult measures, everything had been a universe away.

  The Patient Heart was seated on an aircraft, imagining his relatives – all now catalogued – walking White Stone. The tree’s complete, he sang, the tree’s complete; reaches heaven, and heaven’s replete with White Stoners, White Stoners walk in heaven’s streets. He was bound for Okinawa. In his white robes he would face his Sensei. The older man would look to see if the belt he had given the Patient Heart a full thirteen years ago had also begun its true fade to white. It was a belt made from toughest cotton. It would not fray and fade like its satin counterparts. Make the Heart work, thought Sensei.

  Sensei, what are the measures of Heaven, or even heaven, whichever of the heavens one might imagine or, in the imagination, visit, in dreams, storm?

  There is a Kata called Storming the
Fortress. How you place your feet determines where you punch. How you spin determines whether the enemy can be reached.

  Sensei, I have studied the Way, and the Ways, and just ways for all my life. With you I have been sixteen years. Often, I was your worst student. The least strong. I know you thought this. I knew you were right. I have not been strong.

  You have had too many adventures, Heart.

  Sensei, what is the geometry of Heaven? What are the measures of our dreams?

  Dreams are a tide. Depends how you ride.

  The great Air New Zealand plane tossed itself up. Above the white cloud was a universe of blue. He was doubled over with pain as he flew. He imagined asking Sensei why the dreams of New York, of women, of anything at all, had opened onto false trails. How do you know which dreams are reliable?

  Who cares if a dream is reliable?

  Well then, in the blue skies he saw a Red Emperor, thanking him for arranging the headstone of his wife, asking him to care for his half-brothers and, in his binary ways, just being his father. He saw a White Empress in a white chariot, the past being transmuted at her feet. Gems flew past him. There was a ruby in the sky and he handed it back to the Emperor. Below them all, a long white cloud became, after all, a cloud. He stepped out of the plane, his hair glossy, his robes matching Heaven, and played with his parents. The passengers saw them playing, ah gods, you cannot stop them playing. You cannot stop the dream. You cannot stop the dreamer.