by Alex Miller
Feng’s aversion to Chinese traditions did have its limits, however. With his blessing, two of his daughters had married German army officers and one an Iowan missionary, and as a consequence of this he enjoyed the reputation of being liberal in practice as well as in theory. For the English there could scarcely have been a more revealing test of the authenticity of Feng’s liberalism than this. None of their daughters married anyone but Englishmen; or, if they did, they were not blessed by their parents for doing so. The limit of Feng’s European sympathies, however, was reached when he thought about the son who was to follow him. He could not think of the boy as being other than Chinese, as other than of direct Chinese descent. His three wives had all been from old Chinese families. They had all been Han. This had surprised no one. No one had ever thought of taking C.H. Feng to task for being inconsistent when it came to choosing a mother for his heir. Everyone had understood perfectly.
As he came through the door she resisted an impulse to put out her cigarette. Instead of putting it out she drew on the smouldering tobacco and held the smoke deep in her lungs, half closing her eyes and counting to three before releasing it. He was standing by the table in front of her. She crushed the butt in the ashtray and only then looked up at him. It was exactly five minutes past the hour. He apologised for his lateness and she responded by apologising in turn for the interruption to his arrangements.
May I sit down?
She inclined her head, indicating the chair opposite her. Feng did not hurry but moved cautiously, deliberately, approaching the unknown. He lifted the chair and examined its seat before placing it back some distance from the table. Then he sat down. Neither spoke. Beyond the silence was the distant screaming of the children in the park. When it seemed at last that she would not speak before he did, he asked, When is it to be? He was a short, heavy man, shorter than she. His black, oiled hair was close shorn above his ears. The white collar of his shirt pressed into the thick muscles of his neck and his brown silk tie was knotted tightly – a polished almond at his throat. Lien began to speak of her childhood. He blinked and listened, but did not react to this development, though he had not expected it.
Despite being scrupulously clothed in the attire of a modern Western businessman it would have been easy to think of Feng as a pirate, ashore from roving the South China Sea. There was a wildness and a disorder about his features. His upper jaw bulged, revealing a set of yellow misshapen teeth. His thick purplish lips remained parted all the time, making him look startled. Even composed, his features gave the impression that he was aroused. Every few moments he forced his mouth closed against the pressure of his teeth and swallowed with a gulping sound, his lumpy adam’s apple plunging up and down beneath its sheath of skin, as if it were a live thing he had swallowed. His eyes bulged and from their outer corners loose folds of skin flowed down his cheeks and under his jaw, following the line of a soldier’s hat strap, indicating the erosion of tears. His nose was wide and flat and African. In the centre of his forehead was a deep cleft, like an old battle scar, which added an impression of permanent puzzlement to his animated expression. Feng’s feelings seemed to sit openly upon his features for everyone to see. He looked like an honest, violent, vulnerable pirate, bemused by life’s complexities. One might know where one stood with such a man. It might be some comfort to be certain that as he cut one’s throat he did so because it was the son of thing pirates do, and not from personal malice. Strong though it was, this impression of openness was false. Feng was, in truth, complex. His motives were hidden. He shared his thoughts with no one.
She did not look at him while she talked. She looked past him, sometimes through him, and often out the window to where the nannies were striding about under the plane trees and making circuits of the rose beds. She did not look directly at him until she came to make of him her particular demand, the immediate cause of this meeting. She ceased speaking and turned her attention from the window and looked confidently into his astonished bulging eyes. You must permit me to visit my father, she said uncompromisingly. Then added more persuasively, My health will suffer if I cannot hope to see him again.
Feng blinked, and finally it was he who disengaged his gaze once again from hers. Her boldness astounded him. He had forbidden her to contact her father. The prohibition, imposed before their marriage in the Gothic Holy Trinity Cathedral in Jinjiang Road in front of nearly a thousand guests, had passed as no more than the ordinary exercise of the arbitrary and tyrannical power invested in a husband by a tradition that seemed to Feng to be as much honoured by the members of the international community as it was by the Chinese. Lien had seemed to agree to the condition in return for his assurance of a substantial subsidy to her father so that he might continue to live in comfort in his own vast house in Hangzhou. Feng had imagined till this very minute that Lien had accepted the arrangement as part of their uneven bargain; even as she had wordlessly received on their wedding night his demand that she bear him a son within twelve months or face the disgrace of a divorce. Feng did not know what to think. So he smiled broadly and nodded and made a few sympathetic sounds.
Lien’s attention remained fixed steadily upon him all the while.
His hand went to his face. He was seeing his dead sons. The stone faces of his boys. Both of them at once. Side by side on a flat white sheet. Identical. The same death repeated. The same death twice. Failing to be born at the last minute. He groaned and brushed his palms together. If you see your father will it bring me a living son? He asked. He did not say us.
It seemed to Feng that people cannot be read by their actions. That people do not make conveniently revealing gestures expressive of their hidden intentions, showing to an attentive world their private motives, as characters are made to do for literary purposes in the Chin P’ing Mei or in A Dream of Red Mansions. People, real people and not their fictional ghosts, he had observed, pass along in life without showing their innermost selves at all. They share nothing by signs and gestures, but remain concealed. So he was not trying to read Lien. He would have seen no point in that. To attempt to see into the thoughts of another person must be to risk confusion in one’s own. Feng was trying to read himself. What if a few visits to the old wen-jen artist in his rotting house in the provincial capital were not enough for her? If he conceded this much, he enquired of himself, could he afford to concede more without compromising his position? This was what he looked inside himself to find the answer to. He breathed heavily and struggled with the hard knot of this question. And all the time he was conscious of Lien sitting composedly before him, the vessel within which his precious seed must be ignited, harbouring her priceless capacity to bear him male offspring. He struggled with himself and pushed hard with his foot against the rug until the front legs of his chair lifted and the seventeenth century English oak joints began to give out sharp snapping sounds. He dug deep into the quick of a nail with his teeth and bit.
Lien waited. She had decided she could gain nothing by answering his question and had decided therefore not to answer it. She was watching a British warship nosing its way up the river against the current, its grey guns thin and dangerous, pointing towards the Settlement, pointing, indeed, directly at her, black smoke churning from the forward funnel and adding its darkness to the heavy overcast that lay upon the city. The nannies had begun to leave the park. It was time for the children to have warm milk and biscuits and an afternoon sleep. Shanghai was not the place she had imagined it to be. She had inherited her father’s scepticism concerning the motives of all foreigners.
Feng winced with the sharp pain and examined his finger. A pearl of dark blood swelled against the oily sheen of his nail. He sucked it. Have you had a letter from him recently? He let the chair down with a thump and swayed towards her.
She turned from the window and picked up the packet of cigarettes. She tapped one from the packet and considered it, rolling it back and forth between her fingers and thumb, before lighting it.
Is he in good health?
Feng persisted, probing anxiously for some encouragement to his line of enquiry. How he loathed admitting that such relics as her father still survived in China. Literary painters plotting to reincarnate the bedraggled corpse of Empire. The absurdity was humiliating. It disgusted him to think of them. He bore towards them violent impulses. To be the nemesis of the old families was a dream Feng frequently entertained. It soothed him to think of a China disinfected of five thousand years of their superstitions.
I believe he is not in good health, Lien replied at length, revealing nothing, except perhaps her satisfaction at his anxiety. She would not admit to a forbidden exchange of letters with her father. But one might always hear certain things concerning a loved one’s state of health.
With a studied deliberateness that was not to be overlooked by her, Feng said, When you see your father, please tell him of my concern.
She smiled and thanked him.
His child in her womb floated before him in his mind; a fragile bubble tossed back and forth upon dangerous airs.
THE WINTER VISITOR
Beside me Lang was silent, making himself small, the demon in him stilled. The cool change he’d predicted had arrived two hours ago, a chill blast from the Southern Ocean. If you’d gone to sleep after lunch, when you woke you wouldn’t have known you were in the same country. We’d been transported to a temperate hemisphere and might have been driving now along a crowded boulevard on a showery spring evening in Paris. The existence a little to our north of Nolan’s fiery desert had been forgotten by us once again, and we’d returned to pretending we lived in a Europe of the South Pacific. The hot wind and the burning grass had alarmed us, forcing the truth on us, but only for a moment.
In High Street, Persian carpets hung out on the footpath, and displayed in the lighted shop windows were Italian shoes and French perfumes and German motor cars. In every other shop there were antiques from a Europe whose style we wished to emulate, a Europe that had ceased to exist long ago. Antiques and paintings. And numerous chinoiseries. An abundance of them. It was all there, glowing; everything we could possibly need and much we might never need. Lang pushed the door and I followed him inside. It was a glass door swung upon substantial bronze hinges with, just below eye level, the single word, cursive and gilded, LINDNER. From outside it was not possible to see inside, as there were heavy curtains across the door and the window. You either knew what LINDNER implied or you didn’t know.
A buzzer sounded once for each of us and at the far end of a long gallery three people looked our way. Two men were standing together, and a woman was seated behind a desk. The walls and ceiling were white and the floor was of lacquered Baltic pine. The impression was of an intense illumination. Lang set out across the glassy boards and I followed. My mother had frequently set off with adventure in her heart and precious objects on her mind, whistling down the hill above Hastings as if she were an avenging Celt, her feet off the whirling pedals and her hands nowhere near the brakes, concentrating upon the wind in her face and the smell of the salt sea. Other women who were also alone made her welcome, inviting her in to their houses for tea. Their precious things not wasted on her. And after an appreciation of their Coalport or, if they were rich, their Nantgarw, she was away again. Tucking her coat beneath her bum upon the leather saddle and waving with her gloved hand as she leaned forward, pressing on the pedal with the sole of her sensible court shoe, some little piece, a souvenir, about her person.
Lang was a couple of paces ahead of me when the younger of the men started up the gallery towards us. I had a moment to observe him. He appeared to be no older than thirty and was of average height. He moved, however, with a slight stoop, as if he wished to affect the appearance of being older than his years or to appear distinguished by a visible peculiarity. He was wearing a slate grey blouson shirt with the cuffs turned back and a loose green and gold bowtie. Heavy spectacles swung around his neck from a chain. His most arresting feature was a lush and droopy moustache. It was hennaed. When he’d approached to within a few metres of Lang he held out his arms and smiled, Lang, my dear fellow! There was a weariness in this salutation, apology and self-deprecation, a wish to indicate a particular gratitude, a debt even. He might have called his doctor out on a dirty night to attend more to hypochondria and uncertainty than to a genuine illness. As they met he slid one arm around Lang’s shoulders and turned and proceeded away from me. It was with a little shock of mortification that I realised Lang was not going to include me. He was going to behave as though I were not with him. I felt it was just possible he’d forgotten I was with him.
Abandoned by my guide at the edge of the Desert Pierreux, I directed my attention to one of the ink drawings that lined the walls on either side of the gallery. As I approached I wondered what I was looking at. Initially I took it to be a calligraphic representation of the sacred rock Uluru, but as I drew nearer I realised it was a female nude and that what I’d imagined from a distance to be the weatherings of aeons were the dark canyons between the hilly buttocks and breasts of the anonymous model, who was without head or hands or feet. The artist was Horace Brodzky. I’d been studying the drawing for a minute when I realised I could see Lang among the group around the desk reflected in the picture glass. He was in close consultation with the man who had led him away – Lindner, I assumed. The other man, the taller and older one, who was dressed in a dark business suit, stood apart as I did and observed them. He was attentive, a person striving to follow a conversation being conducted in a language of which he possessed only a slight knowledge. I observed them, mirrored in a deeper place than Brodzky’s black line, until they moved out of the frame and I was forced to turn round and watch them openly if I were to follow what they were doing.
The older man had gone to a bookcase which stood against the back wall and taken the paper wrapping from an unframed canvas. He placed the canvas picture-side out on the floor leaning against the books and stepped away from it. Neither he nor Lindner nor the woman looked at the painting. All three watched Lang, who went over to the picture and stood in front of it. His pale blue slacks were purplish in the bright gallery lighting. They were shiny and thin, the material on the point of disintegrating. They did nothing to hide the shape of his narrow buttocks and skinny legs. There was a configuration of smudgy chalk lines on his left leg, as though a student had been doing graffiti on him.
After looking at the picture for a minute or so he went up close to where it stood on the floor, to within a few centimetres of it, and squatted in front of it. It was a real squat. His feet flat and the seat of his pants brushing the floorboards, his knees jacked up under his armpits and his arms looped over them. Smoke from his cigarette drifted slowly upwards through his spiky hair. He looked as though he were tending a small cooking fire. I thought of the Koories out there as they had once been, in the now sadly depleted interior. But that wasn’t quite right. A Chinese peasant perhaps, squatting on the bank of a flooded river, waiting patiently for the water to recede so that he might go home. The scene before me was familiar. It was like a memory. Looking at Lang, I could have been looking at myself. As I had once been. Ages ago. On the bank of a river somewhere, waiting to attempt a crossing.
Lang snatched the canvas from the floor and stood up. Holding it at arm’s length he jabbed his stained forefinger at it. Cigarette ash cascaded over its inclined face, catching in the impasto surface and spilling in divided streams like larva. He handed the picture so carelessly to Lindner’s companion that it nearly slipped to the floor between them. It’s him. That’s Dobell. Who else do you think could have done it? He made no effort to disguise his contempt. And when the man looked doubtful he snatched it back and jabbed it repeatedly, Here! There! Look! I expected flakes of pigment to fly off. You don’t need a signature, you’ve got the picture. He walked away from the tall man, dismissing the issue. His gaze roved around the empty spaces of the gallery, settling on me momentarily – a figure occupying his middle distance – then moved on without registering
recognition.
Before we left Lindner’s that night he bought a painting. It was a full-length portrait of a naked girl of twelve or thirteen years of age. She was of part-Asian descent. It was a cold, humorless picture in the tonalist manner. He was drunk by the time Tom Lindner fetched the picture out from storage and showed it to him. We were all a little drunk by then, but Lang I judged to be seriously drunk. He didn’t pay for the painting but took it on approval at Tom Lindner’s insistence. From the street I retained a last impression of the three of them standing in the brightly lighted window of the gallery with the curtains drawn aside, the woman in the middle, each of them holding a glass of champagne, watching us struggle to get the portrait of the girl into the back seat of my car. As we drove off they waved. They looked like the cast of a play taking a curtain call. Incredibly pleased with themselves.