by Alex Miller
While he fetched hot water for the scholar’s tea Yu Hung-meng asked himself the question once again: could Lien, their Child of Light, whose birth had elevated himself and his master to a place in heaven – from which they had since fallen back to earth – could their child return from Shanghai untainted by the powers of evil? And if she returned would they not all be worse off than they were now, enduring her absence? At least in her absence they possessed their memories and their dreams. With considerable realism and courage he asked himself, could she humiliate Feng in this way and yet elude his vengeance? He groaned and spat and distracted himself from these forebodings by considering in detail the cigarette he was planning to smoke.
Though forbidden by Huang, he had capitulated to Lien’s persistence and given her her first suck on the charmed weed ten years ago, when she was nine. The recollection of the event cheered him. With the action of a dancer blowing a lingering kiss to her departing lover, she had stood in the prow of the boat touching the cigarette to her pink lips, drawing the smoke into her lungs and holding it there. She had closed her eyes and swayed and smiled. A smoker and dancer both, of great natural ability. The recollection of the spectacle still possessed the power to entrance him. Oh my dear friend Yu, she had exclaimed, her strangely speckled eyes alight with the excitement of projected conspiracy, promise me you will persist in this deception of my beloved Father! What a way to put it! He recalled his panic. But she had won him round with flattery. And from that day until her departure for Shanghai with the banker C.H. Feng, he had shared with her his precious supply of tobacco. She was addicted to the pleasure of the weed from her first taste, and he to the enticements of her youthful rapture. This secret pledge with her renewed his confidence in life at a time when he had ceased to derive pleasure from recollecting the exploits of his youth. Perhaps she would bring him a present of a carton of American Camels. The city of the Lord of Death might yet possess virtue. And surely the girl who had done what other girls had only dreamed of doing, the girl who had laughed at dangers which had caused men of nerve to pause and become cautious, surely she would have proved herself a match for the devils of Shanghai, the equal, even, of the Third Feng himself? For was there not within her, Yu Hung-meng reflected, a demon which was the peer of any man’s? Who would not sleep lightly if Lien were numbered among his enemies? He approached Huang’s table and kowtowed. He was feeling much better.
Huang looked out upon his garden, the failing light concealing the signs of his neglea. The scene before him was leached of colour now, the burnished timber pillars were grey, the column of porphyry was grey. Only the branches of the winter-flowering plum were black against the metallic sky. The shriek of a night heron calling to her mate from an island on the lake startled him. The bird’s cry seemed to him an omen, a voice calling a warning to him from the darkness of the other-world. And was a shadow not moving stealthily through his garden? He strove to see more clearly what lay before him. The answering cry of the male heron came from far above him, high in the moonless sky. With what ornate subterfuge had Lien beguiled Feng, he asked himself wonderingly, that the banker had given his permission for her to return home? Huang had great difficulty these days recalling the manner of his existence before Lien’s birth. She had entered his life like a comet entering the known firmament, a heavenly body of unknown origin and mysterious purpose portending great events and casting her unearthly light upon the familiar objects around him and making them new and unfamiliar. A disorienting force. She had woken him from a deep slumber into which he had been unaware that he had fallen. Nothing had ever been more unexpected nor more illuminating to him. She had rendered him vulnerable to time. An ancient resistance within him had given way before her presence, and she had led him forward into a garden of infinite delight.
He stared into the night. Now she was to return to him from the cursed city of Feng, the solitary phoenix. Huang had never been there. He could only imagine the horrors of a place such as he believed Shanghai to be. On the other side of Hangzhou, steaming across the iron spans of the Quiantangjiang Bridge, an evening freight train sounded two long blasts on its whistle. He turned away and told Yu to close the shutters. He busied himself searching in the cupboard below the bookshelves. There were boxes here of many shapes and of different materials, some of bamboo and others of lacquer or fashioned from rare and unusual species of tree. Yet others were intricately carved or painted. There was one cast in iron. Into the black face of this box there had been set the likeness of a landscape, a tracery of gold thread, wherein minute travellers made their precarious way through a deep gorge among wild mountains. Such a fragment as the painter Sung Hui-tsung himself might have reflected upon in his old age. The boxes contained Huang’s collection of teas. He opened first one then another, sampling a pinch of leaf and rubbing it between his fingers before holding it to his nostrils. It was a particular memory he searched for among the fragrances, but he did not find it. Before Lien’s departure, each of the boxes had carried its silk tie, on which there had been inscribed a description of its contents; the variety of bush, its location, the temperature of the day and the time of year at which the leaf had been picked. After she had left, one by one the ties had fallen off and he had eventually stopped bothering to replace them. They now lay about untidily among the spilt tea leaves on the shelf. It had not taken long for his own slackness to affect the rest of the household. He pretended not to notice the servants standing around smoking, or sitting together in one of the courtyards playing cards, or gossiping with servants from a neighbour’s house in the sun by the second gateway. Of late they no longer even got up and shammed industriousness whenever he passed by. He had overheard Yu reprimanding them, and had seen that this had little effect. He poured hot water into the pot and watched the steam rise before dropping in a few leaves. He sat in his chair and sucked the brew through his whiskers. It was subtly aromatic, a highlight of citron enduring on his palate. He considered it pleasurably, his eyes very nearly closed, and decided it was almost certainly a local bush. From a random choice, surely this was to be taken as a good omen.
He had married but once and knew what it was, therefore, to be judged an eccentric by his peers. He had first taken a wife when he was fifty years old. He scarcely remembered her. He had married her to satisfy his relatives in the south, who had insisted he repay his debt to the family for his education by bringing a son into the world. His wife had not survived the birth. He had taken no other wife. The debt had remained unpaid. Only since Lien’s absence, and in the face of his own advancing demoralisation, had this matter begun to make him uneasy. For by what means might such an outstanding debt be accounted for in the final balance of his life?
Until Lien’s birth he had thought of the coming child as no concern of his own. When he heard her, alone and crying pitifully through the nights after the funeral of her mother, however, he had found he could not ignore her. He believed he detected an appeal in her cry which, he was certain, was directed to no one but himself. He responded, and soon she began to distract him from his work; from his pursuit of a kind of static perfection, a mirror of the work of Hsia Kuei, a Sung master of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. He made no resistance to a desire to give advice to the nurse on how to care for the baby. The woman resented this unheard-of interference, so he sent her away, recruited a new wet nurse and took over the rest of the duties of caring for the baby himself. It wasn’t long before he couldn’t bear to have her out of his sight for more than an hour or so at a time. And even then he thought about her, wondering how she was getting on without him and resenting helplessly the possibility that she might be finding the wet nurse’s company more congenial than his. Once she was weaned he kept her by him all the time, day and night, for he feared that a terrible accident waited to befall her if he should allow her out of his reach. Although he did not speak of this even to Yu Hung-meng, to whom he spoke of nearly everything else, Huang was convinced the little girl did not rightfully belo
ng to him, and had been placed in his care through a mistake in the working out of destinies. He lived daily with the fear that the mistake would be discovered by the powers who order these things and that the child would be taken from him. And, of course, all this time, locked away in a dark place at the very back of his mind where even he did not care to venture very often, was the knowledge that he had failed to pay his debt to his family, the knowledge that he had failed in his obligation to the ancestors. His life with Lien became more and more secretive as time went on.
For a week she screamed and there was nothing he could do to comfort her. It was a warm spring night and he was carrying her against his body under his gown, walking in his garden, when she at last stopped screaming. He stood still, exhausted and relieved, and he looked down at her upturned face. When she saw him she smiled. Gleaming in the moonlight, like two little polished grains of rice which had been set into her glistening gums by a craftsman of great skill, were her first teeth. Deeply moved, he gazed at her in wonder. As if she understood everything that was in his heart, her serious eyes returned his gaze. It was with a feeling that now he must break the most powerful taboo by which his life had been ruled, that he placed his mouth close to her ear and whispered, My search is over. I shall look no further. He kissed her hair. His whiskers tickled her face and made her sneeze. He groaned with happiness.
As the years went by Huang became confirmed in his belief that Lien was no ordinary child. He devoted all his time to her education, eventually losing touch completely with his former students and seeing his friends and fellow scholars so seldom that they ceased to refer to him in the present tense. Indeed, unless they were reminiscing about the old days, when he had been one of their number, the eminent Hangzhou scholars never mentioned the name of Huang Yu-hua at all any longer. He knew this and there were times when it made him sad to think of it. But he could not change the way things had been determined. He had abandoned their way and the purpose of his life had become a secret project, the nature of which was known only to himself and to Yu Hung-meng. Whenever he felt uneasy, Huang sniffed the scalp of his child. And quite often he sniffed it when he was not uneasy. The fragrance was of another world and kindled in his imagination images of sunlit gardens and bright musical harmonies that sang to him of an infinite, untroubled wellbeing. This became the subject of the poems he now regularly wrote and illustrated, and which he showed only to her and to Yu.
Together he and Yu Hung-meng were gazing at the sleeping child one night, as they often did, when Yu observed in a whisper, We are two old roosters who have found a golden chick. The next day Huang painted a picture of two huge dark roosters and a tiny golden chick. He wrote beside the image, The sight of you brings spring sunshine.
Impatient to see what she would do, he introduced her to his art before she could walk. Soon he was watching her use the four treasures of the scholar – the paper, the ink, the ink-stone and the brush – and marvelling at the speed of her progress. It was not many years before the power of her brushstrokes seemed to arise from within her without conscious effort, as they had only ever done for him on one or two blissful occasions during a disciplined lifetime of striving to master the ancient forms. By the time Lien was twelve he might have passed her work off as the very strongest of his own. It was a kind of heavenly anguish for him to watch her. Amused by life now, he often asked himself, Why did I strive and suffer so foolishly for all those years, when it is really so easy for those who possess the gift? Working with her every day as her teacher, those early years seemed as though they were going to last for ever. But this was an illusion. When she was thirteen something happened which changed their lives. The crisis was undoubtedly preceded by small signs, but it was only in retrospect that he identified these.
He had begun to relax. He no longer worried every day about the powers who order destinies. Her work had begun to rival the best he had ever seen, past or present. It possessed power and grace and spirit and such a paradoxical union of wildness and control that it seemed Nature herself must be working directly through the girl’s hands and eyes. It was a winter day and the dark red plum blossom was visible through the open casements when the demon emerged at last. Lien was working at the table in his study as usual. The sun was shining through the open shutters and the air was frosty. The atmosphere in the study reeked with the wholesome smell of freshly ground ink, which she had rendered to the consistency of horse blood. She had finished numerous paintings, and these lay scattered about the floor where she had carelessly thrown them. Huang was watching her.
All at once she stopped painting and held the loaded brush poised above the painting. Huang rose to his feet slowly. Why was she hesitating? He strained forward, trying to fathom her intention. He saw Yu watching them. What was it? What struggle was going on within her? The work which lay before her was bold and large and was possessed of a confident ugliness, its gestures deep and struck from side to side by energies of contradiction. How can she add more, Huang asked himself, to such muscular perfection as this? Without uttering a sound, Lien scored the loaded brush through the length of the painting. Huang snatched the ruined work from the table and looked at her with horror …
The cup had grown cold in his hands. Slowly he placed it on the table. His throat was parched. He refilled the cup with the luke warm remains of the brew in which the lingering note of citron had so pleased him, and he drank. The painting had been a masterpiece. Of this he had no doubt. With the tears running freely down his cheeks he asked her, Why my daughter? Why have you destroyed your finest work?
She laughed at his question and the bronze flecks within her eyes flickered. She ran to the open casement and jumped through onto the verandah and turned and confronted him. Because the donkey needs a tail! she screamed, and again and again she screamed it at him, dodging from one window to the next along the length of the verandah, screaming her nonsensical message at him.
In his sorrow and bewilderment he ordered Yu to burn all her paintings. When she heard this she stood still and ceased screaming, but looked on. While Yu collected her work from the floor and from the earthenware pots in which the scrolls were stored, she stood by looking into the room, her oval features grave and sad, framed by the green and red casements as if she were a formal portrait of herself. Behind her in the garden the deep red of the plum blossom stood out on the black tracery of leafless branches.
The demon’s laughter remained in Huang’s head for days, for weeks. It remained there until he could no longer distinguish it from the mocking voice of his own self doubt. As if they had been a father and son, he and Lien had always taken their meals together. Now they ate in separate apartments. Huang was alone once again. Each day he enquired of Yu how she was. But Yu had little to report, except that she did not wish to see her father. Huang did not know what to do. There was no one to whom he might appeal for an opinion, for theirs had been an eccentric relationship and had been disapproved of by everyone who had come to hear of it. During this time, with nothing else to occupy his mind, for he was unable to find solace in the poets, Huang began to see that he had committed a great folly in raising his daughter as if she had been a boy, not even requiring her feet to be bound and directing her in every way as if she were destined to bring honour to his own family, instead of to the family of the man whom she would eventually marry.
He needed so badly to talk to someone that he at last began to think of going to see his friend Fan Ping-chen, a great scholar and the leader of their old group. When the spring came and the estrangement from Lien had still shown no signs of healing, Huang got up his courage and ordered a huakan and he went to see the old scholar. Fan Ping-chen lived in a fine house on Geling Hill. The sun was shining as Huang rode along and he opened the curtains and looked about him at the people hurrying along the busy streets. He was reassured to see that nothing had changed and he quickly forgot his fear of seeing his old friend again after so many years, and even began to look forward to the meeting. Why should he
not be readmitted to the enjoyable intimacies of old associations? When he arrived, however, Fan Ping-chen greeted him with such an excessive degree of formality and lavished upon him so much honour that Huang was deeply humiliated and was forced to realise his mistake at once. They parted without saying anything of interest to each other.
After this terrible rejection, which he knew must be the cause of endless gossip among the people of Hangzhou, Huang became so despondent that all he could think of was his own death. He visited the local temples, which he had not done since before her birth, and observing the great serenity of the monks he imagined, for a week or two, that he might find peace of mind among the devout Buddhists. But this also proved to be a false hope, for he soon discovered that, for those who dwelt there, beneath the appearance of tranquility within the temple there existed a double of the discordant world that had already brought him so much suffering. After the temple life failed him, Huang stayed home and lay on his bed all day without moving. He refused to eat the food brought to him by Yu.