by Alex Miller
She felt so stifled she could hardly breathe. No matter how great the affection between a man and a woman, she realised there would always be some things that the nature of men would prevent them from understanding. For the first time in her life she wondered what she might have remained ignorant of for not having known her mother. In Shanghai she had observed, and she had seen it here too, that women, even women who were not friends but were rivals, were capable of exchanging a special understanding with each other when there were no men present. An understanding which transcended their rivalries and their social roles and their individual accountability to certain men whom they honoured. An understanding in which something deeper than all that, something universal and unavoidable, was acknowledged. She had never seen this exchanged between women in the presence of men. There was a secret in it, it seemed, the efficacy of which would be jeopardised if men should ever come to hear of it. Was there, she wondered, something in her own nature which disqualified her from receiving this charmed perception from another woman? Had her upbringing as a boy subtly damaged her womanhood?
These thoughts depressed her and made her hungrier than ever for the consolation of a cigarette and a cup of coffee.
It was her last night. She had asked the gatekeeper’s daughter-in-law earlier, Is it true you are all waiting for me to return to Shanghai so that you can laugh again? The woman had been too confused by this directness to reply. Lien looked across at her father, who was sampling one of the fine teas. They were seated side by side with a table between them, facing the newly reconstructed formal garden and watching the fading light of evening play upon its surfaces. She hadn’t told him yet. The reason she hadn’t told him was she lacked an overall plan. And without the foresight such a plan would have provided her with, she feared to be questioned by him. Her plan, her strategy, was evolving. It was unfolding as she entered it. She was required to proceed cautiously.
Does not Fan Ping-chen also have a very fine garden? She was dismayed, and at the same time fiercely gratified, by the mischievousness of this question. She had been looking for the right moment to tell him about the child since the day of her return. Now she had run out of time and was to be forced to disclose her news to him whether the moment was propitious or not. The old women had not been able to agree. One had said it would be a boy and the other that it was certain to be a girl. They had blamed her for their lack of agreement. She knew this. It was the irregularity of her position which had confused the interpretation of the signs for them.
At the sound of Fan Ping-chen’s name Huang drew himself up and smoothed his whiskers and sighed and reached for his cup, remembering his humiliation.
She leaned across the table and before he could pick up the cup she placed her hand over his. He looked at her. Dusk was gathering fast now and it was difficult for her to read the expression in his eyes. I am with child, she said. His hand went very still beneath hers. She heard Yu’s knees creak behind the blue screen. It will be in the winter, she said.
Huang whispered, It is what Feng desires.
He called to Yu to fetch the lamp and he removed his hand from underneath hers and got to his feet and poured hot water into the teapot. He grunted and sighed and shook his head. Yu placed the lamp on the table. He looked quickly at Lien and she saw he was pleased she had told her father. Huang busied himself adjusting the wick. Feng is different from other men, he said, so quietly she almost missed hearing it. Such men as he are like floods and storms. It is no use people such as we are resisting them. He replaced the globe and looked at her, his features lit by the yellow flame, a mask set against the darkness of the garden behind him. His whiskers were trembling. They possess a mandate from the Lord of Death to accomplish their will without hindrance from mortals. They are admired and feared and befriended by governors and generals and by the viceroys of foreign powers for this reason. Men such as Feng cannot be defeated, daughter. Once we have come to their notice we are theirs and must serve their will until they no longer need us. He leaned his weight against the heavy table. He looked as though he might weep. Fate is with them, Lien, and only when fate abandons them is it safe for us to abandon them also.
Although he had used her name, she realised he had been talking for his own sake. And she saw that the famous wisdom of old men is nothing but fear, a loss of nerve in the face of enfeeblement. She thanked him gravely for his words and rose and embraced him lightly. She apologised for being tired and excused herself on the grounds that she must prepare for her journey tomorrow. His skin was chill and moist. As she left the study Yu rose from behind the blue screen and grinned at her. He held up a packet of Camels and whispered fiercely, Shanghai! as if this were to be their battle cry henceforth, the dusty plains upon which together they would meet their enemies and destroy them. Shanghai! he repeated. She had gained the gallery when she heard her father call after her, Your courage means nothing to him! Only a son will appease him.
SIGNS
It was an overcast autumn day in Shanghai on 11 October, 1927, nine weeks to the day from the expected birth of Lien’s child. She remained in bed past her accustomed hour and kept her eyes closed, making no attempt to eat the light breakfast of cereals, buttered toast (with the crusts removed) and fruit juice, which her maid placed on the table beside her. And when the maid returned, Lien told her to call Doctor Spiess.
Doctor August Irenicus Wilhelm Spiess was the leading, indeed the only, specialist obstetrician among the considerable German population of the International Settlement. In an extended Chinese way he had become related to Feng some time ago through the marriage of Feng’s eldest daughter from his first wife, Hsing, to a German army officer who was Spiess’s second cousin and who was also from Hamburg. Medicine, and indeed his particular specialisation, had been Spiess’s father’s choice of a profession for him. August himself would have preferred to have been a playwright. He was fifty. He had offered a variety of reasons to the same people over a period of time as to why he had chosen to come to Shanghai and as to why, having chosen to come, he chose to stay. Because of this increase of reasons over time, reasons which came to sound more and more like excuses, Spiess’s acquaintances assumed the true reason for his prolonged residence in Shanghai must have been too disagreeable to be openly acknowledged by him; an unfortunate youthful excess involving boys or girls or gambling debts or some such thing, for which he had been banished by his father for ever. He was a very good doctor, however, and so they were glad he chose to stay among them and they did everything they could to make him content and not to embarrass him with awkward questions about his past.
He was not attached to one of the great merchant houses, and August Spiess himself did not know why he had originally come to Shanghai, nor why he chose to stay, and on each subsequent occasion that he was asked to account for his exile he made up a new lie, having usually forgotten by then the lie he’d previously given as a reason. From the distance of Shanghai and with the passage of time it was not difficult to imagine that all sorts of things might have taken place in Hamburg. He often spoke of his old home without inhibition and even talked of returning there from time to time. The city of my fathers, he called it. His friends noticed, however, that whenever a boat prepared to steam down the Whangpu for that distant German port straddling the Elbe – a frequent occurrence – Doctor Spiess made no effort to reserve a berth for himself on it. There are always plenty of boats going to Hamburg, he would reply cheerfully, if a newcomer to the European enclave pressed him on this point. Indeed Hamburg and Shanghai have in common a regular exchange of goods and merchant tonnage. I can go whenever the fancy takes me. He left an impression that he might go at any time and at barely a moment’s notice. This impression persisted for more than twenty years, until it could be said that August Spiess succeeded in acquiring an air of permanent impermanence. One or two intellectuals of his acquaintance accounted it very Germanic and philosophical of him to have achieved this ontological instability. He did not care for philosophy h
imself.
With a delicate flourish he clasped Lien’s wrist lightly between the ball of his thumb and his index finger and consulted the dial of his watch. And he stood thus beside her bed, watch in hand, counting the pulses of her heartbeat for approximately fifteen seconds. He was a small man. His blond moustaches drooped expressively and their ends curled upward. His features had about them something that seemed to ask for approval, approval for his cerise silk cravat, possibly, and for the splendid gold pin with a pair of African diamonds that held it neatly in place as if it had been a hunting stock. One golden eyebrow was cocked permanently a fraction higher than the other. Behind his careful, professional manner, sitting ready in the corners of his clear amber eyes, there was a suggestion of a smile. The smile promised to be an open and generous one. It appeared eager to be invited out to share its perception with his patient. The perception the smile seemed to promise was, What a grand amusement it is to have lived! Just that. In the past perfect. To celebrate the opposite, it might be said, of the Grand Guignol It was this that he had not yet given up hope of one day writing plays about. The impediment was his father, whom he respected and did not wish to disappoint. His father, Herr Doktor August Ulrich Carossa Spiess, who at eighty-three still resided in Hamburg and continued to practise obstetrics there and who was very much opposed to any member of his family having anything to do with something as suggestive as the theatre. And August himself saw no point in going to the considerable labour of actually writing his plays unless they could be produced in Hamburg. For he knew that only audiences who understand Hamburg society would understand his plays. Despite this it would have been wrong to conclude that August was either unhappy living in Shanghai or was waiting for his father to die so that he could go home and write plays. He was perfectly happy where he was. News of the death of his father would have upset him greatly. August’s plays – the Platonic ideas of his plays his intellectual acquaintances might have said – existed quite comfortably for him for the time being in an imaginary life which ran along on the other side of the world parallel to his real life of Far Eastern doctoring. He did not make notes about them on bits of paper. They were not his hobby – geraniums were his hobby. But his plays were a great comfort to him whenever the genuine Grand Guignol of greater Shanghai made him feel dispirited about the nature and purpose of humankind.
As if it had been a fine white dish of fragile Ch’ing Pai porcelain from the Sung Dynasty, of which the doctor was a respected collector, he replaced Lien’s wrist on the blue coverlet and replaced his watch in the pocket of his waistcoat. Then he stood, not saying anything, gazing out of her bedroom window towards the ochreous tides of the mighty Whangpu River.
Lien observed him. After a considerable time she said, Well, Doctor Spiess, I see that my pulse presents you with a great mystery.
His attention did not leave the river, but at the sound of her voice his hand absently patted his waistcoat pocket, checking from long habit that it had actually deposited the watch there. August was thinking. He was thinking, with a feeling of awe that mere human ingenuity could be responsible for it, of the vast tonnage and diversity of cargo that was disposed of through the port of Shanghai each day. He shook his head in a gesture of bewildered admiration for the mysterious energy of his own species. Then he looked down at Lien. At once the enthusiastic smile which had been waiting to be called forth transformed his features. Why Madame Feng, he exclaimed, you are the healthiest young woman in the whole of Shanghai. There can be no doubt of it. To himself he added, and the most beautiful. He would gladly have taken a glass of champagne with her to celebrate both her abundant good health and her refined beauty, if there had been one handy.
Lien waited until she had his attention, then she said levelly, I am unwell, Doctor Spiess. And you had better decide quickly what is the matter with me.
His smile faltered only slightly. He was accustomed to her acerbity. He did not take it personally. When, at Feng’s insistence, he had attended her after the still birth of her second child, she had told him that she detested Germans. She might as easily have said Europeans, or foreign devils. He accepted her contempt and even secretly delighted in it, seeing it as a special way she had of dealing with him and with no one else. A challenge. Indeed a compliment. He felt himself to have been singled out from among the other Europeans with whom she came in contact as being particularly worthy. Clearly she trusted him not to make a fuss about her lack of respect, as others might have done. She trusted that he would not consider himself insulted or the dignity of his race impugned; that he would not seek to elevate such incidents to the familiar test of wills between the Chinese and the European styles of honour.
As the daughter of a renowned scholar, and as a practitioner of accomplishment herself of the ancient arts – so he understood – Lien exemplified for August certain particularly alluring intensities of his lifelong fascination with China and its past. He harboured a fervent ambition to visit her father’s home in Hangzhou. He understood from his enquiries among the Chinese and from talk that went about at the clubs, that no Westerner had ever been admitted to the house of her father, Huang Yu-hua. As a collector and scholar he dreamed of the rare treasures such a sanctuary must contain. But even more than treasures, with the antiquarian’s longing for a reanimation of a romantic past, he desired to himself inhabit, if even for a brief moment, the grave atmosphere of untouched originality which he imagined must imbue the house of the literary painter with a profound and poignant intensity; an atmosphere which he thought of as being a distillation of all that was classical and Chinese. Thinking of it, August was reminded of the mustiness of a monastic library he had visited with his father while they were on a tour of Italy when he was a boy – a kind of dim stone cavern, he remembered, reeking with the visions of entombed scholars. It was delicious to consider. Thoughts of Huang’s house aroused spiritual longings in him and he sighed for the opportunity to undertake a pilgrimage to its doors. And was there not something divine, some ineffable mythical reasonance to be found in Lien’s shiningly youthful embodiment of those antiquities?
She was aware of her uncertainty of him as a tingling on the surface of her skin. If he should attempt some further physical examination she was determined not to submit to it. She watched him delving in his bag. She knew him to be the friend of her husband’s only friend, the Chief of Police, Alistair McKenzie. On coming to Shanghai a little over two years ago she had been told, to her bemusement, that Spiess and McKenzie, and the rest of their western confreres of various nationalities, existed in a state known as extraterritoriality. They might thus have been classified for her as beings not from present reality but from another, less certain, location along the perceptual continuum. She had not imagined before leaving Hangzhou that such a condition as extraterritoriality was possible, at least not for human beings. It had been patiently explained to her by one of her husband’s American visitors that technically the term merely denoted the continued jurisdiction of their country of origin over foreign nationals resident in the International Settlement. She had found the tone in which the explanation had been delivered insulting. Did this mean, then, she had wished to know, that these people had travelled to the far side of the world from their ancestral homelands and yet had managed to remain at home? Her difficulty with the concept of extraterritoriality irritated Feng. But the difficulty persisted for her nevertheless. And she persisted in voicing it. It was the metaphysical aspects of the notion rather than its legal definition, however, which most attracted her speculations and which eluded the comprehension of her husband’s visitors.
Watching August Spiess searching in his bag she perceived him as not quite real. As if he could not be understood by her as an ordinary human being might be understood by her. As if, to understand him adequately, she would need to apply to him a standard that was not entirely human. For it was apparent to her that he and his fellow foreigners had not emerged intact from their acquisition of the condition of extraterritorialness,
but had forfeited a precious aspect of their humanity in the process. She saw theirs had been a less than complete transition from the land of the living to the land of the dead. She saw they had become inhabitants of a No-land, where gods, ghosts and ancestors, as well as numerous other unregistered categories of demons and demi-humans, roamed about in a hazy state of speculative indeterminacy, neither entirely alive nor entirely dead. Partly dead, indeed, was how she had come to think of the foreigners; their pallor making this categorisation seem even more appropriate. They had suffered a kind of decease, a departure from life and its supporting structures sufficient to prevent them from returning home to their loved ones, but not sufficient to have delivered them into the tomb. Her own inclusion by them, therefore, as an honorary European, did not impress her. She viewed theirs as a state no Chinese could possibly rejoice in. And it amused her to hear them speculate at dinner parties as to why Spiess did not take the boat home; for it was as if they performed a charade, in which they had agreed among themselves that this option was still a viable possibility. She knew, of course, that it was not. At home in Hamburg or London or some other place, these extraterritorials would have had to behave once again as human beings, which manifestly they could no longer do, since they had forfeited their precious link with the moral imperatives of their ancestral homelands during the transition to extraterritorialness. In Shanghai they might not actually be gods but they could behave as though they were gods, immune from the laws and the responsibilities and the constraints of civilised custom; privileged colonists of a terra nullius in which they might deem the natural inhabitants and their customs to be not fitting for themselves, irrelevancies which imposed no duties upon them. She was fascinated. She saw extraterritoriality as signifying both an enviable liberation and as a fate more terrifying than any she had imagined. It was clear to her their race could not long endure its habitation of such an imaginary place as the International Settlement. She saw that their race was doomed to extinction and she was repelled and intrigued. Superior to their destiny, with a mixture of pity and scorn she came to think of them as the forgotten children of the Lord of Death. A shimmering, half-real existence on the imaginary edge of China.