by Alex Miller
Among them only Spiess had been forced into a form of intimacy with her through her husband’s insistence that she submit to his western doctoring. The situation had afforded her with an opportunity to experiment. One result of this experimentation was that she had concluded it was not possible to offer this man an insult. She had found him to be without a care for his own dignity. This she understood to be undoubtedly a consequence of his having been removed from the oversight of his family and the bearers of his ancestral worth. For she was entirely convinced that Spiess would not have endured her insults and her mockery without complaint if his father had been a witness to them.
Open please! He slid the chill thermometer between her lips. There is nothing the matter with you, Madame Feng, believe me. I am familiar with the signs of ill health. You exhibit none of them. On the contrary, may I observe that you possess the extraordinary appeal of all young people who are in the very best of health. The signs, Madame, are important. They are the hieroglyphs that men of my profession must decipher if we are to succeed.
She removed the thermometer. If I should lose this child, Feng will hold you responsible.
Gently he took the thermometer from her and replaced it between her lips. I doubt that very much. Your husband, I have observed, is a sane man.
She took the thermometer out again and saw Spiess smile indulgently. My husband is Chinese, Doctor Spiess, she said evenly. No matter what other impression he desires to give. He has placed me in your care in order to ensure the delivery to him of a healthy son. It would be unwise of you to insist on my good health when I tell you I am not well and that there is cause for concern. She quickly replaced the thermometer herself before he could reach it and observed his smile withdraw to its place of semi-concealment. She was pleased to see that he had begun to ponder deeply. He was once again looking out of the window.
She had heard he took his doctoring to the destitute Chinese refugees who were daily crowding into the International Settlement, seeking a refuge from the conflict in the Chinese city, and that he administered to these people without charge. She could not fathom such a persistent trade in charity. What might be his recompense? She watched him reach for the thermometer and read it. He was thoughtful as he replaced the instrument in his bag. Do the hieroglyphs reveal the nature of my complaint yet, doctor?
He was uncertain, his eyes questioning her. Perhaps I should make arrangements to have you admitted to the Catholic hospital for observation and some tests. His hand went to his moustaches and he smoothed the blond hair. It would be for no more than a day or two at the most.
She laughed. Make your diagnosis here, doctor. In the presence of my servant. I’m not asking for your opinion. Do you understand me? She gazed steadily into his flickering eyes.
He smoothed his moustaches once more. Ah, he murmured, his fingers twisting the extremities of the hair. Ahhh, he breathed again, as if the elongation of the sound might bring him closer to his goal.
She wanted to giggle. He seemed to levitate, an inch or two, waiting for confirmation to return him to the equilibrium of the level ground, light streaming through his pale hair. I see that you enjoy the view from my window, doctor. She spoke without mocking him. Inviting from him, even, an observation upon life if he should wish to venture one, an indulgence, something of an old man’s wisdom if he cared to part with it. At the sound of her voice he came to earth with a slight bump.
The world passes your window, Madame, he said with enthusiasm.
You may sit down, she invited him, as if he had passed her test. She indicated the rotund French chair which stood beside her bed. Do you know Hangzhou? she asked, when he was seated. It is my birthplace. The air there, doaor, is particularly healthy. She smiled and saw that he was listening to her with great attention. There is the gentle recreation of boating upon the calm waters of our famous lakes in the evenings, at which times one can quote poetry with one’s friends and watch the moon rise. Such pastimes in those surroundings restore well-being more efficaciously than do medicines. Are such signs as these read by men of your profession?
Oh indeed they are, Madame Feng. Most assuredly.
I am glad to hear it. The air in Shanghai oppresses me.
I believe I understand you.
I hope you do. She looked beyond him to the sky. She felt him waiting. The clouds bubbled darkly like the surface of an evil soup. And how are your famous geraniums? They do not seem to wilt in Shanghai’s air.
They laughed softly together.
Perhaps if you were to prescribe a tonic, she suggested. It may take you a little time to convince my husband of my needs. He is very preoccupied with the situation at the moment. Arrangements will need to be made.
He drew out a notepad and flourished his fountain pen above it. Do you prefer a powder or an elixir Madame Feng?
They looked into each other’s eyes. The sound of gunfire which had been audible from the outlying suburbs for some days, had drawn closer during the morning. Neither remarked on it. She had had no friends. She had not joined with parties on the lake and quoted poetry, but had talked with Yu and smoked forbidden cigarettes, concealing her sex beneath the clothes of the gatekeeper’s son. What could this man know of China? An elixir, she said, I believe would suit me. Thank you.
AN INTERLUDE IN THE GARDEN
Towards the end of the autumn we made an advance into Lang’s back garden. It was I who insisted on the move, believing it to be a necessary extension of my territory. The garden had been where Victoria had written The Winter Visitor. She had worked at a table in the summerhouse. I knew little more than this. I mowed a path through the long grass from outside the kitchen door to the centre of the lawn, where the ground cover was thin and dry and had scarcely grown at all during the autumn. There was a mound here, a convenient vantage from which to view our surroundings. The rest of the garden fell away from this eminence, at first gently and then more steeply as it approached the bank of the Yarra. I scavenged two battered cane chairs and a table from a lean-to attached to the back verandah and set them up in the middle of the mound. Reluctantly he came out to see. Standing in the sun hunched up in his lopsided manner, his head shrouded in smoke, he blinked uncomprehendingly. It’s our base camp, I said. He grunted unhappily, but he stayed.
The landscape we’d entered was open to the sky, except in the direction of the house, which loomed heavily behind us, and in the direction of the summerhouse; the direction we were facing. It was not the structure of the summerhouse itself which occupied space in that direction, however, but a great pale twinkling tree of a species my mother had always referred to with fondness as the aspen; in fact Populus tremulosa A dense thicket of suckers from this parent tree enclosed the remains of the summerhouse and rendered it completely inaccessible and, except for the wrought-iron finial adorning its roof, almost invisible.
It was the end of the first week of the May school holidays and our third occasion at the base camp. We were sitting in our cane chairs reading. The day was windless and the sun warm. It had begun with a fog, which had cleared by lunchtime. Gertrude had given me her father’s journals to read and I’d brought one of the volumes with me, but I was finding it impossible to concentrate. Lang seemed to be unaffected by the drowsy stillness of the weather and was sitting upright at the table. I observed him through half-closed lids. The Fourth Phoenix. He was reading my draft of The Lotus and the Phoenix, No Ordinary Child and The Mother. I hadn’t wanted him to see it yet, but he had insisted. We’d had several arguments about its progress. It was still too uncertain to bear a reading. I was sure he would not be pleased with what he read and would misunderstand my intention. I was not clear about my intention myself. All I was clear about was that the manuscript was a further consequence of me being a writer and of having understood, with a kind of passionate intuition that first day, that I needed his friendship.
The sun was warm and golden through my lids …
Parasites customarily recognise their hosts by means suc
h as passionate intuition. The recognition is instinctive. In burrowing into the substance of their hosts, from which they are to draw their sustenance and proceed to the fulfilment of their life’s purpose, they are setting out on a predestined journey, a project about which they are unable to exercise choice. To proceed with it is their only allowable activity. They have no other purpose in existing. If they do not respond to the signal to advance then they and their species perish. One would not speak of motives and aims in such a matter, or of conceptual certainty. The sustaining substance reacts to one’s entry into it. It is not what it would have been if one had not entered it. The result, therefore, cannot become a biography of one’s subject. Nor a history, either, of one’s own progress. The result must be something one has not foreseen.
One goes ahead blindly, not accountable to verifiable facts but to feelings and intuitions; accountable not to an objective reality at all, but to a subjective one, to the mysterious truth one feels, not to the truth one is able to adduce.
And through all the lies and the distortions and the false images which mark one’s way, the endeavour must be to sustain a subjective life for oneself and one’s species, and to do this despite the impermeable face of present reality. This is the only purpose one can have. It is why one continues to burrow deeper day after day.
In these thoughts I wasn’t exactly quoting Victoria, or even rephrasing her words, but was gathering into a single place remarks of hers which I’d found scattered throughout her work. She and I had been campaigning together for months on The Chronicle of the Fengs, the working title I’d given the project. A chronicle of recovery and exploration. Her Winter Visitor was its inspiration. Her book was the model by means of which I’d received my authorisation to deal with Lang’s material. I’d followed her among the slim gumtrees that strained towards the white sky of summer, hungry for light, the remnant of native bush lying between the river and the road above. Her place of refuge and concealment. I’d walked there often and looked back towards the house from the point at which the dab of alizarin crimson appeared in the painting on the dining room wall. Placing myself at the place where she had first insinuated her own presence into the landscape, insisting on my own existence in the place from where she had observed the artist at work on the lawn of her mother’s house. Observed him at work on this very mound where Lang and I reposed in the reflective sunlight of autumn, our base camp now. An ideal site for the young painter from England, a painter employed in the topographical and picturesque tradition, whose entirely approachable landscapes my father’s ‘eye’ would have approved without reserve. But too exposed to be the ideal site for the painter of rapturous attachments she had made of him, displacing in the end his approved material and replacing it with herself.
Victoria had become the landscape. She had determined the way I was seeing it, directing my attention towards the significance of certain features and away from others. He trailed off in her account, a loose end, leaving behind him, besides her portrait, only a ghostly impression of his sojourn. She’d used him up and moved on to a greater campaign, mounted this time not on a man but on her supernatural horse, Tianma, the magic horse of the West. Despite his paintings it was her landscape we inhabited, not his.
The screen door at the back of the house banged and I turned to see Gertrude coming along my mowed path. She waved something at me, a bottle, and called, I could have been a robber. Her hair was tucked under a pale bandanna, tied tightly against the roundness of her skull like a cloche, and she was wearing an old, loose tee shirt and jeans. I realised she must have come straight from working. The place is wide open, she said. She came up and looked at us. I’ve been watching you from the kitchen window. She had an uncorked bottle of wine and three glasses. Stay there, she said as I went to get up. I’ll sit on the grass. I’d rather. She put the glasses on the table in front of Lang and poured the wine. She indicated her father’s journal, which lay open on my lap. What do you think then?
I’ve just started it. I saw that she was in that glittery disembodied mood that is induced by a long session of intense work.
You both looked so old-fashioned from indoors in your white shirts. I wished I’d had my camera. She handed me a glass of wine. It was a pale amber – the colour of her father’s eyes. I caught a whiff of fruitiness, as if a perfumed shrub were blossoming nearby, hidden in the wilds of the garden. The aroma was European and autumnal, and suddenly I was reminded of an orchard in Kent when the fallen fruit is rotting sweetly in the long grass and wasps are busy.
Lang murmured a greeting and went on reading without looking up. With deliberation he turned a page and groped in the air with his other hand. She fitted the glass to his fingers and he drew it towards his mouth and drank thirstily. Then she stood behind him and looked over his shoulder.
I watched them uneasily, afraid of their reactions, their criticism, afraid of hers more than his, of my unfinished work. We hadn’t seen her for a while. She’d been working hard preparing for her show. I’d never seen her in her working clothes before. The left thigh of her jeans was smudged darkly where she must repeatedly clean the charcoal from her fingers. I imagined her standing back from her work, unconsciously kneading the material of her jeans with her fingers while she worked at the drawing with her mind. She read for a minute or two. Then she turned to me and raised her eyebrows. Interesting, she said. And I saw how careful she was being to say nothing, to touch nothing, how careful she was being to leave it alone. She moved away from Lang and sat on the grass, choosing the highest point of the mound. What a fantastic day, she said, as if she really were grateful and surprised that she had been allowed to come out and enjoy it. She turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes.
I watched her. I knew she knew I was watching. I thought how important she had become for me, she and her work, which I had never seen but which I imagined. I’d often wanted to say something to her about the likeness I saw between her and Victoria. Lang said I was imagining it and that they were not a bit alike. I’d had the feeling she might be offended by the comparison, the emotions in the portrait of Victoria being so subjugated and drained of warmth. The likeness between them had seemed too complicated a thing to just remark on, to state simply without being drawn out of a particular context. And then there was the matter of Victoria’s posed and aggressive nakedness.
Seated on the dry mound in front of me now, her hair bound up in the bandanna, as if in intentional parody of the towel around Victoria’s hair, the likeness was distracting. I wanted to get Lang’s attention so I could convince him. For the sake of something to say, I asked, How’s the series of China drawings going? Have you finished them? As soon as I’d said it I regretted asking the question.
She didn’t move but made a little grunt of annoyance. I don’t want to talk about work, Steven. Do you mind? She turned to me and gave me a lop-sided smile, forgiving me. You know what it’s like. She held her glass of wine up to the sun. Isn’t it lovely! It’s a German romantic, or a romantic German. Whichever you like. She squinted at the sparkling burst of light that trembled in the glass, the reflections shimmering on her face. The resemblance to Victoria had vanished. She was Gertrude again.
She took a sip and quoted softly, Das küsste mich aufdeutsch und sprach auf deutsch (Man glaubt es kaum, Wie gut es klang) das Wort: ‘Ich liebe dich!’ Es war ein Traum. Not everyone likes it. Some people think it’s too sweet. She was looking into her wineglass once more.
I saw an image in my mind of our mound overgrown again and deserted. I drank from my glass. The wine wasn’t sweet. It was deliciously fruity. Voluptuous. It’s perfect, I said. What was the poem?
She hesitated and gave a small laugh. ‘It kissed me in German and said in German (it’s hard to believe how good it sounded) the words “I love you”. It was only a dream.’
Lang lifted another page of the manuscript and turned it. I felt the afternoon close around us. The silence was punctuated by the calls of the whipbirds among the willows do
wn by the river and the muffled thump of traffic racing across the bridge a kilometre away.
Heine, she said at last. It was one of my father’s favourite poems. He often recited it. It begins, ‘Once upon a time I had a fine country of my own where I was at home. The oaks grew tall there, the violets beckoned gently. It was a dream.’ It’s his fatherland that kisses him. It’s called ‘In der Fremde’. In exile. It didn’t make my father unhappy to think of it. He was only ever at home in exile. Now it’s one of my family heirlooms, the poem is, from the old world. Something from a German culture neither of us really had very much direct experience of. Me none at all. I haven’t been. I don’t intend to go. But all the same I love it! she said with passion. I love everything about it. I can’t be critical about Germany. I’m sure it’s not a bit like I imagine. She laughed and changed the subject. I was watching you both from the kitchen window just now. Neither of you moved for ages. You wouldn’t believe how long. I nearly didn’t come out. I almost decided to go away again without letting you know I’d come over. You both looked … it looked idyllic out here. A bit unreal. Like a still from a movie. That sort of timeless impression you get when you’re looking on. When you’re not part of something. You know what I mean? When you’re looking on at other people, before you go into the scene yourself, it’s not complicated. Is it? Their situation isn’t. You just get the fact of them being there. It was odd. It started the minute I arrived. I didn’t expect to find the front door open. It never is, is it? And I was expecting to have to rouse you both from the darkness of the house. I had a picture in my mind of you working in the gloom of the dining room among all the junk and stuff and of having to drag you out into the sunlight. I called and no one answered. The place felt deserted. As if you’d both been warned to leave. My reflection in the hall mirror as I came through the front door gave me a start. I thought for a split second it was someone coming to challenge me and ask me what I was doing. The front room, when I looked into it, was so still it seemed as if no one had been there for ages. I mean for years and years. That awful portrait sitting up against a cabinet. I went through the house to the kitchen feeling like an intruder. Like people opening the tombs in Egypt must have felt. Then, when I got to the kitchen, I saw you both out here. I mean, I’d actually been wondering if I’d be able to entice you out of doors, and there you were! Sitting out here on this little hill in the sun. I’d never noticed there was a hill here before. Something had been altered. As if I was in another place. It was so unexpected. It was disorienting. The cane furniture. Where did that come from? And you both in your old-fashioned white shirts with the sleeves turned back. You looked as if you could have taken off blazers and ties and straw boaters a hundred years ago, and somehow you were still here, reading and drowsing in the sun, while everyone else in the world moved on. You could have been anyone. I didn’t know you. Two friends in an old garden. Like a Rupert Bunny.