by Alex Miller
One of the baby’s legs had emerged, the other being twisted back up against the torso inside the distended birth opening, which had suffered a deep and jagged tear. The situation had apparently been in stasis for some time. At this point I was not aware of the android formation of Madame Feng’s pelvis and decided to assist the birth to resume and proceed by the natural means. Was I not, in reaching this decision, however, influenced by another, a greater and more powerful consideration than medical science could have provided me with? From the account of it which I had heard from my father I saw that confronting me here in Marco Polo’s ‘City of Heaven’ at this very moment was a duplication of my own troubled descent into Hamburg fifty years earlier. It was as if an eternal clock had struck the hour for me. As if at the passage of half a century, at the opposing point on the globe from Hamburg, I had at last arrived at the true time and place of my entry into life. All at once the puzzling tenderness which I have felt towards the Chinese since the first day of my residence in this country was made explicable to me. It was as if an angel had descended into the room and swept her molten wings across my eyes and dazzled me with a vision of my own birth. As I stood there I was engulfed by a great compassion for Madame Feng and her unborn infant, a warmth of feeling the like of which I had never before experienced, a sense of my own deep vulnerability to the dangers faced by these two people at this hour. I understood that I had at last come face to face with myself.
But I am a doctor and, dazzled by visions or not, I couldn’t stand about doing nothing. There followed many hours of struggle, during which I applied the accumulated skills of my lifetime of experience to seeking the release of the child from the deathly grip of the pelvic bone. But to no avail. The head remained obstinately fast within her body. It was then I was brought to the terrible decision that I must sacrifice the precious life of this child if I were to save the life of its mother. And it was then, as I approached her with this purpose in mind, that Madame Feng raised herself from her exhaustion and in an unearthly voice commanded me not to kill her child. By the uncertain lamplight we confronted each other. I saw she would not tolerate the half-measure I proposed. That she would countenance, indeed, no retreat to a position of compromise from which a future campaign might be mounted. The expression in her eyes told me that if she did not succeed this night then there would be no future for her. I did not doubt that she had resolved to wager everything on this struggle and to die rather than give it up. Humbled by her resolve, I silently laid aside my instruments.
As if I were some horrible ogre seeking to disembowel her, knowing I inflicted an unendurable measure of pain, I knelt before her and with great difficulty inserted my hands into the deeply lacerated birth opening and placed them around the head of the child. With all my strength I gripped the cranial bones and began to force them into a misalignment, shaping and moulding as if I wrestled with a stubborn ball of clay, until it seemed I dealt not with a single head but with two detached sections. By this primitive and brutal means, uncertain whether the infant lived or expired, but kept to the task by the fierce and unnatural exhortations of Madame Feng herself, who rose upon the passion of her suffering like a martyr upon the flames, I succeeded eventually in passing the infant’s unjointed cranium through the acute angle of the android pubis. When the head emerged I saw my manipulations had resulted in a lateral sugar-loaf distortion more grossly pronounced than anything I had ever witnessed in an infant that survived. The crushed features appeared to have been composed from the poorly joined halves of two separate faces, as if the maker of this creature had lacked the refinement of skill necessary to the fashioning of human symmetry, the basis upon which our notions of form and beauty are founded. I was amazed to see that the child breathed. There was evidence of permanent damage to the area of the right eye.
At the sound of its cry she roused herself and asked to see her baby. When she saw it was a boy she murmured thanks to the fates who decide these matters. She seemed indifferent to its appearance but laid the unresisting newborn to her breast with a contentment that I marvelled at. It seemed child and mother had reached each other by so arduous a journey they asked for no more now than the singular comfort of each other’s embrace. I stayed and watched while they slept a deep sleep of exhaustion. I have never felt more vividly the nature of birth and motherhood, wherein the new being is grown from the old flesh. Two beings where there was one. Two creatures separate but united. The same flesh parted and become two. As I stood there, tired, relieved, elated, ascended as it were upon the uplift of my emotions the way a bird ascends without apparent effort upon a thermal updraft and scans the desert and the mountain below, the mystery of the origin and destiny of the human race seemed to lie before me in all its infinite extent and uncertainty. What other certain knowledge, I asked myself, could there be than if these two who slept before me were one that I was one with them? Surely there could be no family but one family, and no homeland but one homeland. I was moved then to perform in silence what seemed to me to be a secret ceremony, the significance of which shall remain known only to myself. I acted in this as the priest of our fellowship. The midwife and mediator at the nativity of this child and the rebirth of myself. In this little ritual of my own devising I bestowed upon the infant the name Lang Tzu; two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away. I wished him well on the journey I knew he must one day embark upon in his restless search for a homeland. The journey, if he were to be as fortunate as I, which would reunite him with his beginning.
There, I have written my account of it. The moon has long set and the garden is in deep shadow. The frosty sky is filled with stars. The painter’s lines come into my mind: Midway through life I set my heart on Truth And have come to end my days by the Southern Hills. I should like to walk in Huang’s garden, but dare not in case such an action offer him offence. How little I know the customs of these people.
3 pm, 21 December 1927 She maintains a low fever, but the signs of a strong recovery are already present. Lang Tzu feeds well. The realignment of his features will never be complete, but she gazes upon him with a mother’s love and sees before her the most beautiful child that ever lived. She is loath to relinquish him even for a moment to the nurse, and will not permit him to be carried out of her sight. I heard her call him Ho this morning, which means harmony. I have not told her of my intuitions concerning his future. Neither of us has said anything about the peculiar likeness he bears to Feng.
I returned to my quarters here half an hour since, groaning from another feast. I cannot refer to it merely as a sumptuous meal, for this daily gastronomic event is observed with such strict and orderly ritual it seems more the fulfilment of a religious office than the performance of a domestic duty. As with all priestly services, this one also partakes deeply of the theatre. I succumb willingly to Yu Hung-meng’s culinary arts! Am I not for him the King of the Sacred Rites, to be sacrificed at the appointed hour (whenever that may be) for the common good, as was done in antique times in the priest-ridden cities of Zela and Pessinus? Or might I not be the nurse-frog in disguise, Alytes obstetricans, the obstetrical toad herself, whose displeasure they dread to arouse lest I turn my arcane powers against them and betwitch their women into having ugly babies. Whatever marvel 1 might be for them, for myself dinner has become the highlight of the day! Here is the role I have dreamed of creating since I was twelve years old, at which time, to my astonishment, I attended a performance of Schiller’s Die Rauber; the moment, that is, when I saw that theatre must be greater than life, for in theatre and not in life did I for the first time witness the free expression of that idealism which is natural to the souls of all humankind.
Awaited sombrely by my attentive audience I make my entrance and sit in solitary dignity at a bare teakwood table which stands at the centre of Huang’s vast, unheated reception hall. This table and the carved chair I sit in are the room’s only furnishings. My costume is the magnificent fur coat which Yu presented to me with much kowtowing and ne
rvous mumbling on my first day. This coat, so I understand from Madame Feng, was fashioned from the pelts of eighteen grey foxes. It is a princely garment, fastening closely about my throat and enfolding me in draughtproof snugness to the very tips of my boots. In it I appear to be more than twice my actual size. An impression I greatly enjoy presenting to the world. In this coat I am a giant. A figure of fantastic proportions. I am no longer myself.
Cocooned in the silvery grey fur, on the first day I sat in the chair and waited for my dinner; curious as to my new surroundings but a little impatient, for the meal was a long time arriving and I had scarcely eaten for two days. Facing me was the open doorway to the principal courtyard, a wide and vacant space of parade-ground proportions, across which Madame Feng and I had driven in Feng’s Pontiac, with all the pomp of visiting royalty, on our arrival. It presented a view with little in it to distract me from my hunger. The only thing that moved in the barren courtyard was the yellow dust, which was plentiful and which was blown about in fierce eddies by a cold wind. I had begun to think I had been forgotten, when a peasant came and stood in the open doorway and stared at me. She remained perfectly still, gazing at me on my throne as if I were incapable of a response and were not another human being such as herself but an exhibit in a museum, a reconstruction of the stoic mastodon from the Pliocene. In a few moments this first peasant was joined by another, who stood beside her and looked at me with a like measure of curious detachment.
Within the half hour a small crowd had gathered before me silently, entirely filling the wide doorway and obscuring my view of the empty courtyard. Some squatted on their haunches, while other stood with a kind of vacant nonchalance upon one leg, and yet others – as if these determined souls were intent upon remaining for the entire five acts – fashioned little cushions from rags and bundles and sought to make themselves comfortable upon the flagstones. They did not converse with one another but observed me all the while with a fixed and serious attention, as if they were confident their patience would soon be rewarded by a spectacle worth having waited for; as if, indeed, they possessed a more certain knowledge than I of what was to take place. I nestled deeply into my mighty fur and gazed at the great beam above the doorway, as if I were loftily indifferent both to their stares and my own fate. I had plenty of time to muse upon my condition and the appearance I must present to these people. I likened my appearance in my present disguise to that of a fat and shapeless grub; a larva of one of their famous silkworms – which they have reared in countless thousands here in Hangzhou since long before the Venetian visited them in the thirteenth century – waiting to be fed my due apportionment of mulberry leaves.
Etymology, so I have found, frequently sustains the casual images we think we take at random from the teeming possibilities within our minds, and reveals our seemingly haphazard choices to have been guided by forces – should I say cultural and historical forces? – far deeper than the blithe gesturings of consciousness. Something of this consideration urged me to pursue further the image of myself as a larva, which it seemed to me I had based upon nothing more subtle than my gross physical resemblance in the heavy fur coat to such an amorphous creature. It was not many moments, however, delving this way and that and proceeding by association of one thing with another, musing and speculating as one does at such times without an exact discipline but with the freedom to consult whatever rises to the surface of one’s memory, before I recalled Montaigne’s observation that fear sometimes representeth strange apparitions, as their fathers’ and grandfathers’ ghosts, risen out of their graves, and in their windingsheets: and to others it sometimes sheweth Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and such other Bug-beares and Chimeraes. Here, then, was the word larva in its original usage! For in Latin it signifies a mask or spectre whose true form is hidden, a form yet to be revealed. I realised at once that our adoption of the Latin word into our own language and application of it to the metamorphic insect in the primal stage after its emergence from the egg must itself have been an act of imaginative association, a metaphor rather than a literal or scientific description. The discovery excited me. It was but a short step from this ancient Roman notion of the larva as a mask, to the full-blown idea of the fantastic and motley character of the masque itself – a masquerade of my own devising in which I was to be the only player. With this discovery the magical possibilities of my childhood seemed to be restored to me. I had only to desire something to be so for it to be so.
I come in daily instalments. For my audience – who are not at all like our cinema audiences in Shanghai and never hiss or boo if the action is a little slow – I am Hamlet today, conversing with the ghost of his father, and Schiller’s robber, Karl Moor, in the Bohemian forest tomorrow. A steaming savoury dumpling may be for my attentive audience the equivalent of an entire principality sequestered to prop the fortunes of a tottering empire. For the silent gathering of ragged peasants in the doorway before me, I am convinced the fates of dynasties are decided upon the rising and falling of my eating bowl. Seated in solitary state in Huang Yu-hua’s great hall, attired in my phantasmal vestments, and waited upon by Yu Hung-meng and his assistant, I am liberated from the burdensome responsibilities and banal ambitions of Doctor August Spiess, late of the International Settlement, and am exalted to the status of a king or god of the theatre, a mysterious and powerful being who conjures with the secret desires of his devotees at the appointed hour each day. Here in the City of Heaven there is no inner voice insisting that I am lost and must go in search of the real world. Here, for an hour or two each day, I inhabit the real world! And should I doubt it even for a moment I need only raise an eyebrow or crook my little finger in order to receive the instant reassurance from my audience that everything I do is meaningful. Here not a single gesture of mine is wasted! My actions are not whirled away and lost for ever in the blizzard of time the very second they occur! August, seek no more! my reflective voice urges me. Here you are at home!
If only I could confront my schoolmasters once more and tell them of my discovery! How I detested the study of philosophy which they forced me to undertake! How even the names Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, and even more the terrible titles of their books, made my stomach turn and twist with disgust! What a torture for me their exacting formulations were! How I wish I could take those old masters aside for a moment here in Hangzhou and reveal to them that a theatre, a storyteller and an audience are all that are required for the fulfilment of every human desire.
I am not alone. Beside me on the teakwood table while I wait for Yu to bring the dishes of steaming food there rests the black handset of a new telephone – an incongruous article of the modern world in this old hall of the classical scholar. We are Feng’s conditions; an obstetrician and a telephone. But although we dine alone we have little to say to each other. This telephone, which I would rather were not there, is nothing less than the sign of my legitimacy. For is not Feng himself concealed within it? It is his will that has endowed me with the power to be here; the only Westerner ever to be admitted to this house. The telephone and I are Feng’s forces of occupation; our presence here insists upon his primacy in the face of his wife’s determination to establish the ascendancy of her own house. And am I not also an agent of her conspiracy to this end? These are the complicated mechanics by which the universe I inhabit here is driven. Fortunately the telephone does not ring, and for the most part I am able to ignore it. I cannot ignore it, however, when I see the gaze of one of my audience stray to it and linger upon it. This I take to be a sign that my performance lacks authority to distract from mundane fears. At such times it is me against the telephone, and even though it does not ring, it interrupts.
Among the duck, pork, veal, the three varieties of fish, the fungi and the fluffy dumplings, the fruits and vegetables of many kinds and scalding mountain of steamed rice – smoking like Vesuvius and ostentatiously and repeatedly renewed by Yu’s determined assistant despite my indifference to it; is it the same mound of rice b
rought again and again to my table or a different mound each time? – among all this I say, there was today a garnishing that troubled me. One particular dish was adorned with freshly plucked petals from the blossoms of the winter-flowering plum tree which blooms at this time in Huang’s garden, and which I have admired from my casement. In the middle of winter this tree fills the air with the perfume of spring! The petals, which looked at first like bright drops of blood, I took to be a sign from the scholar; an indication that he also watches my performances. From a place of concealment, his box at the opera, as it were. Are these plum blossoms, however, from which the petals detach themselves as readily as do the wings of swarming termites, a sign of his approval or of his disapproval? If I should ask for her opinion on this matter when I go to visit her and the child this evening, after we have exchanged courtesies and are sipping our scented tea, I am certain she will not enlighten me but will, as always, offer some gentle evasion. There is no direct way here; everything is within a maze and must be sniffed out with great finesse if it is to be uncovered and not startled into some deeper hiding place.
I have always found great solace in flowers – my geraniums in terracotta pots outside my blue door are famous throughout the International Settlement – and am reluctant to see in these floral garnishes tokens of ill-will or emblems of decay; Fleurs du Mal, as it were, of Monsieur Gautier’s haunted friend! But they were there and stood out so dramatically against the grey glaze of my bowl I could not ignore them. They seemed to insist upon being the bearers of a message. I stared at them floating in the soup and was put in mind of the coagulation test we applied as students to droplets of fresh blood, tilting the paraffin-filled test tube every few moments to observe the exact instant at which the blood would begin to clot. The petals of the winter-flowering plum turned black as I observed them and stuck with a tenacious adhesiveness to the sides of the bowl. They clung, indeed, to every surface they came into contact with and were soon everywhere.