by Alex Miller
Shanghai, 17 March 1928 I went to bed very late after returning from Feng’s villa, where we dined together. My report to him was a peculiar fiction. How could 1 tell him the truth? I applied a selective artistry to my account and spared everyone, including myself. I suppose he believed none of it. He didn’t seem to listen to me.
I cannot believe I have a son, he said to me. For almost all my adult life I have had an idea of my son in my mind. That is the only son who will satisfy me. Not this one. What do you suggest? What should I do, he asked me, to rid myself of this ghost and replace it in my affections with the real child?
But he scarcely listened to my suggestion that he exercise patience and spend some time with his real son. That he get to know him. You will grow together with time, C. H., I said. With a certain wistfulness he talked then of his regret at never having visited Australia and his relatives there. There has never been a time during my entire adult life when I could safely have left my affairs here and returned to find myself still master of them. He looked at me and asked, Are you happy August? Is there something you have not done that you dream of doing?
I replied that it took little to make me happy. I was not unhappy, I said. But he was not listening to me. He played with his glass of Medoc, pushing it back and forth upon the table. He does not like claret, but drinks it in order to prove he is truly Western. He said to me then, I have no desire to see him. He watched for my reaction. Is desire to see one’s son anything like the desire to see one’s mistress or a friend? Is desire desire or isn’t it? He surprised me then by lifting the glass to his lips and draining it. He poured another. Hunger, he said impatiently, is no different if it is hunger for pork or hunger for rice. Is it? If one has a choice one chooses between them but if one has no choice either will do. I hunger for the son in my mind. How am I to satisfy that hunger?
He was in a difficult mood. A mood which became more difficult by the glass. I could not talk to him. He wished only to tell me the riddles that obsessed him, not to hear my suggestions for their resolution. He was like an angry dog. He only wanted to argue. He wanted someone to disagree with. When I was leaving he came with me to the door and apologised for having been such poor company. Then he placed his arm around my shoulders and said, We know two of them and we are watching these. They will soon lead us to their friends. Have no fear August, we shall have them all for you.
But I know it is not for my sake they hunt those poor doomed children of Phoenix Hill. There is not room enough in this little journal of mine for one so large as Feng. He is a duke in the affairs of State here and needs a Machiavelli to write him into history. What do I know of his world?
Shanghai, 20 April 1928 This is the dream. I had it again last night. I have now had it several times. I forget how many. It differs only a little each time. It is not 1928 but 1926, and the three of us are together attending the funeral of Rilke. The country where the funeral is taking place is not Germany or China. We are in the midst of a large crowd and at first everything is all right. Then I look round and see that Madame Feng, with Lang in her arms, has become separated from me and is being carried away from me by the press of people. We smile and wave and try to reassure each other and we struggle to get close to each other again. But the distance between us grows greater all the time. It is now that I am beset by a feeling of hopelessness and despair. Around me the multitude is indifferent to my plight. The throng of silent mourners moves forward, carrying me with them, and I fear I shall never see Madame Feng or Lang again.
All at once I am brought by the crowd to a wide thoroughfare. It does not surprise me to see Feng riding in his Pontiac at the head of the dead poet’s cortege, the Russian chauffeur blasting away on the car horn, which produces the sound of a cello. Feng is serene, princely, and he is smiling just enough for me to guess that he possesses the secret of human happiness. With a small effort I am able to see into his thoughts. I discern his secret. It is this. At the interment of Rilke’s remains in a few moments, petals from the eighteenth-century poet Novalis’s blue flower of romantic longing for death will be scattered on the coffin by the priest. Feng himself will, at the same time, scatter petals on the coffin from the winter-flowering plum tree in Huang’s garden, the same petals which were put into my soup. The red and the blue petals will react with each other to prevent the coagulation of Rilke’s blood.
This absurdity possesses for me in the dream the force of a mystical revelation unbinding the secrets of the inner life. I know that if I can reach Madame Feng in time and tell her of my new understanding before the petals are mixed then all will be well between us and my past errors will have been atoned for. Suddenly, I am beside the grave. Madame Feng is standing on the far side. Lang, who is now eight or nine, stands beside her. As with his mother, his head is bowed and he appears to be listening to the service. His disfigured right eye, however, which he is unable to close, stares unblinkingly into the grave, and I know he sees his own future. Neither he nor Madame Feng are aware of my presence on the other side of the grave, and when I try to call out to them I find I cannot. The priest is already scattering the blue petals and Feng is scattering the red petals. As they flutter down into the grave I feel the reaaion beginning to take place inside me and I know that nothing can stop me now from reaching my interior homeland. I see Feng smiling at me with understanding, for the country where the funeral is taking place is Australia, his own ancestral homeland. I no longer struggle against the reaction. It takes me away from them. I know that because I have failed to warn Madame Feng, Lang is destined to become an estranged and paralysed man in the crowd of mourners, forever gazing into his own tomb. I feel a great sadness and guilt at this knowledge and I wake with this sadness and guilt heavy upon me. As I lie on my bed for the first few minutes after waking, the dream seems more real and more important to me than the reality that surrounds me, and I long to return to the dream and warn Madame Feng of her husband’s secret knowledge, which is the power to destroy her son, a warning I cannot impart to her in the waking life.
Since the morning on Fenghuang Hill, the International Settlement here in Shanghai can never again seem to be my home, as it has for so many years. I feel it is appropriate for me to end this entry in my journal with a poem of Heine’s, which has long been a favourite of mine and which has now acquired a new meaning for me: ‘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 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.’
THE ENTRANCE TO THE OTHER-WORLD
The last of the yellow leaves had turned brown and fallen from the poplar by June. It was now too cold, most days, to sit out on the mound. Lang had retreated to the gas fire in his front room. Nothing I suggested would shift him. He agreed readily, and even with apparent enthusiasm, to all my proposals, but he did nothing. It became obvious he was determined to proceed no further with me. I persisted, however, looking for ways to cajole him. None of it worked. We both just ended up drinking more and staying up even later than usual. It began to get a bit exhausting after a while.
Then I arrived at Coppin Grove one Saturday at my usual time, shortly after two o’clock, and found he wasn’t at home. This had never happened before and I realised that it might be all over. I might not be able to retrieve the situation. These thoughts scrambled through my mind as I stood at the front door waiting longer than I knew was sensible. I felt a bit shocked, afraid for the first time of how it was really going to turn out for me. I was trying not to remember that my old illusion that I could go back to England if Australia failed me, the myth I’d dragged out and given a shake every time there had been a crisis in my life, was no longer available to comfort myself with. Trying not to remember it induced a pang of homesickness, a moment of vivid nostalgia for England and safety.
Certain he wasn’t going to be there, but unable to face turning round and just go
ing away again, I went to the back of the house and knocked on the kitchen window and called. I didn’t want to be forced to acknowledge just how much Lang and The Chronicle of the Fengs meant to me. I wanted to be getting on with it, to keep going at it. I didn’t want to glimpse, however obliquely, my extraordinary vulnerability to him. He wasn’t there of course. Through the brownish film of grease on the window, I could see the mess on the kitchen table. Empty winecasks and junk mail mostly, with bills from the SEC and the Board of Works scattered through it, and fine-art auction catalogues, dozens of them. And a piece of mummified roast pork-on-the-bone, which had been lying there since the night of my first visit to the house in February, when he’d insisted we dine on pork Shanghai style at three o’clock in the morning.
I stood on the verandah for a long time wondering what to do, for at least a half hour, staring out at the garden. A drizzling rain had begun to fall. Which made some sort of sense of standing under the shelter of the verandah. If I didn’t do something at once, if I didn’t make something happen which was so major and so decisive that he could neither ignore it nor fail to be drawn into it (if I wasn’t able, by some means, to worm my way into a vital region of my host) then the project was over. I would have been defeated by his fear and by his alcoholism, one the symptom of the other, and by the impossible inertia of the house and its contents, those mountains of unexamined memorabilia belonging to his past and to Victoria’s, which lay there on the English mahogany dining table gathering dust like furnishings for the after-life in the tomb of an extinguished dynasty.
I stood outside the back door looking towards our old base camp, thinking these thoughts and feeling let down and bitter towards him. He might at least have telephoned me to say he would be going out today. No doubt he would claim he had and that I’d failed to answer my phone. But he wouldn’t have. For to have done so would have meant risking a confrontation. To have phoned me would have meant bringing his reluctance to continue with our project into the open and talking about it. A reluctance he denied feeling. So how could he talk about it? It was all in my imagination, he would claim. He would challenge me to show some evidence of it and would insist I was being paranoid and unfair to him. Hadn’t he always been enthusiastic about my ideas, about the work? I was stuck, that was my trouble, he’d suggest, I had writer’s cramp or block or whatever it was called and was looking for a scapegoat. He’d take the blame for that too if it would make me feel better.
I would emerge from any such discussion scarified and exhausted. His logic would be irrefutable. He would gently imply that while an apology from me would be nice he wasn’t going to insist on one. He’d let it pass. It didn’t matter to him. Things like that, dignity and saving face and such like, were of no consequence to him. There were bigger things for some people to worry about in this life than who was in the right and who was in the wrong. And while I was rendered mute and angry he would seize the initiative and urge that we begin work at once on the next section. Come on Steven, cheer up. Let’s get on with it. Look at all this stuff. We haven’t touched it, yet. You can’t see where we’ve been. Let’s get my mother’s gold out and have a look at it. It’s in here somewhere.
But if I were to take him up on the offer, by some means the work would get frustrated and only the drinking would get done. We’d be unable to find his mother’s gold, or anything else of interest. The truth was, and I knew it, I was supposed to read his indirect messages only and to behave accordingly. I was supposed to capitulate without a fuss. And if I wanted something to do, I could always recite Burns to him when he was feeling low and have a drink to keep him company. Possibly I might even consider going away altogether for a while and waiting soundlessly until I was summoned, one evening when he was feeling lonely again.
Gertrude’s question made complete sense to me at last. What was I going to do? I knew exactly what she’d been asking. I had no idea what the answer might be. The rain was sheeting across the garden now, a heavy mist driven by a cold southerly. One of the cane chairs had been blown onto its side weeks ago in a storm. I decided this was the moment to right it. I went out along my disappearing path to the mound, which looked less of an eminence in this heavy light than it had in the clear dry weightlessness of autumn, when it had seemed to float a little above the rest of the garden, drawn up as much then by optimism and by Gertrude’s amber wine as by the refractive qualities of the light, no doubt. I set the chair on its legs and tried to brush the leaves from its seat, but they clung flatly to the wet surface of the cane. I gave it a firm shove, so that its legs were forced a little into the earth, which was spongy from more than a week of heavy rain. Then I stood behind the chair with my hands on its back, as if there were someone seated in it. Someone content to sit and gaze towards the summerhouse through the leafless coppice. As if I were their companion, an attendant to their needs, occupying a place with them somewhere between that of a friend and an employee. An amanuensis, possibly. A servant really, but enjoying the peculiar dignities bestowed by an intimacy with the employer’s person and most private thoughts. If it was to be Victoria in the chair then I didn’t mind, I had no objection to my questionable status. She could depend on my loyalty.
I was getting wet but I didn’t want to leave. The garden was a miserable sight, bare and cold and dripping and black. Still I didn’t leave. He’d been right. There were things I had to know. Things I couldn’t hope to guess. If he denied me access to the material, then I would be unable to go any further. My fiction, just as Victoria’s had been, was dependent on a supply of reliable information. It couldn’t subsist on invention. At best the task was always going to be an impossible one and its successful completion therefore an unlikely paradox. The task, the only task I could see as being worth attempting, was to penetrate the impermeable face of present reality. I must do it despite the impermeability of the barrier, and I must do it rather than go around the barrier or ignore it. I must get beneath the hard surface by one means or another, because that is where the fictional strata lay, under the polished face of the great enigma of reality, that huge sculpted monolith, a massive object of worship constructed by our ancestors so long ago that no clue as to the means of its construction survives. The puzzle we find our attention bound to despite our efforts to look elsewhere, despite our efforts to find a place in our consciousness which is not within its shadow.
To get beneath the impermeable barrier of present reality, I believed my writing would have to acknowledge the existence of the barrier. My writing would have to contain the barrier. It would have to be the barrier itself. Verisimilitude, on at least one of its operational levels, I considered vital to the enterprise. I knew I needed the facts as reference points if I were to have any chance at all of encountering the feelings and the intuitions which I sought. She had thrown off Coppin Grove and her mother and her sisters in order to locate her fiction of the northern hemisphere within herself. I was required to do something similar.
Without their leaves, the straight grey poles of the poplar suckers looked like a monstrous cereal crop of some kind. A whimsical mockery of old agricultural practices and far-eastern influences. I could see the entire assemblage laid out in one of the courtyards of the National Gallery. Sculpture for the people. I began to feel an intense resentment towards the suckers. I did need a scapegoat. But doesn’t everyone? Did this make him right about everything else as well?
I can’t be sure, but I rather think I may have said this aloud; to Victoria, whom I knew would appreciate its silliness. She might have leaned back in the chair, making the cane creak, and have reached up with her hand for mine and have given a soft laugh. I realised it is possible to love the dead whom one has never met.
The rain had set in more heavily. I felt helpless standing there with my hands on the empty chair. Had he gone to see Tom Lindner? Should I abandon this nonsense and go to the gallery and drink champagne with them and discuss the price of art? What is the price of art? Should I join them? I am ready, I would say. L
et us drink to something. And then let us go on drinking. I ordered myself to count to three and on three to release the chair and leave the garden. But I couldn’t go through with it.
When my mother had reminded me that the Sidney Nolan monograph related to my own past and not to my father’s, I’d felt so defeated for a minute or two that I couldn’t think. She might as well have revealed to me that something as implacable and incontrovertible as Providence or Fate was against the realisation of my conscious intentions. The kind of thing Huang warned Lien about Feng having on his side. He is in league with Fate. He might as well have said the Devil. Don’t waste your energies trying to get the better of that. You’ll fail.