The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  He refilled our glasses with the heavy red cask-wine and we clinked them together. I remember everything about my childhood, he boasted. You only need the first ten years. That’s all you need. The Nanking decade: 1927 to 1937. The entire period of my life in China. The worst years, the hardest years, for my father and for all the Shanghai capitalists. After ten years it’s too late. After a child reaches the age of ten nothing can be changed. His bleary gaze struggled to locate me in the fug of smoke and radiant heat from the fire. He reached out and clutched my sleeve. He swayed. Did he see me? You’re my only friend, Steven, he said hopelessly and let go my sleeve, half-regretting the excess immediately.

  I saw that his bravado would be easily disabled; I saw in him a kind of sorrow and a kind of love and a deep inconsolable regret, a kind of horror of what lay before him, each emotion discrete, like colours in an oily puddle, circling slowly, trapped within his eyes.

  I said, And you are my only friend.

  He grinned sheepishly, breaking the surface, for a split second the boy experimenting with being grown up. What do you really think of me? He laughed, abashed, unsteady, unable to hold to one direction. We’re a partnership aren’t we. That’s what we are. D’you know who said that? Tom Lindner. Yes. He said to me, how’s your partner? I just laughed at him. He thinks we’re secretly dealing in paintings. He thinks we’re up to something. He’s clever. No, I mean it. You might think he’s silly because he dyes his moustache, but he’s not. He’s successful. He doesn’t know much about art, he doesn’t know anything about art, but he knows a lot about dealing. And what do we know about art anyway? He knows a thing or two. He knows his own business. That’s more than you can say for us. He’s rich. We shouldn’t forget that. We’d go broke in a minute if we tried doing what he does. He gestured at the pictures on the walls. They’d all be gone in a week. Where d’you think we’d find someone to give us two thousand for Victoria. Take it away, they’d say. It’s horrible. And they’d be right. It is horrible. I like horrible things. We wouldn’t be able to give it away. We’d wonder what had happened. The dealers would clean us out. We’d just have the walls to look at. We’d discuss the unfaded patches of wallpaper. Other people would come in and find us talking about Victoria’s portrait and all they’d see would be a dark oblong of wallpaper. They’d think we were mad. They’d think we were off in our gazebo. But we’d have money for renovations. That’s something. Sometimes I feel like inviting them in. I think of ringing Tom and telling him to come and get them. The lot. Everything. Just give me what you think’s right and take them all away. We could take a cask out to the garden, out to the gazebo, and watch them cart it off. They’d think they’d won Tatts. He paused and looked at me quickly. Are you planning on renovating the gazebo? That’s what they do to these houses. They renovate them. They like everything to be normal. That’s when they’re happiest. An Australian gets excited at the prospect of everything being normal. He fell silent and gazed wearily into the gas fire, leaning so close to the flames I smelt him beginning to scorch. Gertrude’s an Australian, he said, swaying towards me. She’d be happy if I renovated this place. She’s renovated her place. Have you seen the way she keeps her house? He watched me closely, mistrustful, calculating again, Have you been there? Have you been over to her place? You could have come this morning. I think she expected you. I rang you, you know. You must have already left. You could have come with me and had a look at her drawings. But she probably had you over when she gave you her father’s journal. Did she invite you to her place or did you invite her to your place? Did you have dinner together by candlelight? He cackled, You might become a couple. When I’m out of the way. She could renovate this house while you renovate the gazebo. He suddenly reached out and clutched my shoulder and dragged himself to his feet and hurried out of the room. I heard him laughing thickly and coughing in the bathroom. He shouted, I’ll get the lotus cup in a minute.

  He was gone for some time. When he returned he dropped something into my lap. I was startled and jumped. I’d been expecting the fragile teacup. I should have known better. It was a copy of the poems of Robert Burns.

  Read Tarn first. He arranged himself again cross-legged within scorching distance of the gas fire. He waved at the book, Read it Steven! Read it for me. He searched around for his wine, made a grab for it and knocked it over. The claret made a red pool on the rug. He watched it. The wine didn’t sink in to the rug but lay like a ruby lens. You’ve got the voice for it, he said, staring at the spilt wine, and perhaps wondering if it might somehow be got back into the glass. I had a friend at St Patricks who had the voice for it. He won the Crouch Prize later, when we were at art school together. He looked at me belligerantly, as if he thought I wouldn’t believe any of this. He lives in Tuscany half the year and in Mosman the other half. They all thought I should have won it. Everyone did. Even he said I should have got it. He rubbed his finger over the wine, spreading it. I got a Highly Commended. I can show it to you. Do you want to see it? Nineteen forty-seven. Read Tarn o’Shanter! Read it! Tarn skelpit on thro’ dub and mire, Despising wind and rain, and fire. How does it go? Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tarn maun ride. You might have heard of him. He’s famous. He said nothing for a little while, then he looked up and stared steadily into my eyes for several seconds. He seemed to be utterly sober. Do you think, Steven, that I could ever have represented Australia? Lang Zoo, he said, mockingly, attempting an exaggerated Australian accent. Mr Zoo. That’s what the students call me. He reached for the cask and dragged it towards him. Please read Burns for me Steven. I know you hate doing it but just read it anyway. The Chinese are right. You only need the first ten years. My father left it too late. Nineteen forty-seven, Steven. The Crouch Prize. I could have won it. I could have gone to the Slade on a scholarship. Everyone said I should have got it. Ye banks and braes o’ bonie Doon, how can ye bloom sae fresh and fair; how can ye … He broke off. I will show it to you. Don’t worry. Just read a few verses of Tarn, We’ve got all night.

  REFLECTIONS FROM THE GAZEBO

  THIRTY-FOUR DAYS

  Just after nine o’clock on the morning of 28 January 1932, at the moment when the first groups of soldiers of the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army were engaging invading Japanese soldiers on the flat northeastern outskirts of Shanghai, Iang Tzu and his grandfather were standing together holding hands beneath the upturned eaves of the garden pavilion at Hangzhou. The old man of seventy-three and the boy of less than six years were admiring the blossoms of the winter-flowering plum tree, situated against the far wall of the garden about thirty metres distant from them across a freshly raked bed of sand. The garden wall’s rendered surface was grey and smudgy with stains. From the distance of the pavilion it resembled a bank of fog, such as often lolled over the lake and hung in the valley late into the morning in winter. Against this background the branches of the plum tree stood out as if they had been black lines in a woodcut on old paper. Lang Tzu and the scholar had been standing in the pavilion looking at the tree for more than half an hour. The morning was very cold, and they both wore fur coats that reached to their ankles.

  Neither the scholar nor the child was aware that China subsisted in a helpless state of civil war. Scarcely a rumour had troubled them concerning the floods and the famines and the bandits who were every day killing thousands of Chinese in the countryside around them. And even if they had given the larger situation some thought, they could not possibly have guessed that less than a day’s journey to the northeast the Japanese were at this very moment attacking Shanghai, which was not only the commercial and industrial heart of China but was also Lang’s other place of residence in his dimorphic existence. For it was true, like a specially grafted fruit tree which produces both pears and apples from the same rootstock, Lang existed in two distinct forms. In Hangzhou he was a student of the classical arts of China and in Shanghai he was no less than the child of honorary European expatriates in the International Settlement, where he studied
European history and mathematics and French and German like all the other children who were not yet old enough to have been sent to boarding schools in the home countries of their parents. In Hangzhou he wore Chinese clothes and spoke Mandarin and was forbidden by his mother to do otherwise; and in Shanghai he wore European clothes and spoke English and was forbidden by his father to do otherwise.

  The contradictions of this double existence had intimidated Lang until Doctor August Spiess, his friend and his German tutor, and the only person who seemed able to see both sides of his situation, confided to him one day that dimorphism was more a divine gift than an impediment to life. They were working together in the schoolroom upstairs in his father’s villa in Shanghai on the congenial task of translating certain of Goethe’s Romische Elegien, number V of which began with a line that August always found heartening for some reason: Here on classic ground I feel joyously inspired. Two-headed Janus, the doctor remarked, was the Roman god of the doorway and embodied the interior view and the exterior view with equal felicity. So why should you not do likewise? Have no fear, there are many happy dimorphic phenomena in art and in nature. The doctor said this confidently, delivering it as information well known to all worldly men of letters, such as he undoubtedly was himself.

  Thinking of his own imminent return to his mother’s home, Lang asked the doctor what there might be in Hangzhou of this double kind? For a moment the doctor was nonplussed. His gaze went glassy as he thought back to the time he had spent with Madame Feng in the scholar’s house. He remembered many things, but he could think of nothing that would illustrate his confident assertion. Then he recalled the petals which had floated portentously, like so many drops of blood, in his soup one day. Why, he exclaimed, relieved that he would not be forced to disappoint Lang, there is the winter-flowering plum tree, which sends forth its perfumed blossoms in the midst of winter and so embodies a double image of life and death. Which is no doubt what has made its beauty so poignant to your poets for centuries. It is truly the janus tree.

  Standing in the pavilion now, in Hangzhou, beside his grandfather, watching the first rays of the newly risen sun strike the red flowers of the plum tree in the wintry garden, Lang felt an assurance within himself the like of which he had never felt before. He felt as if he had learnt something real about himself and his condition at last. Something permanent. Something which would not be swept away by his father’s contempt for Chinese values when he returned once again with his mother to Shanghai. The freshly opened blossoms on the black branches reminded him of the yearning beaks of fledglings in the nest, striving confidently towards the worms and insects which the parent birds would soon bring to them. Looking at the flowers he felt a warm happiness in his belly, just as he did whenever he drank a steaming bowl of sweetened lotus root tea. I am kin to the plum tree. She is my sister. I, too, shall bring forth my splendour in the midst of winter’s grey. He composed this poem silently and with a kind of passionate secrecy. Aloud, because he knew it would please his grandfather, who claimed the author as an illustrious ancestor, he quoted from a poem by the eleventh-century statesman Wang An-shi: Sprigs of plum by the corner of the wall Are blooming atone in the cold. Huang murmured appreciatively and squeezed his hand. Six was not too old for such a gesture of affection.

  Since the intrusion into his house, almost six years ago, of the German doctor, behind the high rendered stone walls with their coping of glazed tiles, nothing distressing or contradictory had ever been spoken of again in Huang’s presence. Yu and Lien had kept their worries from him, and he had lent himself without complaint to this pretence that all was in order with his world. Nothing he had not wished to discuss had been discussed. Ever since Lang’s birth, indeed, for the two occasions had coincided, Yu and Lien and the entire household at Hangzhou had behaved as if the scholar was too fragile to bear the truth any longer.

  Huang spent most of his time sitting in his study, completely still, gazing vacantly into his garden. For the past six years he had maintained a suspenseful equipoise, during which no aspect of his condition had altered, except the duration of his silences, and these, like his beard and his fingernails, had grown a little longer. Every now and then a noise or a smell or some little incident caused him to become aware of the tragedy of his circumstances, and he was opened momentarily to the reality of the present, and once again he felt the pain and the futility of inconsolable regret. On these occasions he wept, silently, his tears sliding down his aristocratic nose to tremble like jewels in the fine hairs of his beard. At such moments he longed for nothing more than to hear a last, kind forgiving word from his old colleague and friend, the literary painter Fan Ping-chen, who had lived on Geling Hill and who had possessed the finest garden in Hangzhou. Had Huang but known it, Fan Ping-chen was dead and his house and garden were no more.

  Since the visit of the German doctor, since that intrusion, that trespass upon his orderly life, except for the smell of French and American cigarettes, which was often stronger than the smell of incense, and the occasional ringing of the telephone whenever Lien was present, daily life was carried on by Huang without any impressions from the outside world. Since the doctor’s fateful visit, life among the crumbling courtyards and galleries and the numerous rooms of the old house had been performed as if it were a play of epic length, slowly unfolding its sombre theme in a theatre long closed to the public’s gaze. As if, after all, the doctor had written one of his projected plays without quite meaning to. As if the doctor had become a playwright despite himself. As if, indeed, his presence alone on that occasion had been enough to cast each of these people into a role from which only the death of the protagonist would eventually liberate them.

  Lien, of course, did not sit for long periods in silence gazing vacantly into the past but got on with the running of the household. She experienced no difficulty grasping a full understanding of the realities of their precarious situation in Hangzhou. She freely acknowledged to herself that there was to be no possibility of a continuation of the old ways in the house once her father was dead. Yet, despite this clarity of mind, she performed her role in the fiction as willingly as everyone else; with, indeed, an even more passionate commitment to its unfolding than the others. While she knew it to be an impossibility, she nevertheless behaved as if her son were one day to assume the scholarly mantle of her father, as if Lang really could become a literary painter and carry on the traditions of her family – a family to which, of course, traditionally he could never belong. She lived for the present. She offered her willing collusion in perpetuating a situation she knew to be entirely fanciful.

  For Lang the events of that day, 28 January 1932, constituted a decisive turning point, ushering in a new phase of the drama in which he bore the responsibility for one of the principal roles. Once again the influence of Doctor Spiess, if not his direct authorship of the events themselves, was crucial.

  Inspired by the conjunction of the blossoming tree and his newly acquired confidence in the prophetic nature of his own dimor phism, all that day, without pausing to take any nourishment, Lang painted pictures of the flowering plum tree. And all day, seated no more than three metres from where he worked on the table, his grandfather gazed through the open casements into the formal garden, unaware of his grandson’s activities.

  One after another Lang painted pictures of the plum blossom without once looking up and referring to the tree itself. He was not thinking of the real tree. He painted with his metaphor of the beaks of the fledglings in mind. On the right-hand side of those paintings which he judged to be the most expressive, he wrote in black ink the four-line poem he had composed that morning in the garden:

  I am kin to the plum tree,

  She is my sister;

  I, too, shall bring forth my splendour

  In the midst of winter’s grey.

  He wrote the poem in the expressive Li-shu script, which his mother had made him practise for two hours each day since he had first been able to hold a writing brush. Late
in the afternoon he chose the very best of his plum blossom paintings and, first having Yu formally announce him, he took it to his mother and presented it to her. The other paintings he later gave to Yu and told the old man to burn them. Standing before his mother in her apartment, Lang had felt dazed and happy. He knew what it was at last to have done something good that would not fade with time.

  When Lien showed the painting to her father later that evening the old scholar’s eyes brightened. It is very good, he said. They stood shoulder to shoulder at the writing table in his study and by the light of the extra lamp which Yu had brought they admired Lang’s poem and his image of the plum blossom. It was many years since Lien and her father had shared such a moment as this over a painting. You have made a scholar of Feng’s son, Huang said at last, his voice shaky, awed and sad.

  The following day he could not resist watching Lang at his studies. He had been standing behind the boy for some time, when he reached over his shoulder and took the brush from Lang’s hand and with two deft strokes painted a shrike on the pine branch next to the shrike Lang had just painted. Huang’s shrike had a ragged patch of white in the middle of its back, a feature which was poorly represented in Lang’s shrike. The old man and boy watched the ink drying. Then Lang grasped the brush and loaded it from the shallow depression in the ink stone and repeated Huang’s two strokes, executing them confidently, as if he had been practising them for days. Huang breathed with delight and he reached for the brush again and demonstrated another combination of strokes. Again Lang duplicated his action fluently.