The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  Lien was writing letters when Yu came to her apartments and called to her. She left her work and followed him. Together they stood near the entrance to her father’s study and, concealed by Yu’s blue screen, they observed the old literary painter and the boy working side by side. Huang and Lang worked with one mind, intent and absorbed, as if they had long been master and pupil.

  After a time Yu leaned close to her and whispered, The master has come back to us. Lien touched his hand in acknowledgment. She said nothing. In Lang she was seeing herself again as she had been when she was a child and she and her father had thought of nothing but painting and writing. With her trusted friend Yu, who knew everything, she watched the play, and while she watched it she was happy.

  It seemed for a time that Yu had been right, and the master had really returned. For, two weeks after the day of the shrike, Huang ordered him to have a boat and refreshments prepared. We are going out on West Lake this evening to look at the moon, Huang announced to everyone’s astonishment and disbelief. And as their boat was gliding past the southern end of the island of the Three Pools Mirroring the Moon that evening, Huang rose from his cushions and took the oar from the boatman and with a seemingly effortless movement drove the heavy craft across the shining water. Is the master a young man determined to impress us with his strength and skill? Yu asked. Lien laughed with happiness and she and Lang composed several poems. To conceal his excessive joy Yu averted his face and spat into the water, where he saw the eyes of the carp gleaming in the moonlight.

  Despite having achieved total military control of the situation and finding himself and his army in no danger from the defeated and demoralised Chinese troops, on 2 March the Japanese general commanding the occupying forces in the Chinese city of Shanghai – he had not occupied the International Settlements – unaccountably ordered a withdrawal. For this inexplicable stupidity he was to be assassinated on his return to Japan. The day the Japanese departed, the road and rail links between Shanghai and the provincial capital of Hangzhou were reopened, And Feng at once sent his chauffeur to fetch his wife and son home.

  In later life Lang was to look back on that brief period of thirty-four days, between 28 January and 2 March 1932, and to think of it as having been a period of years. That was the way life was for us, he would say, speaking of himself and his grandfather, as if everything had always been harmonious between them from the day of his birth until the age of six, when the ancestors had appeared without warning, like bandits through a breach in the wall, and destroyed his peace of mind.

  Lang was to remember difficulties as having arisen after the thirty-four days in Hangzhou and not as having existed in some other form before that time. He was to look back upon his early years as an untroubled golden age. Also, in reconstructing that time, in going over it in his mind and recounting it to himself, he was gradually to substitute his grandfather for his mother as his teacher of his early years. The betrayal, when it overtook him, seemed to him to come from every quarter – except from his German friend, August Spiess; who remained, so it seemed to Lang, both detached and constant in friendship throughout the period of his war with the ancestors.

  WAR

  Once Lien and Lang had departed for Shanghai, Huang’s courage left him. He stayed in his bedroom all day, lying on his bed. For if he ventured out the terrible sound of the telephone seemed still to be ringing among the empty rooms and galleries like the mocking laughter of Feng. During the day he dozed and at night he lay wide awake. In the darkness he was visited by fearful presences. Feng sent his son to mock him. A spectre. The boy a hideous replica of his demonic father, his white eye floating in the blackness. Huang moaned and cried out and Yu hurried to his side and lit a lamp and made potions and massaged the old scholar’s bones. I am rebuked by my troubled ancestors, Huang cried, weeping bitterly. Was I thinking of her welfare when I brought her up as a boy? Yu did not answer, but kneaded the old man’s wasted thighs with his bony fingers. It was my own selfish love of painting! Had I brought her up as an orthodox young woman she would never have married the demon Feng. She would have brought honour to the family of a gentleman and peace of mind to my final years. Huang wept and wondered if he was about to die and he trembled and couldn’t get warm. And when Yu would have left him to return to his own bed, Huang clung to him. I made a terrible mistake, he confessed, clinging to Yu’s gown. Bring me my book of the ancestors.

  From a secret compartment behind the cupboards beneath the bookshelves in the scholar’s study, Yu carefully removed Huang’s book of the ancestors and took it to his master. All that night, and every night after that until Lien returned in the spring, Huang traced and re-traced the generations of his tribe and he re-learnt the names of the past, which he had forgotten. It was his last great effort of scholarship.

  And when the jasmine vine that trailed above the coping of the verandah was in bloom, she returned with her son. The evenings were warm now. They sat in the second gallery beyond the visitors’ hall. Huang in one carved chair and Lien in the other. Beyond the dark, lacquered columns they were presented with a fine view of the garden. The columns sectioned the prospect into three vertical strophes, which might, indeed, have been an intentional triptych, a trompe I’oeil, or a faded mural painted upon a palace wall. A landscape haunted by the absence of figures.

  Lang was seated on a pale rosewood chair a little distance from his mother. Over the seat of the chair he had spread the beautiful skin of a snow leopard. He was reading, the book laid open on his thighs, his hands covering his ears. Every now and then a gentle movement of the air carried into the gallery the sweet perfume of the jasmine. Earlier, a long-billed honeyeater had swung upside down from the vine and gazed in at them, its head moving rapidly from side to side, its bright yellow eye disdainful. Then it had squawked and flown away, its direa line of flight like the dismissive gesture of a critic across the face of the garden.

  Huang turned to his daughter.

  She waited for him to speak. She had been waiting for him to speak about what was on his mind since their arrival the day before. For she had noticed at once that he was preoccupied and nervous and unwilling, for some reason, to be kindly towards Lang. Whose puzzled enquiry as to this she had countered with, Your grandfather is old and may be ill. It is difficult to be old.

  Now that it is spring, Huang said, and the countryside is no longer at war, I shall make a pilgrimage to the shrine of our ancestors.

  He had not made such a pilgrimage during her lifetime. She felt no surprise. She did not respond. She waited for what was to come next, as if he had let a stone fall from his hand into a deep well, a stone he had held all her life, and she listened for the splash in the darkness far below. In her mind she watched the black stone fall and she regretted that it could never be called back into her father’s hand again. His words came then, tinkling like the lapping of water in a stone place that is never to be touched by the sun. I beg you to come with me, daughter.

  Still she did not respond, but gazed into the twilit garden. She did not care for the garden. She had no feelings for it. She had approved of his renovation of it. That was all. It was not her garden. She had grown chrysanthemums in the summer and cabbages in the autumn in a garden of her own when she had been a child. A little raised garden bed that was still there in a courtyard behind the courtyard of the second entrance. She had feelings for that place. She had grown dark blooms, the deep rust of their curling petals the colour of an old fox’s scalp. The colour of those chrysanthemums retained the power today to invoke summer and childhood for her. Without turning to him she said quietly, evenly, without emotion, Do you regret everything then, father? Is there nothing you would not wish to change if you could return to the past.

  Angrily he called for Yu to fetch hot water. What is taking you so long, you old fool? he shouted.

  Lang raised his head and looked anxiously towards his mother. She smiled. When he had returned to his reading, she said softly to her father, My son and I have
never been parted. Not for one day. But she knew her protestations were useless. She knew there was no point in appealing now to sentiment. She knew they were directed by a far larger force than took account of sentiment. It was not her intention to meet force with force, but to do as she had always done, and to slip between the ranks of the enemy and to appear behind the lines, in a place where no preparations for defence had been made. And, as always, she had no precise plan. Her strategy relied on opportunism, her tactics on inspiration.

  Huang said nothing, but he watched her covertly. He waited until she had taken her gaze from her son. Then he murmured, This is the last thing I shall ask you to do for me, my daughter, before I die.

  She did not speak. His request was seamless. There was no way through it.

  The black-lacquered gates to the principal courtyard – through which August Spiess had blithely stepped six years ago, going very nearly to his death – stood wide open once again. The servants and members of the household were gathered in a little crowd before them, as if there was to be a group photograph. Lang stood on his own at the front of the gathering, closest to the gates. He was dressed for the occasion in a dark green silk gown with a high collar. A pace behind him stood Yu Hung-meng. It was just breaking day and a mist hung over the roadway beyond the gates, obscuring in places the lower stories of the houses, so that their upper stories appeared to rise from heavenly clouds like mountains in a depiction of the Emperor Ming Huang’s journey to Shu. Everyone’s attention was fixed on Feng’s black Pontiac, which was moving slowly away along the road.

  Lang’s face muscles ached. He watched the car. She had promised she would wave as they turned the corner at the end of the road. Everyone had congratulated him on his manly bearing during the past ten days – ten days which blurred into a single interminable period of dread for him. Only he knew his bearing had not been manly. Yesterday his grandfather had solemnly presented him with a brown jade disc with a dragon carved on it. The purport of this delicate gift – a precious relic from the Sung Dynasty – had not been lost on Lang; he knew it was intended to bind him during their absence to the composure of an adult. But he had already been bound. His face muscles ached because he was bound, because he was unable to express his feelings.

  As the car neared the corner he raised his hand in readiness to return her wave. But the car swept out of sight so suddenly he had barely time to glimpse the pale oval of her face behind the glass before it was gone.

  A terrible heaviness descended on him.

  Yu motioned to the watchman and the black gates swung closed, shutting out Lang’s view of the empty road. The wooden bar fell into place, knocking like a drum in the quiet morning. Yu touched his hand. As he turned away from the gates Lang knew he was no longer the person he had been until this moment. He could not see what lay ahead of him but he knew his life – like his father’s Pontiac – had rushed round a coiner. He could not say what was to happen to him. Grief and bewilderment and the deep hurt of one who has been betrayed by the person they have loved most dearly, clouded his vision. The faces of the servants were turned towards him, observing him, intent upon his performance. He walked through them without seeing them.

  His grandfather’s refusal to take him on the pilgrimage, and his mother’s collusion in this decision, was too large a detail for Lang to measure. He felt it as if it were a wall of stone pressing against his body where before there had been no wall but only the open fields. There was no way round the wall, and there was no way through it. Nor could he pretend to himself that the wall did not really exist, or that its presence was unimportant to him. The wall extended on either side of him to his furthest horizons. A forbidden kingdom lay beyond it; the kingdom of the ancestors. His grandfather had lured his mother to this place through a kind of spell, by means of a mysterious magical power, which had turned her against her own son. His mother and his grandfather had then passed through the wall together, as if they were not composed of the same substance as he, but were made of a purer material, an elemental, a more primitive, substance lacking his heaviness, his density. of being. Something far older than he. As if their being was composed of a single unbroken thread, linking them to the springs of time, to the original source of being itself. He visualised this link as a continuous shining strand of existence through which the songs of the ancestors found an unimpeded passage.

  How could the ancestors call to him? There was his divine Western dimorphism. The presence of his father in him. There was the West in him. His line was broken. He was broken. A part of him was displaced. He had become detached from the beginning. There was the vast tract of land he must always consider, and there were the oceans and the islands, there was the World and experience that lay between China and the shores of that mythical country from which his father claimed his own doubtful descent: Australia. A name. A word for a place no one had ever visited. Even Doctor Spiess knew no one who had been there. Did such a place as Australia really exist? Was there a headland rising abruptly out of an empty ocean signifying its beginning?

  Until the return of Lien and Huang, he boarded in the care of the second gatekeeper’s daughter-in-law. A room had been prepared for him in the quarters of this family, who had served the Huangs faithfully for generations. The old man’s son had been killed fighting the Japanese. But his daughter-in-law had given him two grandsons, Shu and Shin. Shu was seven and Shin was nine. Both boys possessed long sad faces, which had nothing to do with their grief at losing their father, even though in this particular feature they resembled their grandfather.

  On the second day they permitted Lang to join their favourite game of the moment, which was the conflict between the Communists and the army. Lang was distracted from his suffering and loneliness at once by the bloodthirsty nature of this game, and he decided, as soon as the rules were explained to him, that he would take the part of the Generalissimo himself. Though forbidden till this day to play such brutal games, Lang required no further coaching. The territory was familiar to him the moment he entered it. In the dust by the second gateway, wearing white gloves and a grey cloak which fastened at his throat and fell straight from his shoulders to his heels, he thoughtfully inscribed his strategy with a long golden sliver of bamboo. Then he disposed his forces around him. Shu and Shin were abashed and looked more glum than usual. The game, it seemed, was more serious than they had realised. Lang was not merely to be their playmate, he was to be their master. They had generously offered to share their brotherhood with him, and he had responded by taking their liberty. He did not wish to be their brother. They were rebuffed. They dared not complain.

  Lang ordered the little red gateway to be opened. The theatre of operations was to be extended. It was forbidden for the boys to play outside the courtyard. This day they watched their grandfather hurry to open the gate for Feng’s son. Lang told them to wait, and he went out and stood in the road. On his own he began to feel there was a kind of power in his grieving solitude, a kind of exaltation raising him above the level of other people. He saw that there was something beautiful and sad about his condition. He felt it in the way the others observed him from a distance. He gazed along the road towards the wooded hills. He would let his mother see this new quality of his life when she returned. To shame her and make her sorry, he would display it to her, the way certain scholars displayed their erudition to shame their competitors. He would let her see how lonely and sad and changed he was. From the far side of the road the toffee apple man stared past him. Fetch Yu, he called to Shin. And when Yu came to the gateway, Let us each have a toffee apple.

  The toffee apple vendor arrived as it was getting light each morning and stood against the wall across the street from the second entrance until it grew dark. In each hand he held a bamboo pole with dozens of holes in it, and into each hole he placed the stick of a toffee apple, until the poles bristled with the candied fruit like toy trees. He didn’t call his wares but waited silently, his lacquered apples shining and glinting and easily visibl
e from one end of the dusty street to the other. Few people passed along this road, and quite often he had sold no toffee apples by the time the sun went down. But whether business promised to be good or bad he came each day and he waited. It was his place. He was like a spider waiting at the centre of her sticky web in a lonely corner of the woods. Sooner or later, if not today then tomorrow, someone would stop and purchase a toffee apple from him. Today he sold three. His expression did not change. It was all the same to him.

  During the days that Lien and Huang were away, Lang did no study, but played all day with Shu and Shin. Taking their cue from his behaviour, the servants decided that it was a kind of unofficial festival time, and they also did hardly any work. Some of them even took this opportunity to go off and visit their relatives. Yu sat in the sun against the wall of the storehouse every day and smoked cigarettes and dozed and gossiped with the daughter-in-law and the gatekeeper. Every so often he looked up and checked on Lang to see that all was well with him and his two playmates.

  Four days after Lien and Huang left to visit the shrine of their ancestors the household once again assembled formally in the principal courtyard and waited for Feng’s black car to appear round the corner. Once more Lang stood alone, dressed in his green silk gown.

  He was trembling. He had not expected to feel so upset. He wondered if she had changed. Might she have partly forgotten him? He didn’t think of his resolve to show her how sad and lonely his life had become. He watched the car come through the gates and turn slowly and come to a halt in front of him. His mother’s face gazed at him through the window. He had ceased to breathe. As she stepped from the car he ran forward and clung to her and sobbed and begged her never to leave him again. This was not how he had pictured himself behaving on her return.

  Huang, who appeared refreshed and in a confident mood, gazed upon this unseemly public display of emotion with serene detachment, which the observant members of his household rightly interpreted as a sign of his profound displeasure. He, they saw to their delight, was the one who had changed. He had regained his self-assurance. He was, it appeared, going to forget all about his past eccentricities and pretend from now on that he had always been an orthodox Chinese gentleman. Shu and Shin looked mournfully at each other and giggled, gratified to be the witnesses of Lang’s disgrace.