The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  But no trumpets sounded and no one came. And he rode on from street to street for an hour or more without meeting a single human being. At last he abandoned the middle of the road and reined in at the open doors of a hostelry. His friendly hail to the innkeeper brought no response, so he leaned from his horse and looked in to the interior. All appeared to be in order. The glow of charcoal fires reddened the sides of a row of iron braziers, and blue and white bowls of steaming rice were set ready for hungry travellers upon a freshly scrubbed table. Hot vapours billowed from the cauldrons and the ovens and there was a delicious smell of roasting pork. Lang called again. But again received no answer. Indeed, the echo of his voice, like the echo of his horse’s iron shoes, seemed to him to be unnaturally magnified in the silence, almost, indeed, as if the stones mimicked him.

  All day he rode about the fine town, calling out and searching in vain for someone to whom he could make known his name. When at last the sun was setting, the low orange-tinted clouds casting a fiery glow over the buildings, and a keen wind had begun to blow through the alleys and along the boulevards, he entered a deserted square. He had not seen this place before and wondered how he could have missed it. On the far side of the square the lofty granite walls of a castle proclaimed the residence of the military governor. And standing proudly in the centre of the square was the only human likeness Lang had seen all day. It was an equestrian statue of noble proportions, cast in bronze and set upon a marble plinth. Eager to discover what important person was represented here by this mounted figure, Lang spurred his horse towards it. On reaching the statue he saw at once that the towering bronze was a likeness of himself and his horse. He circled the statue, searching in vain for an inscription on the plinth. But no gilded script celebrated his name and noble lineage in chiselled stone. The statue was as mute in respect to an acknowledgment of him as was the town itself.

  Determined to rouse the governor and to receive from him the princely welcome that was his due, Lang rode up to the stout gates of the fortress and, drawing his sword, hammered on the wood with the pommel. A deep booming, like distant thunder, rolled back and forth within the fortress each time he struck the heavy baulk of timber. Never had a place sounded so empty, so uninhabited and so desolate as this. Dismayed, he knew at once there could be no friends, no hope and no encouragement within. He knew, at last, that there was no one here to greet him, or to whom he might make himself known. Fighting back despair he struck the gates with the blade of his sword. Sparks flew from the iron rivets and his horse shied in fear.

  Why are you riding about the place making this terrible din and waving that sword around, as if you expect to have to fight someone any minute? The voice was that of an old woman. Its tone was contemptuous. When even the most slow-witted stranger, the voice continued, can surely see that we’ve been at peace here for ever. What a fool you must be!

  Lang was surprised to see a tall figure dressed in a long cloak standing in the shadow of his statue. He sheathed his sword and greeted her, apologising generously for not noticing her sooner. I am delighted to meet you, he said, for it seemed to him that where there was one person, no matter how poor and unimportant, there were likely to be others. He felt greatly relieved and was on the point of asking the woman where everyone had gone, when she came towards him.

  She appeared to be in no way awed by his mounted superiority and princely bearing, but laughed and gestured threateningly at his horse, making it shy so violently that Lang was very nearly thrown to the ground. As it was, one of his stirrups flew up and struck him a sharp blow on the knee, making him cry out from pain.

  Well! the advancing woman shouted at him, throwing back her cloak and revealing her nakedness, slashing the air just before the horse’s nostrils with her whistling bamboo, and laughing mockingly. Have you lost your tongue? Now that you’ve found me, don’t you want to tell me your name? She challenged him, Tell aunty your name boy! And she danced nimbly from one side of his horse to the other, jabbing it in its sensitive flanks and haunches with her sharpened bamboo.

  Lang fought to control his terrified horse and he opened his mouth to shout his name aloud. But he did not know his name. He had forgotten it. His mouth remained open but no sound came from it. He searched in the darkness of his memory, but he could not find his name there. It was gone. No hint of it remained.

  His horse reared high on its hind legs and retreated in terror from the old woman’s stick, and she continued to press her advance upon them steadily, crying all the while, They’ve stolen your name! They’ve stolen your name! Over and over again, as if it were the greatest joke she had ever heard. Then, as unexpectedly as she had appeared, the woman ceased her attack and turned and walked away into the gathering night.

  Lang galloped after her and placed himself in her path and drew his sword and demanded, Tell me at once who it is that has stolen my name or I shall cut you down. But all he heard in reply was the barking echo of his own question, flung mockingly from building to building around the vast empty square, and all he saw was his own shadow before him, gesturing at him upon the equestrian statue, and sweetly in the air about him he smelled the odour of old men and the ancestors, and he knew at once that he was in his own tomb, and had been greeted by Shinje, the Lord of Death herself, the only other inhabitant of the place.

  Clutching the sword beneath his gown, and with the disgusting smell of his grandfather’s bedroom still tingling in his nostrils, Lang emerged from the darkness of the storehouse into the bright sunlight of the courtyard of the little red doorway. He paused and looked about him, and he noted that the servants were considering him warily. It is as well for them that they do so, he thought, for I am master here now. Aside from this undercurrent of anxiety, the courtyard had a normal busy morning feel about it. Behind him, within the shadows of the storeroom, the straw rustled beneath the bare feet of Shu and Shin, who waited nervously. Lang continued to observe the activity in the courtyard.

  He knew the journey had begun, his travelling, his campaign, his going from one place to another, and he knew that it would only be halted again by death. He was determined not to let anyone see how afraid he was. Lang Tzu, he whispered, saying aloud to himself the name his worldly friend, August Spiess, had given him on the day of his birth.

  Let us go then, he said to the brothers, and sit over there under the roof of the second gateway and consider our strategy for the game. But still he did not move. He was not certain yet what he would tell them. Not everything, to be sure. He turned and faced them, placing his hand on his diaphragm, where the pommel of the sword pressed into him, and he said, First we shall each swear on this blade an oath of loyalty to the others, and shall promise to keep our secrets no matter what. The brothers’ eyes were lucid and dark, uncomplicated and afraid in the shadows under the eaves of the storehouse.

  That night Lang did not sleep in the room at the gatekeeper’s but returned to his own bed in the empty quarter of the house. He felt alone and thought he could hear strange noises in the garden. But his newly acquired dignity would no longer permit him to sleep at the gatekeeper’s. And anyway, he didn’t want to go back there. Having crossed one boundary, it seemed it was necessary to cross other, even more dangerous, boundaries. He couldn’t go back. Evidence previously invisible was becoming visible. Possibilities, he foresaw, might prove to be limitless. A method, indeed a critical method, was needed to deal with them. But he had no method. Evidence for hitherto undreamed of possibilities was mounting up in an unsorted heap around him. Interpretation was vital if he was not soon to be overwhelmed by the accumulation of indiscriminate detail.

  As he lay there, unsleeping and for the first time alone, startled by the familiar screech of the night heron, he felt more and more beleaguered and confused, until at last he found he had retreated in his thoughts, without consciously thinking about it, to the only place where he ever truly felt at home – on the train. Travelling between Shanghai and Hangzhou, a journey he had made hundreds of times, snug a
nd secure and alone with his mother in their private compartment, he was in the only place he had ever been able to call his own.

  His first memory in life was of the flat countryside south of Shanghai passing slowly before his gaze. With his nose pressed hard against the cold glass, knowing his mother was sitting just behind him reading or writing letters, he watched the fields going by, and the two-storey houses of the wealthy farmers and the peasants walking along the rows of cabbages ladling nutrients from their earthenware jars, and the dark invisible sound of the train’s whistle drawing them on towards the southern hills. In the warm comfortable privacy of the compartment with his mother, beyond the reach of his dangerous father and not yet confined within the encircling walls of his grandfather’s house, somewhere between the painful contradictions of his Western life in Shanghai and his Chinese life in Hangzhou, there he had always felt truly at ease and secure and happy. Travelling, he and his mother had belonged to each other, and to themselves.

  The voice which now matter-of-factly informed him that being at home while travelling was merely another aspect of the precious gift of dimorphism, of his lang tsze-ness, was that of his friend August Spiess, his ally and his teacher, who by his own unexampled persistence in the extraterritorial region of the International Settlement demonstrated that nothing can be one thing without partaking of its opposite; the steady wisdom of the doctor, who belonged in no particular place himself, rescued Lang once again from confusion, and probable defeat. Boundaries, the doctor continued, pacing to and fro in front of the windows and pausing every now and then to gaze at the traffic on the river and to shake his head in wonderment at the industry of humankind, exist to be transgressed, they are there to facilitate crossings, not to frustrate them. It is not, he went on, fingering lovingly the worn pages of his precious volume of Goethe, in those places whose exact frontiers have already been defined for us, but in the regions of uncertainty where definitions have yet to be located, that we must find our place.

  The transgression of boundaries is my established custom, Lang thought to himself, feeling certain that he had been the recipient of a revelation of inestimable value. I am an adept. There is no one better fitted than I to destroy the stronghold of the ancestors, those dead who will not die but who persist in asserting an influence upon the living.

  He knew now that it must be the boundary between the living and the dead that he had to deal with next, and that his visit into his own hinterland, into his tomb, where he had gone on his supernatural horse, his making visible to himself a truth that was not to be discovered in the objective facts of his history, his forward patrol, his simple little fiction, had been but a necessary preparation, a hardening of his resolve, for this journey into the vast shadowy province where his mother had been lured by his spellbound grandfather, the place where gods, ghosts, ancestors and innumerable other forms of phantoms and uncategorised demons met the living face to face.

  Before he went to sleep, when the dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky over the hills and the air had grown suddenly colder, Lang knew what he must do. He wished there had been some way, before he actually did it, for him to tell Doctor Spiess.

  A preliminary reconnoitre revealed Yu dozing in the sun against the wall of the storehouse, trying to keep out of the biting wind that had sprung up. The gatekeeper and his daughter-in-law, the mother of Shu and Shin, were occupied at the gate with a vegetable seller.

  Urging the boys to keep up, Lang hurried through the house. At the south end of the gallery he posted Shu and instructed him to screech like a shrike if he should see Yu coming. Shin he posted outside the door of his grandfather’s study.

  Lang went in alone. A thin trace of the smell of old men and the ancestors lingered in the undisturbed air. He realised he had lived with the smell all his life, the way the zookeeper in his house must live with the smell of the animals, even when he is eating his evening meal. Lang swallowed and cleared his throat.

  Below the bookshelves, next to the cupboard in which the precious collection of teas was kept, the assortment of boxes labelled with his mother’s familiar script and lined up in order according to the qualities of their contents, there was a second cupboard.

  Lang knelt on the cold flagstones and opened this second cupboard. Two large drawers filled the space behind the door. Each drawer had a plain bronze handle. He pulled the lower drawer until it caught and was prevented by something from coming out any further. He reached in to the drawer and pressed upward against a lightly sprung board at the back. The drawer was released at once and slid out easily the rest of the way. He laid it aside on the flagstones. Now he reached his arm into the deep cavity left by the drawer, a cavity deeper than the drawer itself which, on being removed, had proved to be twenty centimetres or so short of the full depth of the cupboard. With difficulty, owing to its bulk and weight, he withdrew a bundle from this secret place and laid it on the flagstones before him.

  The bundle, which contained Huang’s book of the ancestors, was wrapped in white Hangzhou silk and was tied with a ribbon that had also once been white, but which had become stained and dull and frayed with age.

  For some minutes he knelt there staring at the bundle, half-hoping he might shortly hear Shu’s warning screech and be prevented from having to go through with it. Would Doctor Spiess have scorned his fears as empty superstition? Would the doctor have possessed the power to dispel this cowardly disquiet?

  Like butterflies blown into the shelter of the garden by the fierce wind, small stray sounds from the outside world floated over the wall and entered the study. Lang’s attention was drawn to them: a street vendor calling his dried fish, the wheels of a cart crunching the gravel, and then, far away in the distance a steam train crossing the iron spans of the Qiantang Bridge blew its whistle, one beseeching cry that made Lang long to be safely on board.

  The shrike did not screech.

  As if the hands that did it were not his own, Lang watched his fingers struggle with the unfamiliar knot that held the ribbon in place.

  Bent close and scarcely breathing, he parted the silk and let it slip from the bundle. He started back with fright. A face had gazed at him from deep within the uncertain depths of the bronze cosmic mirror of the Huangs. He had forgotten the mirror guarded the book. He was so startled to see the blurry features staring at him that he did not immediately recognise them as his own. One pale eye gazed through him with a kind of blind inward and immortal sight, as if it observed him unfeelingly from a remote place and time. The lips were thick and purplish and were parted stupidly. He did not dare to look again. Was this the face of his father, after all, gazing at him mockingly from within the citadel of the Huangs? Could that possibly be? He experienced the shock of a paradoxical enlightening misunderstanding: Are all fathers, all ancestors, one?

  The specular impression arose and was dispelled within the second or two that was required for him to register the fact that it had been his own reflection he had glimpsed in Huang’s ancestral mirror, and not a supernatural projection of his father. He remembered being told by Yu that a brother of Huang’s had once looked into the mirror many years ago and had discovered that his face was not reflected there. Shortly after this the brother had died. The mirror was a powerful conduit for the supernatural. It had been with the family of the scholar since the Tang dynasty mirror master had cast it for his ancestors in the eighth century.Its interior, within which the mysterious reflections were held, was the antechamber to the signs within the book. The mirror was the residence of the ever-changing image behind the script. Lang recalled Zhuang Zhu’s familiar lines: The mind of the sage perfectly calm, like untroubled water, is like a mirror which reflects heaven and earth and all beings As with all such cosmic mirrors of any significance, this one, Lang knew, possessed the power to reveal not only such things as infidelities and the causes of sickness, but also contained within the cunning harmonies of its light and shade the more disquieting power to show the true form of those beings who dwel
t within the borderland between the living and the dead.

  Taking elaborate care not to catch a further glimpse of his face in it, Lang turned the mirror over and laid it aside on the silk. The back of the eight-lobed bronze was decorated in relief with the representation of two other-worldly birds and with eight entwining bouquets of vineleaves. The two phoenixes con fronted each other, portrayed in sensuous, undulating movements, engaged upon either the ritual of courtship or in preparation for battle.

  Lang wrapped the mirror carefully in the silk, and then he reached for the heavy volume, his hands small and smooth and seemingly too delicate to possess sufficient strength to lift the great book.

  Three days passed before he found an opportunity to carry out the next, far more dangerous, phase of his plan. He had begun to grow anxious that he would not be able to have done with it before his mother and grandfather returned, when a fortunate change in the weather occurred. The day before Huang and Lien were due back from the shrine at Nankangfu a terrific storm broke over the lake and sent Yu and the other servants scurrying inside, where they stayed. This was the opportunity Lang had been waiting for.

  Lashed by the rain and buffeted by the gale and scared half to death by the cracking lightning that broke loose from the black clouds above them, Lang and Shin slipped out through the little red gateway. Shu ran and secured the gate from the inside. He was to remain behind and to open it for them at a prearranged signal when they returned.

  Once outside the walls of Huang’s house there was no need for Lang to urge Shin to keep up with him. The terrified brother stuck so close they very nearly tripped each other as they ran along the road. There was no one about. Everyone had sought shelter from the storm – everyone, that is, except the toffee apple man, who stood at his pitch, unmoved by the downpour, gazing absently before him. Lang felt himself observed by the vendor.