The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  You are unnamed and must therefore go unrecognised in China. You are literally un-familiar here. But in Australia, which is I believe a kind of phantom country lying invisibly somewhere between the West and the East, you may find a few of your own displaced and hybrid kin to welcome you. China is not the place for you. I’ve known it ever since your birth. In this one instance, though he doesn’t understand your purpose and would have no sympathy for it if he did understand it, I’m with your father and against your mother. If you really are determined to be an artist, Lang, then Australia is the very best place for you. I couldn’t recommend anywhere more highly. There’s nowhere better. You’ll be able to imagine it into being for yourself. You’ll be able to make it visible. Think of that! You couldn’t do that with Paris or Berlin or London, now could you? Or even with Hamburg. There must be plenty of work for artists to do in such an uncertain place as Australia. No end of it, I’m sure.

  A sound behind him interrupted this half-recollected and half-imagined conversation with his friend and Lang turned from the window to see who had come in to the room. His father was standing in the lighted doorway to the hall. Feng was just standing there, not moving, silhouetted against the streaming electric light from the hall, as if he had not yet quite made up his mind whether he would come into the room or would continue on his way without speaking.

  Lang waited. He might have been waiting for the thunder after lightning, counting the seconds, measuring the distance from himself to the centre of the storm. The thump of the Japanese naval guns continued at intervals to transmit a delicate tremor through his body, as if this were their principal purpose and death and destruction merely incidental side effects, consequences too remote to be bothered with. Normality squeezed itself into the intervals between each salvo, the foghorns of lighters and merchantmen on the river taking up the echoing spaces.

  Waiting, he became conscious of the smell of coalsmoke. The smell of coalsmoke lingered everywhere in Shanghai. It could not be kept out of even the most sequestered European salon. From his earliest years, the smell of coalsmoke had been the smell of Shanghai and of his father’s dangerous world. Arriving at the busy railway station, returning from the jasmine-perfumed air of Hangzhou, the smell of coalsmoke had always greeted them. It had subdued their spirits and silenced them as they stepped from the train, their little journey together in the precious seclusion of the compartment over, Feng’s respectful watchful Russian waiting for them beside the Pontiac. They no longer belonged to themselves. Coalsmoke was the permeating breath of a dark clamorous world of heavy industry and war, a world, ironically enough, in which the ancestors had lost their sovereignty long ago. There was no debate on that. It was an iron world in which ghosts had no place. His father, the ‘enemy’ whose attentions he was forever trying to evade, was a kind of prince in this world.

  As his father started towards him now from the doorway, it was not simply a man, or a parent, whom Lang saw striding with decisive steps through the coppery light, it was a kind of legendary being possessed of an absolute authority to dispose of and to direct his life. Feng, the Third Phoenix, the old enemy.

  Lang held his arms straight and close to his sides, his thumbs brushing the worsted nap of his trousers, his fists clenched. He knew he had been seen, had been selected now, and was no longer to be overlooked, but was to be set on that path designed to make of him the Fourth Feng. That was the reality he would dispute. He thought of his mother as he had seen her this morning, restless and sad and ill in the next room, grieving for her father and for Yu and for all she had lost of China, and he knew there could be no help for him from her. The Japanese guns bellowed and recoiled and the flash lit up the sky. He felt the tremor pass through his bowels.

  The black weave of his father’s coat brushed against him as Feng leaned to look out of the window. Feng made a noise in his throat, as if he detected something of particular interest out there in the smouldering light, something detailed and observable among the wallowing structures of the city. Or it could have been that he made a judgement on what he saw. I thought you might have been able to see the American flagship from here, he said, as if he felt the need to give a reason for coming into the room and looking out of the window.

  The grey ships passed slowly up and down through the iron gloom as if they were not real now, at this moment, but were impressions from voyages made long ago, offsettings on the memory of the river, like the engravings of the parts of the human body that had left their ghostly imprints on the facing pages in Doctor Spiess’s anatomy books.

  You can see the Augusta from the roof, Feng said and turned. Have you been on the roof?

  They looked at each other.

  No sir.

  Well come on then, Feng said impatiently, leading the way. It’s time you joined us up there.

  Lang followed his father. All civilised people know there is Heaven and there is Hell, the blind storyteller had said, but he had not revealed how to distinguish one from the other.

  THE LOVERS

  FROM THE JOURNALS OF DOCTOR AUGUST SPIESS,

  TRANSIATFD FROM THE GERMAN BY HIS DAUGHTER, GERTRUDE SPIESS:

  MELBOURNE 1968

  The Esplanade, St Kilda, 1 December 1937 For certain people exile is the only tolerable condition. For these people, to be in exile is to be at home. But how is one supposed to understand this? I have reached the age of sixty without having yet decided whether I may safely assume a complexity in others as capricious as the grounds upon which I base my own actions, or whether I might consider others to be constant to some permanent arrangement of preferences about what they want from life. The ‘truth’, I suppose. What they believe to be the truth, at any rate. Their basis for action.

  I have discovered motives, my own and everyone else’s, to be impenetrable. Terrifying possibilities at times flicker across my mind, like faint and mysterious messages transmitted long ago from a remote region of the interior, where a great battle has been being waged day and night for centuries, possibly for ever. These messages flutter into my brain like exhausted doves returning to the dovecote. I fear I may not decipher them for years, or never. Are they cries for my assistance? What are they?

  Whenever I feel this uncomprehending fluttering in my brain, I know that a loss of detail and incident will shortly follow it. That I shall experience an opening up, an incredible clarity of mind enabling me to see with disturbing lucidity far into the vast oceanic depths of eternity, to see into that by which we are encompassed, as if I stand on the brink. And in this undistracted state of mind, that I will see there is nothing in those depths. That there is no outcrop of facts or feelings to which I am safely anchored. That I shall see, in other words, that there is nothing there. Which is, of course, to propose that there is nothing here either. That, indeed, there is nothing. That there is only nothingness. Vacuity. Space unoccupied. Space, no matter how richly charged with metaphor, not even booming faintly with the music of the spheres, nor resounding eerily to mysterious mantic chants. But an unechoing infinity in which here is exactly equal to there and the one has cancelled out the other. A pressure mounted against my eardrums rendering me deaf to all messages. A tension within my skull rendering me insensible to productive thought. In this state of mind, what am I able to call into being but despair?

  Is it despair? Does one call it by that name? Does one search the holy scriptures, as my dear father would and say, This is that which the writer of Ecclesiastes spoke of when he wrote, Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labour which I took under the sun? Or does one assume the cold and diagnostic mode and find through lengthy scientific enquiry that a parasitic amoeba inhabits one and drains one of the will to live?

  Under the influence of this condition of mind I know myself to be detached from the strivings of the rest of humanity. Under its influence I could not muster the will to pilot a ship against the current of the mighty Whangpu River, or even into this tideless port of Melbourne, but would let it drift
. Under the influence of this mood I am dislodged from the continuum of past and future. I do not care. I am rejected, even, as unworthy by the fastidious hand of Providence. Under the (blessedly temporary) shackles of this mood I am a solitary being whose endeavours are unrelated to the fulfilment of the world’s ancestral dreams. I call nothing into being, indeed nothingness. I am a being without meaning. I am set aside from the great project. And, anguished beyond belief, I ask myself, why should this be? And I have no answer.

  Then, when I am miraculously cured, the terrible question ceases to bother me. I wake in the morning and smell roasting coffee beans and see the sun sparkling on the little waves in the blue bay beyond my window and I am redeemed, the foolishness of the night forgotten.

  Before I go out to the cafe this morning to drink coffee and to search the newspapers for some reference to how the war is going in China, I must insist that no interpretation of history can fail to reflect the condition of mind, as well as the state of knowledge, of the person who proposes it, whether that historian is sick and bitter and bewildered by the way life has dealt with him, or whether he is filled with hope for the future and emboldened in his judgements by the validations of earlier successes. The true facts of history, then, what are these? What can they possibly be? Before I walk along the esplanade this morning on my way to drink coffee and to read the newspapers, I must insist that all histories are nothing more than mere fictions. In that case, however, and how much less palatable this possibility is to me, might not all our wonderful fictions be nothing more than mere histories? God forbid that Werther and Lotte should turn out to have been only real after all! To live in a world without histories is one thing, but who would wish to endure in a world without fictions?

  The Esplanade, St Kilda, 15 December 1937 I brought an armful of books to the drawing room on the first floor of Feng’s splendid villa every Wednesday before lunch, and we sat together at the circular Italian table with its intarsia scenes of hunting and we studied German poetry and history and discoursed upon the anxieties besetting his life. After his return to Shanghai from Hangzhou, with his mother, in June, after their final retreat from that troubled redoubt of Classical values, we made little progress with his schooling. His state of mind was often so knotted and confused that I could not offer to answer his questions but could only sit in silence and squeeze his hand in mine and wonder at the fate of this boy, who seemed destined to become the loneliest man on this earth. Madame Feng entered the darkening room one afternoon, for we had not bothered to put on the lights, and found us thus, holding hands and sitting without speaking in the gloom, given over to our state of deep reflection. You are like lovers, she said, contemplating us from the doorway and not putting on the light or coming into the room, as though she feared to approach too close to us, in case she should confirm for herself that we were no longer quite of her world. And after that, and always with a kind of sad, amused irony, she referred to Lang and me as ‘the lovers’. She told her maid, They sit together in the dark whispering philosophical secrets to each other. I observed her fade and withdraw and become increasingly detached as she saw that she could not follow us into the reality we had begun to construct for ourselves. Hangzhou was destroyed and Shanghai was burning. The end of China’s history had arrived. She delivered him into my hands and from then on faced her own future with a kind of bitter amusement.

  He begged me not to continue my dangerous work at the front in the Chinese city. You don’t care for me as much as you care for those wounded peasants! he accused me one day when I was preparing to leave. And when I refused him he became hysterical and dragged at my clothes and screamed at me that I didn’t really care for him. So I didn’t go into the city that day but remained with him. And when I’d calmed him and promised him that I would never abandon him, hugging him tightly to my chest and telling him again and again, and close to tears myself, that he was more precious to me than if he had been my own son, in order that he might understand why I went up to the front line and did what I could for the wounded, I recounted to him the story of my beating and its sequel.

  When I left your maternal grandfather’s house in Hangzhou and set off alone in search of the Sung kilns of Fenghuang Hill, leaving behind me my uneasy audience in the principal courtyard, you were a baby, not more than a month old, I said. And I told him how the Communist students had attacked me and how I had been saved by his mother, who had arrived with the Russian chauffeur in the Pontiac.

  Several months after I’d returned to Shanghai, one day when I wasn’t thinking about the incident on Fenghuang Hill but was busy with patients in my surgery, your father came to see me. He had never come to my surgery unannounced before, so I knew something extraordinary must have happened. He was very grave and serious but a bit excited too, as if he were impatient to let me in on a great surprise. He asked me to go with him at once. He would not tell me where we were going. When the car turned in to Guizhou Road and I saw the Laozha Police Station ahead, however, I began to fear the worst. We drove in through the gates of the station, which stood wide open. It was obvious we were expected, for the Municipal Chief of Police, Alistair McKenzie, who was a friend of your father’s and of mine also, was waiting for us. Without a word of greeting, he took me by the arm and led me to the cells at the rear of this grim building. In the open, against the far wall of a small courtyard, there was an iron cage. In the cage were a dozen young men and women. They were naked. They had been horribly beaten and tortured and some were unable to stand without the support of the others.

  As Alistair and your father and I came out on to the little verandah outside the guardhouse the young men and women in the cage turned and looked at me. They did not speak or make any sound, but just looked at me. The policemen who were guarding them made various humiliating comments, but the prisoners didn’t seem to hear. Alistair pressed my arm and said, Here are your assassins, August.

  One by one, as I watched, the prisoners were taken from the cage and shot.

  For twenty blissful years I had lived as if the condition of extraterritoriality were a kind of literary conceit. A literary conceit which had, by the most magical accident of cultural displacement and imagination, by a unique conjunction of sublime European wit and the colonising instinct, become a reality. We seemed to live as people outside history. Each one of us an actor who wrote his or her own lines as the play progressed. We were not ordinary human beings but a privileged community situated among the stars, inhabitants of the empyrean. We were gods who dwelt in the sphere of purest fire. Life was all imagination to me. I was drunk on it for twenty years. I spent my time at dinner parties and at the races gazing at my fellow extraterritorials with a kind of muted adoration, as if they moved in a story which I told myself.

  After Fenghuang Hill and Laozha Police Station I saw that we were a part of the tragic history of China. And I could stand apart from it no longer. My beautiful illusion of a civilisation that floated in a kind of detached element of imaginative zeal was shattered. It fell to pieces and I knew it could never be put together again.

  Lang, who had been sitting in my lap all the while I was telling this story, jumped up and strode over to one of the tall windows, where he stood looking out and saying nothing. What is the matter? I asked him. In an unpleasantly forthright manner that was brutal and which shocked and hurt me, he replied, Why don’t you just go back to Hamburg then?

  I have to admit that what follows is an imaginary conversation. I regret that it never really took place. It is a discourse that made its progress through my mind later. I was distressed by the manner of Lang’s question and for the moment could think of no reply to him. It was not an unfamiliar question to me, but I had never imagined that he, of all people, would ask it of me. I suppose, really, this is one of those so-called conversations which can never really take place because they do not belong to present reality but belong to our reflections on reality, to our speculations, in the strict sense, as to what reality might be. I suppose, in t
ruth, it must be admitted that what follows is a literary conversation.

  When I was a boy growing up in Hamburg, I said, I believed that one day I was to become a playwright. Doesn’t every young person secretly cherish some impractical ideal concerning their future. My father would have disapproved of this ambition so I never disclosed it to him. I used to go about secretly imagining what it would be like for me when I was grown up and had become a famous Hamburg playwright. Of course, if it was to be congenial to me as a successful playwright, then the Hamburg of my imaginary future could have no place in it for my father. I had to tamper with reality, therefore, in order to contemplate my solemn and romantic destiny with pleasure. I gazed upon the future guiltily and in secret, like a voyeur gazing upon the scene of the crime he plans to execute. I loved my father, indeed I still love him, and I did not like the fact that I was required to remove him from the scene in order to enjoy my future. Yet I was unable to resist the allure of this peculiar freedom nevertheless.

  It was a landscape that I looked upon. It was a magical landscape which waited for me to enter it. I perceived it then, of course, not as a sexual landscape, but as a painting by Claude Lorrain, as indeed the enigmatic landscape of metaphor. I was familiar with the paintings of Claude and knew him to have been the very first European artist to have applied his talents entirely to landscape paintings. I knew, what is more, that he had hired other artists to paint the figures into his otherwise completed pictures. There, go ahead and do what you like with this place I have created, Claude seemed to say to me. So I accepted his invitation and painted myself in. I had also learned from my tutor, a minor Prussian nobleman who was a fierce defender of something which he called the irrepressible genius of the Germanic soul, that while the French venerated Claude alongside Poussin as one of the very best of their artists, in reality, historically so to speak according to my tutor, Claude had actually been a German who had imagined into being the ideal landscape for the German soul to take up its residence in. My tutor justified his opinion concerning Claude’s nationality by pointing out that Lorrain was part of the Empire when Claude was born, and that furthermore, Claude had been unable to speak more than a word or two of French and had done no work in France but had spent his entire working life in Italy. The Prussian’s arguments did not convince me that Claude was a German but rather that he had not belonged anywhere in particular.