The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  In his peculiar detachment from any real place I sensed in Claude a spirit close to my own ideal. He painted landscapes which were the dwelling places not of his fellow citizens, of whatever country, but of gods. He was what my father called a Stimmungsmaler, a painter of moods, a painter whose scenes play upon the open mind of the onlooker. A painter of pictures which invite the onlooker to inhabit them himself. A painter, indeed, of landscapes of the mind, lit by a golden Italian sun and veiled in the mists of a northern vision. They are pictures of no real place. As one stands before a painting by Claude, the hero in the picture is not Juno or Proserpina, but is oneself. The temple in the middle distance is a shrine dedicated not to a god of the Classical pantheon, a god of one’s remote ancestors, but to the worship of oneself, to the worship of the god within oneself, the god by means of whose powers one imagines oneself into being. When I was a boy it seemed to me that all I had to do to fulfil my most secret and cherished dreams was to accept the invitation to become the heroic figure in my own Claudean landscape. This I did and have not undone till now.

  I have often been asked, my dear Lang (I went on in my imaginary conversation), and quite as rudely as you asked me a moment ago, why I have not returned to Hamburg. The enquiry has usually implied that my interlocutor believed I ought to return there. In response to this rhetorical insistence that I don’t belong, I have usually replied with the very first thing that came into my head. I am not known for my wit and have never striven for irony. Oh well, I have usually cried cheerfully, in response to this question, I shall you know. I probably shall, just wait and see. Something like that. Anything at all. A more elaborate lie only if I’ve been pressed. The more hard-pressed the deeper the lie. But never, before this, have I replied with the truth. I have never confessed to anyone until this moment, in which I freely confess it to you, that for more than twenty years the International Settlement has been for me the Claudean landscape of my youthful dreams.

  That, then, was the imaginary conversation which never actually took place. What really happened was the following. When he asked me why I did not return to Hamburg, I replied superciliously that there were a number of reasons but I did not care to discuss them with him just then. And I at once insisted that if 1 were not going into the Chinese city, then we should get on with some real work for a change and not waste any more of each other’s time. I got up and switched on the light and opened our book and ordered him, in a schoolmasterish tone, to translate after me Peter Hebel’s Auf den Tod eines Zechers, knowing full well that he would be completely at a loss with Hebel’s Alemannic dialect.

  I walked up and down the room with the book open in my hands and listened to his hopeless attempt to make some sense of the poem. Then I confronted him across the table and said spitefully, On the Death of a Drunkard, my dear Lang. Is that clear? Auf den Tod eines Zechers, never forget it! ‘They have just buried a man I knew, it is a pity about his special gifts. Search as you will to find another like him, he is gone, you will never find one.’ It is a memorial, my dear boy, to a man who wasted his life. And I placed the book on the table before him and with a disdainful emphasis I said, Have the poem translated for your next lesson. Then I left him. And as I walked home through the streets, in mitigation of my cruelty I began my imaginary conversation with him.

  Before the middle of November the battle for Shanghai was over. The great city and its industry was a smoking ruin. We had not seen the sun for months for the pall that lay over us. The Settlement was crammed with more than a million starving and wounded Chinese seeking refuge from the Japanese. The streets everywhere were crowded with them day and night. They lay against the wall of Feng’s villa when I arrived in the mornings. Through his great influence with the Japanese, Feng made arrangements for Lang and me to get away from the stricken port on the SS Wangaratta, which was one of the last ships they permitted to leave.

  After three months of uninterrupted bombing and shelling, Shanghai was eerily silent during these days. We talked in low voices. We were more on edge than we had been during the height of the fighting, when we had often been forced to shout in order to be heard. It was as if men waited now for the judgement of God on their fierce proceedings. Even the metaphysically inspired General Sugiyama was subdued. After generations of plotting and dreaming, the prospect of the total success of their plan to conquer China seemed to daze the Japanese. During the first moments of silence after the battle they did not dare to whisper the word victory in case God should answer them with another word.

  It was only three days to our departure. Madame Feng’s appearance during this time reminded me of the Chinese officers I had seen who had been captured and were being held in compounds by the Japanese. I thought her exhausted and thoroughly demoralised by the completeness of her defeat. She had succumbed once again to a recurrent infection which has troubled her since Lang’s damaging birth, so I saw a good deal of her. I visited her every day and did what I could to relieve the symptoms, which were extremely uncomfortable for her. She was grateful to me for smuggling to her the Chinese remedies forbidden by her husband. I believe she also found my persistence amusing. As she had never extended the least show of intimacy to me since the day of my beating, I was surprised and moved when she took my hand in hers one day and smiled at me in a gentle and forgiving way and said, You should not lose your faith so easily, Doctor Spiess. China will defeat her enemies. She will win. Have no doubt of that. She withdrew her hand then and with great intensity said, One day the old values will be restored. Once again I was reminded of how easy it was for me to underestimate this woman’s strength. Before I left she laughed and chided me, You will never understand us doctor. Her illusion that the past will return isolates her tragically.

  During this peculiar period of hiatus in Shanghai, a moment that hung between the defeat of what had been ancient and had become terrible and the beginning of something new that might in the end become just as terrible, Lang and I went on meeting regularly in the antique drawing room. At our next meeting after the Hebel incident we embraced each other warmly and each of us begged the other for forgiveness. Once again, even more strongly than before, I experienced a mysterious gratitude for his existence, as if in each of us a voice must cry out without you there is only silence. I was reading Holderlin’s lines to him – ‘The land with yellow pears and full of wild roses hangs down into the lake, you gracious swans, and drunk with kisses you dip your heads into the sober water’ – when he interrupted me with the question, Do you think a Chinese can be an artist any longer?

  The Esplanade, St Kilda, 16 December 1937 My journal cannot be a map after all, joining the beginning of my journey to the end of it. Such a celebration of travelling is possible only for those who are certain of a place to which they will return and there receive the welcome of a true homecoming, to those, that is, who have as their destination the place from which they first set out. The mapmaker is neither a refugee nor a colonist. The mapmaker must leave no gaps. He must not lift his pen from the moment he sets out to the moment he returns or his map will be of little use to those of his countrymen who would follow him. I am not a mapmaker and my countrymen are those who, like Claude Lorrain, are detached from place. I am at liberty, therefore, to lift my pen, to leave a gap and to pass over in silence our last days in Shanghai and the misery of their parting. I shall bury it in the silence of the empty page.

  There is a duplicity in this travelling for me, however, for while I rejoice here he despairs in Ballarat.

  I returned from that city three days ago to my rooms overlooking the bay on the first floor of this pleasant house to find that Miss Cheong had made everything cosy and welcoming for me, and I began at once to think only of myself. I cannot, however pass over Ballarat in silence, but must set it in its place here.

  The ‘aunt’ of whom Feng spoke, being a grand-daughter of Feng One and of his Irish wife, Mary Nunan, is in reality his aunt once-removed. She and her family are clearly not without certain expectations i
n this affair, but feign perplexity and discouragement. Lang, they wish to imply, is like an exotic and rare disease that has been visited upon them as a sign of displeasure from their offended God. A burden from which, however, if they endure it without complaint, they may be delivered eventually with due recompense. His claim upon them is one of kinship, and this, they make plain, cannot be refused.

  Ballarat might be Hangzhou, for there is a fine lake with views to the hills, situated on the nonh-westerly margins of the city. After that, however, one ceases to think of the City of Heaven and begins to think of other things. The Hallorans live in a plain, single-storey wooden house among others of its kind, in a street that seemed strangely deserted. From the windows there is a view of neither the mountains nor the lake, but only of more houses like their own facing them across the way.

  With an affected show of ceremony Mrs Halloran, attended closely by her husband, Frank, and by their three sons, ranked in age from twelve to sixteen, ushered Lang and me into a small, dark and desolate room situated immediately off the central passage and just inside the front door. This room, a kind of ante-chamber to the rest of the house, is surely as seldom visited by the members of the household it serves as is the grimmest Hangzhou reception hall by the members of the household it serves. Indeed the purposes of both are clearly identical, being not so much to admit guests readily to a degree of warmth and intimacy with the family as to keep them for a period of probation at a safe distance. Lang and I sat on a sofa facing Frank Halloran and his sons. We avoided each other’s eyes, for there was no ritual with which to disguise our unease. On each darkly upholstered chair, yellowed antimacassars gleamed like pale beacons in the gloom, fading beams from a bygone age, offering us no hope at all. Mrs Halloran absented herself to prepare a meal of grilled mutton chops and sundry boiled vegetables, the health-giving properties of which she celebrated in detail to us before going, as though she believed Lang and I had narrowly survived a famine.

  When we were at last called to dine and the heaps of steaming food were set in front of us in the kitchen, for the house is without a dining room, it quickly became apparent that Mrs Halloran and her lusty family were to be shamed by our incapacity to eat the meal. Lang hung his head and could do nothing, not attempting so much as a mouthful. I struggled on alone long after the family had finished theirs, conscious of the extreme unease, the suspense, the crisis of anxiety, indeed, that my lack of a genuine appetite for the food had brought on, conscious, as I swallowed heavily and with unusual noises that I do not normally make while eating, that the dignity of the Halloran family now depended on my performance.

  It became an agony of chewing and swallowing. How I wished Yu had been the cook! Then they would have witnessed a performance of banqueting sufficient to satisfy the proudest host. Without wine to assist the process, chewing continued to be possible after swallowing ceased to be. Swallowing is more akin to our heartbeat, to the unconscious and therefore uncontrollable functioning of our vital organs, than it is to the readily directed motor operations of our jaws and limbs. When I could no longer swallow I ceased to chew. There was nothing else for it.

  Like relatives gathered around the sickbed of an expiring loved one, the Hallorans gazed at me with fading hopes, their eyes mutely pleading with me, is there nothing more you can do for us Doctor? I laid my knife and fork solemnly upon the considerable pile of uneaten meat and potato and pumpkin and indicated, by my calm but resigned expression, that the unfortunate outcome had been beyond the scope of my profession to prevent. Death comes to all of us. Amidst a silence that seemed about to bring on church bells, Mrs Halloran rose and removed the cold remains. It was plain from their expressions that the Hallorans had failed one of life’s essential probationary trials – that of the feeding of guests.

  While we drank tea Mrs Halloran questioned me. Had I, she asked, found her own aunt, Victoria Feng, to be in good health? We hear nothing from her, she added pointedly, looking to Frank for confirmation of this. Her unstated question, it appeared to me, was, why has Miss Feng not been called on to support this boy? Where is her contribution? Her connection with him is altogether more direct than ours and her resources more adequate. We do not mind, but.

  Undoubtedly it is a constant uncertainty hanging over the Hallorans as to which branch of the family Victoria Feng will bequeath her considerable estate and the valuable property at Coppin Grove. I replied that I’d not yet called on Miss Feng but would be doing so on my return to Melbourne. Mrs Halloran made a noise in her throat, which I shall not attempt to interpret here. She drank her tea and clattered her cup on the saucer and she drew a deep breath and looked at her boys and shook her head and let the breath out again through her nose, her lips remaining throughout tightly pressed together. At this Frank advanced me a little smile. It seemed I was to accept that there is much I do not understand. Indeed that is so, I am sure, and equally sure am I that there is much they do not understand. But it will never be my intention to enlighten them. The gulf between us is too vast. I have no wish to bridge it.

  They elicited no word from Lang, the forlorn cause of their perplexity. He had sunk into a state of deep despondency where the mediation of words was of no use to him. He could not be reached. I felt myself to be accountable for his despair. I could not bear to think of Madame Feng, alone in Shanghai, thinking of him.

  Our arrival in a body at the great red-brick school, where the Hallorans’ three sons attend as day boys, was the occasion for another species of mystification and anxiety. The tall Head Brother, swaying forward in his sombre cassock, led us from his office into the garden, which was as large and empty as a field. Here he pointed to a row of recently planted pine trees. What had these trees to do with us? I was not to discover the connection. The Hallorans, I perceived, however, felt themselves favoured by this excursion. The brother required us to admire his trees. And this we did. They were not interesting trees. They were not trees of distinction such as the scholar Huang might have admired and wished to see in his garden, but were saplings, thin and rather forlorn and lacking in character. We stood before them as if reviewing an unhappy parade of cadets. The Brother kept his hand upon Lang’s shoulder, possessing him as one might possess new property.

  While we gazed obediently towards the row of ordinary pine trees bordering the immense lawn, Mrs Halloran sought to describe to the Brother the actual nature of Lang’s kinship association with her family. She revealed it to be an attenuated association and not exactly one of blood. Or was it? This point did not emerge absolutely but was left to be inferred from the general body of her evidence, which was extensive. The thoroughness of this woman’s genealogical dissertation, the sheer abundance of detail in her divulgement of the family pedigree, greatly impressed me. She might well have begun Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. Though a poor cook, she is undoubtedly a distinguished matriarch, the keeper of a thing which is of a primordial nature, a thing sacred and extensive and complex and Biblical and reaching into the archaic origins and virtues of the Hallorans’ Australian genesis. A book of the ancestors which she carries with her in her memory, a consecrated grid of knowledge devolved upon her through the delivery of her kind. Who begat whom and where and in what circumstances of ease or deserving need these consecrated couplings and joinings and procreatings took place.

  It was a criss-crossed membrane of life and death laid solemnly upon the landscape for many miles around. A map for those who could read the signs posted against its legend. Here was an oral tradition quite as exacting in its rigour as the literary tradition of China. A mistake would have been unthinkable. A mistake would have been blasphemous. There was poetry in it, too. Stories of romantic interludes and tragedies and brave deeds. The ingenuity and enterprise of the Hallorans had persisted through fires and droughts and floods and wars and sudden death.

  Slowly the family emerged.

  While she spoke a light rain began t
o fall on us. No move was made to take shelter. The Brother’s thin fingers tensed and relaxed, kneading Lang’s small round shoulder, while he gazed upon his trees and from time to time confirmed with a movement of his head or a click of his tongue that he was attending to Mrs Halloran’s unfolding. Once he interrupted, his thick black eyebrows coming together in an unbroken line across the upper portion of his face. Wasn’t it Jack and Molly Keenan’s girl, then, from Mansfield, who married the Costin boy? His puzzlement was sincere. No, oh no, Brother. There was shock in Mrs Halloran’s response. If you’ll forgive me, Molly was an O’Brien. Her father was a carter in Benalla. The O’Briens were all carters. The youngest, Terry, God rest his soul, did not return from the Dardanelles. His name was put by mistake on the memorial in Yea, if you’ll remember. There were letters in the Courier when the council voted not to have it changed because of the expense. It is still there today. The Brother’s eyebrows remained joined. Was it Joseph Costin, then who was here? he persisted, the drizzling rain settling on his tight curls and forming a shimmering membrane of lace over them, a mocking portent of priestly office for this male eunuch, the brother who would not become the father. It was one of the Costin boys took out the Donovan Bursary in thirty-two, I know that, Mrs Halloran. He turned squarely towards her. She waited for him, respectful but knowing better. And you know Molly Keenan only passed away at St Vees in July? Yes, yes she did. Mrs Halloran had known this and was able to confirm it. Respectfully she continued. Molly’s own mother was a Macey. There were nine of them. The brother’s fingers tightened on Lang’s shoulder.