The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  A Halloran and a Feng, at last, were to be seen embedded in the landscape by each other’s side, overlapping just a little. An X placed on the genetic map signifying a boy from China. Mrs Halloran returned to it, eventually, and reminded us, who had quite forgotten by then why the excursion had been begun, that this was the very place from which she had set out, ducking her head at Lang and placing him, a solitary disfigured member of her tribe, on the extreme periphery of her vast, breeding landscape, placing him, indeed, on its horizon – almost over it. In her oral book of the ancestors the concealed argument had concerned the question not of the primacy of either the male or the female line, but legitimacy of descent. It had concerned what had befallen. Kinship, no matter how extenuated, was the singular quality that could not at last be resisted.

  The Brother’s fingers dug into Lang’s shoulder, restraining the would-be escapee. I was repelled. The rain will do the trees good, the Brother murmured, and led us back into the building, where a bell was ringing.

  Standing between the watchful Brother and the three large Halloran boys in the arch of the doorway, Lang looked small and misshapen and startlingly oriental, a miniature, a diminutive caricature of his father. He did not weep or protest when I let go of his hand, but gazed at me with hurt and disbelief.

  I have abandoned him in the golden city of his ancestor.

  The Esplanade, St Kilda, 20 December 1937 The cause of my duplicity, that I rejoice in St Kilda while he despairs in Ballarat, is that I have encountered here a delicate and compelling paradox. This place is at once familiar and strange to me. It is as if I have long been expected. Miss Cheong on her knees scrubbing the front steps smiles and says nothing and seems to know what I must do. My arrival from China has fulfilled in her a secret and long-cherished hope. We are friends without needing to speak of friendship. It is a game between us. I may not ask for directions and she may not offer them. I must locate the clues and decipher them myself.

  Early each morning I am enticed awake from an untroubled sleep by the sounds of the trams and the workmen going along below my window. I get up at once. I am eager. I do not wish to waste a moment of the day. It is with a feeling of mysterious joy, with a conviction that I am abandoning my onerous, mundane responsibilities in order to pursue a higher purpose, that I set out each day on my quest to solve the mystery of my presence in this place.

  Here I am, then, freshy shaved and wearing my linen suit and new straw hat with its cerise band, which exactly matches the silk handkerchief in my breast pocket, and I am coming down the ochred steps of The Towers with my cane in my hand. I bow to Miss Cheong and bid her good morning. On the last step I pause to admire the sunlight sparkling on the blue waters of the bay. Then I turn left and stride towards Acland Street, swinging my cane as I go.

  Within the confines of this narrow street the air is rich with the appetising aromas of freshly roasted coffee and baking bread. The pavements are crowded with hurrying people. The shops are all open, their windows filled with every kind of fruit and meat and sweet delicacy. Along the centre of the roadway, trams go up and down ringing their bells. I enter this street and I am at once elevated by its life. It does not matter to me that I do not know where I am going. I am here, that is what matters.

  As I walk along I am accompanied by the intuition that at any instant an old friend from days gone by, someone I have not seen since my youth in Hamburg, will hail me from the passing crowd with a shout of delighted recognition. August Spiess! It is you! My dear fellow, you have arrived at last! We have been expecting you. And he will place his arm in mine and will insist I go with him at once to meet the ‘others’, where we shall celebrate our reunion in grand style.

  No one calls to me. But the intuition does not fade. At any moment I shall chance upon a familiar circumstance and a lost memory will be restored to me. I shall know at once where I am. Meanwhile I remain invisible to my familiars. With my memory restored my full presence will be restored also, and I shall really be here.

  I pass the open door of a cafe. The hubbub inside rushes out and surrounds me. Fascinated, I pause and listen. The isolated phrase Licht und Schatten is carried to me with a peculiar clarity upon the medley of voices. Licht und Schatten, ‘light and shade’. I look into the crowded cafe. Men and women sit at tables drinking coffee and reading the morning papers and loudly discussing the affairs of the day. Others silently eat breakfast. As I gaze in at them, the detached phrase in German striking my attention, familiar yet strange, Licht und Schatten, these people in the cafe seem to me to be at the very centre of a perfect civilisation. The steaming cups of coffee and the rustling newspapers and the shouted orders and the appetising smells and the eager exchange of views engage me in a kind of metaphysical delight. It is as if these folk possess a precious secret, a secret I am certain I once possessed myself. Shall I possess it again? I go in to the cafe and sit at one of the tables and I order a coffee. Something priceless and secret lies close to me.

  Without thinking, I have given my order in German. No one is surprised by this. The two women who sit opposite me do not interrupt their conversation. The young waitress wipes the table in front of me with her cloth and goes at once to fetch my coffee. August, I whisper to myself, this is not a dream! I know that nothing will surprise me. The mystery, the intuition of the familiar made strange, persists and deepens, and I know that I am about to decipher a vital clue as to my whereabouts.

  Unrecognised, and therefore unseen, I eavesdrop on delicious intimacies and sip my coffee. I am at the centre of the world. I am in the secret place I once knew in my imagination. There is no nostalgia in what I feel. I cannot say this is a European city. It is not a European city. For where is the grand public architecture memorialising mighty regimes, the tyrants and emperors, the conquerors and princes from whose ambitious struggles this State was fashioned? There are none. There are no bronze equestrian monuments here. There are no palaces, no citadels, no open squares for armies to parade their force before a sullen and resentful populace. Here lethal princes have never immortalised their conquests or themselves in stone and bronze. If there were to be a revolution in Australia there would be nothing for the people to tear down, for they have put it all up themselves.

  As I eavesdrop I quickly come to understand that these folk have never known the shadow of the prince, but are accustomed to live without the expectation of the tyrant setting forth from his fortified walls with his men-at-arms to renew his arbitrary demands upon them. The speech and the gestures of these people are without a care for the censure of any person. They do not confer closely and in whispers, but shout their opinions for all to hear. They do not watch their fellow citizens in case they are betrayed, for there is no one to whom their fellow citizens might betray them if they wished to do so. Everyone is a prince here and Australia itself is their citadel.

  These folk reside beyond the reach of history. Here extraterritoriality is the status quo. Here there is no pre-existing law that waits in the hinterland to reassert its rule against their occupation. Unlike the Han, who labour impatiently beyond the boundaries of the International Settlement for the day when they will expel the foreign devils from their native soil and reimpose the hegemony of their own fiat, the indigenous inhabitants of this place are so thoroughly dispersed from their lands and discouraged from revolt that they have ceased to possess a jurisdiction to be reckoned with. Clearly, possession of ancestral links to the land confers no special privileges here, as it does in Europe and elsewhere. Here to have arrived a week ago, as I, is to be more privileged than to have arrived a thousand years ago.

  There is no nation here. Here the displaced are in place. This is not a community that has been wrestled into being through the fierce valour of warriors set one against the other for generations, but a community engendered domestically. Such is the architecture which dominates all styles, in buildings and in conversations. If the people of Australia were ever to set up a memorial bronze, it would undoubtedly depict Mrs Halloran
descanting upon her theme of procreations.

  While I drink my coffee, the mystery is dispelled and the enigma of my intuition partially resolved. Have I not arrived in such a place as our youthful ardours in Hamburg once directed us to dream of? A kind of children’s land, where it is not necessary to be afraid of the dark?

  The Esplanade, St Kilda, 27 December 1937 It is the freestanding two-storey house I saw in Feng’s photograph. It is constructed of red and yellow brick and is situated on a commanding hill among other large houses of its period. This style, I have observed, represents the acme of Australian domestic architecture. Deep, ornate verandahs on both floors shelter a solid square core of building.

  Miss Feng’s home is set in the midst of an extensive neglected garden, in which mature elms and aspens and other European trees shade wild areas of unmown grass. As I walked down the pathway towards the front door, I entered a place of calm and seclusion, a place even of some concealment. There was no one about. A dog barked repeatedly farther up the hill. I might have been in the countryside. I pulled the bell and knocked upon the door, but no one answered. As I waited within the cool shelter of the verandah I was feeling nervous and expectant and uncertain of how, or even if, I was to be received, for she had not responded to either of my letters, in which I had requested permission to call on her. Did this woman really exist, then? I wondered. Or had she died or moved away years ago? Or was she, perhaps, a ghostly inhabitant of an Australia imagined into existence merely to gratify Feng’s own peculiar needs, a kind of private and mental refuge for him from the harsh immutable realities of China, from whose weighty history his predecessor had been cast up as a disinherited superfluous and eroded being? If Mrs Halloran had not herself asked after the wellbeing of her Aunt Victoria, I might have abandoned the case.

  Getting no response to repeated hammerings on the front door with my cane, 1 ventured to the side of the house and looked out on to the wilderness of garden. Stout aerial cables of Chinese wisteria looped about my head from the balcony above, and at the bases of the supporting columns great stone pots, one broken open and its earthy contents spilled out, nurtured thick clusterings of hardy blossoming geraniums. Three steps led to a weed-infested path. I saw that this was the aspect of the house in the photograph shown me by Feng. I was standing in the very place where the woman in the elaborate white gown, his grandfather’s Australian wife, Victoria’s mother, had stood. I remained there for some while, spying upon the sunlit garden from my place of concealment, and trying with little success to reanimate in my imagination something of the old days here as they must have been. The sunlight was extraordinarily clear and sharp and the shadows cast on to the black and white tiles of the verandah by the wisteria formed a dappling about my feet, like the stilled reflections of water in a painting. Eventually I was put in mind by this of the enticing and suggestive phrase I’d overheard from the footpath outside the cafe, Licht und Schatten. The aptness of this slight, but real and present, connection encouraged me and I took it, along with the geraniums, for a favourable sign.

  I’d noticed some way out from the verandah where I stood, perhaps thirty yards distant, a kind of knoll, a prominence which had attracted my attention. Apprehensive that I might be observed and taken to be an intruder, I started down the steps and set off across the open area of dry grass towards the mound. I was like an explorer on a level plain who has perceived a hill in the distance and is drawn towards its superior elevation in the hope that if he ascends it he will be granted a superior understanding; surely the hope of all ascents since that of Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.

  I had gone no more than half a dozen steps out from the verandah when a gazebo situated further down the hill towards the river came into my view. Convinced by now that the house and its wild garden were without occupants, I was startled to see a woman seated at a table within this oriental and picturesque construction. She was writing. She had not seen me. I advanced towards her down the gentle slope. I had arrived to within a few yards of her, and was on the point of calling out to her in case my sudden appearance should startle her, when she looked up.

  She looked up the way one does when one is deeply engaged with a composition. That is, she looked up suddenly and in mid sentence, her mind yet balancing the weight of the work-in-hand while her eyes examined her surroundings, as if she believed the word or phrase that was to serve her was to be located not within her memory but on the outside, among the world of material objects.

  She looked up from her work directly into my eyes. She might have been appealing to an imaginary companion, to a fanciful amanuensis whom she was accustomed to have by her side at all times, for she showed no surprise at seeing me standing before her in my pale suit in the bright sunlight, my hat held respectfully before me with both my hands. Indeed it was as if she expected to see me there, had even called me into being, willed my existence in her garden for no other purpose than to serve as her literary consultant in this particular instance – and what when she has done with me? Shall I not vanish once again? Will I not be sucked back into that limbo from which she has granted me a moment of reality? So concentrated and intense and so searching and familiar was her gaze that I felt it was I who was the fiction. If her attention should wander from me then I should cease to be there. She would have her word, would have drawn it in with her to her place, and would possess no further use for me or for her garden until the need for our presence ripened in her again.

  She resumed writing.

  Hot, metallic bird calls clinked in the willows beside the river and the sun burned my scalp. The air shrieked faintly with insects. I watched her complete the sense of what she had in mind. She wears a simple grey dress of a light cotton material. It is soiled and frayed. She is slight in build and exceedingly emaciated, her skin loosened on her frame and aged and wrinkled far beyond her years. She is tanned to the leathery complexion of a peasant. I know her to be fifty-nine, a year younger than myself. In her gaze, where her intelligence and energy are concentrated, I had detected a family peculiarity, a likeness shared by Feng and Lang, a manner of looking at one as though one is on the outside, located among an arrangement of objects, and they, the observer, are far away inside, inhabitating a more entirely immanent reality than one’s own. Her appearance is unexpectedly oriental, as that of someone of unmixed Chinese descent, and is not at all the look of the Eurasians one is accustomed to see in the International Settlement. This impression is no doubt due in part to her weathered and emaciated condition. In China she would never have been considered beautiful, even when she was young, for she possesses the much despised single-lidded eye.

  I coughed. I insisted on my presence. I am really here, I wished to say. Looking away has not got rid of me. She ceased to write and straightened up, working her scrawny arms back and forth to loosen a cramp in her shoulders. And she smiled. You’re Doctor Spiess, she said. And you’ve come from Shanghai as a companion to my relation. It’s very good of you to call on me Doctor. Won’t you come in out of the sun?

  Perhaps I should come back when you’ve finished writing? I suggested.

  I’d like to know when that might be, she said, a little ironic.

  I went up the steps into the gazebo. Flakes of desiccated paint crumbled beneath the grip of my fingers on the rail. There wasn’t much spare room and I was required to stand beside her desk, as if I had been called up to her to account for myself or to be examined by her. A word, Doctor Spiess, she asked, that one might use in place of pilgrim? She waited, then looked up at me and smiled, offering me reassurance, her eyes sharp and black and observant, reading my features with open and unabashed interest.

  I saw that here was a woman to whom it would not be possible to tell a lie without finding oneself immediately detected. It seemed to me that if I were to tell her anything at all, then I should tell her everything. I at once drew encouragement from this conclusion, and made the decision to go in boldly and to hold nothing back from her. Why, if pilgrim will not do for
you, there is no other word in English that will, I responded. Bunyan used it up so entirely that you’ll never get it back from him. You must either use pilgrim and allow for there being something of Bunyan in your use of it, or leave that region of conjecture alone. Unless you would go back before Bunyan to the Latin root and tease something out of peregrinum, which signifies the stranger. If you wish to save yourself that trouble, the Chinese possess a useful phrase. Though I dare say it may not particularly suit you.

  She laughed and said, You have the advantage of me with going back to Latin roots, doctor, and she invited me to sit in a cane chair which stood to one side of her writing table. I imagine you could do with a cup of tea? she offered. I said I’d be very glad of tea, as the walk across the bridge from Richmond and up the hill had made me hot and thirsty. She didn’t move but continued to look at me. And what’s this phrase in Mandarin, then?

  There were books and piles of papers and tea chests with dirty crockery and cooking utensils on them, and there was an untidy camp bed and other items of furniture spread about the gazebo’s octagonal floor, as if she must camp out here. I made space on a teachest for the volumes that were on the chair. The boards of these books were curled from exposure to the weather.

  I settled myself into the creaking chair. The phrase, I said, is lang tsze.