The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  With the new expectation in my mind, with a mixture of feelings, with curiosity and excitement and a certain envy, I began my re-reading in Gertrude’s voice of what I had read once as the authentic journals of Doctor August Spiess. As I opened the first volume I recalled Gertrude’s enigmatic smile, as if we were about to share a secret, as she placed the seven volumes in my hands, and at last I understood it: 9am, 18 December 1927. Hangzhou, at the house of Huang Yu-hua the literary painter! I am elated and exhausted. That I am here at all seems still to be a dream …

  I was late. It was after half-past five. The instant I stepped out of the car I knew he wasn’t home. The front door was closed. I knocked, knowing there would be no answer, and went round the side without waiting. The flywire door to the kitchen was swinging backwards and forwards in the wind and the kitchen door itself was locked. I peered through the window. My reflection peered back at me, anxiously – another me trapped inside his house, inside his powerful cosmic mirror, lying at the bottom of the Qiantang River. Mutely we gazed at each other through the greasy lens of the glass, strangers, familiars. It was the window through which Gertrude had framed her image of us at the end of summer – two friends in white shirts sitting in the sun in old-fashioned cane chairs, while the rest of the world moved on. I shielded my eyes. Inside the kitchen there was only the usual mess. No signs of flight or panic or rage. I stepped back on to the grass. I knew no neighbours would bother me if I were to break in. Even if I were to set off one of the alarms, howling among the quiet groves of Kew, no one would bother me.

  A stealthy movement behind me made me turn. The poplar was thrashing about in the wind. Numerous branchlets with one or two pale new leaves attached had been torn off in the storm and were scuttling about the lawn like shimmering green crabs. I could just make out the ornate wrought-iron finial on top of the gazebo, angled a little to one side – sinking towards the west - a high note of Victorian style pointing at something that was no longer there. Pointing at nothing. A finial indeed. It was spring but the garden had acquired an abandoned air.

  It was now after six. There was less than half an hour before the opening of Gertrude’s show. I drove quickly yet I wanted to go back and really break in to his house. To search for something. Something to provide me with the certainty that he was not his father’s son, that he was not the Fourth Phoenix, who must one day feel compelled to burn our books and cast our mirrors into the stream.

  He wouldn’t be at all upset. He’d be delighted. He’d even be disappointed if I hadn’t actually purloined an item or two from the alluvial congeries of memorabilia on and underneath his dining table. It would excite him. It would be a real move in the game. Steven! Steven! Steven! he’d cry, It’s you! You’re the thief! It’s you I’ve been setting my alarms for all these years! And I didn’t recognise you! I invited you in! I thought it was Tom Lindner and his lot I had to look out for but it was you! I could hear him choking with mirth, the jaundiced vision of his pale eye confirmed, mocking us both; mocking the seriousness of everything, revitalised, able to believe once more, for a little while, in the elevating power of prophetic irony … Let’s have a drink! Struck by an idea. I tell you what, why don’t we get the lotus cup out and have a look at it! You still haven’t seen it, have you? Snuggling against me as he urges me to go further with him. You do want to see it, don’t you? You remember I told you about the little red door? The second gateway? Dragging me along with him. The rain and sun eventually weathered my mother’s new coat of paint to the colours of autumn in the forest. I had a recurring dream on the SS Wangaratta when I was coming to Australia. August and I used to talk about it – we’ll get the cup later. Last night I had the dream again. Just like that. A dream from my childhood! What do you think of that? What does that mean, Steven? Shall I tell you what it was …?

  The traffic in Bridge Road slowed almost to a standstill. There was a line of trams banked up one behind the other. I’d begun to see that the garden at Coppin Grove really was depleted and used up; that she was no longer there, that she was in me. The focus of our affairs was moving, to the gallery, to Gertrude and her drawings. That’s where it was about to break the surface. If I were to return and steal Victoria’s portrait now it would be merely a nostalgic memento. The lights changed twice without anything moving …

  I got back to Hangzhou, somehow. It had been difficult. I arrived there on my own. Maybe I was still a boy. But perhaps not. I can’t be sure about that. I’d been travelling for days, for ages and ages, to get there and I was worn out but in a state of elation. It was real. There was no feeling that any of it might be a dream. The instant I turned the corner at the end of the street I could see the little red doorway with its upturned roof. The toffee apple man was there at his post across the road, his apples trembling in the sunlight. I ran up to the doorway and hammered on it with my fists and yelled out, Mother! Mother! Mother! I kept banging and yelling, It’s me! I’m home! It’s your son! But no one answered. After a while I realised I could hear these deep booming echoes, just as if someone was striking the temple drum up in the mountain at Lin Yin. But inside me. It was the first inkling I had that none of it was real, and that it was all a dream, this heartsickening booming. I stopped hammering on the door. There was no one there. The place was empty. They can never know I returned.

  The traffic came to a stop completely. Nothing moved. I wasn’t going to be there with them for the precious bit of ritual at the beginning – the opening ceremony; the moment when she would become fully visible to us in the presence of her drawings. They are, or might be, standing on their own at the far end of a long gallery, their backs to the door through which I will soon enter. They are looking at but not discussing three large black and white drawings, which hang on the end wall. A bold, symmetrical arrangement - windows looking out onto a darkening landscape from the lighted hall – the three large drawings are heavily worked, richly textured, complex and full of concealed narratives and fugitive figures (as I have been told in the article in the fine-art journal they will be). I will know soon if they are also graphic realisations of her own journals, the journals which she has made her own; something the article could not have told me. She is wearing the expensive black gown she was wearing in the clever photograph. Lang is small and shabby beside her – a demon with blue smoke rising through his electrified hair. (It surprises me to reflect that the dream of the red doorway is not his dream, but is my own.) I remember that the last volume of her journal begins, For certain people exile is the only tolerable condition.

  They are examining the uninhabited tryptich before them: a divided landscape waiting to be inhabited, the principal characters withheld by her until this moment.

  NEW FROM ALLEN & UNWIN

  CONDITIONS OF FAITH

  Alex Miller

  ‘It’s surprising to read a book about a woman written by a man which works, but this one does. I take my hat off to the author, and note with interest that his heroine consumes Madame Bovary, another male-authored tour de force about a woman. My private acid test of a literary work is whether, having read it, it lingers in my mind afterward. Conditions of Faith fulfils that criterion; I am still thinking about Emily. Very sad, very thought-provoking. Congratulations Alex Miller.’

  —Colleen McCullough

  Conditions of Faith is the long-awaited major new work by one of Australia’s leading novelists.

  When Alex Miller’s mother died she left him her fragmentary journal from the 1920s. Inspired by her exotic tales as a young woman living in Paris and this entrée into her emotional life, Miller has written Conditions of Faith.

  With university behind her, Emily Stanton finds herself on the threshold of life. Introduced to a Scottish engineer, the exoticism of his life in Paris beckons, and she leaves her family home in twenties Melbourne to become his wife. But far from providing answers, her conventional marriage awakens in her an ardent desire to find a reason for living beyond that of simply wife and mother, a desire that leads
her to flirt with risk, passion and unorthodox friendships and carries her to Tunisia on a journey of self-questioning and intellectual reawakening.

  Conditions of Faith is a provocative romance, but it is also an elegant and intellectually abundant meditation on a timeless dilemma. Impetuous yet entirely sympathetic, Emily Stanton, like Henry James’ Isabel Archer, is in search of a reason for living in a society where motherhood is deemed reason enough. This mesmerising and thought-provoking story of dreams, obsessions and destiny will hold you in thrall.