The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  On Thursday at morning recess the man was alone by the gas heater. He didn’t look my way, but as I approached him I was aware of him beginning to wait for me. I indicated the table tennis table, Like a game?

  He checked me keenly, as if I’d suggested some extraordinary piece of mischief. Yes! he exclaimed with a throaty rush of breath. Let’s have a game! He continued to smoke while we played and never shifted from the one spot at his end of the table. He flicked the ball back to me with a practised twist of his wrist that was effortless and automatic. I dived and lunged from one side of the table to the other, trying to keep the ball in play, but succeeded in scoring only when he paused during a point to light a fresh cigarette from the stub of his old one.

  We should play that point again, I offered. He wouldn’t hear of it. That was a good shot, he said. I laid my bat on the table. It’s too hot for this. He agreed at once. I gained the unsettling impression that he would have agreed as readily to anything I might have proposed, would have been prepared to fake enthusiasm for it.

  There was a disturbing and fixed misalignment to his features. It was as if the right side of his face had been given a permanent upward nudge, resulting in a faintly sardonic expression, an aspect of amused irony stamped on his countenance at the instant of understanding. I was put in mind of my mother’s warnings that the wind would change and leave me with an obscene frog mouth and bulging eyes for the rest of my days. The wind must have changed for this man. I thought of him as having been touched, as having been wounded, by the powers of the enchanted world she understood but had been unable to share.

  He was of her height and of a similar slight build and he, too, had about him a fey elusiveness. Where’s your assistant today? I asked.

  He looked uncomprehending for a second. Oh, you mean Gertrude. He chuckled. That’s what I’ll call her! My assistant. He was shy suddenly, as if he thought he might be in danger of taking the joke too far. Gertrude Spiess. She’s a senior lecturer in drawing at the Prahran College of Advanced Education. He delivered this explanation with a formality that was almost ceremonious. She is an artist. A real one. She comes to do some emergency teaching here because she likes to do it.

  His upward-tilted right eye observed me coldly all the while he was speaking. I found myself caught between responding to the diffident yet encouraging tone of his voice and the malevolence implied by the set of his features. With a seriousness that made the question more than casual, he asked me at one point was it difficult to teach non-English speaking children to read and write English. He awaited my reply as if he expected to hear from me something lucid and definitive.

  There was an eagerness, a kind of complete disclosure of his own ignorance, in the manner with which he put his questions to me, that made it appear he must be prepared to accept whatever I might say as God’s truth. His manner flattered me with an implied expectation that I would adopt the role of expert in the English language. And I might have adopted it, except for the way he seemed to wait quietly within himself for just such a sign of my acquiescence. He noted my wariness and smoked his cigarette. His name, he told me, was Lang Tzu.

  With ten minutes of the morning classes still to run I went in search of his art room. A terrible north wind had descended from the desert. The school grounds were filled with a roaring. A harsh rain of red Mallee dust swept down from the roofs and whirled in drifts about the yard. Through the noise of the storm a child was screaming. A few metres in front of me a boy was thrashing around on the near-molten asphalt. I couldn’t decide whether he was at play or had been hurt. I started towards him and he sprang up at once, shouting over and over a word which I didn’t understand. Opposite were the Gothic doors Lang had told me to look for.

  The air was so hot against my face I felt sure things must begin to ignite at any minute. Plastic bags, milk cartons and other rubbish were being whipped into a vicious tornado by the scorching wind. At the doors I hesitated, fascinated by the fury of the heat storm, my hand on the iron latch, and was immediately engulfed by the fierce updraught of hot plastic and grit. I went in and dragged the door closed against the suction of the wind.

  It wasn’t a classroom I’d entered, it was a barn. An assembly hall. A great cool echoing place of sanctuary, in which a pale illumination was admitted through several high, pointed windows composed of dozens of diamond-shaped panes of glass. There was an old and somehow familiar smell, composed of mineral turps, oil paint and book dust. Something moving on a cross-member in the open timbers of the ceiling caught my attention. A sedate row of pigeons roosted there shoulder to shoulder, gazing down on to the activity below them. Several children were taking it in turns to run the length of the hall, jumping from one work table to the next, until from the table nearest the front they made a leap of two metres or more, at full stretch, on to the proscenium of the stage, where they landed with a sonorous boom that echoed round the hall as if a drum had been struck. Surprisingly, considering this distraction, most of the students were working, either on their own or conferring with a neighbour. They were painting pictures on large sheets of brown paper.

  Lang was standing on his own at a table on the far side of the hall, reading. He had a cigarette notched firmly between his fingers and held close to his face, his eyes tight against the smoke. He was standing side-on to the table, the book pressed down with his free hand, the pages held open with his spread fingers. He looked as though he’d paused to take a quick look at the book on his way to doing something else and become caught up in it. His lips were moving and his body was reacting to the rhythm, or to the sense, of the words.

  He didn’t look up as I approached him. I saw he was reading Burns’ Tam o’Shanter. With a mixture of fear and awe and deep fascination, I’d listened as a child to the swaggering tones of this poem more times than I could remember. My father had known by heart every one of its two hundred and twenty-four lines. I’d been exposed to it so often that I’d absorbed entire passages without ever making the effort to do so. At the slightest invocation, it sang in my head with my father’s voice. The mention of something Scottish, and in particular Glaswegian, was sufficient to set off in me a string of stanzas from Tarn.

  When I was fifteen I discovered I possessed the ability to reproduce exactly my father’s voice, his thick Glasgow accents and the aggressive manner of his delivery. After I discovered this talent I used to pretend to be my father to my mother. I did it despite misgivings of a preternatural kind, despite feelings that I was invoking something sinister and dangerous and greater than myself, something that I might not be able to control. The compulsion to do it, however, was irresistible. At about the time of day when we were expecting him home from work, when the house was quiet, I’d slam the front door and go into the sitting room and call wildly, Are you there for Christ’s sake Mary?

  My mother would come to the door of the passage and look at me with her clear grey eyes. Though I feared them both in different ways, neither of my parents ever punished me. There was a detached fatalism in their attitude to my behaviour, as if they believed that to seek to direct it lay beyond their charter. As if, indeed, we were not a family but were three unrelated people living in the same house.

  When my mother saw it was me who had called and not my father, she would return to whatever she’d been doing. At that moment I would sense my father’s presence within me and would fear I had enchanted myself with him. Despite her lack of a reaction, I understood that my mother was quite as disturbed by this trick as I was myself. It drew us into a kind of shared conspiracy against the real man. She never admonished me, even mildly. Her attitude, it seemed to me, implied that if I wished to do such things then I must be prepared to deal with the uncertain consequences myself.

  The poetry of Robert Burns was my father’s established way within me, it was his right-of-way, a means by which his personality could flourish in me. When I saw that Lang was reading Tarn I was more dismayed than surprised. I felt offended. It was too personal. Impossible that
there could have been any conscious malevolence in Lang’s choice of poem, but I couldn’t see it as mere innocent coincidence. My gaze was drawn along the lines by his moving finger and I heard my father’s voice begin to fill the hall, The wind blew at ‘twad blawn its last; The rattling showers rose on the blast.

  The students stopped jumping on to the stage and watched us. Lang turned to me and urged me to continue, his knowing right eye twisted upon me, his nicotine-stained finger pointing at the poem. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and pushed the book towards me. It was an Everyman edition, its green cloth boards sticky-taped to a broken spine. Go on! He exhaled a dense cloud of tobacco smoke, which engulfed me. The students moved in a little closer. They were Lang’s size. He picked up the book and placed it in my hands, then he took a step back and stood among the gathered students.

  I looked down at the poem. My father’s voice arose at once within me, loud and arrogant, challenging all authority, a voice beneath which aggression strode in time with the rhythm. An aggression that denounced as weaklings and fools any men who did not partake with him of the superior liberties of the Scots – an option he considered unavailable to women. An aggression directed principally at the English, who’d had the unpardonable audacity to abandon the values of the eighteenth century. The wind blew as ‘twad blawn its last; The rattling showers rose on the blast; The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d; Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellow’d …

  Fascinated, we listened to the authentic voice of my dead father declaiming the poetry of his imaginary friend and hero, his darkly timbred tone thickening the air of the high cavity of the hall. I could feel his weight above me. A monstrous charge of flesh for the air to carry. Not a tall man but square and solid, heavy and unyielding in thick tweeds and woollens.

  After several stanzas the suspended dust caused a stifling tickle in my throat and I gagged on the words, my eyes burning and filling with tears. The students turned away. They’d heard enough. I blew my nose and glanced into the shadows of the ceiling. A figure there foreshortened from beneath, an inverted Dali Christ, my father, dangerous among the old black timbers, the polished studs on the soles of his boots glinting. I wondered how my mother could have remained indifferent, how she’d managed to go on reading her book while he ranted, hobnailed boots and all. I’d made the mistake then of believing it was he who held the key to our share of the magic, not she. For it was he who had freely invoked hobgoblins and apparitions and she who’d eschewed all reference to such things. I’d not recognised his bluster for what it was, nor her unadvertised guardianship of the secret remembrances of childhood.

  I sneezed and blew my nose again and wondered if Lang thought I was weeping. He returned from dismissing his class and stood close to me and looked into my face, eager to see what I was feeling. His thick lips were purple and his teeth darkly stained and his short black hair stood straight up from his white scalp as if it were electrified. There was a greedy excitement in his eyes. Come on then, let’s go and get a counter lunch!

  I’m not crying, I said. It’s the dust.

  Yes, yes, yes! He was exuberant. He made an expansive gesture in the air with his arm extended, as if he would dismiss the dust back to its concealment for me. I shouldn’t let them jump on the stage. This old place ought to be pulled down. He was laughing.

  I went with him through rising steam across a concrete yard which had just been hosed and into the pub by the back door. There was a smell of grilling meat and stale beer in the passage. We entered a small back parlour. It was an old-fashioned pub, untouched since the fifties, at which time this room had no doubt been the Ladies Lounge. The tables were topped with thick, scarred brown linoleum. The woman artist, Gertrude Spiess, was sitting at one of the tables on her own. She looked over and waved a magazine at Lang when she saw us come in. There was no one else in the room. Lang introduced us and left us. She offered me her hand. Our fingers touched and we smiled and said hullo and fell silent. Lang had gone to a servery, which framed a portion of the front bar, where there were men gazing upwards to the accelerating voice of a race commentator on the television. Gertrude examined the magazine she’d been reading. I realised she was part Asian.

  Lang placed a glass of red wine in front of each of us and sat next to her. Let me see. He took the magazine from her. She watched him closely. He began to read, his lips moving, murmuring the words, at first inaudibly, then more loudly, until we could hear them. ‘Born in the colourful Melbourne suburb of St Kilda in 1946, Gertrude Spiess is an Australian Artist with an intuitive grasp of the significant icon.’ He made an appreciative noise in his throat and took a gulp of wine. There you are then, he said. An intuitive grasp. That means you didn’t have to work hard for it. It’s amazing what they can tell just from looking at pictures. ‘She acknowledges a cultural debt not only to Gabrielle Miinter and the German Expressionists but also to China.’ He paused to take another gulp of wine and to light a cigarette.

  She reached for the magazine. Read it later.

  He held on to it. Just a minute! He read on, adopting an overly respectful tone, his voice drifting towards parody.

  Lang! She warned him.

  His voice dropped obediently to a murmur. His lips still moved, however, and I had the impression that the effect of her warning would soon wear off. His eyes glittered with a mischievous, primate quality of cunning.

  Observing them, listening to them arguing about the worth of the article in the smart fine-art journal, feeling my presence with them accepted, and beginning to see something of their friendship, I chose to understand them in a certain way. The way I began to understand them offered me the outlines of a story, something to preserve me from certain disenchantment, to save me from the awfulness of reality. Feeling pleasantly woozy from the effects of the wine, it seemed to me that Lang and Gertrude might occupy the vacated homelands of my interior, which were in danger of being colonised by the chanting spectre of my father. Without considering what I was about, I allowed myself to be charmed by the pretensions of this fiction.

  After a while, when they had left the magazine aside and he had drunk several glasses of red wine and had begun to be difficult and argumentative with her, I picked up the magazine and read the article.

  It was an extended essay in biography and criticism. There was a photograph on the title page: a black and white portrait of her. She was seated on a lacquered ladder-back chair in a room braced with light. She was leaning a little forward, as if she were about to get up and go towards the object of her attention. One pale hand pressed expressively on her thigh, against the rich woven fabric of the black woollen dress. The dress had a wide V neckline. The photographer had achieved the lustrous sheen of soft pencil-modelling on her bare shoulders and bosom. She was looking through the eye of the camera towards the object of her thought. It was a very clever photograph. A skilled photograph. It made of her an important personage: a woman emerged from a deeply textured life into the view of the camera for us to glimpse for a tiny privileged moment, before she was drawn away once again to where our attention could not follow. I felt sure the photographer must be her close acquaintance. A friend. An admirer no doubt. His name appeared discreetly below the lower right hand corner of the picture: Ernst Kuhn. I began to elaborate a circle of such people positioned around her.

  The article posed as scholarly, but possessed none of the enthusiasm and generosity one hopes to find in a work of scholarship. It was disappointing. It lacked an ardent desire to share understanding, to bring lucidly before the reader certain precious results of a search for knowledge. It was, in fact, little more than a promotion for a one-woman exhibition of Gertrude’s drawings, which was to be mounted later in the year at a Richmond gallery. There was, however, another, more concealed, meaning to the text, evident in certain passages: ‘The merging of different motif areas in her drawings and the transformation of spatial relationships into flat correspondences gathers towards a distortion of depicted reality and the dissol
ution of its phenomenal form.’ I didn’t try to reach the sense of this. I understood the point of it was to transpose the locus of authority from the works to the discussion of the works. The writer had assumed the role of validating authority for the images he discussed. In order to do this he had been required to transform what he saw with his eyes into ideologies that he could ‘see’ with his intellect. It was not he or his ideas that interested me. It was the biographical information of his subject:

  One cannot speak for long with Gertrude Spiess about her work without hearing from her of her father. The facts are themselves unusual. Gertrude was born when her father was sixty-nine. She never knew her mother and cannot recall a time during the first twenty years of her life when she and her father were apart for more than a few hours. She talks of her work, its sources and its challenges, as if she is referring to a parallel life, as if she is referring to a time and a place where she and her father continue their existence together today. Her unusually close relationship with her father, a gentle and highly cultivated man according to her account, obviously remains the principal source of material for this young artist’s project.

  After a lifetime as a bachelor, she informs us, her father never quite recovered from his delight at becoming a father. ‘As a child I always knew myself to be at the centre of his concern. He was very old and I was very young. It was always necessary for us to look after each other.’ She will not discuss his death and refers to herself as ‘the unpunished child’, as if there is a mystery here, the significance of which we ordinary folk will not quite comprehend. One is inclined to believe her.