The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  His home was on a hill overlooking the city, just over the river from Richmond. It was a polychrome brick mansion and was in a state of serious dilapidation. He claimed his great-grandfather had built it in 1876. I stayed till dawn, till he passed out on the rug in front of the gas fire in the front room, which was cluttered with antique furniture and paintings and empty wine casks and old newspapers and which stank like the back parlour of the pub where we’d had lunch with Gertrude Spiess. I turned off the fire and put a coat over him and tiptoed out into the grey morning. Even though he was safe sleeping on his own hearth, I felt ungenerous for leaving him. I felt I was abandoning him and ought to have stayed till he woke.

  At the end of his entrance hall, facing the front door, there was positioned a very large movable mirror in an ornate mahogany frame. As I turned to pull the front door to I saw my reflection in this mirror, apparently entering a garden hidden within his house. Resolutely departing from it, I witnessed myself penetrating more deeply into Lang’s domain. Leaving him, I could not resist the impression that I was becoming the person inhabiting the landscape within his mirror. I closed the door and stepped back into the porch. Above the lintel was a sandstone plaque. It was set within a framework of terracotta and ochre bricks. I paused to examine it. It was circular and depicted a pair of dancing phoenixes. Beneath the mythical birds was the word RESURGAM, as if this were the family motto. Eight bouquets of vine leaves adorned the outer circle of the plaque.

  I made my way across the dewy grass to the street and drove home through the empty streets. In sleep he had looked even more like a child – small and vulnerable and abandoned, his cheek resting on his two hands, palms together, and his knees drawn up towards his narrow chest; as if someone once in authority over him had instructed him always to sleep in the orthodox manner expected of a child, and he had not been able to disobey them.

  The next evening I took a book he’d lent me to bed. I was very tired and intended to read a few pages of it so that I could say something to him about it when I next saw him. It was an old hardcover, and must have once been a smart edition, though now it was broken-backed and stained. Its cloth covers were a rich golden yellow. On the upper cover there was a blind-stamped design. I’d been holding it closed in front of me, resting it on my raised thighs and wondering if I weren’t too tired to read any of it, when I realised the design on the cover was similar to the one in stone above the lintel of Lang’s front door. I sat up and held it obliquely to the light. A pair of phoenixes confronted each other symmetrically. The birds appeared to be engaged in a ritual dance preceding either mating or combat. I counted eight bouquets of vine leaves clustered round the outer circle. There was no legend, no proclamation of faith, beneath this one. I opened the book. A not unpleasant mustiness was released; a complex odour in which I detected tobacco and wine and the dampness peculiar to Lang’s house. The title page bore the following: THE WINTER VISITOR. And beneath this a sub-title, A Life in the Northern Hemisphere, followed by the author’s name, Victoria Feng. There was an epigraph from the Threnos, or lamentation verses, of Shakespeare’s poem ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’:

  Beauty, truth, and rarity

  Grace in all simplicity,

  Here enclos’d in cinders lie.

  Death is now the phoenix’ nest;

  Here, then, was the explanation for the missing legend, RESURGAM. Unlike the builder of Lang’s house, his great-grandfather, it seemed Victoria had not hoped for a resurrection from the cinders to which she had presumably consigned her own particular phoenix. I was tempted to look at the last page, and was on the point of doing so when my eye was held by one final piece of information at the bottom of the title page: the name of the publisher of the book. It was the name of my own publisher. Only the address differed, given here as The Strand. The date of publication of this book was 1912, so presumably The Strand had then been the location of my publisher’s premises. The coincidence pleased me. I turned to the first page of the text:

  After absences lasting more than half a year he came to me each time as if from a strange apartment which communicated with the part of the house in which I lived by a hidden staircase or passage. When he was absent from us I spent many hours searching for the entrance to this secret way and often imagined I had found it. For a time after his departure I learnt to dull the sharpness of my grief with a resort to the fantastic, and in my daydreams I joined him in a land of pure imaginings which, for me, must lie beyond the hidden doorway. Together he and I, like the mythical feng and huang of the Chinese other-world, the heavenly emissary which appears when the land enjoys the gods’ favour, journeyed side by side and danced our benevolent dance in perfect harmony upon the land which blessed our presence. Daily reality in Coppin Grove by comparison to this fanciful world seemed to me for some years during my childhood to be a meaningless folly pursued by persons of an unmitigated and grim practicality. A world of persons who did not deserve my compassion. No word from my mother or sisters, no matter how kind or well-intentioned, drew from me for years anything but disdain. Until, at the last, one by one, they had all reluctantly abandoned me to my folly, seeing in my presence among them not a daughter or a sister but a stranger in their midst.

  On each subsequent visit he was always changed from the way he had been when I had seen him last. And so, I am certain, was I. We met on each occasion as new people, freshly burnished from our travels. The father with whom I dwelt for months at a time in my imaginary landscape was forced to retreat into the shadows of fiction whenever my real father arrived. He always came unexpectedly and unannounced.

  On a bitterly cold day when I was eleven – it must have been the winter of 1889 – I was praaising Franz Schubert’s Fantasia in C – how could I forget, for it is based on his beautiful song ‘Der Wanderer’. I was lost to my surroundings, struggling to master the unfamiliar fingering, when I became aware that someone was near me. I ceased playing and swung around upon the stool. He stood in the doorway. We gazed at each other. In that moment I felt for him the purest, the most distilled, love. We did not embrace. We never embraced. But gazed upon each other’s beloved countenance in wonderment. We dwelt in splendour. Schubert’s chord loitered in the room as if it were the ghost of that great sadness which all humanity must bear.

  ‘Please don’t stop,’ my father implored me gently.

  ‘I have just finished, father,’ I replied and I slipped quickly from the stool and hurried from the room by the door furthest from him.

  He called to me, ‘Stay a moment Victoria. I have a present for you.’

  But I could not stay. I ran to my room and locked the door and stood dry-eyed before my mirror and solemnly announced to my faithful sister from the other-world, ‘The Phoenix has returned to us.’ I did not see him again until dinner. The formality of this occasion rendered our meeting easier for me. The ceremony, that is, which was required from each of us shielded me from emotions which I might otherwise have found it difficult to deal with. I believed he too, and that he alone of all those present, understood this exactly as I understood it. His gift to me was waiting in my place. They watched me while I opened it. For my eight sisters there were fine silks from Hangchou and for my mother a carpet from Tibet.

  From its bed of silvery wild grass, a grass so soft it was like the fur of a young rabbit against my fingers – a grass so unlike the coarse grasses that grew beside the Yarra and in the paddocks around Hawthorn that it could only have come from the other-world – from this nest I drew forth an earthenware horse glazed with subtle green and orange glazes. It was a horse of fine proportions, realistically formed. It stood with its head slightly turned and its mouth open, alert to the will of its rider. It was caparisoned with a Persian saddle and rosettes of green frogs on the harness. This tall, noble steed I recognised as none other than the legendary Tianma, the heavenly horse of the West. I looked at my horse with pride. This supernatural beast would carry me safely and swiftly to the furthest lands which my father might ev
er visit. It was a horse perfectly fashioned to inhabit the unearthly shadows of my fiction. Carefully I replaced it in its nest of wild grass and put it to one side. I did not need to look at my father to share with him the meaning of this gift. I understood that henceforth I was to travel with him.

  My mother did not resist suggesting, ‘I am sure Victoria wishes to thank you.’ It was her way of letting me know that she acknowledged on my behalf no special preferment with my father. I raised my eyes and looked at her with a contempt that the dead might well bear towards the living. How little you can know or understand of this, my look was intended to convey. I remember she blushed. She was a loving and sensitive wife and the kindest mother ever blessed with eight dutiful daughters, an abundance of worldly goods and a robust constitution. But she was also Irish and her anger could be sudden, implacable and violent in its expression. But I was not afraid of her. How should I be? For I had my secret. So I smiled and waited for her to tell me to leave the room and to go to bed without my dinner. I knew my father would not intervene. My mother was the empress of this world, the mistress of the house at Coppin Grove, her domain bounded by the road and the river and by the summerhouse, and by the edge of the native trees yonder. But not extending beyond these boundaries. Beyond her domain lay my freedom. And his. I did not care for this world at all, nor for its rewards. I laughed at them. When Katherine married the mayor and they moved to their great house in Brighton I felt sorry for her. I saw that she had been taken to a prison from which there could be no escape.

  How many years was it from the gift of the horse to the terrible day I learned that not only the existence of my mother and sisters but my own existence as well had never been made known to my father’s Chinese wife and son in Shanghai? That day I learned I had not existed for him in the Northern Hemisphere, with his number one family, as it became clear. Though I am not certain that in his youth he meant this to be so. I believe it was something deeper than himself which eroded our validity for him over the years. There are certain actions for which people should not be held personally accountable. There are ancient forces which make their way through us as rivers make their way through landscapes, reshaping features we had thought permanent, moving what we had thought to be stilled for ever, and wearing away resolves in us that are not touched even by our strangest irnaginings. We are not only that person we think we are, but more. As my father I knew he loved me. But he was also a man from China.

  This bright autumn day with the sun warm against my shoulders, the twenty-seventh of May 1908, he is dying. My half-brother from Shanghai, who is wholly Chinese, is with him. I can see my brother’s shadow at the window. He stands behind my father’s chair and waits to become the second Feng. He is a practical man. I believe Australia means nothing to him … I would like to cease writing and walk among the trees, among that remnant of bushland which lies yonder, between the riverbank and the road … The shadow of my brother has gone from the window. My father, the first Feng, is dead. I am alone, now, with my horse and my fiction. I am in my thirtieth year. I have been many years in preparation. Now even Shinje, the Lord of Death herself, could not be better mounted for such a journey as I intend to make.

  The light beside my bed was still on. The book lay on the covers near my hand. I picked it up and remembered I’d finished reading it before going to sleep. There were three hundred and two pages. I closed my eyes again and it was all still there. I watched her cantering away into her fiction on her orange and green horse through the patch of sunlit bush. I watched her setting out on her journey, riding bravely into the unknown landscape of her fiction, aware of her inevitable solitude. Her black hair streamed out behind her and the hooves of her supernatural horse threw a fine golden dust into the bright summer air, a dust which rose into the branches of the slim gumtrees and lingered there long after she had gone. Watching her I washer, the way one is the character within whose persona one transcends oneself; and strives with that person, as vulnerable as they to the dangers and difficulties which are encountered; hope and anxiety and fear dancing together in one’s brain. Opposed to us on the journey was the dark sign with which she had announced her work: Beauty, truth and rarity, grace in all simplicity, here enclosed in cinders lie.

  NO ORDINARY CHILD

  Huang Yu-hua, the old literary painter, was sitting at his writing desk in his study in the provincial capital of Hangzhou. He was re-reading a letter from his only child, Lien. Huang was wearing a black fur coat, which fastened high and close about his skinny neck. The coat was more than fifty years old. It was bald on the shoulders but was still proof against draughts and damps and sudden chills, providing they were of the summer kind and not too severe. A Kazak trader from the Kirgiz had sold his father the twelve Syrian bear-cub pelts which had been required to make this precious garment. On his shaved head Huang wore a black silk skull cap with a gold emblem at the front, like a watchful eye. Between the skull cap and the black fur his face shone in the lamplight. His skin was the texture of waxed blondwood and was stretched tight over the framework of his bones. From either side of his upper lip silvery grey whiskers languished against the sable fur, as two branches of a mountain stream might pass on each side of a rocky prominence.

  Huang’s lips moved as he read and he nodded all the while, measuring the rhythm of Lien’s thoughts. Since she had gone from his house two years ago he had become more sensitive to cold and damp. There was no need for the fur coat this evening, for the air was pleasantly mild, but should anything happen, should an unexpected chill arise, for example, with his fur coat on he felt sure he would be ready for it. And he would rather have suffered the discomfort of too much warmth than the wretched anxiety which must arise from being unprepared. He had been nineteen, Lien’s age now, when his father had presented him with the coat. He read her letter once again, this time with even more care than before:

  My Dearest Father,

  Feng sends you his greetings and trusts that you will soon have recovered your former state of good health. Can you believe this? Is it possible that you are reading these words from your daughter, or are you dreaming them? Or, is it that our dream is to come true? I shall keep you in suspense on this matter no longer. Here is what I have to say. I shall be arriving in Hangzhou next Friday. Everything must be just as it was! Nothing is to be out of its customary place! Yes, we are to be together again! But first we must wait almost a whole week. How shall we bear it? By the time you receive this it will be one day less. How lucky you are to be one day closer to me than I am to you, revered parent! Concern yourself about nothing. Do not disturb your routine. Experience no anxiety on my behalf. Everything will be arranged. I shall be travelling by train and his Russian will go ahead by road and meet me at the station with a car. I am hurrying to write this. Be assured my dear Father that I shall not be coming as an important guest to your house. So make no arrangements for the reception of the wife of C.H. Feng. He will not wish to know anything of how it is done. He would rather it were not done. Do not greet me at the principal gate with the assembled household. Keep my visit a secret from them. Tell only Yu. Consider that I am returning from an excursion to the temple at Lin Yin. I shall re-enter by my customary way.

  Behind Huang hundreds of dusty books were piled untidily one on top of another on pearwood shelves. Apart from his writing table and the books there was little furniture in the room. The floor was composed of large irregular-shaped flagstones the colour of lead. They were worn into smooth undulations from the passage of many generations of slippered feet. The faded carmine and green casements were open and through them could be seen the red lacquered posts of the verandah, lustrous in the evening light as if they had been made of polished metal. Beyond the verandah lay Huang’s formal garden, now in a state of neglect. Huang ceased reading. He folded the letter carefully and placed it in a pocket inside his coat. The sun was setting. Through the casements a bank of cloud could be seen lying across Langdang Ridge, a forested hill which rose from the western sh
ore of the lake, and which was visible to him above the roof of the furthest section of his house – that section of his house, beyond the courtyard of the little red doorway, through which she was to return to him. The temple of Lin Yin was situated on an outcrop of rock within the ridge among the hills, concealed by the forest. He watched until the gilding had faded from the edges of the cinnamon clouds, then he withdrew her letter and once again began to study it. His attention lingered on the ideograph father. A tear slid down the side of his straight nose until it encountered the cup formed by the rise of his nostril and the curve of his cheek. When the unbidden servant, Yu Hung-meng, came in and placed the lamp on the writing table, it appeared Huang wore a diamond in his nose. He dwelt lingeringly upon each of her brushstrokes, seeking remembered aspects of a terrain with which he had once been familiar, muttering to himself of rocks and withered vines and dewdrops about to fall, seeking his daughter through her expressive script. A script he had taught her himself. Though she had done him the honour of using the brush, her letter had been written in a hurry and he found only fragments of the old ground they had shared.

  He murmured her name and was startled by the unexpected voice. He had not intended to speak her name aloud. It whispered around the walls. He fancied he heard the silk of her gown brush against the doorpost as she entered. He stared about him, distracted. The lamplight illuminated only the flagstones. He was afraid.

  Behind a blue-painted screen near the door Yu Hung-meng eased his joints. The scholar’s pain was his pain. The scholar’s anxieties his. He had served no other master. Since Lien’s letter arrived he had been waiting for the signal to rejoice. He bore the old man’s misery impatiently. The painter’s tears made him groan aloud. How often had they wept together? Were they always to be the ones who must weep? From the folds of his gown he drew out a little box, carved in one piece from the root of a wild thorn tree. She had given him the box to keep his tobacco moist. He tugged off the lid and held it close to his nostrils, breathing the aroma of the dark leaf. The voice of his master called to him then and he rose, slipping his treasured gift back into its place of concealment. As he crossed the study the joints of his knees creaked and snapped, giving out the sounds of someone walking over bamboo trestles. He had tried often to imagine what it must be like for her in Shanghai. The city of the Lord of Death. He knew that much. The infernal regions raised above the eanh, where the tower of the Phoenix looked down indifferently upon the misery of a people. A city ruled by foreign devils who knew nothing of Kung or Mung, or of any morality.