The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  The wind had dropped and the rain had begun to fall heavily almost straight down, as it does in Hokusai’s woodcuts. The summerhouse was fortified by the suckers. As if the ground around it had been staked, the way the defenders of the village in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai staked the ramparts with sharpened bamboos to keep the bandits out. Taking the chair with me I left the mound and forced my way through the suckers to the summerhouse.

  There was a strong smell of cat spray. The boards sagged a bit but did not give way, and the wide upturned eaves provided shelter for more than three-quarters of the interior. I put the chair down. There were three empty teachests lined with silver paper and there was a small table and a chair. The table and chair were broken. Not smashed, but fallen apart, the joints weathered out. It wouldn’t take much to repair them. And there was some other junk in a pile in one corner. As if someone had come along and had a go at cleaning up but had abandoned the task. I pulled out the silver lining from one of the teachests and spread it on the wet seat of the cane chair I’d dragged in, and I sat down and looked out at the rain. As the heat of my thighs began to warm them through, my trousers gave off a vapour and a pleasant self-smell. My silver-lined chair was windproof and cosy. I was comfortable. I felt relieved that I’d avoided being entirely frustrated by his absence from the house. The rain continued heavily. I was glad of its grey, intimidating screen. I was glad to be made invisible by it. I stared out at it, feeling that I’d reached a sanctuary, pleased now that Lang was not at home and grateful to have achieved a respite from him and from the exhausting manoeuvrings of the game.

  From where I was seated the mound appeared insignificant. It was not a prominent feature of the landscape from the perspective of the summerhouse. The dominant elements of the view – and these opposed each other in an interesting way-were, to the north, the opaque mass of the house, blocking off the light from that source as if it signified an end, as if there could be no going any further in that direction; and, to the east, the tall, open stand of eucalypts, the remnant of native forest, which glowed in the rain with a cold interior phosphorescence, promising diffuse and interesting spaces to the curious traveller.

  These two vertical features, the house and the forest, confronted each other across the open area of lawn. The mound from here was a no-man’s-land. It was an abandoned base camp. Abandoned by everyone, by the mother and by the daughter and now by us. I began to see that the summerhouse was positioned at the trig-point of this triangular arrangement. The summerhouse, neither itself quite house nor clearing nor alluring space, but possessing elements of the features of all three, was in fact the interstitial place from which, with the cunning trigonometry of her fiction, she had surveyed her landscape. The summerhouse was the indeterminate feature by means of which she had located herself and engineered her escape from Coppin Grove.

  I knew I’d realised something that ought to have been obvious to me for a long time. Something that had been obscured, however, until this last week or two, by the tremulous mask of aspen leaves, the dense thicket of suckers that was at last leafless and no longer able to conceal the secret hidden at its heart. It was a shock to find myself seated there. It seemed I had found my way there, not by any conscious deductive process, not as the result of careful observation, but by the instinctive homing intuitions of a true parasite. It seemed that I’d been making my way towards her workplace all the time. Going out to the mound had not just seemed like the establishment of a base camp, it really had been one, a preparatory stage towards the eventual occupation of the summerhouse. I was delighted by this extension of my metaphor, of myself as a parasite, as ‘one who eats at the table of another’.

  The rain was slackening. When it stopped altogether, I resolved that I would go to the lean-to where I’d found the cane furniture and I’d get the axe I’d seen there and hack a pathway through the suckers to the steps of the summerhouse. The path would signify my occupation. It would be undeniable. I would knock her table and chair together and he would find me already hard at work, as if I were Victoria returned from the northern hemisphere – as Gertrude had it in her image – one hundred years on. The summerhouse would be my winter quarters. He would be required to approach me along my path. I would abandon him.

  When he returned from drinking with Lindner, he would find that I had not retreated in confusion from his door, defeated, but had inserted myself into the interstice created by his momentary absence, and that I had thereby seized the indirect initiative myself. He would see, to his dismay, that the situation had changed during his absence, but not as he had foreseen, nor as he had planned. He would see that if he wished to reinstate himself, then he would have to read my signs. I’d been too clever for him. He’d underestimated me. He would not be able to ignore the challenge to the interpretation of his material implied by my occupation of her worksite. It was a masterful stroke of indirectness.

  She had written, ‘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.’

  From where I was seated it was not possible to see the upper storey windows of the house. I got up and moved my chair closer to the edge and sat down again. I looked up towards the large bay window at the back of the house, which I took to be the one Victoria had referred to. Lang was up there, standing at the window, watching me …

  In the house he handed me a glass of wine and remained close beside me, his shoulder just touching my upper arm, sheltering beside me. He seemed extraordinarily fragile. I recalled an impression I’d formed of him even before we’d met, that he might not be going to have a middle-age but might carry his arrested youthfulness all the way to old age and even to the moment of his death – a solitary figure far out from shore on the dangerously thin sea ice, moving away slowly. Then when I looked again he was gone. The landscape was empty. It was a northern winter landscape I saw him in, almost the icy fogbound river where my mother and I had held our brief vigil in memory of my dead father. I knew I would wake one day to find that Lang no longer existed. A line from Tarn came to me and I spoke it aloud: Like the snow falls in the river, a moment white then melts for ever.

  He moved away and leaned on the window sill, his face half-turned towards me, the sardonic tilt of his features caught by the watery sunlight, that aspect of irony which the trauma of his birth had stamped permanently on his countenance and which subsequent experience had done nothing to erode. His right eye examined me distantly – from the other-world – and he chuckled hoarsely and dragged on his cigarette. Bums, he said, appreciatively.

  You’d get on my with my mother, I said, seeing this for the first time. Despite Burns. She hated him.

  He looked pleased. I remember your mother. I have an image of her racing down a dangerous hill on her bicycle with her eyes closed and her feet off the pedals and her red hair streaming out behind her like the flames of a rocket.

  It was a child’s drawing of my mother.

  In my picture there are thatched cottages and a castle rushing by. He laughed. I’ve never been to England. She has forgotten that you and your father ever existed.

  I knew my mother would understand Lang completely and intuitively. They would understand each other. They would not be surprised or puzzled but would begin conversing at once in a language unknown to anyone else. A secret language for which they would not need the port
able icons of white swans and Ned Kelly masks. Their communication would not be on that level, but would be on a level older than that. Objects would glow for them with an interior light, an illumination which had its source in geological, not in historical, time. My mother’s advice to me would have been to avoid him. She would not have believed me capable of benefiting from a meeting with Lang. I felt something between us that was almost a family tie, something I’d never felt before for anyone in Australia.

  Lin Yin, he said, the temple of hidden spirits. He was looking out the window again. Did you know the gazebo is a Chinese invention? I left the table – where Gertrude’s drawing lay; the reason for his earlier absence from the house – and I went over and stood beside him and looked down into the garden. The pale yellow sunlight of the winter afternoon was shafting through the naked branches of the poplar and sliding between the pillars of the summerhouse below us.

  You’re right to work there Steven, he said, in the solemn, regretful voice he often used when he spoke of Gertrude’s work. A gazebo was originally a lookout for the enemy and was built into the roof of the house. Thousands of years ago. Before civilisation. He was telling me something I could never have guessed, reminding me – even though he knew I did not need reminding – that Spiess’s journal and Viaoria’s Winter Visitor were not, on their own, enough for me to go on. The father of the village went up into the gazebo as dawn was breaking over the fields each day and he watched for the approach of the enemy. And after many generations, when it was no longer necessary to watch for the approach of the enemy in this way, when the kingdom had been pacified by the benevolent rule of the Yellow Emperor, those who’d sat for hours and watched began to miss the solitary time they’d spent in the gazebo, gazing down on to the countryside and the busy comings and goings of humankind. The long hours alone had revealed to them something which they could otherwise never have discovered for themselves in the world at ground level. Alone in the gazebo they had learned how to reflect on their experience. They had discovered the hidden beauties of solitary contemplation. To gaze inward had become an established custom with them, and they found when they came down that they could no longer live happily without it. For what they had seen in the interior world had amused and entertained and gratified them far more than anything they’d ever seen in the world at ground level. In the busy world of the daily routine of the village, where no one ever had a moment to stop and think but where everyone had to either get on or risk falling behind, those who had come down from their gazebos now found themselves to be strangers, even though they were surrounded by the dear members of their own families. Sadly, they realised that they could never again be content without the interior life of their reflections. So, without attempting to explain themselves – for they knew no one would understand their rejection of reality – but satisfied to let everyone think they were mad, one by one they abandoned their families and their responsibilities and they returned to their gazebos to think. Eventually they removed, or were perhaps asked to remove, their gazebos a little distance from the house. This retreat from worldly responsibilities and from the family was the beginning of the literary arts. It was the beginning of civilisation. It was the beginning of history. And it all started with the need to keep a sharp lookout for the enemy.

  He turned to me, restless, unsatisfied, the demon awakened in him now. The gazebo isn’t an English summerhouse, Steven, for people to take afternoon tea in. It’s the entrance to the other-world. You didn’t know that did you? He drained his wine and looked around, as if he feared that while he’d been talking the enemy had cut him off from further supplies. Westerners, he said, searching for the cask and struggling not to sound too contemptuous, think the distinction between fact and fiction is self-evident.

  He pointed his wineglass at me, like a shaman pointing a bone. She was Chinese; remember that. Chinese, Steven! he repeated, as if he were reiterating a law of the occult that I, his lazy, dull-witted apprentice, was stubbornly unable to acknowledge; a law which placed Victoria and her imaginative life beyond the reach of Western understanding. He snatched Gertrude’s drawing from the table and headed for the door.

  The erotic was there, but it was concealed. The erotic was in fact the most important element in the picture; the thing that made you want to keep coming back. You couldn’t sate yourself with it. It didn’t lose its effect with repeated looking, but grew quietly more evident, more disquietingly evident, with one’s increased familiarity. It wasn’t in the girl’s nakedness. Her flesh had been made inert. It was grey, with cold, purplish shadows, as if she were suffering from an abnormally high concentration of reduced haemoglobin. The child’s bones, her ribs and her pelvis and her knees, poked out, like the bones of other creatures bundled up inside the envelope of her skin. Pictorially the portrait was sinister. The flesh had been rendered unapproachable. One’s attention was directed away from the flesh to the eyes. It was in Victoria’s eyes that the erotic was implied. She was looking levelly into the eyes of the painter. In her gaze was an acknowledgment of his fear and his guilt and, if one looked long enough and keenly enough, his desire, his lust. And in his attempt to legitimise, to normalise, his lust he had made her features appear much older than her body. Lang claimed to have detected all this at once, the moment Tom Lindner brought the picture out and showed it to him. It took me much longer. But eventually I pieced together the erotic as she saw it, in the mind of the painter, not in his picture. The erotic was withdrawn from the pictorial. It had its existence elsewhere. In dealing with it one’s imagination was drawn away from the painting, not into it.

  She stared at us in the light of the gas fire: ‘The girl who stands at the edge of the thin, dry forest observing the artist at work on the green sweep of lawn before her keeps a private journal of her own. Into its pages at night, when she is alone in her room at the top of the house, her thoughts of herself and her findings concerning the northern hemisphere are written. She writes of the English painter carefully, deliberatively, with the kind of loving and solitary joy of a writer. She is accurate with her observations and careful to resist the proffered image. She is aware of the temptation to become fanciful and knows the dangers are real. Fiction, she has discovered, though it is conducted in the isolation of the mind, cannot be permitted to become madness. She does not know what her researches will reveal. She does not know the end of her story. She writes not with an end in mind but with a desire to make the material of her scrutiny her own, to possess it by means of the location of herself at its centre. She enters it by degrees. She insinuates herself. She is in fear of and is fascinated by her power to entice and to mock the artist.’

  Lang coughed, doubling over against his hand. He stayed doubled over for a couple of seconds, then he breathed deeply and drew himself up with difficulty and lit another cigarette. He stabbed his stained forefinger at the portrait. They hate this sort of picture, he said hoarsely, struggling to breathe, in pain, presumably meaning all art-loving Australians. He’d been telling me the story of the painter, the true story, the one occurring briefly in the record. The painter had met with misfortune after he left Coppin Grove and the service of Victoria’s mother and, despite his letter of introduction from the magisterial Mr von Guerard, had not managed to make a decent career for himself in Australia. He had, it seemed, painted other naked children. There had eventually been a scandal, a trial, and when he emerged from this he had walked into the breakers off Point Lonsdale and ended his life, facing back towards England.

  You ‘re Australian, Lang said, as if he were reminding me that I’d had myself tattooed while I was drunk. He blew out a cloud of smoke. He was gleeful. You told me you were an Australian. Remember? Remember that, Steven? He laughed and waved his cigarette at me. He didn’t require an answer. His spiky hair shivered and sent out gleams in the firelight. His ankles were bone-white above his socks, brittle plaster-of-Paris casts. He sat cross-legged on the rug and rocked himself backwards and forwards, the wine slopping about in h
is glass and spilling on his old blue trousers, his left eye watering and blinking with the optimistic, greedy innocence of a child, his right eye swivelling about independently, the elder, the remote sensing organ of the lookout in the gazebo, on the alert for the approaching enemy. It steadied on me fleetingly, Would you like to see the lotus cup my grandfather gave Spiess.

  It really exists then?

  Of course it exists! Of course it exists! The eagerness of my interest gratified him. The lotus cup, he said. There’s plenty of time. Let’s have a drink first. You do want to see it?

  I’d love to see it.

  Good. Good. I remember everything. He drank deeply, abandoning caution, becoming master of his past again, empowered to reclaim it breath for breath and to deliver it to me, intact, its smells, its texts and textures, the precise weights and measures of things and of circumstances, the gravity and the levity of events. And to prove it, he would produce for me the celadon teacup from the Sung kilns of Fenghuang Hill, the fragile antique heirloom saved miraculously from the ruins, which Gertrude’s father had held honourably in trust for him. To prove his capacity, his friendship and his largesse, to prove that it all still belonged to him, he would disclose Huang’s lotus, his lien. He would produce for me not merely his mother’s gold this time, but his mother herself. He would produce whatever I might desire for my concoction. Nothing was too sacred. Nothing was too precious. He was protected from his fear of saying too much, of revealing too many of his secrets, by the confessional veil of alcohol. He aspired to demonstrate abundance. Completeness. An unflawed trust that would never have permitted him to react suspiciously, as I had done earlier, to his absence from the house. He intended to prove himself to me and to rebuke me in the process for my lack of generosity of spirit. His estate was invulnerable to my incursions. It was too large and too grand to be noticeably depleted by my appetite. He would account to me for his past in its entirety. He would present me with the problem, not of what to put in but of what to leave out. He would dazzle and disorient me. He would leave me confused and uncertain.