The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  Lien held Lang tightly against her body and she whispered to him, I promise you my darling, we shall never again be parted. Forgive me. You can have no idea how terribly I have missed you.

  The assembled members of the household looked at Madame Feng and her son with great interest. They were impressed. No such scene as this had ever before been witnessed by them. It was a wonderful, shameless display. Clearly Madame Feng and her son were not even going to pretend any longer that they were not half-western devils. Yu told the servants to get on about their business at once. The holiday is over, he shouted angrily. And when they moved reluctantly, he struck them sharply round the ankles with his stick.

  Three months passed. Lien and Lang had been back in Shanghai for more than six weeks. Then, to her surprise, one day Lien’s maid informed her there was a telephone call for her from Hangzhou. It was Yu. He had never before used the telephone. He shouted his message and hung up. Huang Yu-hua is dying, he had screamed. If you want to see him alive you must hurry. When they arrived in Hangzhou late that same night, Yu hurried to meet them. He was calm and grave. As soon as I told him you were on your way, he informed her, Your father recovered just enough to sit up and take a little soup from me. He will not receive you in his bedroom. He says you must wait until he is strong enough to receive you in his study. A week of uncertainty went by, while everyone crept about the house conversing in whispers and expecting any minute to hear the news that the Lord of Death had carried off the old scholar. Then, on the seventh day, just before noon, when she and Lang were reading together, Yu came into Lien’s apartments and announced sombrely, Your father awaits you for the last time in his study.

  Lang’s hand tightened in his mother’s.

  Yu seemed embarrassed and unhappy. He did not look directly at Lang. Your father does not wish to see the boy, he said and he made a little gesture of defeat and left them. How else could he have expressed it? Huang’s instructions to him had been explicit. Lang was never to be admitted to his presence again under any circumstances. Feng’s son (he did not say, my daughter’s son), the old scholar had confided to Yu one night, is a demon. The faces of the two old men were only a few millimetres apart, their watery eyes glinting and shifting in the smoky lamplight like the eyes of fearful chimpanzees, a profound and nervous suspicion animating their depths. He is a supernatural projection of his father, Huang assured Yu, speaking in an appalled whisper. I was beguiled by the subterfuge. You have only to look into the boy’s right eye to see his father’s thoughts there, mocking us and our Chinese way of life and waiting to see us all destroyed. Feng, Huang confided, looking around nervously at the black hole of night through the open casement, sees everything through his son. Yu was dismayed. No doubt it was true. He had heard of such things. Yu helped his master to dress, the dry silk rustling against their dry fingers.

  Lien sat opposite Huang in his study and took the cup of tea Yu passed to her. I am dying, Huang said. There is very little of me left. I possess just sufficient strength to pay my respects to the ancestors one last time. Perhaps, he added archly, I shall die while we are at the shrine. It would be convenient for everyone.

  In the gallery afterwards Lien asked Yu, How am I to tell my son? He will believe I am betraying him. But how can I refuse my father’s dying wish?

  Yu folded his hands into his sleeves and gazed thoughtfully towards the plum tree, which was in full summer leaf, and he reflected on her double question, the dilemma of a mother. Then he sighed and sniffed and offered the conclusion, If you do not go with your father this last time, then you will have the rest of your life to regret not having done so and there will be nothing you can do to redress the wrong you have done him. On the other hand, if you do go with your father on his last pilgrimage, you will have the rest of your life in which to regain the trust of your son and to redress the wrong you have done him. This is merely an observation, he added.

  Lien thanked him and apologised for forgetting to bring cigarettes from Shanghai this time. We left in such a hurry, she explained. I’ll send you some when we get back. They looked at the garden. Neither had anything to say. The moment was one of uncertainty between them. She knew that Yu would never be able to advise against her father’s interests. For herself, she had seen the limits of her loyalty to her father. That out of this there had arisen an estrangement, no matter how slight or how temporary, between herself and Yu greatly saddened her. She had always confided in the old man as in no one else. She offered him a cigarette and lit it for him. Sometimes Yu, she said, my spirit leaves me, and I feel a terrible tiredness which I cannot resist. I can’t remember at such times what it is like to feel well. Have you never felt this?

  Yu had never lived for himself nor considered the state of his own spirit. He cleared his throat noisily. Do you remember, he said, how your father took the pole into his own hands that night and drove our boat across Xihu Lake, as if he were a young man, keen to impress us all?

  There they were again. This time gathered together in the soft light of a summer dawn, drawn up like a little grey army waiting for the order to march, Lang at the front on his own, in his green silk gown with the high collar, the captain of the garrison.

  This time he did not wait to see her wave from the corner. Even before the black-lacquered gates had swung closed, before the great teak bar was dropped into place by the strong watchmen, while the car was still visible, Lang turned and ran. He ran as hard as he could. Startled servants skipped aside to let him through. Dust and small stones were scattered by his slippers. His green gown billowed like a wizard’s cloak behind him and walls and doors and copings and lacquered columns swept past him as he ran through the house.

  Breathing heavily, he stopped at last in the middle of the raised garden bed in the courtyard behind the courtyard of the second gateway. He had lost his cap, and his spiky black hair stood upright on his scalp and quivered, like the raised crest of an aroused fighting cock. Dust motes and straw swirled around him in a golden mist, glittering in the bright dawn and sprinkling the shimmering green of his silken gown. He faced the storehouse, through which the throng of servants shortly followed him.

  When they saw him standing there, all green and gold in the morning sun with his hands on his hips in the middle of the garden bed, a warlord or a bandit, they hesitated and fell back. It appeared to them that he would ask something of them. They milled about in the entrance to the storehouse like sheep confronted at a gate by a dog.

  Lang stood upon his mother’s childhood garden bed as if he stood upon her history, just as August Spiess might have imagined him; a being efflorescent with destiny, a lang tsze, a traveller at the instant of departure. Although August Spiess was not here to see Lang at this moment, there was a sense in which the doctor’s presence was engaged. For it was because of August Spiess that Lang did not feel himself at this moment to be utterly alone, with no alternative, except his father’s, to his mother’s world of the ancestors, and that he knew his own perception of the world was shared by at least one other human being whom he trusted and admired. Had he felt himself to be completely alone, then he would almost certainly have behaved differently, for he could not have possessed the confidence to seize the moment as he did. Of course, poised on the rostrum of his mother’s garden, which offered him the necessary elevation from which to look down upon Yu and the servants, he did not see precisely what this moment was that he had seized. He did not see what it contained for him, he simply seized it. Or, rather, he was seized by it. The moment seized him the way a young bird in its first year of life is gripped at a certain season by the inescapable desire to leave the place where it was born and migrate to a place where it has never been before.

  To set out, to depart from the old way, was for Lang the inescapable imperative of the moment, not to reconcile the opposing positions of his parents. He did not think of an end to the journey, any more than the migrating bird thinks of the end. His desire was to set out, not to go somewhere in particular. August Sp
iess alone had offered him a resolution to the dilemma of his dimorphism. Without considering it, without being exactly aware of what he was doing, it was into this proffered interstice between the way of his mother and the way of his father that Lang at this moment inserted himself.

  He went into his grandfather’s empty study and stood by the writing desk, uncertain of what he intended to do next. He turned and looked at Shu and Shin. They, who had never been admitted to this part of the house before, stood in the doorway holding hands and gazing at him with fear, knowing themselves to be beyond the reach of assistance. Come here, he called to them softly. And when they did not move, he said, Do you think the watchman will beat you if I command him to?

  The boys shuffled forward, stopping at Yu’s blue screen, their bare toes curling against the flagstones, gripping the cold, reassuring slate. Come and stand beside me at this table, Lang ordered them, and he patted the glossy wood on which he and his grandfather had worked in harmony as master and pupil. When the boys would not move he went over and grabbed their arms and dragged them to the table. He held them and looked into their terrified eyes, searching for their courage, for their capacity to be his lieutenants, to be his witnesses. For that was what he needed. He needed someone to see what he did. He needed recruits, whether they were willing or not, who would carry around in their heads an awe of his purpose.

  Listen, he said to them, drawing them close until he smelt on their breath the sour pickles they had eaten with their porridge. I have a new game for us. I shall instruct you in its rules. It shall be a secret between us. If either of you ever speaks of it to anyone else I shall tell my father, the great merchant Feng Three, and he will come and destroy you. It is called the ancestor game, he said, inventing the name and finding himself pleasantly taken with it. He had no idea what the rules were, but he felt confident he would be able to improvise well enough until he could either discover the rules or invent them. He felt very pleased, for he had made a valuable discovery that belonged to no one but himself.

  Next to Huang’s study were the scholar’s sleeping quarters. Separating the study from these rooms there was a vestibule. Lang had never been beyond the vestibule. He had never seen the place where his grandfather slept. He did not know what he might expect to find there. He did not know why he now decided to go in. He ordered Shu and Shin to wait for him by the table, and he went through the vestibule and pushed aside the curtain.

  The room was dimly lit, dark, the casements closed. Lang took an uncertain step forward. The air was thick and stale and sweet and difficult to breathe. The smell he understood to be composed of a mixture of the odours of the old man’s body and the unguents Yu administered to him as remedies for his innumerable ailments. Lang at once signified this repulsive odour as the smell of death and the ancestors. That, intuitively, was the sign he attached to it. It possessed a quality both intimate and unclean. It repelled and frightened him. He almost turned back. He had smelt it before, but thinly and from a distance. Here there was a reek of it. Here was its source.

  As his vision adjusted to the gloom, he saw that, as with no other room in the house, what he looked in upon here was clutter and disorder. There were chests and vases and pieces of furniture, and articles of clothing and pots filled with scrolls and piles of manuscripts, and books heaped one on top of another with scarcely room for a person to walk between them. Here, Lang realised, was the place in which his grandfather had passed almost every night of his life since the age of twenty and into which he had thrust the unsorted memorabilia of a lifetime. In the language of war, which was the language that most appealed to him in the present circumstance, he viewed his impromptu invasion of his grandfather’s privacy as a reconnoitre behind the enemy’s positions. He might have been, it began to seem possible, looking for a weakness to exploit in the defences.

  There had been no formal declaration of hostilities, however, and the situation in this regard was therefore unclear. He did not possess a strategy. He was guessing. He scarcely knew himself to be at war yet. The material of his journey, of his campaign, was, he understood, to reveal itself to him as he proceeded to advance into it. The ground was new to him. His purpose was a mystery. He was aware only of having transgressed a formal boundary, of having crossed a border, and that he could not, therefore, know what rules now applied. His invasion had been intuitive and inspired. He did not know what he was looking for as he stood there gazing in upon the hoard from his grandfather’s past. He did not know until he saw it. Then he knew at once.

  A large, unglazed earthenware pot, a vessel more than a metre tall and almost half a metre in diameter, which resembled a family’s rice jar, stood against the far wall beneath the shuttered casement. In this jar, like iron blooms arranged in a vase, was a collection of halberds and lances and swords. He stepped over a pile of books that lay at his feet and made his way to the pot. Alongside it on the floor was a bundle of leather hauberks and leggings. Here, then, was the paraphernalia of war, the arms of an old bannerman of the scholar’s clan. Here were the defences of Huang and his ancestors. Lang selected a short, stout sword from the pot. He lifted the weapon above his head and drew the blade downwards through the air in an arc before him. It was not a masterpiece of the swordmaker’s art that he held in his hand, but was a crude and poorly balanced piece. Its double-edged blade was blunt and pitted with rust. The guard, which had loosened with age, was a hammered bronze crosspiece, and the grip was made of unpolished pearwood. But it was a sword. He turned and retreated with his booty, his heart beating quickly with excitement.

  As he re-entered the study from the vestibule he made a whooshing sound through his pursed lips and cut a wide diagonal slash before him. Shu and Shin drew back. He laughed and slashed the air again. The brothers eyed the point of the sword. He lowered the weapon and considered them. It had been his intention to also arm the brothers with swords from the pot. Now he changed his mind. Come! he commanded, gesturing at them with the blade. Let us return to the courtyard of the little red doorway, where I shall instruct you in the rules of our new game.

  He concealed the sword in the front of his gown and led the way back through the house. The weight of the cold weapon against his warm skin, as he strode through the long gallery beside the faded pillars, excited in him a feeling he could not name. He saw, or imagined he saw, that what lay before him now was a kind of hidden doorway in his memory, a doorway he had not noticed before – this door opened easily at his touch, and as he went through it a mood of intense optimism and expectancy took hold of him …

  Beyond the forgotten doorway, in his memory, there lay an extensive country, of which he knew himself to have long been the princely ruler. Had he left this place only yesterday, or had he been absent for many years? He could not tell. It was familiar and unvisited at the same time. An impatient warhorse waited for him, ready saddled and richly caparisoned. Thrusting his sword into the jewelled scabbard at his belt, he mounted the steed and rode confidently into his homeland, certain that as soon as he was recognised by the inhabitants he would be given a joyful welcome. Secure upon the back of his fine horse, which responded alertly and with an eager obedience to his commands, he gazed about admiringly at the countryside. Soon he began to recognise within himself, as if in response to the richness and beauty of the landscape through which he rode, the elevating certainty that he was a good man. Had he not always known this, but not always remembered it? He knew that if he could but once discover the wisest and the most just course in life, then he would possess the courage and the will to follow it. And is this not what it means, he asked himself, to be a good man? He was moved to a powerful emotion by this rediscovered knowledge, to a feeling of intense self-love. He spurred his horse forward, impatient to meet his subjects. On all sides the trees grew tall and the flowers blossomed thickly among the rich meadow grass. In the distance the sun glinted on a broad river and in the pastures contented herds of red cattle and flocks of dazzling white sheep grazed upon abundant herbage.
Fat geese flew high overhead in the blue sky and in the fragrant trees birds dipped their bills into the blossoms and called merrily to each other.

  It was not long before he came to the outskirts of a town. The imposing dwellings were constructed of expertly faceted stone. Wooden fences surrounded well-tended orchards and gardens and vineyards, in which every imaginable variety of fruit and vegetable ripened gently in the sun. Lang marvelled at the wealth of his kingdom. On all sides there was evidence of good order, abundance and wellbeing. He entered the town, certain in his mind the inhabitants would rejoice to see him and that he would find his name revered among them. The prospect of their homage made him feel generous and he puzzled over what gift he might justly bestow upon these people in honour of his visit, for it was evident they lacked for nothing.

  As the iron shoes of his horse struck the paved roadway, the hard sound echoed between the buildings on either side. But it woke no response from them. Freshly painted doorways in bright reds and greens and the gleaming windows impressed him with the certainty that here lived a civic-minded and industrious people. The street, also, was clean and well-maintained, and was broad enough to be the principal thoroughfare of an important provincial town. Lang kept to the centre of the carriageway, sitting straight-backed on his aristocratic horse, which arched its neck and champed its silver bit and tossed its head proudly, as if it understood perfectly the importance of the occasion. Lang expected at any moment to be greeted by a fanfare of trumpets and to see a crowd of happy people pouring out onto the street shouting his name and making him welcome, eager to begin the great festival in honour of his homecoming.