The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  Clutching their bundles to their chests, Lang and Shin hurried along the road beside the lake, making for the nearest of the hills. The low clouds bore down on the lake from Huang Shan and the cold wind and rain whipped the water into a frenzy, as if great fish were struggling beneath the surface. The pleasure boats tied up to poles stuck in the mud bumped against each other, making knocking sounds like bullfrogs courting. Lang glanced towards the dark sky and he saw a deep green cavern within the belly of the cloud above him.

  At the end of the road they turned from the lakeside and ascended a steep hill by a stone path that rose through the forest in a series of stages. At the end of each stage a shrine with a statue of the Buddha inside had been carved from the native rock. Around them the forest trees groaned and twisted and thrashed in the storm, as if their roots were on fire and they sought to tear themselves loose from the soil.

  When Lang and Shin turned the corner of the last stage Lang stopped so abruptly that Shin ran into him. An old peasant was sweeping the path ahead. She had her back to them and was bent forward swishing her broom savagely from side to side and debating fiercely with herself. Suddenly she stopped sweeping and turned and confronted them. Ah! she cried shrilly, like the cry of a shrike, on seeing them close behind her in the lashing rain. Where are you boys running to? Are you demons? Menacingly, she descended a step towards them, brandishing her broom.

  Lang felt Shin clutch his gown and heard him whimper. The old peasant laughed, What is that you’ve got there? Let Aunty have a look at your treasures!

  Lang stood his ground, his left hand searching for the pommel of his sword, which was concealed beneath his padded gown. She is only a path sweeper who is too mad with old age and boredom to possess the sense to seek shelter from the storm, he assured himself. But for all this, his heart was beating quickly and his belly was light with fear.

  So! the old woman cried, standing on the step above him and looking down upon him with cunning, amused and avaricious eyes, neither old nor young but flickering with the unsteady light-and-shade of other-worldly thoughts. You have robbed a poor widow of her precious heirlooms! And murdered her too, I don’t doubt. Show me what you’ve got in your bundles or I shall strike you from my path. She lifted her broom and advanced upon him.

  It seemed to Lang that he observed the scene from a little distance, that he saw himself draw the sword from his gown, as if he were detached from the events taking place on the path, as if there were two of him, one calm and able to reflect upon the scene, the other no longer in possession of feelings but engaged in the action. He seemed to witness without emotion the surprise and then the terror in the old woman’s eyes as she saw the steel blade dance towards her through the streaming air. He seemed to see her struggle to retreat, to see the sole of her sandal catch against the projecting lip of the step behind her, to see her lose her balance and snatch helplessly at the air, to tumble sideways from the path on to the steep rocky hillside, to observe her as she leaped and rolled and clutched at the branches of the trees, to see her fall, down and down through the awakened forest, her black rags dancing like so many extra limbs to the madness of the storm. And he seemed to hear her shrieks taken up by the noise of the storm, echoing within the booming clouds above him, as if they were howls of a vast unbridled hilarity, a laughter more wild and strange and more possessed of a triumphant irony than any he had ever heard before. As if it were he who were falling, not she.

  And when she was gone from his sight, the noise of the storm rolled back and forth against the hillside, as if it searched for her, like a parent searching for a lost child.

  The path was empty. He turned to Shin. The boy was crouched with his hands over his face, soaked and shivering. Get up, Shin! Get up! Lang ordered him. Shin took his hands from his face and gazed at the sword, which Lang still carried in his hand, and he picked up the bundle containing the bronze mirror and slowly got to his feet. You haven’t seen a demon, Lang reassured him and laughed, but his laugh was thin and unsteady.

  He went on, keeping the sword ready in his hand and scrutinising the path ahead. He would not have been surprised to see her there again, standing before him, blocking his way and waving her broom at him. Had he struck her? He did not know.

  When he reached the spine of the ridge the path divided in two, one branch continuing up the ridge towards the temple of Lin Yin where he had once been taken, and the other descending he knew towards the river. He took the lower branch and a minute or two later came out at the bottom of a gully, where a stream of clear mountain water disappeared into a dense thicket of tall bamboos.

  He pushed his way into the swaying poles, which moved back and forth in the gale, as if he were forcing his way through a chorus of tall singers linked arm in arm and harmonising a song of many parts. He emerged suddenly from the bamboos onto the flat, grassy margin of the Qiantang River.

  The margin was exposed to the full force of the wind. Waves lashed the pebbly shore. He placed the book on the grass and weighted it with the sword. When Shin came out of the bamboos he took the mirror from him and instructed him to prepare a fire.

  With the wind tearing at his gown so that he was forced to lean into it in order to advance, Lang approached the river. The farther bank was a darker slash upon the dark horizon. Behind him the bamboos clacked and clicked and cracked against each Other.

  Lang waded into the water until the waves were breaking against his chest and he could scarcely keep his footing on the slippery stones and then, like a drowning discus thrower, he hurled the cosmic mirror of the Huangs as far out into the current as he could. Briefly, the ancient eight-lobed bronze spun through the air, the phoenixes alternating with subliminal rapidity with the polished circle of the mirror, then it plunged beneath the surface of the wind-torn water.

  Lang struggled back to the shore. He did not look over his shoulder. He was satisfied that he had blinded the mischievous supernatural eye of his grandfather’s ancestors. He was shivering.

  On the shore Shin was busy building a fire from slivers of tinder-dry bamboo, which he was resourcefully stripping from the inside of a dead pole he had felled and split. Lang knelt on the grass and untied the bundle.

  His grandfather’s sacred book of the ancestors lay before him, Huang’s churinga, his connection with the spiritual life of his tribe, his consecrated text, in which he had his place and without which he would be displaced and cast into an alien landscape whose features he would not be able to name, the book without which Huang would be a stranger on this earth.

  The waves broke with a rush on the pebbly shore, and the wind snatched the spray into the air. Lang crouched over the book and watched his chilled fingers struggle with the gold and crimson embroidered phoenix bands which held the boards in place. He laid the book open at the first page. Drops of rain and wind-driven spray fell upon the text. He placed the blade of the sword across the book to keep the pages from being torn away by the gale and he bent close to inspect the early script.

  Here was the first entry in the old book. It was written in the flowing ts’ao-shu. The entry had been made by the Sung poet and calligrapher Huang T’ing-chien. Lang was so moved by the indescribable beauty of the hand that he gave an involuntary groan. His affection for the painted word had been kindled in him by his mother even before he had learned to talk. His love of writing was his first love. There was nothing he could ever love more, no matter if he lived to be a hundred years of age, than the painted word upon the page.

  Huang T’ing-chien, the eleventh century literary painter, the first recorder of the ancestors of the twentieth century literary painter Huang Yu-hua, had left a poem in the margin. Affecting a certain superficial clumsiness in order to eschew the appearance of being merely a skilled professional, and in order not to vulgarly display his erudition, Huang had painted beside his exact genealogical entries two lines, consisting of the heaviest question followed by the lightest answer: To what can we liken human life? Perhaps to a wild swan’s footprint
s on mud or snow.

  So entranced was Lang by Huang’s calligraphy that he forgot where he was and what he was doing. His mission departed from his mind as he contemplated the running characters on the page. He was not satisfied with the literal meanings alone, those hinges that held the characters in place next to each other, but entered each character in search of the implicit thought which it contained from the remotest past of civilisation’s beginnings. With the trained discipline of a scholar, and the passion of a lover, he sought the primal literary reflection enfolded within the shape and structure of each ideograph. He travelled within the residences of the origin of thought itself, the black figures on the page, and gazed about in wonder at what he saw there.

  He was bewitched by the marks of the scholar, the indelible trace upon the face of eternity which had brought history into being. Such painted signs as these, for Lang, were no less than thought itself, uttered in the eternal silence of the cosmos. For once uttered, the question endures: To what can we liken human life?

  It was the crackling of the fire that roused him from his last meditation on the art of his tribe. Half-naked Shin danced in the yellow flames, his body steaming, unloading another rattling armful of dead bamboos on to the blaze. The fire roared and crackled, the bamboos exploding with the sound of musket fire, the sparks and flames driven flat by the gale.

  Lang tore Huang T’ing-chien’s page from the book and impaled it on the point of his sword, and he thrust it into the orange heart of the fire and watched it burn. Page by page he burned the book, and finally he burned the boards. And when there was nothing left to burn he stood and gazed into the coals until they were reduced to a cold grey circle of ash in the green grass. In his head all he could hear were the ringing and whistling sounds of silence and emptiness.

  PRESENT REALITY

  An infamous decade was coming to a close and a new beginning was expected eagerly. Four years after Lang burnt Huang’s book of the ancestors, the disintegration of China seemed about to enter its final phase. In the first week of June 1937, Lang’s father, Feng Three, was passed detailed and highly secret intelligence by the Japanese high command concerning the initial phases of their master plan to destroy the national morale of the Chinese people and to subjugate China under the rule of a new Nippon empire. Feng was given this intelligence, which he did not find unexpected or surprising, a month before the Japanese provoked the incident at Marco Polo Bridge which gave them the excuse to begin their military operations in earnest; operations which were to keep the Japanese people continuously at war until the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945 and another on the city of Nagasaki three days later, and the high command was finally forced to abandon the military option.

  In 1937 there was to be no unaccountable withdrawal from Shanghai by the initially victorious Japanese army after thirty-four days, as there had been in 1932. This time, like the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchus in the seventeenth century, the Japanese were not coming to China simply in order to plunder and humiliate, they were coming to colonise, permanently. They were coming to re-write history. Their means, as with the great Khans, was to be military conquest, the traditional and only honourable means by which a proud and ancient nation might seek to achieve ascendancy over its neighbours.

  The Japanese policy - if such an organic bridling of a nation as this was can be signified by so rational an epithet as policy – aimed to achieve the practical realisation of a dream, upon which they had been meditating for centuries. Their mission was to turn a vision into tangible reality. Their mission, and it was a mission, was to turn thought into actuality. And for this the only suitable instrument with which the centuries of their civilisation had provided them was war.

  Though their governments and the representatives of their press did not outwardly share their enthusiasm for the Japanese plan, most of the British, the French and the American businessmen who were operating out of the International Settlements in Shanghai, and who enjoyed the uncertain benefits of extraterritoriality, considered the Japanese policy to be reasonable and desirable, and they looked forward impatiently to its swift and successful realisation.

  Feng also welcomed the imminent takeover by the Japanese. Indeed he had been positioning his interests for it ever since Chiang Kai-shek had come north in 1927 and set up his government in Nanking – 1927, that inauspicious year of the birth of Feng’s only living son.

  There were no Shanghai capitalists of the old comprador caste, indeed, who did not welcome the Japanese. Those who had been clever enough or lucky enough to survive Chiang’s terror and his pillaging of their fortunes longed to see an end to his omnivorous militarism and to see it replaced with the orderly and reliable management of China’s commercial and industrial resources under a strong central authority able to deal effectively with the threat which warlords and Communists posed to the re-establishment of economic prosperity.

  Among the numerous contenders for power, only the Japanese, it seemed to the commercial interests of the day, were suitably equipped, positioned and motivated to achieve the nearly impossible task of bringing the whole of China under the control of one strong central government. No matter that a few Western journalists and official spokesmen and women, and one or two intellectuals, raised their voices against the injustice of the approaching takeover, for Western commercial interests generally, as for the Shanghai capitalists (and for Feng among these), the Japanese bid for power was the only one to which they were prepared to lend their support, either implicitly or actively.

  When he returned to his villa from the privileged briefing with General Sugiyama, Feng went directly into his private office and reached for the telephone. He asked the operator to connect him with a Hangzhou number, and while he waited for the connection to be made he gazed thoughtfully out of the window.

  He was now nearing his fifty-second birthday. His features had scarcely aged during the past ten years. Contrary to his vengeful and piratical appearance, Feng’s fortunes lay not with a capacity for sudden violent action but with his patience, with his capacity to wait, concealing himself, until the moment had matured and his raptor instincts need no longer be contained. He had no patience with the fiction of the noble arts of war. If a violent conflict were unavoidable, then he looked for a brief and conclusive engagement.

  The coincidence of his son’s coming of age and the end of Chinese history had not gone unnoticed by him, despite his outward devotion to practicalities. There was a fatefulness about the conjunction that could not be ignored. And although he did not dwell on the likely significance of it, it did register with him sufficiently to cause a flickering uneasiness to rise and fall beneath his conscious preoccupations.

  He was prepared, on the grounds of sound strategy, to embrace both his son, whom he scarcely knew, and the new empire of the Nippon. There were aspects of both which he disliked, but he recognised that it was not a perfect world and was prepared, therefore, to work with imperfections. The Japanese and his son were both necessary to him, the former to ensure his personal continuation and the other to provide the future means for passing on what he and his father, and his father before him, had spent their energies accumulating – wealth and power, the fragile assurance of a lineage, in a word, a name.

  Though C. H. Feng loved neither the Japanese nor his son he did not consider trying to do without either in his enterprise. As for the Japanese, he would have felt easier with them if they had been merely opportunists rather than visionaries. ‘I cannot but feel that some power even greater than God has inspired our men,’ General Sugiyama had remarked to him with tears in his eyes less than an hour ago. A power greater than God? It had made Feng feel terribly uncomfortable. He had not known where to look. Sugiyama’s remark had made him clear his throat and fidget. It too nearly resembled the superstitious idiocies much loved by the old China. Feng wanted stable government from the Japanese, not mysterious spiritual intensities. A power greater than God! He
kept hearing the general’s voice saying it.

  A voice was struggling to reach him through the wash of static. He realised it was his wife. He shouted his instructions to her, ordering her to begin preparations at once for her final departure from Hangzhou. He didn’t attempt to explain why it was to be final. And she didn’t ask him. They both knew the time had come for her to hand over the son to the father, that the moment when the pledge must be redeemed would not be postponed. They both knew the world was about to change. They both knew that if she had not accomplished her purpose with the boy in the ten years he had given to her, then there were but a few moments left to her to complete the task.

  They didn’t have much to say to each other. The truth was obvious. It voiced itself in the extended silences between them. Then at last, in case she should happen to consider delaying her return, he passed on to her the highly classified information that the Japanese planned to land a large military force at Hangzhou Bay, with the intention of by-passing Shanghai and striking directly along the axis of the triangle at Chiang’s seat of government in Nanking. (A manoeuvre, in the event, though indeed planned, which was delayed until November, by which time the Chinese city of Shanghai – though not the International Settlements – had been almost completely destroyed by three months of the most vicious and intense fighting that either the Japanese or the Chinese were to engage in during the entire war. To the great surprise of the English and the Americans, who had long ago dismissed the fighting abilities of the Chinese soldier as negligible, the Han died in their thousands as heroically as any warriors in history in a stubborn and inspired defence of their ancestral homeland.)