The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  I have been fortunate to recruit as the General of my militia one Sa Ho-ang. This fierce young man was until recently a senior officer in the Governor’s personal bodyguard and is highly respected and feared by the Governor’s men, who consider him ill-used and are ready to favour him with their loyalty still, even though he is no longer of their number. The cause of this is that their master took Sa’s beautiful second wife by force to be his concubine. Sa stands behind me and he smiles and readily makes a most servile obeisance to the Governor whenever I meet with that resplendent gentleman. But I think that in his heart he waits for the day when he will exact his vengeance for the theft of his wife. This warrior was as delighted to enter my service as I was to have him in it. If it had been by our careful arrangement, indeed, we could scarcely have come to serve each other’s aims more thoroughly than we do. The situation here is charged with many such intriguing matters. Dangerous opportunities abound.

  The Americans, the English, the Belgians, Danes, French, Germans and the Dutch are all in Amoy in great numbers and are gathering up immense fortunes as speedily as they can. They speak with excitement of the port of Shanghai to the north as a new El Dorado waiting to be plundered once Amoy has been thoroughly looted. I shall visit that city on the mighty Whangpu River as soon as I have completed the establishment of our interests here. I believe, however, that we shall monopolise the trade in the living cargo from Fukien to Australia without too great a struggle, for none of these other commercial folk see their way to setting up a society such as ours. They are envious of my quick success with it and wonder how it may be emulated. Thus I find myself the object of their most assiduous attentions and am invited to dine at their consulates on the island ten times a week.

  It was nearly dawn by the time Feng finished the letter to Mary. He was working alone in a square tower which topped his villa and overlooked the harbour of Amoy. The tower occupied almost the same dimensions as had his hut on Ballarat Station. The unpolished wood floor was bare and the furnishings were a plain deal table and chair. Besides his writing materials the only other items on the table were a lighted oil lamp and the velvet covered box containing Dorset’s skull. Feng knew he could be seen for miles around sitting in his lighted tower, yet he felt concealed there.

  He picked up the letter and read it through. When he had finished he sealed it with his seal. A heavy mood had descended on him. He listened to the slap of the naked feet of a squad of the Society’s militiamen trotting past in the street below, their captain calling and the chorus of their response. It was nearly dawn. His collectors were beginning their day’s work. For even before the first ship had sailed with its cargo, there were those who were already unable to meet their obligations to the Society on behalf of a son or a brother. Somewhere not far off, in one of the narrow twisting streets of Amoy, a small merchant or a shopkeeper would be raising his head from sleep and listening to the approaching chorus.

  Feng sat on unmoving in his tower as the sky began to grow light. He was listening to the silence.

  Lang opened his eyes. Yu had come from behind his screen and was helping the blind storyteller from the room. Lang looked at his grandfather. The old man had woken, weeping, from his sleep. He closed his eyes again and tried to think himself back into the story, but all he could see was an image of his weeping grandfather.

  VICTORIA

  Victoria Feng, the last child and ninth daughter of Mary Feng (nee Nunan), sat writing at a plain cedar table in the gazebo in the garden at Coppin Grove. Her mother had died seven years earlier and the last of her eight sisters had married and left home the previous spring. Victoria looked older than her thirty years. She was extremely thin, her long black hair was untidily caught in a loose bun at the nape of her neck and she was dressed in a simple muslin gown of a steely grey, the colour indeed of a wintry morning sky. The gown was soiled and showing signs of wear and neglect.

  She wrote, then paused and considered, then went on. And every now and then she looked up from her work and seemed to follow with her gaze the flight of a bird across the garden. Her right hand steadied the sheet of paper and her left, for she was left-handed, manipulated the pen, the instrument of her craft. That is how it appeared. She wrote with care, as if the shape of her words mattered as much to her as their meanings, as if, indeed, their meanings might very well be located in their shapes. She hesitated and crossed out phrases and re-wrote them and sometimes she uncrossed the crossings out and re-established the original phrase.

  On it went, rising from her pen, this composition, gathering in flocks of words beneath the oriental temple roof of the gazebo, and flying off into the hot garden, a migration of signs, certain textural cadences going down sombrely towards the turbid river, where there was a little jetty and a boat, and others, more wild and lighter, streaming away like black native bees towards the remnant of bush which flanked the lawn on the southern side of the garden, and escaping shrilly into the dazzling light there among the tall skinny gumtrees and the dry crackling ground litter.

  The afternoon was windless and hot. It was February 1908 and the end of a very dry summer. Victoria laid aside another sheet filled with her writing and, placing it on top of the others, she weighted it with a round stone. She took a new sheet and dipped her pen into the blue and white porcelain inkwell and she bent over the paper. She hesitated, her lips compressed with thinking, then she went on: ‘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.’

  She stopped writing and looked up from her work as if she had heard a sound from the house, perhaps hearing her name called. She looked up this time not at the garden but towards an upper storey window of the house. Standing at the window, not looking down at the garden or the gazebo but gazing into the distance towards Richmond and the smoking factories and crowded workers’ tenements, was the figure of her half-brother, her father’s only son from his Shanghai marriage to a Chinese woman, the man who was to become at any moment the second Feng.

  Victoria stared at her half-brother until he moved away from the window. He looked so much as her father had when she had been a girl that she easily imagined him actually to be her father standing there at the window. Soon he would go away again. Perhaps he was already leaving. She snatched up a new sheet of paper and began writing hurriedly:

  Feng, the Merchant of the Living Cargo, the mighty Phoenix, lay in his bed dying. He was struggling to accumulate a pool of clarity within his failing consciousness large enough for him to draw from it a thing of great importance for his son, who had travelled all the way from China and now stood at the window waiting. At last Feng managed to emit a feeble groan. This sound drew his son to his side. With a small rush of breath, already soured by the stench of carrion, Feng whispered, Tell them nothing! and then tried to thrust the velvet covered box at his son. But he found he could not move it.

  Feng’s great energies were spent. The tea box on his chest weighed as much as one of the iron anchors of the old Nimrod. It crushed the breath from him. He struggled against it. He seemed to struggle for years and years, for decades, but really it was only for a moment. He lay upon his back and gasped and strove alone in the gathering darkness to pass the talismanic skull of Dorset to his son. But the harder he struggled the heavier the box grew. He could not move it.

  As the box crushed the life
from him, Feng began to imagine he was once more seated at his table in the lantern roof of his villa in Amoy, listening to the Society’s collectors hurrying along the dark streets before dawn. Yet even while he was imagining this, and he imagined it with an incredible vividness, he knew he wasn’t really in Amoy but was in the house at Coppin Grove.

  He was so puzzled and so confused and so nauseated by the contradictions of it all that he began to weep. He despaired. There was no one near him. The maelstrom whirled him away helplessly and he knew it had all been for nothing. I am a dead man, he thought with horror as Shinje drew him into the void.

  The second Feng eased his father’s fingers from the box and drew the blanket over the old man’s head and went downstairs to tell his father’s Headman, who was waiting in the hall.

  Sheng Fo-sheng, Headman of the Society of the Phoenix for the past half century, stood at the edge of the crowd and watched with disgust as Feng’s coffin was lowered into the grave. He held his breath while the priest swung the smoking thurible over it and uttered his mysterious incantation. Each time a spadeful of earth landed on the coffin Sheng felt the thud in his own heart. He watched the white devils bind the bones of his master into the soil of Hell.

  When they had completed their barbarous ceremony he turned away and walked quickly along the gravelled path, ignoring the fearful cries of Feng’s disfigured ghost. It was time to go home to his two sons.

  Victoria didn’t blot the page. The ink was drying today as soon as it touched the paper. And she didn’t re read what she had just written. She put down her pen and rubbed her hands over her face and blew out a big breath, and she jumped down from the gazebo and walked quickly across the lawn and in among the eucalypts. In a few days she would begin her life quite alone. She wanted to cry, but held back her tears until she was out of sight of the house.

  INTO REGIONS OF UNCERTAINTY

  He had never thought of his father as ‘father’ but as Feng, a dangerous entity who might confront them without warning and inflict some unspecified damage on their lives. He had always been afraid of his father. There had been no other emotion. He believed all sons were afraid of their fathers. And were afraid, too, of having one day to become like their fathers. Until the ancestors had revealed themselves to be the true enemy, his father had been the ‘enemy’. The ‘enemy’ had always been located in Shanghai. In Hangzhou Lang had considered himself safe.

  In Shanghai, however, it had never been a matter of going to war against the enemy, of looting and burning and drowning in order to have a decent existence. It had never come to that. Feng was indestructible; everyone knew it. There was no point taking him on. He was not vulnerable to sudden assaults. The strategy had been to keep out of his way as much of the time as possible. The strategy had been to render oneself invisible to him. To render him and his world, indeed, invisible to oneself. To hope, secretly, that he would forget about one.

  For ten years, it seemed to Lang, the strategy had worked.

  It was early afternoon on a day towards the end of September 1937. It was almost three months since Feng had telephoned Hangzhou and told Lien to abandon the old house and return within three days to Shanghai.

  Lang was looking out of one of the tall windows in the grand upstairs drawing room of his father’s villa – the same room in which, almost eleven years earlier, Lien and Feng had had their meeting to discuss the question of her visiting her father in Hangzhou. He was wearing a grey English worsted suit and a droopy silk bowtie and he was reflecting unhappily on an angry exchange he’d just had with his friend and tutor, Doctor Spiess. His emotions were unresolved, a mixture of guilt and fear and anger. He was thinking about what had been said and, in particular, was regretting his parting words as the doctor went down the stairs. It will be your own fault then, he had shouted over the bannisters, if you get yourself killed for nothing! And he was trying not to admit to himself how unimaginably terrible the death of the doctor would be.

  Doctor Spiess had left only moments before to make his way to the Chinese city. Every afternoon at this time for the past three months the doctor had set off for the front, which was only a mile or two down the road. And on most of those afternoons Lang had stood by the window just as he did today and waited for the doctor to wave to him from the corner. Sometimes, after the doctor had gone, he had felt so afraid and sorry for himself that he had sat by the window and wept.

  Today he did not weep, but he continued to stand by the window long after the doctor had disappeared round the corner. Things had come to a head. He had said things he had not meant. Now he was trying to keep alive a faint hope that if he stayed by the window he would see the doctor hurrying back any minute, waving and smiling. I’ve changed my mind! You are right, of course, my dearest boy. It’s selfish of me to go there every day. And far too dangerous. Anyway, what difference does the little I do for them make to the outcome of this war? Let us forget the fighting and read some more of Rilke together. Poetry is more important than war. ‘How shall I hold my soul so that it does not touch yours? How shall I lift it across you to other things?’ Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, dass sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie hinheben uber dich zu andern Dingen ?

  Although it was only just after three in the afternoon, there was a kind of twilight outside. Heavy smoke from the ironworks and from the steamers and from the naval guns was bellying against a dark overcast of rainclouds. The river and the waterfront were illuminated in a coppery light, as if a great Bessemer converter were discharging its load of molten steel nearby. The solid structures of the buildings along the waterfront and the ships on the river, and the river itself, were rendered in a variety of soft, metallic hues which made them look like lurid shadows cast up against the more solid, the darker, sky. They had lost their detail, they had become a painter’s idea of a city under siege. Lang observed that the people on the street below his window no longer strolled; they were not at ease, but hurried, fugitive figures eager to be gone from the scene before some terrible event unfolded and engulfed them.

  He was alone in the large room. He had turned off the lights after the doctor left so that he could see outside better. Every minute or two the house vibrated, as if an earthquake was taking place. There was a peculiar and sinister calmness over everything, in which small events continued to unfold. A British cruiser had begun manoeuvring to a new station in the middle of the river, the moving sailors on her deck tiny. He watched her making a pale bow wave as she turned against the thrust of the current. Less than two kilometres downstream, out of sight, the Japanese battleships continued at regular intervals to fire over the Settlement into the Chinese city – where the doctor had gone. Each time the ships fired a salvo of shells from their big guns the window pane in front of Lang rattled and the floor trembled. An earthquake.

  Don’t be afraid of Australia, the doctor had said to him when they were walking together in the park one autumn afternoon, a day when the sky above Shanghai had been clear and blue and people had seemed to have all the time in the world to stroll and to feed the ducks and to sit and gaze into space. Long for something you can’t name, the doctor said, and call it Australia. A thing will come into being. See a golden city on a plain, shining in the distance, and be certain the greatest prize existence can bestow on you is to belong somewhere among your own kind. Let it be Fairyland, an other-world. A land imagined and dreamed, not an actual place. The ancients of all nations understood that we don’t belong anywhere real. They understood that the mystery of life, the paradox of our existence, is located in that charged space between the present reality of our individual life and the dream of the immortality of our species. It’s the Phoenix, among the mythical beasts, which embodies this paradox for both the occidental and the oriental worlds alike.

  They’re one in this, as they were once together in most things. It’s said to have been an oriental named Phoinix, after all, who founded the greatest travelling nation of the West, that of the Phoenicians. It was he, also, who
first introduced the written word to Greece! To Greece! Imagine that! So, nothing is discrete. It’s all linked if one bothers to look closely enough. The ancients quarrelled with their fathers, too, and left home and founded nations. What has changed? We’ve confused ourselves by allowing it to seem that intractable differences divide East from West. Almost as if a law of nature had decreed the separation. But that wasn’t always our view.

  There’s nothing for you to fear in the blind storyteller’s words. He accused you of nothing. You accused yourself. He didn’t understand what he was saying. He meant nothing. He doesn’t deal in meanings. He didn’t need to understand. He was the mouthpiece. That’s his craft. Forget him. He has long ago forgotten you and is telling another story today. He’s not important. It’s up to us, dearest boy, to interpret the story for ourselves. In order to live on, we know the phoenix must periodically die. We know that. The phoenix, therefore, is both the mortal individual and the immortal species in one. It is the emblem for all living creatures, not only our own species. It is a peculiar creature resembling nothing actual. And that’s just as well.

  Art is a phoenix. An annuls the sterile dichotomy Life/Death and makes for contradiction and fertility. It is both life and death. It shoots out from between the named and the known like a startling and mysterious flame, confounding the familiar. An is our dispute with present reality. It seems not to arise from among our common associations, and to mock what is most dear to us. We resent it. It affronts us. Art utters a word and the thing so commanded to exist struggles into being. We think how ugly, how disgusting and how disfigured it is. But we cannot rid ourselves of it, and eventually we grow accustomed to it. Then, at last, we call it beautiful and fall deeply in love with it. But we cannot own the thing art has brought into being, nor say to what nation it belongs. An belongs to no nation. Art is the displaced. It is not validated by nationality. That is something else.