The Ancestor Game

by Alex Miller

  Lang tsze, she repeated after me, taking the tone just right and leaning towards me, small and light, sitting above me on her tall narrow chair and waiting for me to elaborate, an eagerness and a suspense in her that made her youthful.

  I felt trusted by her and as though much was expected of me. It refers to a son, I said, who has gone away from home, who has gone away and gone astray, who has abandoned the customs of his family, that is. There is something of the prodigal in it, though that is not an exact parallel. He has abandoned his family and his duty towards them, let’s say, but he may return to them one day enlightened and redeemed. Is that not a kind of pilgrimage?

  O yes, of course, that is a familiar story, she said with so much impatience that I hoped I’d not disappointed her. She gazed out of the gazebo towards a belt of thin native bush, which I saw forms a narrow corridor of wilderness between the bank of the river and the continuation of the road above.

  I do not wish to figure life merely as a journey, she said emphatically. As a travelling to a sacred place of understanding and returning fulfilled and forgiven. I know nothing of such things! The somewhat contemptuous tone in which she said this made it apparent that she felt herself to be correcting in me a rather too literal misunderstanding of her purpose in asking the question.

  She turned to me. I don’t travel, Doctor Spiess. I’m not a lang tsze. I was born in that house. She lifted her arm and pointed. And I have gone no further than this. I have never left home. Travelling does not interest me. I have spent my years imagining China from this garden in Kew. How should I imagine China if I were to visit it? It’s not visiting I care about. It’s not China but the imagining that interests me. A Chinese would recognise nothing of home in my stories. You’re right, however, about peregrinum, if that was your word. It is to live among strangers that I know about in my work. That is the part of the pilgrim’s experience I care for. I write of what it is to live among strangers, Doctor Spiess, I do not write of what it is to be enlightened and redeemed. I leave that to the Bishops.

  We talked all afternoon and into the evening. She drew my story out of me by insisting there was a story in me to be drawn out. I could not resist her expectation. And she was a very good listener. So I told her everything. It was a joy to do so. Every word delighted her. Suspense transfixed her. We laughed often. And whenever I would have passed quickly from one incident to another she would not permit it, but insisted on hearing every detail. So with her I gazed once again from the casement in Hangzhou at the winter-flowering plum tree, in that sad original of all formal gardens. And once again 1 banqueted in the cold guest hall upon Yu’s splendid dishes, transformed briefly into an enigmatic sign by my silvery fur coat. And, with emotion, I told her of the night Madame Feng and I had struggled to deliver Lang into this world. The wrong place for him, I said. A disintegrating world.

  When I was silent at last she rose and heated more water in the billycan on a kerosene stove. I fancied we were both listening to the peculiar silence of the evening, intimate and entirely familiar to her, new and strange to me. I felt at home with her in her gazebo, which is surely an explorer’s camp situated far out on a great plain, with only the stars to drench it in their flames at night and the path that shines in the darkness, pointing towards the remnant of native forest. Hers is not a world of solid objects, but is a transparent reality without a hard surface. There are levels, some deeper some shallower, but all permeable.

  She stood beside my chair and poured fresh tea into my cup from the steaming billycan. There is a place, she said, where your plays have written themselves. That is the manner in which she speaks, saying such things so casually and with such assurance that one ‘sees’ the place she speaks of.

  We did not leave the gazebo. It is her home. I am confident she will set about writing me and the people I have spoken of into her work. I believe I can see the means of her remaking of us as her own. I and Madame Feng and Huang and Yu and Lang and Feng, and even Mrs Halloran, will all surely come to serve her in the examination of lives lived among strangers. As I spoke I saw her attention collecting us, for in a way I understood she was not listening to me but to herself, listening to her own voice all the while in a far off place of deep enchantment.

  THE LITTLE RED DOORWAY

  On the morning of 10 September 1976, a violent equinoctial storm passed across Melbourne, travelling from the south-west to the north-east. A one-hundred-year-old elm fell on a house in Glenroy and power lines were brought down. There were no reports of injuries to persons. There is often savagery in Melbourne’s climate at this time of the year, yet it always seems startling and unanticipated. Radio and TV presenters spoke that day of freak weather. It is as if we persist, despite repeated experience, in referring to a northern hemisphere tribal memory for an expectation of a gentle spring, in which The first butterflies appearing on those warm afternoons of late March and early April when the blackthorn hedges turn white and the dandelions open their saffron heads, enrich the spirit and elevate the soul And they do, but not in Melbourne. It is as if we are unwilling to let go and to reconcile ourselves to a fierce spring, to a spring in which raging Antarctic storms wrench trees out by the roots and fell power poles. And there are just enough of those ‘warm afternoons’ for the delusion to persist that it is they which represent the true norm, if only things would return to normal.

  On this day Gertrude’s important, her first, one-woman show was to have its official opening at The Falls Gallery. For Gertrude, therefore, unquestionably, but also for Lang, and even for myself in a private way, 10 September was to be a day of special significance. For the three of us, the triangle of us as Lang would have it, it was to be a day on which certain critical, and irreversible, reckonings would be inscribed. The Falls Gallery is in Richmond, within sight, just, of the hill around which Coppin Grove makes its elegant half loop, before it becomes Shakespeare Grove and eventually rejoins Isabella Grove.

  At a little after seven in the morning, the storm winds struck South Melbourne and woke me. It was my empty garbage bin crashing on to its side on the concrete landing of the outside stairs that actually woke me. I came up through layers of sleep and broke the surface like a slow giant whale returning to the wind and the waves from a secret rendezvous in the deep, where everything is still silent. I lay there with my eyes open, listening to the bin rolling backwards and forwards on the concrete with a mild thunder and puzzling what the sound might be, the dreamless emptiness of my sleep hanging beneath me, still asserting the pull of the deep on my mind.

  Then the telephone rang.

  I reached over the side of the bed for it. There was a familiar pause after I’d said hullo – his deliberate heightening of the anticipation. Have you got the storm over there yet? I asked.

  In an awed, husky whisper, he confided, Mao’s dead, Steven.

  For 10 September 1976 was also the day of Mao’s death; or rather, if it was not quite the day on which he died, it was the day the news of his death was announced in the world’s press.

  I was looking at Gertrude’s translation of her father’s journal. I’d left the last volume on the floor beside my bed after reading late. It was open at the last page. I had begun to realise something about it which had not occurred to me before. I said carefully into the telephone, I suppose that’s good news then, is it?

  There was a very long pause. I heard him light a cigarette and turn aside from the phone to cough. I read August Spiess’s words about Victoria, indeed Gertrude’s words: As I spoke I saw her attention collecting us, for in a way I understood she was not listening to me but to herself, listening to her own voice all the while in a far off place of deep enchantment. But I wasn’t thinking about the meaning of the words this time. This time, as I read, I was thinking about something else, about the thing I’d begun to realise about these translations.

  Lang said in my ear, anxious and testing for a reaction, They might let me go back now.

  This surprised me. It even shocked me a l
ittle. Privately I’d wondered more than once if he’d ever considered the possibility of going back, eventually, if the regime were ever to become more open to the rest of the world. It wasn’t out of the question, after all, that his mother might be still alive – Madame Feng, Huang’s beautiful Lotus, aged and alone somewhere in a transfigured Hangzhou or Shanghai, holding firm still to her hopes for a revival of ancient values, still out to defeat Feng, dreaming of her son, that he might return shining from the West, like General Koxinga, and save the Middle Kingdom from the demons of the Lord of Death. If she’d survived the war and the Revolution and then the Cultural Revolution – one upheaval after another – she’d only now be in her seventies. A reunion was still possible. It was not out of the question. His voicing of the idea of a return to China, however, seemed fanciful to me. It did not come from a part of Lang which I’d taken seriously. I said doubtfully, Would you go back though, if they’d let you?

  It’s the first chance in thirty-nine years, Steven! What was the matter with me? Hadn’t I been doing my sums? Hadn’t I been paying attention all this time? What could I have been thinking about? Hadn’t I realised this was all serious for him? I felt rebuked, and guiltily reminded of the fact that I’d not yet let him see the Reflections, even though Gertrude had read them a while ago.

  I was afraid of his opinion of them; and even more of his claims, of what his opinion and his claims might do to my possession of these unfinished pieces. Given half a chance he might yet make good his claim upon them. What had just begun to seem possible to me might be lost to me once again if I were to let him loose on the work before it had reached some sort of conceptual certainty. The voice, with which I had at last begun to replace the ranting chant of my father’s ghost, might be silenced in me once again. Nothing was decided yet. Nothing was fixed or clear, or definite enough, or strong enough yet to be called my own with any assurance. Gertrude had embraced me and had generously understood all this and been careful to say nothing. Her acknowledgment had been important to me. For she was, as Lang had observed so often, the only real artist among us - she had made something her own. Lang might rage and denounce the work as spurious and he might successfully challenge me for repossession of his memories against my fictions.

  Why shouldn’t I go back? he asked into the silence, which was crackling with the static of the storm, his voice thick with suspicion, trying to read my features through the phone, trying to hear what I was really thinking.

  What I was thinking was of Melbourne without him, without access to her garden at Coppin Grove and to the suggestive memorabilia, and to his difficult drunken realities. I’d miss you, I said, claiming to be without ambivalence, claiming that life would not be less problematical without him.

  No you wouldn’t, Steven! He chuckled throatily, sounding a bit triumphant. No you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t miss me. He read out a few lines from the Age, in which the journalist claimed no foreign dignitaries were to be invited to attend Mao’s funeral. I told you you’d get it wrong! He laughed and wheezed and choked. You’ll never understand us. They’re keeping it in the family! It’s going to be strictly a family affair, Steven. We’re the only ones who can do that.

  After forty years hadn’t the connection atrophied? I know, he’d told me, there’d been nothing all this time. Not a message. Not a word. No news since his arrival at St Patricks in Ballarat. The possibility that somehow he might have contrived to retain the option of going back to his original homeland, because there really is something different and special about being Chinese, something which I’d not understood and never would understand, offended me. I felt jealous of the possibility of it, no matter how slight or illusory it might really be. It was as if he were taunting me with his possession of a certainty he knew I wouldn’t be able to match.

  Are you still there Steven?

  I’m thinking, I said. The garbage bin rumbled back and forth. He was beginning to enjoy himself. I decided to get off the phone and asked him what time we were to meet later. We arranged that I would pick him up from Coppin Grove at five. He suggested we have a drink at a pub in Bridge Road before going on together to Gertrude’s show. I hung up before he could begin developing his theme.

  The pan of him I’d not taken seriously was his foreignness, the possibility that he might really be a peregrinum, a stranger among us, a genuine lang tsze who could return home enlightened, redeemed and reconciled, no matter how long he’d stayed away. In seeking to confirm my own unclear sense of Australianness, what I’d never considered was the chance that Lang might not see himself as an Australian at all. I began to test an image of him as a foreigner. I let the word sidle into my mind and accompany the image: foreigner. On the face of it a descriptive appellation, an appeal to neutrality, a form of applied classification, indicating something neither good nor bad but simply other. Yet applied to him I recognised at once that it was sinister. As a tag it was coercive of categories. It dismayed me to see him so described. I resisted it. An intimacy was available to me … I approached the house and entered the hallway. Having come from his bedroom at this hour, or from the kitchen, he would be facing the front door. In the large mirror at the far end of the hall there would be my reflection, standing as Sickert might have had me stand, against the light, looking in at him. As if I really were emerging from the hidden inner garden. And there would be a reflection of his back. At this hour he would be wearing a pair of loose yellowed drawers with button-up flies. Apart from these, which he would have slept in, he would be naked. His body, which I love with a strange, resisting tenderness, is small and hairless and exceedingly pale; his skin untouched by sunlight. A network of blue veins is visible, rising to the opalescent surface then diving deep into the interior. His musculature is poorly defined. His is an almost adolescent body and not unlike that of his great-aunt’s in the portrait of her as a child, which now hangs to the right of the front door – outside the front room where the other portraits hang – and which cannot therefore be viewed by someone standing, as I am, in the doorway itself. He is hunched over the telephone and he is shivering. His tight black hair is standing straight up on his scalp, like the closely shorn mane of a hunter. Its appearance is surprising, giving him the look of someone belonging to an elect caste. It is his most striking feature.

  I worked steadily all morning, systematically examining each page of the journals. The entire text is in Gertrude’s careful, rounded handwriting, done with black ink and an old-fashioned split nib, yet throughout the seven volumes there is not one crossing out, nor a single revision in the margin. For a handwritten manuscript this is remarkable. But is this a handwritten manuscript? Or is it something else? The seven volumes, all small folio, are uniformly bound with green cloth-covered boards. Every page is numbered at the top centre, and at the beginning of each new section there is a bracketed note giving the actual date of its translation. A rectangular label on the front cover carries the volume number and, simply, A I. W. Spiess. Altogether there are four hundred and sixteen pages.

  It is a beautiful thing. A unique set. The easy flowing text is clearly not a first draft but is a painstakingly crafted transcription of a highly finished translation. These books are not the product merely of a dutiful impulse. There is a larger and more considered purpose than that in their creation. Gertrude’s intention in completing this massive task cannot have been simply to produce an English language version of her father’s journals. I felt convinced of this.

  I found the dates instructive. The bracketed date of the translation of the first section of Volume I was given as 14 December 1964. Only a month after her father’s death at the age of eighty-seven, when Gertrude herself would have been eighteen. The final date, bracketed before the last entry in Volume VII, was 15 May 1968. Three and a half years later. From the age of eighteen to twenty-two, then, during most of the period she’d been a student at art school, Gertrude was working on the task of making these journals, translating, redrafting and transcribing them. In a handwritten
manuscript of over four hundred pages the absence of corrections would indeed be remarkable, but in a finished work of art the absence of such obvious signs of revision would not be. I had assumed, until this moment, that she had given me the journals to use as a source for my own work. Now I began to see that this may not have been her motive at all.

  Mounted on the inside back cover of Volume VII, the last volume, was a black and white snapshot. An elderly man in a panama hat and a pale crumpled suit and a young Chinese were holding hands with a little girl who stood between them. The young Chinese was Lang. He was in his early twenties. He had a cigarette stuck squarely between his lips. The cigarette was so bright it looked as if it had been superimposed on to the photograph with white-out. Since that day he appeared hardly to have changed at all. I’d never seen a photograph of him before. The little girl was trying to drag them forward and they were pretending to resist her. Behind them was a kiosk at the end of a pier, and then the sea. I felt as though I should have known them then, and I wondered who had taken the photograph.

  My journal cannot be a map after all, joining the beginning of my journey to the end of it. How could he have been so certain he would never revisit Hamburg, the place of his origin? Had he really been that certain. How much latitude had the translator exercised with his original text? To what degree had her hindsight led her to modify her father’s thoughts? Could she, indeed, have resisted tampering with them, still loving him, grieving for the loss of him? I have discovered motives, my own and everyone else’s, to be impenetrable. What was the German for this? How had he actually expressed it? Would another translator have rendered this thought as his daughter had rendered it?

  As the day wore on and I progressed more deeply into my re-examination of the journals, I became increasingly convinced that in these books Gertrude had embarked on a fictionalisation of her father. Perhaps at first not with that intention. Perhaps at first simply smoothing out a difficulty or making an image turn more surely. But before very long beginning to enjoy the practice of the form and to do it with increasing flair and assurance as the work proceeded. Finding herself required in the end, if she were to realign the warping of the structure which her infiltration of the text must have induced, to take the work through several painstaking drafts. And by this process, little by little and with subtlety, replacing the presence of her father in the work with the presence of herself; accomplishing a reverse colonisation to the one with which the chanting spectre of my own dead father had threatened me; the living child, in her case, fittingly taking up and renaming the spaces of the dead parent; making herself at home while making of herself an artist.