The White Door (2 page)

‘It is not late,’ the mayor spoke. ‘Let me show you your old house. I said the law now allows repossession of properties abandoned in war or seized by cadres.’ She hesitated. Memories lived there. Also, other people and their memories now lived there. But the mayor was escorting Teresa into the street and Auntie Wang, who had already requested Teresa to expend two rolls of film on her alone, was jostling, half-pushing behind them. The caravan of repossession bumped
well-fed
into the night.

The large family who now lived in the Kwok house had heard of Meil Wah’s return. Already inflated by legend into a foreign millionairess, they worried alternately that she would throw them out immediately, in the way of foreigners without Chinese mercy; or that she could not possibly want to live in such a humble house again but, in the way of a foreign or even Chinese millionairess, demand huge rents from them. She was beautiful, the town had said, she had been the mayor’s childhood love. Her daughter was beautiful also, and they wore gold as if it was a natural badge of office and of superiority.

But when the caravan arrived, the two women looked more bewildered than vengeful, greedy or superior. Beautiful certainly, foreign in walk and dress, accent a bit tinged as well, except that the daughter didn’t speak Chinese at all and stared at the proceedings and personnel as if they were all that universal ship of fools.

Caravan, ship, silly metaphors, thought Teresa. It’s time to get out of here, reassure these people we don’t want their house, but to do it in the least patronising way. To be repossessed would be a tragedy. To be not repossessed, some sort of insult. Greetings, oh dwellers of the dark hovel. Then she thought of her mother. What paroxyms of memory now hovered over her?

Kwok Meil Wah was looking up, where a skirting should have run between walls and ceiling. The space was empty, and the stain of smoke was uniform on all surfaces. Nothing had ever been there, nothing had ever intervened between top and sides. But the mayor knew what she had lost, that one piece of memory that had not reincarnated itself in the room, that had simply not been there in developed or deteriorated form. ‘It was not these people who did it,’ he said with extraordinary, unbrusque kindness. ‘Other families lived here, and they removed many, many years ago the wooden plaques that named each ancestor. You had many of these, I remember, they stretched around the entire ceiling. There was a time in the revolution when we wanted only to live in the present and for the future. Then, the signs of the past were removed in one of the great campaigns. I am sorry, Meil Wah. I do not think you would have had time to make a copy before you fled the Japanese. You have come back to a past without its history. But you were young. As we grew older, all of us, not just the party leaders, thought of history and found it unbearable.’

It was only a record, she said, only a family tree, surely nothing to do with centuries of hunger and suffering. And these ancestors, you know the Kwok family took up arms against suffering, a plaque was a tribute as well as a record. She thought, ‘I should not have come.’ Everybody in the room realised it was unbearable. Auntie Wang said nothing, and Teresa’s camera hung against her stomach, a compressed weight. Kwok Meil Wah stepped out and looked at the sky, eyes fixed
on a star at ceiling height. In Teresa’s intuition, she was crying, and in the poetry the mayor wrote afterwards, it was how the gods had named the village, looking into the future, how white tears had struck the ground like stones.

He had to cross Tokyo from Haneda Airport to Narita. The division of duties now meant that Haneda was almost exclusively a domestic and regional airport; Narita handled long hauls. He had once vowed never to use Narita. It had been carved out of farmland and the smallholding farmers had fought. Radical students had come to the aid of the farmers, and he had watched the three-year television reports of the siege and defence of Narita. He admired the student demonstrations of the period, drilled, helmeted, armed with thick and long bamboo staves. Years later, when the South African Springboks came to play rugby in New Zealand, they were greeted by a new generation of antipodean protesters who had taken their cue from Narita. Only then, he was already living in Africa, and saw the video flicker of the street battles on a black-and-white Lusaka screen.

He was still thinking of how to reach Narita when, exiting from Haneda baggage claim, he was greeted, arrested and manfully escorted to an interrogation room by several well-armed policemen. The G7 summit was in town. Reagan, Thatcher, Mitterand, the rest, were all ceremonialising their way through some declaration or other of concern for the parlous world. Security, he thought, and he watched himself being marched off, vowing to shave, wear a suit, tie back his hair the next time he came through Tokyo. The overhead video screens were a perfect accompaniment. Caesar wrote in the third person, he thought, and the Gallic chronicles are a narrative of amazing self-view. Must have had it videoed, he grinned unshaven to himself. Dredging up schoolboy Latin, preparatory to dredging up tourist-tape Japanese. Can you please show me the way to a good sushi house? Where is the underground station? I wish to go to Yokohama Harbour. I love you. I am not a terrorist, nor am I here to assassinate the leaders of the Western world.

Two hours of faultless Japanese interrogation later – their Japanese; he had just sat there, surly and silent – they finally agreed he was a foreigner and hauled in a translator. Then they made a passable job of apologising – even a true Japanese might have accepted it – and then, still at gunpoint, whisked him off in a police bus, he the lone passenger, and dumped him with one last guard who whisked him through the departure formalities at Narita. Security cameras everywhere. He was beside himself with video’d glee, danced into the duty-free shops, then splashed Chanel pour Monsieur all over his stubble and dragged a palmful through his hair. Thus redolent of the G7 industrial world and one of its products, he sauntered onto his flight and began his grand affair with the kimonoed stewardess.

Ah, what would Sensei have thought? he mused to himself as the plane took off in its faultless manner. He thought of his teacher on the little Japanese island – only Sensei swore it was not Japanese and supported the tiny and very peaceful nationalist and cultural preservation society. And that was why he had been there, even though now lubricated inside by saké and besmirched outside by Chanel, and some groin-loaded confluence of the two imagined outland cultural exchanges with the stewardess.

What would Sensei have thought? Laughed, most probably. His teaching room ringed by wooden plaques bearing the names of his graduates. Not ancestors. Damn ancestors and their struggles. Sensei’s offspring who struggled with faulty persistence in the long image-brokered future.

The public toilets of Unused Sky were on a pier over the lake. To use them was a therapy – water as you looked down, gentle cylindrical splash as you delivered your load. The unused sky overhead. Rustic, bucolic – ah, a peaceful ruraltania of boyhood dreams. To be constipated forever and never leave that simple, magical pier.

The jewels of the water, ah yes; you’d better swim at the other end of the lake – so man and man’s shit co-existed, and the used lake was a mirror, the reverse decor of the unused sky. Would life ever be so simple and symmetrical again?

He had these reveries often now. Almost fifty years after evacuating to New Zealand, another last boat out of Hong Kong, he still felt nostalgia for the image of what he had left behind. New Zealand, what the Maoris called the Long White Cloud, the beautiful cloud that uses the sky, something for it to fill. It’s a cloud’s vocation to fill the sky. In the village, true to its name, there was only ever the bluest of blues. The stark, seasoned wood of the rickety pier, the bottle-green murk of the water, and the almost alarmist blue… What if one day I should have to live without such blue? No sweat… New Zealand skies could be blue… but they were watered down by sea. Each horizon betrayed the sky. Water leached into blue, so that it had always this
mind-reducing
, sky-reducing pale edge. And it was reduced forever… you know, sea went on forever. Oh, for contained water, containing water, and hills – horizons that climbed and dipped and swayed, but whose contours were exact boundaries. Edge of green hill. And there was edge of blue sky. Exact, uncompromised. He missed such boundaries, the parameters of the colours of youth, the functions of use, the impossibility of using the sky. Only when the Japanese warplanes came was the sky used and betrayed. Then the sky leaked fire and the earth leaked blood and escape was a pell-mell scramble away from home and history. During the warlord years, the civil wars of China’s stuttering modernism, he had never seen planes. Blood and bodies, yes. And his family were not without even major participation in it all. Big warlords and petty warlords. Being of the latter gave you a chance of survival at least. And his mother, old dragon that she was, never learnt to use a gun but was skill incarnate with the double-edged broadsword. She could toss it high as a bird into the earth’s boundary with the sky, cartwheel, roll, arch backwards, and catch the sword as it fell. Returned by the frontier guards of sky.

How that sword must have glinted in the sun – light laughing at how it had sought to wound the sky. It was one of the few truly positive images he had of his mother. And the sky-tossed steel was no use against planes. One good image and it was of futility. Even after decades in New Zealand, she had never learnt to speak English. She would make her way around, usually to that night’s mahjong game, by jabbing her finger at an address in her notebook and jabbing that notebook at whatever taxi driver had come for her. They all knew her. They called her the Dragon Lady – a cheap stereotype and instantly true. He was, therefore, Son of Dragon, the Dragonlet of New Zealand, putting on weight, ingeniously restyling his hair, and in his cave of fulfilled dreams.

This was the cave of fulfilled dreams, a jeweller’s shop in the heart of a big city. Well, after all, Auckland was now one million strong and, if not Sydney, San Francisco, was crowning his prosperity with growth. He thought of a wand he could wave like a sword – with a sweep of his magician’s hand, light up the display cases of diamonds and rubies until they were a beacon to his long-lost homeland.

Wife and one daughter were there now. Taken the plunge. He… no, content to skirt the old country, tour the Thailands, Taiwans, Hong Kongs of the world, setting up deals, importing the mined goodies of their earth for a transient though glittering life in his cave. He could never go back. Too much memory to overcome, and it would all have changed, too much sky eaten away, used up. Used up sky was useless sky. A jewel was a piece of sky that had fallen to earth, been swallowed by earth, hardened but preserved by earth. Used up sky could never become jewels. No, here in New Zealand, he transacted fragments of sky. His dragon mother was an emerald queen; some first-born son, somewhere risking his life, lived only for the red sign of a rose – a ruby was, he guessed, the closest translation – but he, he hoarded sapphires and late at night, the security grilles mounted outside, he would spread them out and, like a child dragon, compose as a jigsaw the village of his personal fables and dreams.

How much of his sky had been used? Not pain. It was like a sharp grabbing inside his stomach. It was how he imagined the night at the end of his days – a hand that grew too large for his stomach, so it came out black and huge and enveloped him in the final far too softened hug of time. He liked playing with his jewels – too hard ever to unravel, and they could be displayed to represent all the years, villages and houses of his life. They could not outgrow his life.

He imagined one day, years in the future, the hand would come. He imagined he was, even now, controlling the gestation of his death. He imagined, by telepathy, on the eve of hand’s snuffling lurch into the world, a plane would land and son would be there to see the architecture of history, his father’s history, laid out in all its facets, and son would identify instantly the ruby at the heart of the complex configuration of sapphires. Son would lift up the ruby and father would wave goodbye, quite sheepishly probably, and son would sail off on the currents of air again, shunning wills, legacies, etc, but he would keep – like that sovereign around his neck – the single ruby, and not try to return it to the sky at any blazing sunset.

Ah, the troublesome, death-defying son. He and his wife had become experts on Zimbabwe when son was there, a small mediator of its jangly, noisy trundle into independence. Only problem was that the
New Zealand Herald
carried precious little on Zimbabwe. The only paper on Earth that had more sports pages than international news pages, and more horse-racing pages – in their own special section – than ordinary sports pages, Every third or fourth day there would be an inch or two on Zimbabwe; but every day there would be great action photographs of horses neck-and-neck. In a newspaper, a horse could only be black or white, and on the days of the Zimbabwe column inch, the white horse would always win. Yes, there it would be, charging out of the antique page design – the newspaper the eye of time forgot, the ugliest paper on earth, the most mean-spirited little New Zealander editorials on earth, and the heartstring-pulling
front-page
leaders on cats that nearly drowned – the most sentimental dross on earth. No wonder son was in Zimbabwe, the inch-high country, the diminutive just-about-latest-state-on-earth.

He reassembled the sapphires on his table. He turned the ruby into a plane. He made a gentle engine noise. He called the plane White Horse and drove it across the great unused sky. Dear son, he sighed, why do you not wish to inherit a single gem of my shining life? Why do you toss your life in the air like a sword that will land one day in my heart? If cancer doesn’t kill me first, worrying about you will.